Tag: Growth

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Jams Libby

Unwritten

Can we talk about the song Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield? First of all, this woman has some pipes. And even if you’re not a fan of pop, it is quite the catchy tune. But more than that, this is one inspirational ditty. I think it was originally introduced to me by my colleague, Megan, who is one of the most upbeat, positive, inspired people I know. I am sure it was after some confession of anxiety or self-doubt over coffee (aka martinis) that she sent me the link or had me connect to her iTunes player, and man, it did the job – I went from zero to hero just listening to it (I’m sure I cried a little, too). Since then, the song has become a touchstone for me on a pretty regular basis – it is really about having faith in yourself and forgiving yourself. We all make mistakes (some of us, ahem, more than others) but that doesn’t mean everything is an epic fail. At the very least, we are wiser from our experiences. Our futures are not static and therefore can be changed as long as we believe in ourselves. So, stop beating yourself up, take a deep breath, “open up the dirty window” and “feel the rain on your skin”…try again. Starting fresh is liberating and a great way to stay positive. Every day can be a do-over if you need it to be…the rest is still unwritten!

-Libby Bingham

Categories
Inside My Head Karen

Carefree Moments

UmbrellaIt was a rainy morning. I was in my car, approaching an elementary school. I saw something so full of life. My curiosity heightened. I had to pull over. And watch.

A little girl was walking through the open field, heading to school. She carried a bright pink umbrella. The winds were powerful. All of a sudden, its force grabbed the umbrella from her little hands.

The umbrella starts rolling and jumping across the field.

She chases it…

Laughing!

The wind became her playmate.

She ran to catch her umbrella. And the wind would twirl it in the air and bounce it across the grass. This continued until at last she captures her umbrella.

She tilts her head back, with a big smile on her face, as though she were saying “Oh Wind! You are so silly.”

Her laughter made me laugh. I smiled. And drove away.

A little girl reminded me to never stop living whimsically – regardless of the storm.

There is wonderful adventure awaiting us at any moment. Remind yourself, again, that you love carefree moments.

What carefree moment have you experienced in the last seven days?

– Karen Thrall

Categories
Career Libby

What I Want to Be When I Grow-Up

My boss just recently told me that she is retiring after many years in teaching and over three decades in association management. We talked a bit about what she’s going to do once she doesn’t have to come to the office on a regular basis and she mentioned spending more time with family and friends, exercising, theater and the like. But the thing that sticks with me most is that she wants to live abroad in impoverished areas and teach little kids. Now, she’s got a pretty cushy deal right now: a big corner office, travel to resorts for meetings, teleworking, etc. To hear her talk about leaving it all behind and getting down in the trenches kind of threw me – I mean, that’s pretty cool. It also got me thinking, what the heck do I want to do when I grow-up?

I think this is a thought process much longer and complicated than I could (or should!) put in a blog post, but it’s definitely worth putting out there…if you could stop doing what you’re doing and do something else, what would it be? Certainly there are practical considerations – I’m never going to be a figure-skater or a whale biologist – but barring those (and a few others), there are a lot of possibilities. My boss went back to her roots as a school teacher…unfortunately, my roots are in food service and I don’t think I want to go back, but could I go forward? Could I finally work as a park ranger or red carpet security agent? Maybe, maybe not, but if I start thinking – and doing – now instead of waiting until I retire, maybe I can spend more time doing things that are closer to my heart and get closer to what Catherine talked about in “Loving What You Do.” I realize now that my boss’ plans are not just her own, but mine as well – she has created for me an opportunity for self-reflection and reshaping the direction of my own career trajectory…thanks, Anne. Now, excuse me while I search for open mic nights at my local pub…

-Libby Bingham

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Book Reports

Mind Your Wake – Lessons from Uncontainable

I’m currently reading Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives. Sure, it’s a long title, but I think it’s understandable, considering how much awesomeness comes out of The Container Store. (Seriously, that store is my happy place. It’s unreal how much joy those organizational opportunities bring to me!) Kip Tindell, Chairman and CEO, shares his philosophies on what’s made The Container Store so successful, as well as stories that make you think you’re reading about someone’s family rather than a large publicly traded company. While a little corny at times, there’s still a lot to be gained in what he has to say. Kip devotes most of the book to the Seven Foundation Principles, but what struck me most was the notion he shared about being mindful of our wake – what we leave behind us as we move forward.

