Category Archives: Transformational Consumer®

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Success Means Embracing Randomness

Title: The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World
Author: Frans Johansson
Publisher: Portfolio, 2012; 256 pages

The Click MomentFrans Johansson, author of “The Medici Effect,” starts his latest book with a simple, yet undisputable, proposition: Life is uncertain.

In “The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World,” Johansson constructs a very persuasive argument that uncertainty plays a crucial role not only in failure, but success.

Despite our best attempts to map out a path to success, the best avenue is often to simply seize a window of opportunity that seems to have opened by serendipity.

Providing success case studies from sports, business, music, fashion and politics, Johansson shows that the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice we’ve all grown to accept are prerequisite for mastery of a subject are less relevant to success than the ability to create, recognize and tap into randomness and luck — at least if you live, work or do business in a field that is unstructured and without many rules.

For example, the tennis champ sisters Venus and Serena Williams can chalk their success up in large part to obsessive focus and practice during their childhoods.

Nike, on the other hand, springboarded to success off founder Bill Bowerman’s serendipitous pouring of latex into his wife’s waffle iron after having an a-ha moment at the breakfast table.

Starbucks? Howard Schultz’s epiphany that America needed espresso bars like those he saw, packed to the gills, on every street corner of Milan.

The fact is, most of us are not seeking to become masters of chess, tennis or other highly rule-driven endeavors where the path to mastery through deliberate practice is clear. Although daunting, the Williams’ six hours of practice six days a week for the four years they were in a tennis academy got them only 7,500 of the 10,000 hours.

Most of us are seeking to build successful careers, lives and businesses in a very unpredictable marketplace, which Johansson argues allows us to harness and leverage the seemingly unharnessable and unleverageable tools of randomness, serendipity and luck to create the success we seek.

Here are a few of Johansson’s prescriptions for creating what he deems “click moments”:

1. “Take your eye off the ball.” “When you focus on one thing exclusively,” Johansson writes, “you miss everything else that’s going on around you.” And being able to catch opportunities and holes in the market when they happen around you is essential to being able to take them, converting them into so-called “luck.”

Johansson urges that we ask ourselves whether it’s even possible for something unscripted to nose its way into our vacuum-packed schedules. If not, we should take care to create some flexibility in the calendar and schedule the time to do something “unscripted and unplanned.”

2. “Use intersectional thinking.” By exploring fields and cultures that are extremely different from your own, Johansson argues, you spike the probability that you’ll be exposed to a random idea. He points, for example, to Beto Perez, the Colombian aerobics teacher who forgot his normal class music one night and ended up teaching a class to his own personal tape of salsa and merengue songs, creating Zumba in the process.

In the same vein, exposing yourself to diverse groups of people and diverse ideas online and even at conferences outside your normal domain can boost your chances of drawing novel connections and having a moment of insight and serendipity — a “click moment.”

3. “Follow your curiosity.” “Curiosity,” according to Johansson, “is the way your intuition tells you something interesting is happening.” Curiosity lives at the intersections of the unknown and possibility, yet we are inclined to follow our curiosity less and less as we get older, probably because we get busy. Following the path of what makes us curious is a key action step for creating moments of luck and serendipity, in Johansson’s book.

 

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Bibliotherapy Session: How to Stop Fear from Stopping You

How to Stop Fear from Stopping You

By unlearning the habit of expecting the worst and rehabilitating negative thought patterns, you can create forward momentum in your life.

Books covered:

Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

You Can Heal Your Life

 The Charge: Activating the Ten Human Drives that Make You Feel Alive

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Real Estate Decisions Better After ‘Dinner and a Nap’

Title: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Author: Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
Publisher: Penguin, 2012; 304 pages

Willpower book coverWhen I sat down to read the latest book from research psychologist Roy Baumeister and New York Times science writer John Tierney, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” I thought I’d read it in the context of what the rest of the world was thinking and saying on the subject.

In my own lifetime, I reflected, I had seen a vast spectrum of thought on the topic, from my dad’s U.S. Marine Corps-influenced tendency to set and reach goals with little more than willpower, to my generation’s Oprah-influenced tendency to believe that willpower might not even be a thing, so to speak.

So, as I’m wont to do with all essential and existential stalemates needing breaking, I Googled it. What is most telling is not so much what the research said, but what Google used to auto-fill my search. I typed the word “willpower” and Google suggested the following searches:

  • willpower doesn’t exist (~191,000,000 results).
  • willpower doesn’t work (~6,770,000 results).

