Why Do I Feel Like An Intellectual Fake? (Imposter Syndrome Series 1/3)

You have just been told the fantastic news that you have been promoted to lead a team for the first time and while you thought you would have an immediate rush of euphoria, you pause to pay attention to your actual feeling, and notice that you have an overflow of doubt and negativity.  Your mind spins a series of aggressive questions - what if I cannot do this?  What if they find out that I am not that talented?  What if I mess up so badly that I become the first person in company history to get fired on the first day, perhaps even before lunchtime?

Do these worries torment you?  If you are like 70% of the population, you are not alone in this particular type of feeling known as imposter syndrome.  In their study, researchers James Alexander and Jaruwan Sakulku described it as “a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success.”  We have this sense that other people think that we are more skilled and competent than we are, and at any moment, we are going to be exposed as intellectual frauds.

How does Imposter Syndrome differ from good old fashion performance anxiety?

Sure, we all may experience moments of stage freight – right before stepping into the spotlight to deliver an important speech or conducting a high-stakes meeting, we deal with performance interference thoughts that can push us off our game.  And then there is imposter syndrome, which is self-doubt on steroids.  According to Researchers Joan Harvey and Cynthia Katz, there are three core characteristics of imposter syndrome: 1. The belief that you have fooled other people 2. Fear of being exposed 3. The inability to attribute your achievement to internal qualities such as ability, intelligence, or skill.  Instead, you think you got to your position through luck and do not deserve any of your previous accomplishments, you are just living this big fat lie.  Nervousness and some stage fright before big events are different than the perennial feeling of not earning any of your successes.

When we explore the negative impacts of imposter syndrome, we can work towards managing this feeling more effectively.  Here are some of the most detrimental effects:

1. Decreased satisfaction with work.  While some self-doubt can keep us on our toes, push us to take chances, and check our egos as we are reminded of our fallibility, too much of it can diminish our ability to find satisfaction at work.  If we are always feeling an excess of anxiety with every task we do, it will be hard to derive joy.  Even when we have an accomplishment, new situations arise and continue to be proving grounds.  It can also lead to increased workaholism.  If we are driven by this fear of failure and feelings of not possessing the capabilities, we will work harder, overdo things, and burnout.

2. Diminished happiness.  Imposter syndrome does not only hurt our career, but also our health, well-being, and personal relationships.  When work dominates, we neglect our self-care and our connections with others.  Resentment grows and dissatisfaction becomes the pervasive norm. 

3. Prevents presence.  If achieving presence requires us to be in tune with our truest feelings, beliefs, abilities, values, then how can we be ourselves in the moment, if we feel like a fraud?  Imposter syndrome causes us to overthink and second-guess, and it makes us over-fixate on how others are judging us.  Our thoughts are scattered and we find ourselves mentally reviewing our previous few steps and what our rewrite would look like.  This self-monitoring can prevent us from listening to others because we are distracted by our inner monologue, which makes it more challenging to build trust and connections for the highest quality relationships.

4. Keeps us playing small. A chronic sense of unworthiness can breed misery and crush our motivation, thereby holding us back from pursuing our ambitions. We reject ourselves before even granting a chance to succeed. We start to question our personality and wonder if we are even cut out for this job. That leads us to only take on tasks that we know we can succeed in and we do not put ourselves in positions of feeling stretched so our growth potential is heavily capped.

While imposter syndrome is a normal feeling, there are things we can do so it does not unleash a torrent of adverse effects on us and get in the way of our goals and dreams. The next blogs will jump into how imposter syndrome shows up and ways we can fight against it.

Quote of the day: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."  -Cary Grant

Q: In what areas of your life do you experience imposter syndrome?  Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 2/3 will focus on the origins and manifestations of imposture syndrome]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to shatter their limiting beliefs and build confidence, contact me to learn more.

The untold damage of Imposter Syndrome

A Better Way To Handle stress in the Workplace (Stress Series 4/4)

We spend an inordinate amount of time being stressed at work.  While some frustrations may be driven by the “do more with less” approach, the struggle to keep up with rapid changes, and a general avalanche of problems, one of our top sources of stress relates to the conflict we have with other people.  The typical responses of complaining, avoiding, or fighting can be absolutely draining.  Recent studies show that in the US, work-related stress is costing the economy over 300 billion per year and can be blamed for 120,000 deaths per year.

How we deal with stress related to coworkers can determine our health, happiness, and productivity. While it is tempting to blame the other person, there is usually not one culprit so an excellent place to start is understanding our role in the situation.

Here are some suggestions for dealing with stress-related conflicts at work.

1. Assume positive intent. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error or over attribution bias refers to our tendency to judge others by their behavior and assign it to their character but to judge ourselves based on our intent.  When we see someone doing something, we tend to think it relates to their personality rather than the situation that the person might be in. For example, if someone cuts in front of you in line, your immediate reaction could be, "What a jerk!" But in reality, maybe he never cuts lines and is doing it this one time because he is about to miss his plane and hence his brother’s wedding and of course he has the rings! Yet, when we do seemingly obnoxious things, we always have a good reason. It is other people we see as defective, but not us. When making these judgments about others, we increase our levels of stress. Instead, when we focus our attention on their possible positive intentions, we start to see things differently, not only do our stress levels reduce, but we can be surprised by how much more optimistic we can feel.

2. Activate your self-awareness. To interpret the frustration you are experiencing towards the other person, you need to be aware of your emotions which are causing you to feel thwarted or threatened.  When was the last time you made time in your busy schedule to list the ways which others can send you into mad mode?  The more you know about your triggers, the better you can control your temperament.  Sometimes, all it takes is a small discovery that we did not perform well on a presentation to touch our larger insecurity around public speaking, and in that case, it has more to do with us than the comments of others who are just trying to be helpful.

3. Consciously manage your emotions.  Once aware, channel your emotions to be a thoughtful responder rather than an emotional reactor. Lashing out can seem like an easier action, but it is not the more productive one.  One way to be more mindful is to incorporate reflective practices in your life – deep breathing, meditation, yoga, solitary walks, and other activities can go a long way in increasing your self-awareness so you will be able to plan and be strategic on how we will respond. It’s about intentionally choosing how you want to show up, instead of blurting out words that you could later regret.

4. See people as people, not threats.  Building friendships at work can increase our happiness level and provide additional perspectives to check our opinions.  Adopting a collaborative mindset over a competitive one can also create untapped joy.  Try out these words – “we, us, ours” instead of “me, I, mine.”  Ask yourself, “what can I do for the team,” instead of thinking “what can the team do for me?” Consult close friends at work to get another perspective or work with a coach to learn more about your blindspots.

5. Lean into your natural empathy and compassion. Find out how the other person came to their point of view.  How is it different than yours? How is it the same?  The more you learn about somebody else, the more you may discover that you have more in common than you may have thought.  Or perhaps there is a new appreciation for what the person is trying to do which has nothing to do with singlehandedly, or in a larger conspiracy, taking you down!

Instead of just enduring the toxicity and associated stress that we may experience at work, we have a multitude of options to explore, which will create more internal and external joy.  Life is too short to spend time brooding about unnecessary drama.  Take steps to control what you can and not worry about what you cannot. 

Quote of the day: "Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude." -William James

Q: What strategy do you use to handle a stress-conflict at work? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear your thoughts!

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to resolve conflicts in the workplace and create agreements for success, contact me to learn more.

Handle your workplace stress for a healthier and happier life.

How Well Do You Know Your Stress? (Stress Series 3/4)

When stress strikes and impacts your body and mind, how do you handle it?  Learning about your reactions can help you manage it and build resilience in its presence.

Here are 3 leading ways to get to the root of stress:

1. Explore your stress through questioning. Ask yourself:

A. How do I respond under pressure? Maybe you confront, avoid, break down, become irrational.

B. What does stress do to me physically? Beating heart, tightness in your chest or shoulders, sweating, knots in your stomach, or headaches.

C. How does it affect me emotionally? Do I get sad, angry, worried, or have a pervasive out-of-control feeling?

D. What are my go-to distresses? Are they positive: Laughing, meditating, practicing yoga, reading, socializing, or negative: excessive eating, drinking, procrastinating, watching tv, overworking, being rude to others?

E. Do I have a different reaction or destresser for a different trigger or context? Perhaps when it is dealing with family, you engage in emotional eating, but when dealing with a work event, you get angry and condescending.

It is ok to not have all the answers, but embarking on a journey of self-discovery can be the most important expedition you go on.  You can start by prioritizing your self-reflection by journaling daily, thinking regularly on these questions especially during mundane activities like brushing your teeth, or by reading about how other people handle the causes and effects of stress so you can provide a comprehensive solution.

2. Know your values.  Stress can occur when one of our values is being violated so knowing your values can help with an adequate response.  For example, you may be anxious about giving feedback to your team member.  Upon further scrutiny of the situation, you realize that the value that is being tested is your concern with fairness, so you want to make sure you are doing right by your teammate. You ask yourself, “by prolonging the conversation, am I being fair?”  You may realize that when you frame the situation through the fairness value you are much quicker to provide feedback so she can improve and help the team.  Or perhaps, you criticize yourself harshly and are stressed because it is violating your value of self-compassion.  When you can identify the principles that are being tested, you know how to put strategies in place that allow you to use your emotions wisely under stress.

3. Increase your response range. When we are stressed, our brain is wired to be more reactionary and our decision-making faculties are impaired.   We can resort to binary choice-making which limits the options available to us.  In tough decisions, we can reach premature conclusions rather than opening ourselves up to more and better options. A good way to combat this problem is to force yourself to generate several responses, even when you think you only have a few, challenge yourself to have at least 10 and then you can winnow down to a realistic and empowering three. Knowing that you have more options will reduce your stress. 

When confronted with a stressful situation, carefully appraise your core strengths and resources rather than panicking or disconnecting from reality.  Identify the source of the stress, think about the values that are being tested, and increase your range of responses so you can defeat anything that comes your way.

Quote of the day: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

Q: Which value, when violated, causes you the most stress?  What’s your best distressing technique?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

[The next blog in this series 4/4 will focus on dealing with stress in the workplace]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a game plan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

What do you know about your stress?

