Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance.To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another’s way of life – so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit.
Hands off!
— Henry Miller
Years ago, while I was establishing myself in a new executive coaching practice, I supported my family by working as a part-time, outsourced CFO. Here is a reminiscence of a deep learning I earned during one of those accounting gigs.
I sought help from my own executive coach with the very difficult behavior of a bookkeeper employed by my client. She had called several urgent meetings with the partners and each time threatened to quit, more or less because of me. These meetings were very exasperating as she made charges that were either too vague to dispute or clearly contrary to plain facts. For example, although we repeatedly assured her that she had her job as long as she wanted it she insisted she could not continue to work under such uncertainty and would resign immediately because we were conspiring to take her job away. The partners felt obligated to placate and mollify her because she was the only bookkeeper out of several they had tried who was able to make any progress in getting their bills out to clients.
I said to my executive coach, “I am stressed and bothered because of her unpredictable behavior, of course, but I am mostly bothered by the fact that it bothers me. I am so ‘trained’ and ‘transformed’ I ought to be able to deal with her behavior without becoming stressed, hurt, or angry. I try to remain calm, not react to her outbursts, and keep on working because I need this income. I do what is necessary just to keep getting paid, so why do I lose sleep and spend my non-billable time talking about her with my coach, family, and friends?”
By the way, is this scenario reminding you of anything in your life, right now?
My coach reminded me of the dangers of attachment, of identifying with our property or positions. We confuse preferred outcomes with necessary results. We grasp so avidly to particular bits of property or actions by others that we forget we can still be ourselves without them. We attach money or prestige to ourselves so firmly that we forget that we are not our results or our reputations. What I want is not what I am.
I then remembered the old samurai expression (I suppose all samurai expressions are now old).
The most effective warrior dies before entering the battle.
The bookkeeper was not damaging my body or physically invading my free time. My attachments were the only things making my life difficult. I was attached to looking good in the eyes of my client, I was attached to (more…)
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or
have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if (more…)
Making change in organizations is central to my work. The nature of organizations, however, is to resist change. That’s why we call them organize-ations, not random-izations or adapt-ations,
One common way for organizations to resist innovation and change is for people to collect evidence that any novel tool or procedure is causing problems–even if the problems predate the change.
Waterless Urinals
Craig Hansen, the Army base’s energy engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”
Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle?
In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean. He suspected there was something else going on and decided a little experiment might flush out the problem. He bought a smoke bomb, lit the fuse, dropped it down the main sewer line, and waited. Hansen observed that the sewer vent outside the building was placed directly in front of the structure’s air intake. Smoke flowed out of the vent and was immediately sucked back into the building. He also found a cracked toilet in the women’s rest room that spewed smoke. The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job.
Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived.
—Pissing Match:
Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?
WIRED Magazine
People continually and automatically evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value …
The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emotion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans by nature …
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect…
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize something is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communicate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003), so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect…
The conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes (more…)
Scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
…
We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
–Jonah Lehrer
The New Yorker
The Truth Wears Off
December 13, 2010, p. 52
Mine was the Depression generation of journalists. Many of the best people were not educated. When I went to London as a sportswriter, I didn’t even know the difference between the Baltic states and the Balkans. But I learned the advantage of the dumb-boy technique. I found that people love to talk about themselves. You get more news by trust than by tricks.
But that is not a very popular idea with this generation. Because they went to college, they think that they know more than the guys who run the joint, and that’s a pretense that doesn’t work. Also they like big shots. I always felt that the way to gather news in Washington is at the periphery not at the center. You get it from the people who tell the big shots what to say.
— James Reston
interviewed by Alvin P. Sanoff
US News and World Report
“People, quite literally, see themselves as more desirable than they actually are,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. (Click here for another post on his research.) “When people rate themselves on any dimension that’s ambiguous – their managerial skills, their interpersonal skills, their grammar, or their test-taking ability – there’s zero correlation between their self-perception and their performance. When the picture is ambiguous, people give themselves the benefit of the doubt.” …
The researchers discovered this nearly universal self-distortion by photographing university students, then altering the digital images in tiny increments. Using the real photograph as the model, they created 10 other photos, five approximating an idealized version of the student’s face, and five approximating an unattractive version. When the students returned to the lab several weeks later they were asked to pick out their own face from the 10 other photos in the lineup.
The result? Two-thirds of the students selected a photo that was artificially enhanced by 20 per cent.
–Susan Pinker
in The Globe and Mail
The pace is slow for an online video but Brené Brown’s message is deep and true. Use the extra time to think about your own life, relationships, and desires.
Tony recently published a Kindle version of his talk inspired by Brené Brown’s work. See it on Amazon by clicking here.
I have been very happy with an easy, free, browser-based screen sharing facility called Join.Me. That is also the web address: join dot me (not dot com).
I often “dig into the numbers” with my CEO executive coaching clients, sometimes with the help of my free Excel templates (see them here). This tool allows us to see and work on the same screen together though we are miles apart.
Join.Me is so simple, with no software to download or install and no firewall or security issues, that even top executives can use it on the fly.
–join.me – Free Screen Sharing.
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