Upon digging into “Willpower,” it became crystal clear that the book’s authors were also aware of this debate; the Introduction actually tracks the history of willpower — aka self-control in the face of desire — from the Middle Ages through the Information Age.

The authors also started their inquiries into willpower somewhat dubious about its existence, but ended up as champions of what they deem the most pivotal, controllable element for making our lives happy after years of original research and analysis of source material ranging from Henry Stanley’s diaries of self-discipline in the heart of the jungles of 19th-century Africa (while his colleagues gave into a bizarre array of human lusts, from food to violence and all points in between) to Drew Carey’s ongoing — victorious! — battles with his office clutter and daily to-do lists.

“Willpower” relates their findings and synthesizes them into entertaining, entirely usable insights we can all use to drive our own “productivity,” “fulfillment” and “happiness.” This book is uber-educational, serious, funny and fascinating all at once. Baumeister and Tierney cover everything from how and why to be an effective, efficient goal-setter, dieter and self-scientist to how and why to raise children who have self-control, versus self-esteem.

But one of the most actionable, powerful sections of “Willpower” is the chapter that focuses on dozens of studies that have found that the “power” ingredient of willpower is largely glucose, which appears to fuel our brains’ ability to control our impulses. The chapter then translates these findings into a set of action items for boosting our own willpower, whether we’re trying to save money, spend less, eat less or otherwise exercise more self-discipline. Here are a few of those steps:

1. “Feed the beast.” The upshot of this provocative-sounding mandate is this: Don’t make decisions, argue or try to solve major problems on an empty stomach. Calorie counting is also a setup for failure when you’re trying to change major habits, like quitting smoking. In fact, studies cited by the authors found that smokers trying to quit who took extra sugar along with other smoking cessation therapies had more success than their peers.

2. “Sugar works in the lab, not in your diet,” so “go for the slow burn.” In the lab, researchers give subjects actual tablets of sugar. In real life, though, eating junk foods and sugary things spikes your blood sugar and shortly leads to a feeling of depletion that actually make efforts to control yourself and your emotions much more difficult. Our bodies convert most foods into glucose, but things with a low glycemic index, like veggies, nuts, raw fruits, fish and olive oils, are very slow to be converted into glucose, so they fuel your body, your brain and your willpower for a longer, more sustained period of time than starchy carbohydrates and sweets.

3. “When you’re sick, save your glucose for your immune system.” Baumeister and Tierney point to this stunning truth: “Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated.” Yikes! They then post this question: “[i]f you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office (assuming you make it there safely)?”

In any event, the authors advise, when you’re under the weather, avoid making big decisions, trying to exert “peak performance” or putting your self-control to the test.

4. “When you’re tired, sleep.” When we rest, the authors teach, our body’s flucose demands decline and our ability to use our blood glucose ticks up; as well, when we’re deprived of sleep, our glucose processing power declines and our self-control can decline, immediately.

If you’re buying a home (or anything else, for that matter), it might be best to make your final offer price decision after dinner and a nap!

 

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The Art of Real Estate Negotiation

Title: The 33 Strategies of War
Author: Robert Greene
Publisher: Penguin, 2007; 496 pages

The 33 Strategies of WarIf you’ve been reading my columns for long, you’ve probably gotten the sense that I see negotiations as a problem-solving opportunity: a chance for everyone involved to get their needs met, or perhaps do even better. However, this approach definitely has its caveats.

First, there are simply situations in which the interests of a home’s buyer and those of its seller directly conflict. This is precisely why it’s ideal for buyers and seller to have their own separate brokers: to facilitate finding the win-win, when it’s possible, but to ensure each party’s interests in this high-value transaction are protected, if and when intense conflicts do arise.

Second, some people simply have a different point of view, seeing every negotiation as a war. This is easy to understand, and largely a matter of emphasis: You can focus on the things that both buyer and seller want in a transaction, or you can focus on the ways in which their interests always seem to conflict (e.g., buyer wants a lower price, seller wants a higher price, etc.). While my focus tends toward the former, I also recognize that there is utility — even value — to trying on the other point of view.

There are age-old texts and historical learnings about how to be smart and, eventually, victorious in the context of a war, which anyone who is negotiating anything can learn from, in order to protect their own interests and get their needs met.