Top 8 Ways To Deal With Stress (Stress Series 2/4)

In the last article, we talked about different kinds of stress and associated positive and negative impacts.  The focus of this article will be on ways to manage worry effectively.

Let’s Jump Into Leading Techniques to Deal with Stress:

1. View it positively. How you see it makes all the difference.  A study tracked 30,000 adults in the US for eight years and began by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" and "Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?" Researchers then used public death records to find out who died.  The results showed that people who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year and viewed it as harmful to their health had a 43% increased risk of dying.  People who experienced a lot of anxiety but did not see it as harmful were no more likely to die.  In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little strain. Changing how you view stress can literally mean the difference between life and death. 

Furthermore, when you tell yourself, this is my body helping me rise to the challenge, you channel that energy to work for you and not against; you turn stress from debilitating to enhancing. Reframing it can provide a different look and open up an array of healthy possibilities to stare down the tension from an empowering position.

2. Get help. When you share with somebody how you are feeling instead of bottling it up, you can relieve some of the effects. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you, there is a built-in mechanism for resilience found through human connection.   When you reach out to others to seek support, you can bounce back more easily than if you choose to isolate yourself. You may be surprised that the very worry that you are convinced only relates to you is shared by others and more common than you think.

3. Play and laugh.  The best antidotes to stress are play and laugher.  It is hard for the human brain to think about more than one thing at any given time.  You cannot be both pepped up and driven down at the exact same moment so when you find ways to laugh, you are reducing the stress emotion.

4. Get busy. Winston Churchill famously said, “I have no time for worry.”  If you are doing something that involves planning and thinking, it is hard to fit in worry. Sometimes, taking your mind off the nagging worry will allow you to return to the problem on your own terms. What kind of project or task can you work on that will occupy your full attention?

5. Rehearse the worst-case scenario.  Instead of having these uninformed nebulous catastrophic thoughts bounce around in your skull, you can think through the worst-case scenario which can shed new light.  Perhaps we realize that it is not as bad as we are portraying it, or we discover the power we need to get through the toughest times. When we visualize, more information can surface to assuage our concerns and we can plan to mitigate those circumstances.

6. Know it will pass. Believing in the idea that the stress is temporary and that there is nothing life could bring to you that is beyond your strength to endure.  You can also ask yourself… how much is this thing that I’m worrying about really matter in the grand scheme of things?  How much am I willing to pay for this worry, how much have I already paid? 

7. Engage in future think. Picture yourself in the future, perhaps 1-3 years from now, and how you will not care about this trivial matter.  It helps us visualize not being in this painful moment but in a more joyous time. When we are so ensconced in the short-term, we are filled with all kinds of emotions, but when we can shift our mind to the long-term, the more rational side can balance the emotional side.

8. System design. If there is a problem that is causing you stress, you can address it by designing a system to combat the problem.  This can involve the following:

A. Have a process: When people panic they make mistakes, they override systems and disregard rules.  If you have a familiar process, you will be less stressed because you have prepared for this before and know exactly what to do. 

B. Get started: Maybe the first thing you do is write down what is causing the problem. You do not even need to devise a solution, you just need to begin. You can even pretend you are somebody else objectively collecting facts for the problem.  When you devote your time to research, worries tend to evaporate in light of knowledge and clarity.

C. Break down the stress:  When you can dismantle something or look at it from a new angle, it loses its force over you.  Don’t focus on the big goal, break it down into small pieces, and pay attention to taking the first step. 

Other techniques can include: getting adequate sleep, regular exercise, mental downtime, taking vacations, doing controlled breathing, practicing yoga, mindfulness meditation, getting acupuncture treatments, walking in nature, journaling, being of service to others, and practicing loving-kindness to name a few.

The main takeaway is that we are not powerless to stress.  When we proactively manage it, we will regain control and find more ways to be happy and fewer ways to worry.

Quote of the day:  “It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” -Hans Selye, Father of Stress Research

Question of the day:  What technique do you use that is not on this list? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 3/4 will focus on ways you can learn about the sources of your stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Reduce your stress with these techniques

Making Sense of Stress (Stress Series 1/4)

There are no shortages of common sources of stress including work, children, finances, relationships, illness, overcommitment, loneliness, family dynamics, lack of work-life balance, and uncertainty, all exacerbated during these quarantine times.  While stress is a ubiquitous part of life, its negative effects do not have to be. The very way we look at stress can completely change its hold over us.

Stress, or this agitation in the body, usually happens when demands exceed capacity. It can come in many different forms. There is the type of stress which you bring onto yourself such as showing up for a meeting unprepared or skipping out on a commitment.  This is pointless stress because it can be avoided or minimized with advance planning and prioritization before the situation turns problematic. There is the stress that hits you like a bolt from the blue and even having done everything right, you could not have anticipated or controlled its arrival.  There is high-level stress that can be debilitating to your performance and there is low-level stress that can be enhancing. There is short-lived stress that provides the accelerating force for you to accomplish a task and there is long-lasting stress that chips away at your health and happiness each day.  The intensity and duration of stress matters, and when both are present, it is a recipe for disaster.

Stress: The Destroyer

The one thing for sure is that too much stress, especially of the acute variety can have deleterious effects.  It can muddle our thinking by crippling our abilities to think long-term, and it can compel poor decision making. University of Pennsylvania Professor and Author Annie McKee says, with chronic stress, “we have more difficulty being flexible or open to new ideas, we start seeing things in simplistic ways and we overreact to minor irritants; everything and everyone starts looking like a threat.” In this state, we are more likely to cause problems rather than solve them.  It is an endless loop – we do not think straight and we pick fights; we lash out, hide out, or opt-out. It gives us tunnel vision, the more stressed we are, the more focused we tend to be and are unable to see the periphery.  Neurologist Robert Sapolsky spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health.  He concluded that long-term stress suppresses the immune system, making us more susceptible to infectious diseases and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles. Being chronically overwhelmed and fatigued can negatively impact our performance and can lead to mental health issues such as burnout and depression.

Stress: The Builder

Not all stress is bad, however.  A little bit of stress or a lot for a very short period of time can be a good thing.  Our stress hormones keep us alive!  If something was intent on eating us, our stress reactors would kick in and encourage us to run away. Sapolsky explains, stress hormones are brilliantly adapted to help us survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth, and reproduction.”  You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if we are dealing with an acute physical stressor. Other than keeping us alive, moderate stress can help us develop coping skills and even kick us in the butt to boost our output.  Being unproductive can cause a feeling of stress and sway us in the direction of aiming to get work done. Having that deadline that is tight, but not too tight can spur creativity and motivation. Additionally, those stress states help us appreciate the periods of tranquility and the proactive steps we can take to spend more time in those peace zones.

It is important to notice the difference between stress that causes us chaos and stress that brings great results.  Fostering the good kind of stress and using techniques to minimize and avoid the bad type of stress will take you far. Regardless of the approach, we should never allow the stress termites to eat away at our lives. We have more power available to us than we realize and there is always some type of strong response we can offer.

Quote of the day: “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there” -Eckhart Tolle

Q: How have you used stress to achieve peak performance?

[The next blog in this series 2/4 will focus on 8 ways to deal with stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Embrace the good kind of stress while mitigating the bad type.

Top 10 Tips for Prioritization (Priority Series 5/5)

One of the biggest struggles in the modern workplace is knowing how to prioritize work.  Workloads are ballooning and everything feels important.  However, the truth is that a lot of the work we do every day does not really need to be done.  At least not right away.

Here are some additional helpful tips for tackling prioritization:

1. Apply the Pareto Principle or 80-20 rule to everything you do.  It says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results.  So from a list of 10, two of those items will be worth the other eight combined.   On any given day, do you know your top two valued activities?  Spending 100% of your time on 20% of the activities will make a big difference.

2. Set Deadlines.  It is important to have deadlines for every task; otherwise, according to Parkinson’s Law, work will expand to fill the time available for its completion.  Coined by British scholar C. Northcote Parkinson, he points out that people usually take all the time allotted (and frequently more) to accomplish any task.  When you set an appropriate deadline, you can generally find ways to finish in that time frame. 

However, there might be times when you are unsure how long a task will take.  Do your best to plan and think on paper so you can give yourself a time range.  You can even build in extra time since you are not sure of the exact end time, and if you do not use it, you will be happy with the bonus time. Having an incentive to complete the task by the deadline and not infringe on your free time can be motivating.

3. Go From big to small.  It is good to start with a macro picture - what you want for the year - then go small by thinking about what you need to do today.  The smaller you get, the more energy you can devote to those items.  Mark Twain said, “the secret to getting ahead is getting started, the secret to getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.”  Each day, you can begin by asking – what is the one thing I can achieve today? 

4. Assess the value and estimated effort.  You can order your tasks by value.  There will always be some tasks that will have a much higher value.  For example, completing a client’s high-revenue project before doing internal work such as designing a presentation template for yourself for the next time you give a speech. Ask yourself how many people would be impacted by your completed work.  The more people involved, the higher the stakes.  

You can also order tasks by estimated effort.  If you have competing items that are equal in value, you can further divide them by the estimated time of completion.  Generally, productivity experts usually suggest the tactic of starting on the lengthier task first.  However, if your style is to complete a series of smaller tasks to free up the mental energy to dedicate all your power to the bigger tasks, you can choose the process that best supports your style.  It can also be motivating to check off a few things from your list before moving on to the weightier items.

5. Be flexible and adaptable.  Uncertainty and change are givens.  Know that your priorities will change, and often when you least expect them.  Since we cannot know the future, new information can force us to tweak our plans.  While that is true that you want to stay focused on the tasks that are important to you, you also want to be aware of the sunk cost fallacy.  In this psychological effect, we feel compelled to continue doing something just because we have already put time and effort into it.  Spending time on the wrong items that will not move the needle will be detrimental in the long run because you will never get that time back.  Life can remind us that there will be times when we have to stop what we are doing and switch tactics to get back on a better and faster track.  Bestselling Author Jim Collins reminds us that a “stop-doing list” is even more important than a to-do list.  We simply cannot do it all, even though we all know many people who try.