Being mindful of our wake. It’s a powerful visual that reminds us we’re not here alone, and that like a boat, our presence and movements leave a trail behind us, whether we’re around to see it or not. It’s not uncommon to be reminded that our actions affect others, but this comparison to a boat specifically addresses what we leave behind us as we move on, which struck me as a profound reminder we perhaps need a little more often. Even once we’ve moved on – be it geography, career or relationships, or even just in our own thinking – we’ve created waves that still exist. But how big are those waves? When we’re out on the open water, we speed up, leaving great waves behind us, but as we get closer to land, we’re warned to slow down so our wake will not harm others. We don’t always have much control over reactions that happen after we’ve left, but there are certainly things we can do to affect how disruptive our presence is.

Clearly there are times in our lives when it’s acceptable and even fun to create a large wake behind us, while other times we need to move carefully, not damaging what’s around us. And it’s important to know the difference so we can be mindful of our wake. How are you mindful of what you leave behind?

Categories
Inside My Head Karen

Believe and Trust

future

Every December, before the new year begins, I contemplate what the next theme will be; what journey will I embark on; what learnings will I experience; what stories will unfold.

It hit me with strength and clarity as I sat looking out over the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver:  My theme for 2015 is #Believe&Trust.

Believe:  Believe in your present and in your future with expectancy; with hope; with confidence.

Trust:  Trust with relentless surrender in the very things you long for; trust the path you are on.

Believe and Trust in the uncommon and the extraordinary.  The remarkable.

In reflecting, I think Believe and Trust are some of the hardest verbs to surrender to:

  • They are our bane and our delight.
  • They haunt us and exhilarate us.
  • They unsettle us and draw us to peace.
  • They disturb us and heal us.
  • We shame ourselves when we lack them and are content when we lavish in them.

Believe and Trust meld us into raw vulnerability.  Inviting us to surrender over and over and over again.  Not easy…

Perhaps to Believe and to Trust means to let go of control, just a little more.  Doors will open and doors will close.  And all will be well.

Is there an area in your life where this resonates with you?

Sometimes we allow our circumstances to thwart our confidence. We’ll let conversations, moments and environments infect us with doubt. Whatever is going on in your life right now doesn’t define you – it shapes you. And this is good. Valuable. Your life is a series of chapters – being woven into your story. And the reader, captivated, turns each page with wonder to see what happens next.

Believe. And trust.

-Karen Thrall

Categories
Career On the Job

StrengthsFinder

A team I’m currently working with is using Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 skills assessment and I’m lucky enough to be taking part in it. I’ve participated in a number of assessments before and used a couple with my own teams, specifically the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Enneagram personality types assessment. MBTI is probably the most well-known assessment in the circles I travel and along with that, probably the one that most people roll their eyes at as well. There is often not much time between getting the results and hearing, “Oh, that’s your ENTJ talking,” or “No kidding you’re an introvert.”

And as misunderstood as these assessments can be, I do still think there’s great value in taking the time to learn about yourself and the people you work with. If these types of assessment offer nothing else, they remind us that we all process information differently and approach the world with unique worldviews, and there is great value in those reminders. However, if you’re open to learning more, each assessment can offer more valuable insights on you and your teams.

What’s interesting to me about the StrengthsFinder is that it’s focused less on personality and more on – as the name would suggest – your skills and strengths. In our professional and personal lives, we seem to focus much more on our weaknesses and how we can improve those, and that’s often a recipe for failed New Year’s resolutions, feelings of inadequacy and plain frustration. The philosophy behind the StrengthsFinder is that if we focus on our strengths instead, we can build teams and partnerships with others who possess complementary strengths to our own, rather than looking to be all things within ourselves. It’s a fascinating concept to me, and one that makes a lot of sense. If we spent more time focusing on what we are good at rather than where we fall short, I suspect we’d open ourselves up to a lot more possibilities.

And just in case you’re curious, my top 5 themes are empathy, relator, communication, responsibility and developer, which seemed about right to me.

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Career

What’s Your Story?

Being authentic can be harder than it sounds. Herminia Ibarra recently published The Authenticity Paradox in the Harvard Business Review, which outlined how being authentic can backfire, despite being one of today’s most sought-after leadership qualities. Authenticity shouldn’t be viewed as permission to stay cozy in your comfort zone. Ibarra argues that when we are adjusting to new situations we should give ourselves permission to try on different variations of our own style to find one that works best given the new reality. We can still be authentic in these variations because we are not trying to become something we are not; we’re just tapping into a different set of strengths that may have been dormant or less developed. Ibarra details three steps to help find your “adaptively authentic way of leading,” but the one I find the most interesting is not sticking to your story.