Robert Greene, best-selling author of “The 48 Laws of Power,” has taken on the weighty task of assembling and interpreting many of those old texts and war stories into “The 33 Strategies of War.” This book includes way more than 33 highly usable insights, strategies and recommendations that virtually any professional, consumer, negotiator — anyone who ever has to deal with any sort of challenge or conflict, ever — can learn from.

So, while I differ with Greene’s emphasis (i.e., “life is endless battle and conflict”), you can’t argue with his thesis that conflict is inevitable. He’s also correct that feeling equipped to engage in conflict, rather than always trying to avoid it, is essential for being a strong, effective and capable adult in this world. To that end, here is a taste of his massive collection of strategies, a few of Greene’s “fundamental ideals” for being a strategic warrior — as needed — in your everyday life:

“Look at things as they are, not as your emotions color them.” Facing the brutal truth of situations, rather than allowing your emotions about things to color how you interpret them, is essential to sound, strategic decision-making in every area of your life. But the higher the stakes are, the more adversarial a situation gets, the more intensely your emotions may influence how you perceive things and formulate your plan of action or responses to your ‘adversary.'”

So you can see how germane this is to real estate dealings. Your home is likely the largest asset/purchase/transaction you will ever make, and it requires a major emotional commitment to even decide that you would like to own a particular property, much less to go through the months or years of preparation, savings and logistical hoops it can require to actually make it yours.

So, when you feel a threat to “your” home, whether by competing buyers, a turn in your economic circumstances or market dynamics that don’t value it as highly as you do, it’s the most human of reactions to unconsciously allow fear, attachment, anger, even success to skew your view of reality and your decision-making.

Greene says that to be a strategic warrior demands “the utmost in realism,” which you can achieve only by being “aware that the pull of emotion is inevitable, notic[ing] it when it is happening and, compensat[ing] for it.”

“Depend on your own arms.” We humans tend to rely on strategies and things that are easy, simple or proven effective, based on our past experiences. But relying on these things can be a trap for the unwary, because as Greene states bluntly, “Everything in life can be taken away from you and generally will be at some point.”

Greene insists that our true advantage in matters of conflict in every area of life is to be found in our strategic arsenal and our mental fortitude, not in gadgetry, gear or even allies.

In the real estate context, adopting this ideal requires us to get educated and proactive about things like running our own budget and affordability numbers, understanding comparable sales data fully, and being intelligently skeptical and analytical of the advice and input we receive from others to ensure we truly understand and are assertive in formulating our own actions and approaches.

“Worship Athena, not Ares.” Ares, Greene explains, was the Greek god of brutally violent war in its most direct form, while Athena was the deity embodying the wise warrior mentality, including craftiness and strategy.

Greene recommends readers do as the Greeks did and model their battles in life, their engagements in conflict, after Athena, not Ares, urging an approach that eschews conflict for its own sake. Rather, Greene advises, our “interest in war is … the rationality and pragmatism it forces upon us.”

 

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‘Solo Staycate’ and ‘Bootstrap’ Your Way to Happiness

Title: Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream
Author: Whitney Johnson
Publisher: Bibliomotion, 2012; 256 pages; $24.95

Dare Dream DoA dear friend who just so happens to be a wonderful mother recently confided in me that she was concerned that she might have trained her oldest son’s wildest dreams out of him in the name of encouraging him toward a “serious” career.

At 8 or 9 years old, he’d said he wanted to be a lion tamer or some such. She’d replied that lions ought not be tamed and that he should come up with a more realistic aspiration for his “when I grow up” career vision.

We talked through some of her regret. Who among us hasn’t wished we could redo a conversation with our children? My friend came out reassured that she had not quashed her son’s ability to dream (he’s now 13).

Yet, our conversation circled the much bigger, very real issue that so many adults face or, rather, fail to face. As children, we dream big dreams. But we tend to do much less dreaming as we age, often trading our lofty fantasies for the inevitable pile of practical concerns and disappointments we accumulate over a lifetime.

Harvard Business Review blogger Whitney Johnson tackles precisely this issue, undertaking a mission to systematically resuscitate our childlike dream powers and supercharge them with grown-up powers of execution in her new book, “Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.”