What’s your favorite tip for prioritization?

6. Make a decision on priorities.  A big problem that some leaders have is that they do not make any decisions, thereby failing to signal to others what is truly important.  This lack of prioritization is a problem.  Steve Jobs said, “what I don't do, is just as important as what I do.”  Take a couple of minutes in the morning to set your intentions to get what you want from the day instead of somebody else setting your agenda.

A. Actively choose what not to do.  Warren Buffet decided that he would invest only in the business that was absolutely sure of and then bet heavily on them.  He owes 90% of his wealth to just 10 investments.  All the decisions he made not to invest are just as important as deciding on what to invest.  He said, “for every 100 great opportunities that are brought to me, I say no to 99 of them.”  To be one of the best investors of all time, you need to be selective.  So, when in doubt, cut!

B. Choose One.  Having one significant priority will help to add structure in your life.  In the early 2010s, Mark Zuckerberg had a single focus to grow Facebook.  So anytime somebody went to him to pitch an idea, he would respond, “does it help us grow?”  Even if the answers were attractive such as this will make a lot of money or this will help the business, he would ask the same question about growth until he got the answer he wanted.  He had a main goal to focus on growth and made it very clear to all his employees so they were able to filter their requests first before going to him because they knew clearly what he cared about; they knew about his main objective of growth.  He only wanted to discuss one initiative at a time and refused to talk about anything else. 

Similarly, Billionaire Peter Thiel gave everybody one objective to focus on and when his employees wanted to have a meeting with Peter to pitch a new idea, he would ask how the new idea impacted that goal.  They had to connect all their work to that one priority.

C. Choose the “Hell Yes” option or it is a No.  The things that yield a “hell yes” response should get priority.  Derek Sivers uses this approach when making a decision, he only says yes to the things that he is really excited about.  Everything else, including the lukewarm commitments are a no.  So, if you think of activities on a scale from 1-10 (10 being really excited), the activities with a ranking of a 10  would be an easy yes, and any task from 1-9 would be a hard No. Check out my blog on Saying Yes for more.

D. Go for quality over quantity.  You do not have to do 100 things, you just have to do a few things right.  Get clear on your first principles, which are the things you love.  Distinguishing between the trivial many and the vital few is important.  Greg McKewon defines being an essentialist as “the relentless pursuit of less but better.”  Cross something off of your to-do list by not doing it and feel the relief.  

7. Get comfortable saying No.  Once you know your top goals, you want to say no to time killers and non-aligned requests.  Saying no does not mean a rejection of the person, but a way to honor your own commitments to yourself.  You can say, “This is something that I would love to help with and I’m grateful for the opportunity, but I need to focus on other pressing commitments right now.  The good news is I have already lined up a great replacement.” 

The script can be written in many different ways, the important piece of information is that there are a multitude of ways to say no politely, while also protecting your most important time.  Feel free to check out my earlier blog on Saying No which contains more scripts. 

8. Get comfortable with tradeoffs.  In making priorities, you have to make tradeoffs.  When you say no, it means you get to say yes to something else. Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, always made these strategic tradeoffs.  He treated every “no” as a yes for his company.  Saying no to one thing allowed him to say yes to something else, such as developing an amazing company culture.  These tradeoffs were not made by default, but by design!  Herb said in an interview, “You have to look at every opportunity and say, well, no … I’m sorry.  We’re not going to do a thousand different things that really don’t contribute much to the end result we are trying to achieve.”  He made Southwest the dominant airline because he said no to destinations that were not point to point, no to serving meals, and no to first-class because they would have all been at the expense of offering cheap seats, which was his main priority.

It is important to be clear in your priorities because if two conflict, you want to know exactly what to do.  For example –being called into the office to work on a project and having a family event to go to, you can decide in advance what you are going to do based on what’s most important to you.  This way, when the decision comes up, it is not as difficult since you already did the advanced decision-making.  

9. Stick to your agreements and beware of boundary creep.  Let’s say you and your boss have agreed that your main priority is to build the website so all other aspects would be taken off your plate.  The beginning of the agreement feels great because you finally have the time for a single focus and you are making significant progress.  Then, a few months later, you notice that additional work keeps creeping in so your normal workload is the way it used to be before the discussion.  When that happens, be sure to correct it immediately.  Your priorities will always be tested, but when you are crystal clear with your boundaries, you can prevent any additional work encroachment.

10.  Choose an outbox over an inbox strategy.  How easy is it for us to lose precious hours of our day swallowed up by emails, wondering where the time went and why we did not accomplish anything? Living with an inbox strategy means that we respond to every request and interruption, we are at the mercy of other people‘s needs and agendas. In contrast, living with an outbox strategy means taking control of our day by setting clear and focused goals and then following that roadmap to get the job done.  Successful leaders know how to get clear on the essentials. 

Prioritization is a necessary skill to learn because sometimes it can feel like information is coming at us like a hose that has no off switch.  The approach of keeping up with the amount of data coming our way is a full-proof fail strategy.  Instead, we have to find ways to be selective in how much we are going to accept, when we will receive it, and how we can discard the excess. 

Quotes of the day: “ It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”  -J. K. Rowling

“Theory is good for the intellect, action is good for the soul” - Robert Reiner 

Q: What is your favorite prioritization tip?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear what works for you! 

As an Executive and Leadership Coach, I partner with people who want to get clarity on their priorities, contact me to learn more.

To better prioritize, use a system (Priority Series 4/5)

You have done the work of capturing and organizing all your tasks.  Now it is time to figure out what should come first and next, so you attain optimal results for you, your team, and your organization.

Here are some popular systems for prioritization: 

1. Eisenhower Matrix.  Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed this tool. It is a simple four-quadrant box that helps you separate important and urgent tasks.  Most of us fall into the trap of thinking urgent is important, but there is a big difference.  This propensity likely has roots in our evolutionary history; our ancestors concentrated more on short-term concerns than long-term strategy.  This is because tending to an immediate stimulus like a charging saber-toothed tiger could mean the difference between life and death.

In basic terms, urgent tasks are things that feel like they require your immediate attention.  They can put us in reactive mode, marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset.  Think about an email that has to go out in the next 30 minutes, we could feel a little rushed and stressed and maybe will not put the kind of work into it that we would like.  Additionally, it could be an email that we have to do, which is not necessarily central to our goals.

There are two common reasons why urgent tasks occur.

·      First, it can be related to your poor planning. For example, you just finished a meeting and have five deliverables, but you forget to write them down.  About an hour before the next meeting, you remember those tasks and become frenzied to complete them.  This is the type of urgency that can be fixed with more solid planning. 

·      Second, it can relate to other people’s poor planning that puts you in a situation where you have to now react to their demands.  Perhaps your teammates drop in and request information within the next hour.  Just because something is urgent for them does not mean it is significant to you.  Of course, emergencies arise, and it is always good to band together in times of crisis and support the team, but if this is more the case of poor planning and less of a pop-up situation, it should be addressed to course correct for the future.  Having a system to deal with these two common causes of urgent tasks will be helpful. 

Important tasks are ones that support your long-term purpose, mission, values, and goals.  They are tasks that inspire you.  While some important items can be urgent, Eisenhower believed, “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”  Most people spend a lot of their time managing situations and crises by reacting to other people’s priorities stemming from poor planning.   

Once you have created your matrix and listed all your items in the respective quadrant, you can then behave accordingly. 

·      Important and urgent (Q1): Do these tasks as soon as possible.

·      Important, but not urgent (Q2): Decide when you will do these and schedule it.

·      Urgent, but not important (Q3): Delegate these tasks to someone else.

·      Neither urgent nor important (Q4): Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible and never look back.

The goal is to have only a few items in Q3 because this quadrant is about putting out fires and dealing with tight timelines.  It does not serve anybody to have a sense of panic around completing an item.  The more time you dedicate to effective planning, the more you will notice that in about a month or so, you will have fewer items in Q3 and can focus more of your effort where it matters (Q1). 

2. Ivy Lee Method or the Tomorrow List.  This strategy is a way to rank your urgent and important work by its true priority.  The Ivy Lee method dates back to 1918, when Ivy Lee, a productivity consultant, was hired by Charles M. Schwab, the President of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, to improve his company's efficiency.  As the story goes, Lee offered his method to Schwab for free, and after three months, Schwab was so pleased with the results he wrote Lee a check for $25,000, worth $400,000 today.  

Here’s how it works:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks you need to accomplish tomorrow.  Do not write more than six.

2. Prioritize those six items in order of their importance.

3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task.  Only when you are finished, you may move to the next one. 

4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion.  At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.  Repeat this process every working day 

When you spend time in the evening creating this “Tomorrow List,” it has several benefits:

·      Studies indicate that writing down our goals and tasks helps us relax and declutter our minds.  The more we free our minds, the less we worry about when we try to fall asleep.

·      While sleeping, we can subconsciously be thinking about the goals and problems awaiting us, and our mind can go to work solving problems and forging new insights that can be carried forward for the following day and prime us to take action.

·      When we are focused on our plans for the next morning, we save time thinking about what’s first on the docket.

·      Limiting ourselves to six daily tasks (or less depending on preference) creates a constraint that forces us to prioritize appropriately and then stay focused by single-tasking our way through the list.

3. ABCDE Method.  This technique developed by Brian Tracy helps further divide the most important from a list of already important items. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Go through your list and give every task a letter from A to E.  Letter A being the highest priority because if you do not complete it, it can have serious consequences.

2. For every task with an A, give it a number that dictates the order you will do it in – A1, A2, A3.  B are tasks that you should do, but have somewhat important consequences.  Ideally, you should not move on to a B task until you have completed all the A tasks.  C tasks are ones that may have mild consequences.

3. Repeat until all tasks have letters and numbers.

The power of this prioritization technique lives in its simplicity and precision.  It allows you to get clarity on what is truly important to you because you have to decide what goes in the B3 category v. the C1.

4. Eat that Frog or “Hardest Item First” Method.  Once you have prioritized your most important work using whichever preferred method, it’s time to choose how to attack the day. 