The premise is that our personal narratives may be keeping us from growing and moving forward since they’re rooted in our past rather than telling the story about where we could go – what we’re capable of doing, given the chance. I think about my own career history and the story it tells. For some, my resume may look a little scattered since I’m not clearly one thing in one profession – I’m not an engineer, a teacher or a network specialist. However, I look at my time in banking, associations, retail and consulting and it’s very clear to me that one of the things I am is a customer service specialist. Whether it’s service to external or internal clients, I have always prided myself on being among the best. And that’s part of the narrative I need to make sure I’m telling, but it’s rooted more in what I’ve done than where I want to go. Adjusting my narrative to talk about the ways I can bring out the best in people is what I want to emphasize at this point in my career and that’s something I’ll be thinking about moving forward. What are the stories you’re telling about yourself?

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Career

Different Lenses

Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay from December 12th caught my attention. Women at Work: A Guide for Men may seem like it’s a few decades too late, but I found it interesting on the heels of few different conversations that have found their way into my life at the moment. For a current client project, we’re focusing on engaging half of the staff, plus one. While obviously we’d like to engage more than that, the thinking is that if we’ve got a majority (even the minimal majority of 50% plus 1) of the staff on board, change will be inevitable. Not wholly unrelated is the UN Women’s campaign HeforShe, a solidarity movement for gender equality, based on the idea that gender equality shouldn’t be a women’s issue led only by women. We’ll need the majority of the world to make real change, and that includes men.

When looking at change, be it behavior in an organization or discrimination of any kind, it makes sense that the change will be more successful with more people involved. We spend a lot of time focusing on women mentoring women, and let me be clear – I think there is tremendous value in that. That doesn’t mean, however, that men can’t also play a role in helping women up the career ladder. Managers and those at the top of the ladder are responsible for helping to cultivate the next generation of leaders, regardless of gender. I think to pretend we all approach things the same, however, is naïve and anything we can do to understand the lens of others is time well-spent – gender, generational, socio-economic, cultural, and so on. Whose shoes can you walk in for a bit to adjust your own lens?

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On the Job

Survival Skills – Facilitation-style

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of co-teaching a course at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which is an old stomping ground of mine. It was great to be back and teamed up Libby Bingham to present “Facilitation Essentials: Effectively Managing Conversations.” We had an exceptional group of folks, and they were great about staying with us as we moved between information sharing, exercises and small group discussions. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together and learned as much from them as I hope they learned from us.

We talked about the skills needed to be a strong facilitator, and one of my favorites is often overlooked. It’s common to talk about active listening, the ability to draw people into a conversation, and how to manage conflict in a group. While all these skills are critical, there is one that can help with any situation: the ability to improvise. For anyone who has ever been at the front of the room in any sort of capacity, you know the only thing you can count on is the unexpected. Despite all our preparations and best intentions, there is always something that catches us off guard — technology woes, a rowdy audience member or an extensive question in 7 parts. Improvisation is something created without preparation, typically a piece of music, drama, etc. I would absolutely argue that facilitation done well is an art form all its own, and there will always be opportunities to create an experience, a lesson or a memory without preparation. So the next time you’re presented with the unexpected, you can view it as a pain or take advantage of the opportunity to practice your improv skills. You never know when or how those moments will present themselves, and the more comfortable you are simply going with the flow, the better the chances are that your improv will leave them laughing and wanting more.

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Career

Tools for Change

I was working with a team a while back and we were focusing on how to strengthen their organization and make it an extraordinary place to work. Dozens of ideas were thrown around – ideas about the physical space, ways the staff could work together and program improvements the organization could make. They outlined how they might be able to get to this extraordinary level and what they’d need to get there. And while the rest of the brainstorming focused on technologies, training and structure, one person took a different approach. He suggested that they already had what they needed, but would have to nurture these things: nimbleness, humility, camaraderie, sense of humor, time and patience.

His observation stopped me in my tracks. He is, of course, right, but how many times do we blow right past these tools? Change and growth are not only much harder if you overlook human nature and our behaviors, but it’s also a whole lot less fun. People who are adaptable, humble, funny and patient are far more enjoyable to be around than their counterparts who lack those traits. And to make any real change, you need a group of people to be out there with you or supporting you. How are you using your humility, patience and sense of humor to strengthen your life?