Here are a few of Johnson’s many salient pointers for how to conjure up and manifest your dreams:

1. “Use your words.” There is creative power, Johnson says, in simply, boldly stating your dream verbally, and claiming it as your own. Doing so, she argues, allows us to experience life with meaning, to express our deepest emotions and viewpoints that otherwise have no outlet, and to turn our messy, painful experiences into a stories that both springboard us into a hopeful future and have the power to create change in the rest of the world. Johnson provides several inspirational examples of women who prove these points.

2. “Make space for your dreams.” The power of “Dare, Dream, Do” is in its marriage of the inspirational challenge to readers (Dream big!!) with the nuts and bolts logistics of how to actually realize their dreams. On the latter point, Johnson provides a number of instructions for how to create the space in our lives, our budgets, our homes and offices, and especially our calendars for the dreaming and doing that manifestation requires.

Acknowledging that in a busy daily life, it can be easier to dream than to set about the detailed work of doing (and urging readers to push past that friction anyway), Johnson goes on to encourage readers to be intentional about making space for their dreams, including:

  • take “solo staycations” when needing to get dream work done;
  • gear up to ask for the resources and help they need; and
  • reconfigure spending habits so as to effectively vote for one’s own dreams, with one’s dollars.

3. “Bootstrap.” Johnson urges readers to move beyond perfectionism and into a scrappy state of getting their dreams activated and in motion with whatever resources they do have. In fact, she encourages them to inventory their resources and look for the hidden opportunities to rethink elements of their plans, models and ideas based on the gaps or holes where they don’t have something they think is necessary.

In “Dare, Dream, Do,” Johnson presents a three-step path to moving forward in life and being happy that is punctuated and beautifully illustrated with the poignant stories of dozens of women who acted on their dreams of everything from running marathons to running world-changing businesses. If you’ve stopped dreaming as an adult, or if you have a secret dream you’ve always wanted to act on, “Dare, Dream Do” might be just the inspirational and instructional manual you need.

 

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4 Tips to Overcome Fear, Failure and ‘Quit Points’

Title: Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success
Author: Rick Newman
Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2012; 256 pages; $26

ReboundersMarkets crash. People die. Scary diagnoses are issued. Jobs are lost. Homes are lost. And for many Americans, it feels like the last few years have hit them with more than their fair share of these sorts of traumas, proving true the adage, “When it rains, it pours.”

I’ve certainly been through a number of my own, personal worst-case scenarios, but have come out the other side with a vastly expanded understanding of my own inner resources and a great appreciation for life’s possibilities.

Once you prove to yourself what you’re really made of, as often happens in recovery from a crisis, you take that confidence, that knowledge and those problem-solving skills with you as you face life’s incessant stream of incoming challenges.

That’s resilience.

And this quality — resilience — is precisely the subject of U.S. News and World Report journalist Rick Newman’s new, hopeful and useful book, “Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback to Success.”

The book starts out with Newman’s own transparent tale of his own life, family, financial and career struggles in the aftermath of his divorce, just as the traditional newspaper industry was being derailed by the advent of online news — and the takeaways he gleaned from the experience, including that hard work doesn’t always pay off without a strategic plan also in place.

But the meat of “Rebounders” is a series of detailed stories of figures in business, politics, philanthropy and culture — stories of rebounders who experienced and recovered from all manner of devastating failures and traumatic disasters on their paths to achieving an assortment of heroics, from becoming our national heroes, like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to helming companies such as Pandora and Netflix.

Newman vividly tells these stories, then deftly uses them to surface dozens of nuanced insights with the power to spark and call forth the individual flavor of resilience within every reader.

That said, there are also some overarching themes around what it takes to be resilient that Newman sets out at the very start. Here are the four most pervasive insights he provides:

1. “Setbacks can be a secret weapon.” Newman relates that the unanimous message of his interview and research subjects was that the lessons and skills they had acquired in the process of overcoming their setbacks were much more pivotal to their success than the moments when everything finally came together. In fact, in providing the precise definition of resilience, Newman points to the strength, smarts and durability that develop in the process of pushing past fear, failures and “quit points.”

2. “Small adversities matter, just like big ones.” Small disappointments and frictions, like getting stuck in traffic or having a chronic, but relatively mild, illness, can seem unworthy of our attention especially when compared to all the tragedies and chaos we witness on news reports. However, Newman argues that we can harness small failures and dramas to build our resilience muscles, giving ourselves what he calls a “stress inoculation” that will allow us to recover from much larger life upsets whenever they do inevitably arise.