Many productivity experts including Brian Tracy suggests doing the most important or most laborious task right away because it will set the tone for the rest of the day.  Mark Twain famously wrote, “If you have to eat a live frog, it does not pay to sit and look at it for a very long time!”  After you eat the frog, you will have the satisfaction that you have already done the worst and hardest thing for the day, and everything else will seem easier.  That emotional payoff can spark inspiration and confidence to tackle other tasks.  For those who consider themselves early birds, it makes sense to do your most challenging item first because you have a tank of fresh energy in which to dedicate.   

5. Warren Buffet’s 2-list strategy.  This is a way to make sure that you are working on the most important goals.  It does not matter how productive you are, if you are going after non-essential goals that are not leading you to your vision, you are not making progress. 

As the story goes, Warren Buffet used this process with his personal pilot to help him prioritize his career goals.  The first step was to write down 25 life goals, big and small, relating to career, education, family, and anything else worth spending time on.  Step two was to circle the top five goals on that list.  Any goals not circled, should be ignored, rather than interspersing them in your schedule for when you have time.  This is so that you are always working towards those big life goals and not spending your time doing non-trivial items.  Be sure to frequently check-in with yourself to make sure your priorities align with your long-term goals.

6. Fran Hauser’s 4 Square Model.  Author and Executive Fran Hauser divides her life priorities into four key quadrants: Career, Friends/Family, Me, and World.  Each box has the top priorities that cannot be moved because they deliver the greatest joy and align with her lifestyle.  80% of her time is dedicated to those top items, anything else that does not fit into that box, she is prepared to say no.  Sometimes it may mean shifting her schedule around so she can ensure that most of her time is spent on these four quadrants.  You can also build in some flexibility and take the average of two weeks instead of sticking to a weekly schedule since some weeks are more demanding than others.

Here are some examples of what it can look like:

·      Career: Reading books, learning a new skill, working with a coach on growth and development

·      Family/friends: Twice per week, family rituals of spending time together, such as working on a project or doing something wildly enjoyable together

·      Me: Personal development goals – could be exercise, more sleep, eating well, meditation, etc.

·      World: Doing charitable or volunteering work

7. Pomodoro Technique.  Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s as a time management technique that helps you with your priorities.   It uses a timer to break down work into intervals traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.  Each interval is known as a Pomodoro, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student.  This method has been widely used and similar to concepts such as timeboxing.

Here is how it works:

·      Decide on the task to be done.

·      Set the timer (traditionally 25 mins.) and work on the task.

·      End the work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.

·      If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break for 3-5 minutes.

·      Once you have completed four Pomodoros, take a longer break (15-30 mins.), reset your checkmark count to zero, and begin with step one. 

This technique can help you concentrate your energy on a big task you have prioritized that you want to devote at least a couple of hours to make a dent.

There are various systems that will help you prioritize work that will move the needle in your life to a place of fulfillment and meaning.  Experiment with the right system for you and get started!

Quote of the day: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” -William James

Q: How do you prioritize? Which system do you use that may not be listed above?

The next blog in this series 5/5 will focus on top tips for prioritization.

As an Executive and Leadership Coach, I partner with others to get clarity on your priorities, contact me to learn more.

What’s your system for prioritization?

Why you need a daily practice of planning and prioritization (Priority Series 3/5)

The last blog covered the importance of mapping out our high-level plan, including our purpose, vision, and values.  Now we can jump into creating a daily practice of planning and prioritizing.

Author and Organizational Consultant David Allen, a master of prioritization and planning, offers his Getting Things Done (GTD) system for organization.  His 5-step process - capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with your stuff - helps us get more precise with our work.

1. Capture.  We need different lists for different purposes.  First, make a master list, where you capture everything you need to do in one spot that is out of your mind.  This thought-download exercise will provide a sense of relief.  Allen asserts, “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”  If we put things in an external drive, we can free up mental space and be fully engaged with our current tasks and be more present with the people in our lives.  You can create categories of things that are important to you for more significant organization.  You can also have a “someday maybe” list of items that could be interesting to explore eventually.  For example, consider taking the marketing course, look into taking the family to this event.  You can then further divide your work into monthly, weekly, and daily lists.  Don’t worry about the number of items, just get as much down on the paper as possible. 

2. Clarify.  Get clear on all the things you have to do.  Break down your big items into parts.  Instead of having the task of “write a blog,” you can split it into its components parts such as: 1. Create an outline 2. Research 3. Write the first draft  4. Proofread 5. Post.  It seems like a small simple action, but it makes a big difference if it means that you are more likely to start when you know all you have to do is jot down an outline instead of doing all those prerequisite steps for publication.

3. Organize.  You can arrange your actionable items by category, priority, and due date.  As productivity consultant Brian Tracy explains, your monthly list pulls from your master list. Your weekly list pulls from your monthly list.  And so on.  This way, you know your daily priorities align with your bigger goals. 

When completing your different lists, remember the Pareto Principle, that 20% of your efforts tend to produce 80% of your results.  Look for those tasks that bring you great gains.

4. Reflect.  Reflect on your to-do list.  Allen recommends doing this weekly and performing general clean up.  It is a time to see how your week went, what needs to be adjusted, and what needs to happen for the week ahead. This airplane view will allow you to see if your priorities are aligning with your purpose, vision, and goals and if they are not, you can choose to delegate, cancel, or reschedule some of your non-essential tasks.

5. Engage.  Take action – choose your next task from your list and get it done.  If you find that you are stalling, break up the task, maybe the next step is to have a couple of conversations with others to get ideas on how to proceed. Once you take the next step, you can receive additional information that you can act upon for the following step, and so on.

While you are planning, it is essential to be flexible.  What you want today can be different from what you want in the future, so you need to occasionally check in with yourself to make sure your values and goals are crystal clear and current.  Reshuffling priorities and making changes are all part of the process.

The very act of thinking and planning unlocks your mental powers and triggers your creativity.  Choose a process that will allow you to take action on the work that matters most to you.

Quote of the day:  “Cleaning and organizing is a practice, not a project” -Meagan Francis

Q: Which method do you use for organizing your information?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 4/5 will focus on systems of prioritization]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to get clarity on their priorities, contact me to learn more.

Establish a daily practice to enhance your prioritization skills

The Importance of Long-Term Planning Before you Prioritize (Priority Series 2/5)

You have just decided that you are going to start regularly prioritizing so you can go big on the things that matter to you. To facilitate your efforts, you first want to devise an effective planning system that will offer greater strategic clarity.

Here are some useful steps to take to create a foundation of planning that will set you up for more effective prioritization: 

Get clear on WHAT you want and WHY you want it! This process includes purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.

1. Purpose.  This can be a much more involved exercise, but essentially, why are you on this planet, what are you here to do?  Is your purpose to help others, if so, what actions are you taking to serve that purpose which allows you to feel fully alive?  It will be easier for you to create daily and weekly tasks when you know what you need to do within the bigger picture and when you are going after purpose-driven items, you will love the reasons for choosing what to spend time on.

2. Values.  These are essential pillars that energize you and buttress your purpose.  Maybe your values include learning and service, so having a purpose aimed at helping others seems natural. When you are living your values, you will feel productive in how you spend your moments.

3. Vision.  Three or five years from now, where do you want to be?  If you fulfilled your purpose, what would that look like, what would your lifestyle be?  Paint a detailed picture.; you need to know where you want to go so you can take prioritization steps to support that vision.

4. Set goals and objectives.  Once you have your vision, you want to collect all the things you need to do to accomplish that 3-year plan and capture it on one master list.  Then you can break it down into yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and objectives.  Prioritization happens on different levels. You have the tasks that need to be done today, goals completed in a week, and accomplishments for the month.  Sometimes the lists do not always align, and sometimes it can be easy to default to what seems urgent today instead of what is vital for the long term.  Always choose to take the steps that are moving you closer to your important life priorities – your purpose and vision.

This high-level planning will make daily decisions much easier.  Brian Tracy’s 10-90 rule for personal effectiveness says that when you spend 10% of the time planning,  you save up to 90% of your time in execution.

You may also want to consider this popular ABZ planning method in designing your long-term objectives.  Created by Authors and Co-founders Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, it is an excellent strategy for designing your career while being flexible and having a backup plan for when things go wrong.  Plan A is about your current focus, which can be modified to adapt to small changes.  In case of a dramatic or unexpected change, Plan B launches, allowing you to pivot to refocus your goals and take the next steps to get there.  Plan Z is the fallback position; if all goes wrong, it is something you can comfortably rely on while you get back on your feet and not have to worry about the basics.

When you are clear about what you want and your priorities, you should be able to act decisively when a conflict comes up.  To help with this decision-making, you can set up potential conflict scenarios.  For example, you say that you want to prioritize career advancement.  So if you have an amazing work opportunity come up, but it is on the same day as your friend’s birthday party, which activity will you choose to attend?  When you put a few of these conflicts against each other and know exactly how you will act based on your vision, values, and purpose, you will be less stressed and act with conviction when the time comes.

To begin to prioritize, you want to get clear on your big-picture items – purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.  Then you can jump into the daily actions of working from a list and prioritize your most important work.

Quote of the day: “Tell me, what is it you wish to do with your one wild and precious life?” -Mary Oliver

Q: When was the last time you dedicated time to think and write about your purpose?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you 

[The next blog in this series 3/5 will focus on daily practices of prioritization] 

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to craft their personal leadership vision, contact me to learn more.

Big-picture planning will make your priorities clearer

The Dangers of Not Prioritizing (Priority Series 1/5)

It can be common to feel like you have a never-ending river of responsibilities. You put in what feels like a productive work session, but cannot quite seem to make a dent in your pile.  Learning to prioritize your most important work will allow you to make meaningful progress in your life.