3. “We’re all addicted to alluring shortcuts and incomplete slogans.” Newman points to example after example in which people get or stay on the wrong, failure-prone course because of their belief in pithy, partly true, but incomplete motivational slogans like “Do what you love, and the money will come.” He points out that there are potential pitfalls to this reasoning, like that the work you love might be work many people love, rendering the field an uber-competitive one in which to make a living. Ultimately, these magical slogans are simply not enough to point you in the direction of success.

4. “Optimism is overrated.” Optimism lives in the same bucket, in Newman’s book, as these incomplete slogans, in that they both oversimplify what it will really take for most people to find success. Newman suggests that you trade both the slogans and overconfidence or optimism in for a strategic action plan that accounts, in advance, for pitfalls that are likely to be encountered, and is both heavy on the problem solving and flexible enough to allow for the adaptation and course correction you may need to do if things don’t work as planned.

In this vein, Newman advocates something called “defensive pessimism,” in which you envision your worst-case scenarios and prepare for them, in advance. Ultimately, this point of view is empowering and even calming, as it results in complete preparedness and, fortunately, our worst-case scenarios don’t actually materialize the vast majority of the time.

 

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3 Steps to Get Over The Pain of the Past & Move Forward, Baggage-Free

Here is a 3-step flow I’ve found to be particularly powerful in processing painful experiences or failures, so we can get on with the business of transformation and level on up:

Step 1: Dive into the pain. Feel it.  And I mean, let it be excruciating, if it needs to be. When you have some down times, whether it be at home or at an off-site or meeting (not when you or your team needs to be incredibly “on”), bring the experience to mind, and give yourself permission to acknowledge the disappointment, painful event or failure and sit with the feelings that arise.

Could be grief.  Could be sadness.  Could be frustration or anger.  Maybe even guilt or shame. Or panic, fear or terror at the consequences or karmic chain that might have been set in motion.

Whatever it is, let it come up – and don’t fight it.  Leaning into these feelings, experiencing the grief or pain that comes up organically, is a critical completion of the painful event or relationship.  You can’t grieve what’s not over, so feeling these emotions is the most fundamental, necessary way to declare the experience over and clear the slate for forward motion.

For some this is easy – tears flow freely. I, on the other hand, once spent about 6 weeks listening to sad songs, reading sad blog posts about puppies and their fallen military companions, and giving myself permission to cry.  And I got two measly tears. Probably a result of having had a 1-cry-a-year policy since childhood.

If you’re like me, and have a built-in resistance to these sorts of emotions because you’re afraid they might break you down or make it harder for you to be The Competent One, hear this: a number of recent studies have shown that widows who were strong and resilient when their husbands died had much longer-lasting physical and emotional effects from their grief than those who had a so-called emotional breakdown in the days after their spouses’ deaths.

Break down in order to to break through – there’s a rethink for you.

Also, Harvard researchers have found that the human being’s physiological capacity to deeply experience excruciating grief and pain in reaction to an event or experience lasts about a grand total of 90 seconds.

Yes, 90 seconds – and here’s the transcript of my own mental chatter from that minute-and-a-half:
“I can’t believe that happened, my heart is completely broken, the agony and distress, what will I ever do, I can’t imagine I’ll ever recover from the pain of – hmmm, wonder if I can score some of that walnut Kalamata levain for cheat day.”

However, we do have the power to extend the duration of our deep pain, for years even, if we attempt to avoid feeling the appropriate emotional response to a situation, or if we simply choose to keep revisiting or being stuck on thoughts and memories of the event, which typically results in us circling back to the painful circumstances ad infinitum.

Step 1 to powerful ‘past processing’ is to lean in, feel your pain, let it be excruciating. 90 seconds, 90 days, 90 months or a lifetime – you get to choose.

Step 2: Metabolize, Part I: Extract the Lessons from Your Losses.  Whether your team has failed at an initiative and had to pull the plug, you had to fire an employee you cared about or you lost your home to foreclosure, if you want to turn your painful failures and losses into fodder for progress and transformation, it’s essential that you do what Dr. Henry Cloud deems “metabolizing” these experiences. The parallel is to what your body does when it metabolizes food: it takes the nutrition it can extract from the food, then expels the rest as waste product.

After you’ve felt your 90 seconds of trauma and drama (or thereabouts), set about the process of extracting and gleaning insights and lessons from the experience that will serve you as you move onward and upward. If you’re in an organization, it might make sense to put a systematic process to this, including documenting the learning and analysis that will be applicable and useful to future endeavors and projects.