Choosing not to prioritize comes with some dangers.  Here are a few:

1. When we do not prioritize, everything becomes important.  Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, shares a story of how on the day after his daughter was born, he was urged to attend a work meeting by a colleague.  Feeling pressured and not knowing his priorities, he left his wife in the hospital and showed up to work.  When he got there, clients looked at him perplexed and could not understand why he was not with his family.  When you are not clear on your priorities and say yes to everybody to please them, you end up doing more damage in the process – in his case - harm to his family, his integrity, and client relationships.  Agreeing to requests seems like you are being helpful, but you are not; it is much more important to know your priorities and act in accordance with them to serve yourself and others even better.

2. If we do not prioritize, we can get overwhelmed with too many choices.  An abundance of options can be problematic.  In The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz argues that having more choices can lead to unhappiness because it can be harder to cut through the noise and make a decision.  But when you know your priorities, you can look past the superfluous because that diamond is shining so brightly in front of you that you do not even see any of the other enticing stones.

3. When we do not have a clear sense of our priorities, we can engage in multi-tasking by trying to do it all.  Our brain can only focus on one thing at a time, so when we aim to go after two or more high priority items, we pay the price in time and effectiveness.  What happens is not multi-tasking (you cannot solve a math problem and share original poetry at the same time,) instead, what occurs is task switching, spending time on one task, and then moving to another.  A bounce between activities wastes our time because we have to reorient our brains to the new job.  We lose up to 40% of task effectiveness and sometimes more depending on the assignment’s difficulty.  Prioritizing helps us focus on one thing at a time for a longer duration, and that uninterrupted workflow can lead to higher productivity.

4. With no prioritization, we live in reaction mode.  If we do not know what we want to do, we may say yes to things that others want us to do.  Jim Rohn said, “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.  And guess what they have planned for you?  Not much.”  Getting clarity on your most essential work will allow you to feel good about the job you are doing that supports your mission and vision.  

5. A lack of prioritizing can lead to burnout.  We all know those people who consistently stay late at the office or work on the weekends to catch up.  Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, but when it is the norm, it may be due to a challenge in prioritizing.  This activity is not something to wear as a badge when it comes at the expense of quality family or wellbeing time.  Conversely, there are those people who consistently leave at 6:00 pm to go to the gym because they have prioritized exercise, and knowing they have set boundaries garners great respect.

We may have 100 visions a day, but we cannot accomplish them all simultaneously.  Less is more.  Prioritization is a cornerstone of productivity and once you build this habit, it will help with time management and work-life balance.   

Quote of the day: “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Q: What is one skill that you can be excellent in that would have the most significant positive impact on your career?  How willing are you to prioritize that skill development?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this series 2/5 will focus on the importance of long-term planning to facilitate prioritization]

As a Leadership and Executive Coach, I partner with others to help discover and clarify priorities, contact me to learn more.

What’s your cost to not prioritizing?

Top 6 Ways to Brainstorm (Brainstorming 2/2)

In the last article, I wrote about how adding guidelines can improve the process of brainstorming, however, there are many different types of brainstorming. Let’s explore six popular ways to spark creativity on your team.

1. Brain Writing. Start by giving people time to think and work alone by writing down all of their ideas.  Then come together as a group and each person shares one idea at a time. When you separate the individual idea generation stage from the group discussion phrase, it allows for many more initial possibilities. You can then narrow down your selections by detecting the overlapping themes and building on these smaller and more concentrated concepts in greater detail.

2. 6-3-5 method. In this approach developed by Bernd Rohrbach in the 60s, six people sit around a table and pass their three ideas to the person on the right who builds on them.  This passing is done five times (or more) until everybody has had time to add to each idea.  They then get together and evaluate and search for commonalities.  This method is successful because it slows down the creative process since it gives everybody in the room adequate time to generate and strengthen before moving on to the evaluation phase.  It also prevents those who want to rush into solution mode because they are uncomfortable with uncertainty.

3. Round Robin Brainstorming. After each person has prepared something to share, the facilitator will go around the table requesting one idea from each person.  The job of the facilitator is to ensure an orderly process so everybody has a chance to talk and nobody evaluates the ideas until all have the opportunity to share.  This approach can be useful when team members have a tendency to stay quiet.  It also provides additional control for those who want to start analyzing the first few ideas before seeing the whole menu presented, they will have to wait until everybody has offered something.

4. Nominal Group Technique. Is a structured method for group brainstorming that can illicit creative answers to specific problems. Team members begin by writing down their ideas, then selecting which ones they feel are best. Once they are ready, everyone presents their favorite idea persuasively and then discussed and evaluated thoroughly. The group can take a simple vote for the ideas that they want to prioritize to further develop.

5. Sentence Stems. These include a series of prompts to get the discussion started.  For example, “we can cut our costs 10% by…?”  “We can become #1 in our space by…?”  Researchers at Google, Facebook, and IDEO have come up with a powerful three-word sentence starter – “How Might We…?” Each word is deliberately chosen, the HOW encourages detailed description, the MIGHT allows for freedom and creativity and the WE invites anybody to participate.  According to Duane Bray, the Head of Talent at IDEO, “How Might We” questions are so effective because they “allow clients to mentally reset and reframe a problem as an opportunity.”

6. Sketch Storming. This is the combination of drawing and writing to visually present your ideas.   Some concepts can be too abstract and difficult to describe in words so using diagrams and drawings can be helpful.  The depictions may even illicit multiple interpretations and fun, creative offshoots.

Whichever method you choose, the key is creating an environment of psychological safety so people can be encouraged to take risks in their thinking and silliness. You can choose to start with a fun warmup game.  Management Professor Leigh Thompson conducted a study on this subject and found that groups who shared funny or embarrassing stories about themselves came up with 26% more ideas and were 15% more creative than the groups who did not.

The best creative groups are not just the sum of their parts, but the totality of their experiences. When you can effectively implement methods that elicit people’s best, ideas blossom. 

Quote of the Day: “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainty” -Erich Fromm

Q: What’s your favorite brainstorming technique? Comment and share below, we would be overjoyed to hear from you!

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate processes for brainstorming & creativity. Contact me to learn more.

Which brainstorming methods yield the greatest results?

Brainstorming: From Broken to Better (1/2)

Does brainstorming ever feel like a waste of time? You believe it is necessary to get your team's input on a topic, but the session usually turns into a few people bickering, and the other participants remaining silent.   What’s going wrong?

When Advertising Executive Alex Osbourn developed this specific technique in the 1950s, the concept seemed obvious and simple - toss out as many ideas as possible without regard for being right or fear of criticism.  As it turns out, there are inherent problems with the design.  Psychology Professor Art Markman draws on research which shows that people who follow his method come up with fewer good ideas, compared to if individuals were to generate suggestions alone. 

Here are some challenges with basic brainstorming:

1. When people work together, their ideas tend to converge early on.  When one person throws out an idea, an anchoring bias occurs, where others tend to affix their ideas to the first ones.  Their minds are influenced as they start to think in similar ways about the problem.  In contrast, when they have time to work alone first, they diverge in their thinking because everybody takes a slightly different path when working through the problem while not being shaped by other ideas.  To reach the most creative solutions, it is much better to start with a large number of proposals and winnow down as opposed to having the first few thoughts dominate the process, thereby starting with a smaller sample in which to work.

2. Only some voices are heard.  According to Rebecca Greenfield of Fast Company, only a few people do 60%-75% of the talking, which can prevent other fresh ideas from surfacing. Even worse, if one of those people happens to be the boss, others could rally to support that view as a way to curry favor. Some may even censor themselves because they may feel like their ideas are not as worthy as those of the boss.

3. This method favors extraverts over introverts.  It is a natural tendency for many extraverts to blurt out ideas, even if they might not be fully formed because as they are sharing, they are processing and arriving at what they really want to say. It is their style. Contrastly, most introverts usually like to take time thinking more deeply about an issue and may go through several internal edits before they feel comfortable sharing.  The domination of a few loud contributors can cause others to remain silent because of fear of looking stupid by contributing an idea that has not gone through their personal vetting process or because they do not feel comfortable sharing freely in this way since they yearn for that uninterrupted thinking time.

In my experience in working with teams, not many people take the time to set up guidelines before they engage in a brainstorming session, they want to jump in and figure it out on the go.  With just a little bit of structure, the process can yield much higher efficiency. 

Here are some helpful steps to make the most out of your sessions:

1. Organize the logistics.  According to Author Brian Tracy, the ideal size of groups is 4-7, and the optimal length should be about 30 minutes.  Chose a facilitator to ensure that each person can have the same amount of contributions and to step in when guidelines are not being followed. Be sure to create those norms that work best for your team. Elect a recorder to capture all the ideas for revision and reflection.

2. Go for quantity.  The goal is to generate the greatest number of ideas in the time allowed.  There’s a direct relationship between the number of ideas and quality. In the book Originals, Adam Grant argues that creative people are no more creative than anybody else, but what separates their effectiveness is the number of ideas they put together and while many of them may fail, they just need that one from the bunch. Do not aim for 3-5, go for 15-20, or whatever may seem like a stretch for your team. Sometimes the last idea offered in the final minute is the breakthrough one.

3. Be positive and build. It is essential to avoid criticizing or judging. When you treat every idea as a good one, even seemingly absurd ones, it creates a safe space for people to give freely.  Always be thinking about how you can encourage and build on other’s ideas because it could take you to interesting and surprising places. This is the approach of improvisation, which is called, “YES, AND.” The idea is that when your partner introduces a crazy idea or scenario, instead of rejecting it, you go with it and make it even crazier. Essentially accepting what they say as truth and building on the reality that they set however asinine you think it may be.

4. Go for the ridiculous ideas. It is not uncommon for one bizarre idea to be combined with another crazy one to create a revolutionary third idea.  Lighten up, this process should be fun, silly, and at times, have you stitched over in laughter. After all, if we can’t laugh when in an imaginary and creative space, when can we?

When we put careful thought into brainstorming, we can create an environment that extracts the best quality from the team, while also fostering a feeling of fun, connection, and being a part of a powerful creative process which can deliver untold meaning and purpose.

Quote of the Day: Creativity is contagious - pass it on” -Albert Einstein

Q: What other guidelines would you add to maximize effectiveness in the brainstorming process? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

The next blog will explore the different types of brainstorming for maximum team performance.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate processes for brainstorming & creativity. Contact me to learn more.

How do you spark creativity on your team?

Optimize Your Nighttime Routine for Sounder Sleep (Sleep Series 4/4)

In the previous articles in the sleep series, we covered the harmful impact of sleep deprivation, tips for a more successful snooze, and the importance of daytime decisions to improve your quality of sleep.  To conclude our blog series, let’s jump into strategies for creating an optimal nighttime routine, or a series of automatic steps to take, to help you fall asleep more easily.

Here are some suggestions to include in your nighttime routine that could help you relax and prime you for sleep.  Whatever you decide that comprises your routine, it can be helpful to set an alarm to kick it off about 45 minutes before bed.

1. Start strong. You can begin the routine by listening to music or a podcast while doing your bathroom business.  Beginning with an enjoyable activity will allow you to look forward to the process instead of instinctually trying to delay it. Maybe you have a dedicated audiobook that you get to enjoy each night and look forward to picking up the story where you left off.

2. Stretch. Doing a series of relaxing, low-impact exercises like yoga or gentle stretching in the evening can help promote sleep. The key is to draw your awareness to your muscles and feel them getting tired.

3. Breath. These exercises are another way to relax your body. When we are relaxed, our breathing slows.  Researchers have found that the relationship is bidirectional, when we deliberately slow our breath, our body relaxes and can more easily fall asleep in a calmer state.

4. Read in bed.  Some studies show that reading for as little as six minutes lowers our heart rate, eases muscle tension, and reduces stress by as much as 60%. The more relaxed our mind and body are, the more we can ease into restorative sleep.

5. Journal. Take time to write a few sentences about the events that you experienced that day. When you dedicate moments to actively reflect on your day and put your experience into words, it gives you a sense of control and makes it easier to quiet your thoughts. Not keeping a journal is like spending the whole day painting a portrait and not bothering to step back and examine what you have made and where you want to go for next time. If you are not reflecting on your day, you are not learning or improving how you live.

6. Foster Positive Thoughts. While lying in bed and ready to fall asleep, focus on the positive.  Research from the University of California took a cohort of people who were having a hard time falling asleep and divided them into three groups and timed how long it took to fall asleep.  Group 1 was not given any instructions and took about an hour. Group 2 was told to try and forget their worries; they fell asleep in about 40 minutes. Group 3 was asked to think pleasant thoughts, they fell asleep in 20 minutes. Focused thinking on something positive like an upcoming vacation, a good movie, an adventure with a friend can help with lights out.   The more specific your thoughts, the better, e.g., thinking about the colors you see and the surrounding objects will engross you in the experience and relax you.

Setting yourself up for excellent sleep does not just happen when your head hits the pillow, but in the series of choices you make leading up to bedtime. When you can start and end your routine on a positive note by doing one of your favorite activities and writing in your gratitude journal, you are priming your mind for a quality snooze.

Quote of the day: “If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.” ― Dale Carnegie

Q: What’s your favorite nighttime routine to prime you for the best sleep of your life? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

What’s your nighttime routine?

For Quality Sleep, Make Better Daytime Decisions (sleep series 3/4)

Getting good quality sleep does not just happen when your head hits the pillow, but from the moment you wake up.  Our behavior throughout the day and the choices we make, especially in the last few hours of our day can significantly impact our ability to get great rest.

Here are some practical things to do during the day to improve your sleep:

1. Control Stimulants.  As a general rule, it is best to cut off caffeine by 2 pm. Try to give yourself at least eight caffeine-free hours before bedtime. Nightly alcohol also disrupts your sleep quality.  Some people may believe a couple of glasses of wine can help them fall asleep quickly, which may be true, but the problem is that sleep hinders the REM stage, which is the most restorative.  That’s why even when getting many hours of sleep after a night of drinking, we wake up exhausted because alcohol has gotten in the way. The rule is if we are going to have a drink, make it at least three hours before bed; for two drinks, at least four hours before sleep.

2. Get Sunlight Exposure. The more daylight you soak up, the happier and the more alert you will be, which will allow you to sleep better at night since some of that energy has been expended earlier.  Even if you may not be able to get outside, sitting near a window can also help.  Studies show that on average, employees whose offices have windows get 46 min more sleep every night.

3. Exercise. Even as little as 10 minutes of exercise per day can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your sleep. For one thing, it is because movement tires the body, which increases the chances that you’ll be sleepy when it is time for rest. Sleep specialist Matthew Walker recommends visiting the gym after work rather than before because it is a great way to reduce stress after a day at the office.  The movement helps burn off any tension, which enables you to wind down more easily and relax when you get to bed. Taking more walks can help boost your energy so the next time you need to make a phone call or have a meeting, why not combine it with walking?

4. Eat Well. The food we consume throughout the day has a surprisingly strong impact on our sleep. In particular, eating saturated fats and sugar is associated with a harder time falling asleep. Fat requires the body to work overtime, which makes it more difficult for us to feel comfortable. Regularly eating a cheeseburger and french fries – especially for dinner – causes your sleep quality to suffer, and frequent sugar intake raises energy arousal. Accordingly to an Australian study, spicy food may also disrupt your sleep.  In addition to the higher fat levels, it can increase your internal body temperature, which needs to lower for you to have restful sleep. If you eat these foods too close to bedtime, your body expends energy in digestion rather than helping your brain fall asleep. Many studies would advise not eating at least 3 hours before bed.

The choices you make during the day can have a major impact on the quality of sleep you have. When you are eating healthy, exercising, getting appropriate sunlight, and avoiding stimulates like caffeine or alcohol late in the day, you are creating the conditions for the best sleep of your life.

Quote of the day: “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night.” ― Charles Fisher

Q: What are some productive daytime activities that help you sleep better at night?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

The next blog in this sleep series 4/4 will focus on optimizing your nighttime routine.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

Make healthy eating choices for better sleep

Tips for Being a Super Sleeper (Sleep Series 2/4)

When was the last time you thought about the quality of your sleep? Given that it is one of the most important factors that can greatly impact our health, happiness, productivity, and relationships, it seems like it would be pivotal to invest our time to be super sleepers.

The National Sleep Foundation and the Center for Disease Control recommend 7-9 hours. Because every person is different, how much sleep you need depends on your genetics and how you are spending your waking hours. Some people may believe they fall into the category of needing only a few hours of sleep, but their underslept brain may be tricking them.  Arianna Huffington, Author of the Sleep Revolution notes, “Unless you have a genetic mutation and can function on three to four hours of sleep which is 1.5% of the population, the rest of us need 8-9 hours to have fully restorative sleep.”

If you are not sure how many hours you need to feel refreshed, you can run an experiment over a holiday or long weekend to find out.  Allow yourself to wake up whenever you want without setting an alarm. Needless to say, if you are backed up on sleep, the first night of doing this will not tell you much because you will be making up for lost sleep. But after one to two nights, you will start noticing how many hours you are getting when you wake up naturally. 

Why Are We Sleep Deprived?  Here Are Some Common Culprits:

1. Incompatible work schedules. Your work schedule may not be conducive to your natural tendencies. You may be a night owl who can do your best work in the evenings but those creative insights sparked at midnight will take a toll on your job when you have to report to the office at 9:00 am or even earlier.

2. Technology disruptions. Researchers have known for years that the blue-ish light that smartphone screens emit can make it harder to fall asleep.  A new study from Deloitte found that one-third of adults check their phones if they wake up in the middle of the night, as do nearly half of those under the age of 35. This smartphone addiction is impacting our ability to fall asleep and to remain so.

3. Coffee consumption. Caffeine is a stimulant that raises alertness and blocks our bodies from getting tired. What most people may not realize is that coffee has a half-life of 5-6 hours, meaning that if you drink a cup of coffee at 6 pm, 50% of that caffeine will still be in your system at 11 pm. So while your body may be tired later in the day, your mind is still racing, preventing you from winding down.

Now that we laid out key sleep disruptors, let’s turn our attention to tips for getting the best sleep of your life:

1. Minimize technology. Curtail technology use about an hour before bed; if you must consume, read a book.  To avoid distractions, use the iPhone bedtime app or an equivalent.   By setting an alarm for when you want to fall asleep, the “do not disturb” function switches on, and your phone will not continuously lure you with dings and vibrations.

2. Set the right temperature.  Being a little chilly will help you fall asleep more easily.  The ideal temperature is around 68 degrees but adjust according to personal preference. 

3. Control the light.  Light tells our brain it is time to wake up so keeping them dimmed leading up to bedtime can help. When you are ready to sleep, make your room as dark as possible.  You can even cover up any blinking lights from your laptop, cable box, or tv with stickers called lightdims.

4. Be Consistent with your sleep routine. A mistake that a lot of us make is that we stay up late on Friday and Saturday, and sleep later the following mornings. That leads to a phenomenon that psychologists call “social jet lag” because it’s what happens when our social life throws off our bodily rhythms. Sleeping in on the weekends after a late night with friends or binge-watching Netflix is what causes Sunday night insomnia. Going to bed and waking up roughly the same time will prime your body for nighty rest.

5. Create a sleep runway. If you are aiming to sleep at 10:00 pm, you should create a sleep runway of at least 10-20 minutes, depending on how long it takes you to fall asleep after you close your eyes.  Most people falsely assume that if they are in bed at 10 and up at 6, they have met their quota, but being in bed is not the same as being asleep.

Sleep deprivation is a pervasive problem and if left unaddressed, it can have devastating consequences. Creating the ideal conditions can help you get the best sleep of your life and have you perform at your best in all your important arenas.

Quote of the day: “Tired minds don’t plan well.  Sleep first, plan later.”  -Walter Reisch

Q: When you are having trouble sleeping, what is usually the main reason?  What trick do you use to help you fall asleep? Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this sleep series 3/4 will focus on making better daytime decisions for sounder sleep.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

How do your habits contribute to your lack of sleep?