Step 3:  Metabolize, Part II: Get Over the Past by Eliminating What Doesn’t Serve You About the Painful Experience.  When it comes to expelling the superfluous elements of a painful experience, like waste, do not underestimate the power of making an intentional decision to stop fixating, ruminating or perseverating on what has happened. Having some clarity on what you’ve learned will help you discard what doesn’t serve you (or anyone else, for that matter) about the painful experience by focusing you on the future.

Some other powerful tools for eliminating the pain and toxic remains of a failure or experience, organizationally or personally, include:

  • Rituals and symbols of endings. Dr. Cloud recommends having a “funeral” for the dead division, product, or other ending – these can include going away parties to commemorate even bittersweet personnel moves, team retreats, or even grief or recovery support groups and classes, on a personal level.  I’ve always thought those divorce parties you see on reality shows were tacky, but they serve a purpose.
  • A corporate culture and personal values system that views failures and losses as a normal part of the cycle of innovation and evolution (more on this, here).
  • A clear, galvanizing vision for the future. Having an aspirational, declared vision and commitment to an inspired future, for yourself or your company, is probably the single most powerful motivator for leaving behind the patterns and emotions that do not serve you and will hinder you from creating the future you envision.
  • Avoiding “rebound” projects, endeavors or relationships until metabolism is complete. If I had a dollar for every foreclosed homeowner whose home hasn’t even yet hit the auction block before they’re trying to perform mortgage wizardry to qualify to buy another, I could personally fund a Main Street bailout. And time and time again, I’ve advised: “Slow your roll!” Sit still, feel the pain of the foreclosure, move from the grief stage of denial and anger into the stage where you figure out what you would have (and will) done differently in your mortgage decision-making or personal finances, heal your finances and credit from the trauma of losing your your home (and/or job, etc.). Get all the way out of debt.  Save up.  Your next home purchase, a couple of years down the road, will be much more sustainable and drama-free for it.

You can’t hold onto waste products – or the bitterness and pain left over after the lessons have been metabolized out of a failure or excruciating experience – and also be nimble, flex with the circumstances and thrive. So, lean in, learn and let go.

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Growing Pains [Part II of II]: 6 Ways to Deactivate What Derails You

Growing pains are a frequent derailer of our efforts to change, evolve and grow. If we allow it to, the inevitable discomfort that comes with stopping bad habits, taking a different approach to solving old problems or launching into a new phase can knock us off course. This, in turn, causes us to get stuck, backslide, sabotage ourselves and end up spinning in frustrating cycles.

This applies whether we’re trying to create and manage change in our businesses or our lives. At one end of the spectrum, companies trying to scale might find their employees freaking all the way out and pushing back hard in response to new systems and processes; at the other end, you might simply experience intense internal resistance to your efforts to eat more healthfully or get up earlier.

Experience has taught me that there are a number of ways we can deactivate the derailing potential of growing pains; ways that work no matter the size of the transformation-seeking entity or the scale of the sought-after change.

Here’s a handful:

1.  Understand that you only have three options. When you’re in a situation or experiencing circumstances that make you uncomfortable, you feel stuck or you crave to make a change, whatever that change is, there are really only three options available to you to resolve the distress.

You can:

  1. leave the situation
  2. change the situation, or
  3. change the way you think and feel about the situation, accepting every single thing about it, soup to nuts.

Anything else you do – grumbling, analyzing ad nauseum, ruminating or bonding with others in misery, or repeatedly making false starts and leaving or changing, then turning right back to the status quo that made you miserable in the first place – is a guaranteed path to continued anxiety and upset. This is true whether the change you seek is to innovate a product or service that solves a problem in the marketplace or whether you want to stop smoking, quit your day job or pay off your debt.

Understanding your only three options can neutralize the rationalizations that are so tempting to engage in when growing pains strike.

2.  Abandon hope. Listen – if you have a reason to be hopeful that a situation is going to change on its own (a real reason, with a basis in fact, not a wish or a fantasy), then great. But much more often than not, the people who want a situation to change are the ones that are being negatively impacted by it.  Is the situation you want to change one in which someone else has been taking advantage or benefitting from their own poor behavior, to your detriment, despite your repeated efforts to talk with them about changing? (Think: the employee that is not pulling their weight, the abusive boss, the defiant kid, the spouse with a gambling addiction.)