To Be a Peak Performer, Start with More Sleep (Sleep Series 1/4)

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is a mantra uttered by some of my clients who are trying to max out their waking moments.  But in fact, the best way to live productively is to do just the opposite -  invest in good quality sleep every day.  It is one of the most important factors to being a peak performer and successful leader. If some of us are finding that during this global quarantine, we have some spare time on our hands that would normally be spent on commuting or attending social events, I would say, now is a great time to prioritize sleep.

The Problems with Sleep Deprivation:

According to a Gallup poll, about 100 years ago, people slept on average 9 hours per night. Now, the average is closer to 6.8 hours with 40% banking less than 6.  Sleep is not just a luxury, it is a necessity, and the lack of it can cause an onslaught of problems.  According to Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, “Sleeping less than 6-7 hours have long-term health consequences, including a weakened immune system, hypertension, gastrointestinal disorder, diabetes, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  World leaders Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher both talked about sleeping 4 hours developed the latter condition.  Denmark has even begun paying compensation to women nurses who developed breast cancer after working night shifts because the government realized the deleterious effects lack of sleep could have.

And it is not just physical health in jeopardy, but our mental health is impacted every bit as profoundly. According to Psychologist Ron Friedman, sleep deprivation changes the way we see the world. Upsetting things are much more distressing when we are tired.  We have reduced energy levels and increased anxiety which impacts our mood and our behavior – we are much more likely to blow things out of proportion and lose our temper with colleagues and loved ones.  UC Berkeley researchers have found that sleep-deprived people feel lonelier and less inclined to engage with others, avoiding close contact in much the same way as people with social anxiety. Jeff Bezos noted yet another ramification, “When I get six hours, my decision-making is 5% - 20% less solid.” 

The Bountiful Benefits of Sleep:

1. Fosters good health.  When you sleep, your brain flushes out toxins that build up over the course of the day and when you do not do that, you run the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other degenerative conditions.  During sleep, your body produces hormones and proteins that build your immune system. Friedman noted, “those who sleep only six hours a night are 50% more likely to get sick.”  Additionally, the nightly release of growth hormone makes your bones stronger and increases your muscle mass. 

2. Positively impacts memory and learning.  Sleep’s primary purpose is memory consolidation.  New memories are formed when a person engages with information to be learned (i.e., memorizing a list of words or mastering a piano concerto). However, according to Matthew Walker, these memories are initially quite vulnerable. To stick, they must be solidified, improved, and shifted from short- term into more efficient and long-term storage regions within the brain, which happens during the NREM sleep stage. This process of "memory consolidation" occurs when connections between brain cells and among brain regions are strengthened; time spent asleep plays a role in preserving memory. Consequently, while awake, memory tasks can be performed more quickly and accurately and with less stress and anxiety.  When you are sleep deprived, it is harder to focus attention optimally and learn efficiently to store those insights. 

3. Enhances problem solving and creativity. Research shows that the average person has about 60,000 thoughts every day. When we sleep, our minds are busy consolidating, organizing, and reviewing experiences, as well as generating insights.  Our brain tests out connections between vast stores of information and is biased towards seeking out the most distant, non-obvious associations in ways our waking brain would never attempt. Our sleeping brain allows us to take freshly minted memories, collide them with an entire back catalog to spark creative insights and forge novel links between unrelated pieces of information. This REM stage, also responsible for dreams allows us to take a step back, make sense of this collection, and glean overarching insights.  It fosters impressive problem-solving skills -- you essentially wake with new solutions to previously intractable problems.  Larry Page said the idea of Google came to him in a dream. Indeed, the brain you take to bed is not the same as when you wake up. 

4. Improves happiness and performance. Quality sleep is linked to greater energy and happiness. Walker adds, “Just one night of good sleep makes you feel more outgoing and socially confident, and furthermore, will attract others to you.” This will make you feel more connected and filled with positive feelings.

Sleep is also tied to performance, such as better alertness, enhanced cognitive functioning, better judgment, stronger productivity, and fewer mistakes.  Researchers at Stanford University took 11 members of the school basketball team and were made to sleep 8.5 hours every night, while the rest of the team slept 6.5 hours.  At the end of 5.5 weeks, the performance of those who kept their normal routine of 6.5 hours did not change.  In contrast, the group that was now sleeping 8.5 hours became different players.  Their free throw percentage shot up by 9%, their 3-point shooting jumped 9.2%, and they were even running faster, shaving half a second off their sprint time. In every sport tested, performance went up. In tennis, players hit fewer faults, ran faster, and got to more balls.

Many people may believe that they can outwit sleep, that they can survive on less than 6 hours, but that is only because they might be making this call while being sleep deprived so their judgment may be blurred. Getting high-quality sleep consistently will positively impact every area of your life.

Quote of the day: “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” -Gandhi

Q: What is the biggest cost sleep is having on you?  How can you prioritize sleep? Comment and share below, we would love to hear!

The next blog in this sleep series 2/4 will focus on top tips for being a super sleeper.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

Enjoy the numerous benefits of sleep

Top 10 Tips For Building Community Within Your Team (Team Series 10/10)

People yearn for a sense of belonging.  Some want to go to their job and feel just as connected to each other as they are to the work.  Otherwise, it can be tragic to think that you are alone in a crowd because you do not entirely relate to others or even have a chance to get to know them.  Companies would bode well to provide more enriching communal experiences for their employees to bring them closer together.

Here Are Some Ways To Build Community In Teams:

1. Pre-Meeting “How Are You” Check-ins.  The goal is to have people get to know each other and learn about their lives outside of work as interesting people with families and not just experts with a particular role.  Five minutes spent chatting may seem like only a little bit of time, but when you add those dedicated moments before each meeting, it will build up over the long run and lead to positive results.  It is about sacrificing short-term efficiency for long-term productivity.  Professor Uri Hasson's research at Princeton University shows that when people share personal stories with one another, even if they do not have anything to do with the topic of the meeting, neural coupling takes place.  This is the synchronization between the brains of the listener and storyteller. This strengthened cognitive connection between each other makes it more likely they will build rapport and work well together.

2. Trip Report Practice.  This is a simple communication practice that Eric Schmidt used at Google and was taught to him by his Executive Coach Bill Campbell.  He got people to share stories that would lead to better decision-making.  He would kick-off meetings by asking what they did on the weekend.  If somebody had traveled, he would ask for a trip report.  The responses would allow team members to know each other on a personal level, which went a long way in improving relationships.  Having these common connection points got everybody involved in the meeting in a fun way from the start.  Learning about what matters to people helps to build a stronger relationship.  It also turned out that sharing information early on led to additional contributions later in the meeting. 

3. Thank You Ritual.  Former Yahoo Executive Marissa Mayer began her staff meetings with THANK YOUs.  It was called family prayer – you had to thank another team for something that happened last week, big or small. The only stipulations were that you could not thank yourself or repeat another person’s thank you.  It is an excellent way to recap the week, show gratitude, and build team camaraderie. 

4. Book clubs.  Those who learn together grow together.  Building camaraderie and teamwork by analyzing a book every 4-6 weeks to learn new concepts that can be applied to the workplace and our lives.  Collaborative learning is excellent for cultivating community, having fun, and building lasting bonds beyond the scope of work.  It is also really nice to have a common language in which to refer.

5. “Ask Anything” Approach.  This is an idea herald by Zappos Tony Hsieh.  He believes in a flat organizational approach, which is that the best ideas can come from any part of the organization.  Therefore, all his employees got to collaborate on the company’s core values, and not just the executive leadership team.  He launched a monthly employee newsletter, “Ask Anything,” which encourages employees to send an email and ask any question they want to get answered.  This approach can also be taken at the team levels as a way to share knowledge openly and build understanding.

6. Brief Weekly Check-ins. Teams getting in the habit of gathering once a week to clear the air on anything administrative – scheduling, events, or issue alerts can have its advantages.  For this segment, you can intentionally have no agenda or issues to be solved, just information exchange for as little as five minutes.  It can be a part of its own meeting, or it can be a component within a larger scheduled meeting.  A lot of time can be saved by not chasing down issues through emails and texts that can be solved in a meeting in 30 seconds.  This process to circulate information freely will help people feel like they are not existing in a silo and always know what is going on. 

7. Musical Connections.  When you listen to music with others, it creates bonding.  According to Srini Pillay, Harvard Medical School Professor, “physical synchrony to music makes people like each other more, remember each other better, and also trust each other more.  In fact, even as early as 14 months of age, children who are bounced in synchrony with an adult are more altruistic - they pick up objects that adults have dropped and give them back.”  Having team gatherings and events where people have musical experiences together can create more unity.

8. Talent Book.  It is nice to know the people you work with, and one way to do that is to have fun profiles of people that include a brief bio of their interests and talents.  It is an easy way of getting people connected through similar interests and starting conversations around interesting topics.  The book can include anything you want; it can even be expanded to include people who have had a profound impact on you or people that you admire. Zappos has a culture book they give out to people, which contains company highlights, individual achievements, funny moments, and weird times.

9. Collaborative Spaces.  Architects like to talk about spaces for serendipitous encounters, which can lead to enhanced collaborations.  Steve Jobs’ desire was that the only bathroom at Pixar be in the center so workers from different parts can mingle.  You can create spaces in your office where people are directed to those areas for spontaneous conversation and creativity.

10. Time for Physical Proximity.  Although we currently have to socially distance, things will go back to normal. Face-to-face collaborations help improve performance.  Independent studies conducted by Ben Waber et al., President and CEO of Sociometric Solutions found physical closeness boosts virtual communication.  He reported, “In one case, engineers who shared space were 20% more likely to communicate digitally and emailed four times more frequently when collaborating on a project.  The result was that their projects were finished 32% faster than those from staff working in different places.”

Practicing any of these activities or ones that your company created can engender magical moments in your team that brings them closer together and contributes to greater happiness, productivity, and a feeling of belonging.

Quote of the day: “You can only really succeed and accomplish things through the collective, common purpose.” -Lee Bollinger, Columbia University President

Q: What’s your favorite practice that your team has or that you would like to see?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

As a Leadership and Executive Coach, I partner with teams to build more community, contact me to learn more.

How do you build a sense of community within your team?

Does Your Team Have A Ritual? (Team Series 9/10)

Sitting around the table with your family for your favorite holiday and then playing board games together afterward can be a sacred social ritual that contains special moments that have lasting significance.

Rituals are surprisingly ubiquitous across cultures and time and have played a role, for better or for worse, in the lives of individuals and societies.  Our ancient ancestors used the bond of ritual to create ties of kinship necessary for survival in a world rife with dangers.  The ritual of storytelling around a fire was used to pass down wisdom and beliefs across generations. 

In modern times, for some people, this word can conjure up a negative connotation because it may remind us of the practices that we had to do when we were young to appease our families.  Perhaps we did not want to do them or even know the reasons for why we were partaking — I always wondered about going to confession when I was not in the mood to share my secrets.  However, simple social rituals like a bedtime routine, keeping a gratitude journal, or a Thursday evening walk to the ice cream shop with your partner can help us consistently engage in our core values by fostering healthy and positive habits for our mind. 

The benefits of social rituals that we choose:

1. It allows for presence.  In our hyper-paced world, we can easily become anxious by ruminating on the past or being worried about the future, but when we spend more time in the present, we gain a greater sense of control and wellbeing. Doing the same activity every day and choosing to be mindful and fully present means that we will both receive the most from, and give the most to the experience.  Top sports players are well known for their pre-match rituals.  Serena Williams always bounces the ball five times on her first serve and twice on her second.  She wears the same pair of socks for the duration of a tournament.  She has even blamed losing on not following her ritual.

2. It provides structure and comfort.  It gives a sense of stability and continuity amidst the ever-changing, hectic, and often chaotic world.  Knowing that there is a practice that we consistently turn to provides familiarity and control over a changing world.

3. It offers a sense of renewal.  Metaphorically, rituals are oases, a time to rest, replenish, and restore ourselves on our long and winding path through life.  The time-out from our cyclic existence can provide mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing, especially while we are connecting with others.

4. Increases self-control.  Harvard Business Professor Francesco Gina and colleagues wrote about the use of rituals to help with self-control. Their study compared two groups of people who had the goal of losing weight. The first group was told to be mindful of what they ate for five days.  The second group had to engage in a three-step pre-meal ritual.  Step 1: cut their food.  Step 2: arrange their food symmetrically on the plate.  Step 3. tap their food three times with the utensil before eating.  The second group who followed the ritual ate less on average.   Going through these steps made them more mindful of the process and had a more significant impact on their goal of eating in moderation.

The benefits of rituals in teams and organizations:

Secular rituals or repeated enactments of a particular set of behaviors, scripts, and interactions can be a great tool to shape company cultures.

1. It is a way to stay connected.  Setting aside quality time to better relate with others and build a strong sense of community is everything.  Rituals can provide purpose, values, and meaning, while also bringing us together.  It can be a way to reinforce our identity.  Many workplaces have rituals for this exact objective.  At Walmart, workers begin the day with a company cheer.  At Yelp, salespeople bang a gong when they close a sale.  When I was at Penn State for college, I encountered a ritual that I initially found quirky but then wholly embraced because it made me feel more connected with my classmates. Walking through campus or the town, you would hear crowds spontaneously erupt with chants “We Are?!” and then they would wait for the only response from all to join in “Penn State!” As my group of friends would proudly respond in unison, it made us feel more connected to each other and this special experience. Ritual is what allows us to gather the energy needed to achieve great things, often beyond what we could imagine ourselves capable of. 

2. Rituals can be motivating.  Athletes who come together and do a cheer before the start of a game feel linked and energized.  Rituals can motivate a team to excel together.  A few years ago, Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School Professor, led a study in which 221 people were grouped into small teams and assigned to run around campus taking group selfies in front of specific locations, earning points for how many photos they completed in 45 minutes.  Before they began, one group was instructed to form a circle and perform a series of rhythmic claps and foot stomps, followed by a chant of “Let’s go” — a ritual they repeated three times.  The other groups spent this time reading an article in silence.  When the scavenger hunt finished, the groups that had executed the pre-hunt ritual had outscored the no-ritual groups — and they also reported liking teammates more.

Engaging in a social ritual for your team can create special bonding moments that can boost performance and create lasting memories.

Quote of the day: “The human soul can always use a new tradition.  Sometimes we require them.” -Author Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline   

Q: What are your favorite individual or team rituals that help you feel more connected?  Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

*The next and final blog in this team series 10/10 will provide common ways to build community in your teams.

As a Leadership Development & Team Coach, I work with teams to create rituals for peak performance and community building. Contact me to learn more.

What are your team rituals?

Teams Who Break Bread Together, Bond (Team Series 8/10)

How often does your team eat together?  This simple yet powerful act can have a myriad of positive benefits.  

Research by Professor Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University found how extraordinary meaningful eating together can be.  One study looked at firefighters who engaged in Commensality – preparing and eating food together – and it showed that those who ate together did their jobs better.  In some cases, there is a lot of cooperative behavior that underline meal practice - collecting money, planning, talking, cleaning, and eating - all enhance group performance on the job.  In fact, cooperative behavior was twice as high for those who ate together versus those who did not.  Even those who did not contribute money for the meals still went in on the experience as they brought their food to eat with the others.  Eating together is essential for making the team more effective because it makes a group feel like a kind of family and creates bonds beyond the job. 

You can see this also happening in the sports arena.  Spurs legendary basketball Coach Gregg Popovich, who has the most wins in NBA history, knows all about building a strong team culture.  The Spurs eat together as often as they play basketball with a high number of team, group, and coach dinners.  As a food connoisseur, Popovich plans the restaurants and meals carefully, and at the end of the season, each player gets a leather-bound book containing the menus and wine labels from every dinner.  It’s a bonding experience that each player remembers long after the event.  

Companies would do well investing in how employees eat at work.  Google offers free high quality abundantly varied meals, which increases the odds that teammates will eat with each other and build further connections. While it is unrealistic to think that every company can provide meals, some simple things can be done to encourage your team or organizational members to break bread together more frequently.

Here are some practices you can use to encourage more team mingling:

1. Lunch roulette.  This is a great way to foster in-company networking.  It is currently being employed at Boehringer Ingelheim.  It works in four simple steps.  Participants select a date when they are free for lunch and choose one of the company cafeterias in which to travel.  They then click a “Match Me” button, and a lunch date and calendar reminder are emailed to their mailboxes.  After that, all they need to do is show up with an open mind and a willingness to connect.  Within seven weeks of the program, more than 350 people were matched, including a more unusual pairing of the CEO with a young member of one of the brand marketing teams.  It is a practical way of creating links where none had existed and exposing colleagues to different ideas and perspectives. Unexpected pairings and conversations for creative collaborations are always a welcomed surprise. And if you do not prefer to use an app to do these matchings, you can make the sign-ups electronically available as a google doc where people can add their names. If you are unable to meet in person, you can arrange a zoom lunch and create connections even while physically distanced.

2. Lunch and learn.  Similar to lunch roulette, but combines a more formal learning and socializing approach. You write down three things you would be interested in sharing and three things you would like to learn.  Partners are made based on mutual interest.  It is a great informal way of building cross-functional engagement and connecting with people who work in different departments that you do not get that much personal time to interact. This helps to create greater bonds and connect with people outside your immediate team.  Other than one-on-ones, you can also choose to have a small group gathering to amplify the learning experience.

When you dedicate time to get to know others and eat food together, you are creating special moments.  You may find yourself talking about meaningful personal topics that keep you connected to others in unbreakable ways. Additionally, that positive energy transfers into the work world as there is a significant correlation between eating together and positive performance.

Quote of the day: “First we eat, then we do everything else.” -Writer M.F.K Fisher

Q: What food practices do you have to spend better quality time with others? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 9/10 will explore the importance of rituals for teams.

As a Leadership Development & Team Coach, I offer teambuilding seminars & coaching Contact me to learn more.

The power of community through meal sharing

Collective Intelligence is the Goal (Team Series 7/10)

Your team is filled with highly talented individuals, yet you are not getting desired results.  How do you get your all-stars to contribute to something larger than themselves to produce excellence?

In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT wondered what made teams consistently better?  The answer – harnessing the power of collective intelligence or the coming together of people to share their knowledge and insights.  Michael Silverman, MD of Silverman Research, defines collective intelligence as “something that emerges from a group that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.” 

They concluded that two factors go into fostering collective intelligence.

1. Have equal distribution of conversation.  When you have all people speak for roughly the same amount of time during a meeting, you have the presence of what researchers call “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”  Whether people are speaking a little bit on each of the meeting tasks or more on one or two of them, as long as the balance sheet shows roughly the same amount of air time, collective intelligence can be reached.  Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author offered, “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well.  If only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

Executive Producer Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, one of the longest-running and most successful shows on tv abides by two rules related to participation: give everyone a voice, and force people to listen to each other. Michaels will often keep a sheet of paper during a meeting, and make a note each time someone speaks.  He will not end the session until others talk an approximately equal number of times.  He sees his job as protecting people’s distinct voices and getting them to work together productively.

2. Foster high social sensitivity within the group.  This is a fancy way of saying that people are skilled at reading the room.  Teammates can intuit how other members felt based on non-verbal cues – body language, tone of voice, facial expressions.  Members took into account what was said and unsaid and were sensitive to all those thoughts and emotions. So, how do these behaviors of being more attuned to others emerge?  In a New York Times article where Author Charles Duhigg writes about effective teams, he answers the question by saying, “The right norms – those small habits, unwritten rules, and mutually agreed-upon ways of treating one another - could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.”  One recommendation by the Kellogg Insight would be to have more women on the team because they tend to be more socially perceptive.

When you set up the systems for all people to share openly and to really listen to each other, marvelous things can happen.  It has been shown that the quantity of ideas is where a lot of innovation stems, so nudging all your participants to get involved can advance your team’s creative purposes.

Quote: “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”- Peter F. Drucker

Q: How do you ensure that each member is contributing equally?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear.

*The next blog in this team series 8/10 will cover the importance of eating together for teambuilding.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate the creation of norms and agreements for the best performance. Contact me to learn more.

Harness the power of the group for the most excellent results