If so, the chances that they will sense your upset and spontaneously make every effort to fix things are very, very slim.  Why would they? Things are great, from their perspective!

The Buddha said that attachments and expectations are at the root of all human suffering. And Oprah says that people are almost always trying to educate you about themselves via their behavior.  So, if you are in a distressing relationship or situation with someone who has resisted your entreaties to change, it might be time to get hopeless:

  • Stop expecting them to be or do anything but who they are and what they do right now,
  • Figure out what boundaries you need to create to care for yourself, your team members, your family, or the higher vision and
  • Mind your own business. Impose reasonable boundaries and consequences for bad behavior, if that’s within the wheelhouse of your responsibilities. And, in any event, stop anything you’re doing to intervene between their bad behavior and its natural consequences, immediately.

Implement these boundaries with the full understanding that the person(s) at issue are likely to flip out, push back and otherwise act out in ways that will be uncomfortable or even painful to experience. But also know that this growing pains phase (a) doesn’t last forever, and (b) will last longer the more often you allow their discomfort to trump your new, healthy boundaries.


3.  Plan for uncharted post-change territory. Sometimes, the changes we make are to fix what’s broken. But at many critical junctures in our businesses and in our lives, the changes we need to make are to uplevel something that’s already functioning relatively well – to embark on a new venture or grow to a new scale. Counterintuitively, these can be some of the hardest changes to make, because of the core belief that seeking more makes us ungrateful for what we have, or the resistance of team members who feel like things are just fine as they are.

These upleveling changes also pose the spectre of unnecessary uncertainty and exposure to failure and rejection, all possibilities which often make us queasy and anxious right when we’re on the brink of clicking send or dropping the proposal into the mail. To neutralize these growing pains, it can be helpful to visualize yourself executing flawlessly in the face of the feelings of uncertainty and fear into the vision, and to build any skills that you can project will help you scale the predictable emotional obstacles of the uncharted territory into which you’re embarking.

I recently read that Michael Phelps visualized himself, thousands of times, keeping calm and carrying on to a world record and a gold medal in the event his goggles failed, a circumstance which would normally knock even the best swimmer off his or her game. So, when they did and he could not see, he was able to stay relaxed and swam to a world record-setting Olympic gold medal, precisely as he and his coach had planned.

4.  Get the unsaid said. In relationships, from teams to families, so much of the angst that comes with growth and change festers and turns into irreparable resentment and change-derailing resistance when people simply fail to communicate what they are thinking and feeling about the vision, the process or the other people involved in the change initiative. By getting the unsaid said, I mean getting these concerns out in the open – and not in gossipy, whispering silos, but all the way out in the open, so that valid concerns can be addressed and acted upon and so that mistaken perceptions can be addressed.

Putting structure and process to getting the unsaid said can seem silly, and feel like a waste of time and effort. But it is the only real way to make all parties feel respected and involved. And that, in turn, skyrockets the chances they will feel and become truly engaged in the campaign or effort to change (or at least stop trying to sabotage it).

5.  Minimize the risk of chaos and crises. So, so many change initiatives are derailed by crisis and chaos. You try to lose weight, then get a big tax bill in the mail that causes you to seek solace in sourdough and fall all the way off the wagon. Or you try to get to work earlier every day but seem to constantly run into delays by crises around what to wear or what to have for breakfast  – not to mention having your car break down due to the same thing that apparently made that light stay on for the 4 months prior.

I believe that these kinds of crises often reflect subconscious self-sabotage. Most are a long time in the making, and can be avoided with care and an investment of effort into problem areas or attention to brewing issues we’d probably prefer to avoid or ignore, hoping they’ll resolve on their own. The good news is that because they are truly predictable, if we pay attention, we have the ability to anticipate and solve for them before they knock us off course.

Completing open and overdue projects – even if that means killing and burying projects that aren’t working or eliminating staffing weak links – is key to clearing the slate for any new vision you want to create.  In the same vein, to avoid predictable crises, it is essential to create good habits and organizational routines in the areas of wellness and wealth (i.e., fitness, eating habits, bookkeeping, accounting, bill paying, income and expenses, etc.).  There’s a reason Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day; routinizing the musts of life frees up mental bandwidth so you can devote it to your projects and adventures.

6.  Rethink your growing pains: lean into them. Growing pains are often unavoidable, though you can anticipate and deactivate their derailing potential. Here’s a thought: what if we totally rethought what growing pains actually signify. Instead of seeing them as a sign we should turn around and undo whatever progress we have made, going back to the comfortable – if dysfunctional – status quo, what if we recognized that growing pains might actually be a signpost that we’re onto something?

What keeps us feeling emotional pain, and keeps us perceiving our growing pains as excruciating and intolerable, are our efforts to duck them, avoid them, slap band-aids on them, work around them and ignore them.

So, here’s my challenge: whatever it is that you want to change, consider in advance what’s likely to hurt about the change. What relationships could explode, what financial or other crises could erupt, what uncertainties will you encounter?  Do your best to anticipate and solve for these things, in advance.

But if and when you (or your organization) experiences growing pains anyway, don’t try to escape the feeling of discomfort at your growing pains. Lean into them, knowing that they could very well signal that something you’re doing is working to kill whatever it is about the status quo that you want or need to change.

Growing pains are simply the status quo dying, and the status quo dies hard.

 

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Growing Pains [Part I of II]: Why Change Hurts

Fun fact about yours truly: I’m an amateur doctor. That just means that I’m somewhat  – okay, very – obsessed with my health and wellness, and that of the willing amateur patients in my life. If WebMD certified power users, I’d be their leader. I’ve diagnosed many of my own medical issues, and I even asked for a scalpel for Christmas one year (don’t laugh – I was 30 years old). My treatment philosophy, if you will, has a decided bent toward holistic, mind-body and ‘alternative’ modalities.

In fact, the “prescriptions” I most frequently dole out include:

  • “Yoga”
  • “Stop eating all that nonsense”
  • “Cut out the wheat and/or dairy”
  • “Try my spinach smoothie recipe for breakfast every day”
  • “Call my acupuncturist”
  • “Call my writing coach”
  • “Try lavender oil/brussels sprouts/ valerian root”
  • “Read ‘Necessary Endings’/ ‘If the Buddha Got Stuck’/ ‘The Art of Possibility’”
  • “Get a dog (or two) – from the pound, of course”
  • “You should rethink that assumption – are you sure that’s really true?”
  • “Cod liver oil”

So it wasn’t completely bizarre that a friend rang me up the other day to ask whether I’d heard of an affliction that had stricken one of the star players of the high school baseball team he coaches: blebs.  Apparently, the boy had experienced a growth spurt in which his body grew faster than his lungs, causing blebs – a sort of blister that forms on the lungs – to develop. One of these blebs ruptured, causing his lung to actually collapse, rendering him bedridden for weeks.

This boy, who has recovered completely, was experiencing a severe case of something that many of us go through in a less concrete way as we try to make changes in our lives or businesses: growing pains. No matter how desperately we desire to proactively make changes, like losing weight or changing careers, or how much we crave to be more adaptable to our rapidly changing world or recover from our failures with more resilience, the fact is that sometimes – most times – change hurts. And often, change hurts enough that the most human, instinctive reaction is to stop what seems like the most proximate cause of the pain: our efforts at transformation.

Have you ever switched from junk foods to clean, whole, healthful foods and felt sick to your stomach? Or stopped smoking and nearly chewed your fingers off?  Have you cut back on watching television, your spending or your gambling and noticed how your former compatriots in those activities tried to nudge you back into bonding over these things?

Two words: growing pains.

One summer, I was making some major transitions in my career and my personal relationships, and within a 10-week period of time, I broke my foot in two places, had issues with my liver enzymes, developed an infection in my eye, discovered a painful (but benign) cyst AND was diagnosed with the Epstein Barr virus (like mono, for grown-ups). Given my inclination toward health nuttiness, all this body drama was a great source of comedy in my circles. My friends joked that my liver problems stemmed from the lack of alcohol in my diet, and even my doctor called me the healthiest person with a bunch of random, painful health problems she’d ever seen. (I’m grateful to say they were all blessedly minor, in the final analysis.)

But I knew: it was all the change. I believe my body was giving off clues about the internal dis-ease (right?) and discomfort I was creating by slamming the brakes on some long-lived, dysfunctional habits, patterns and relationships. My physical symptoms were evidence of my subconscious resistance to the change, a deep-down ploy to distract myself from evolving into my highest and best life. I was tempted to just let go of some of my plans and new approaches, or at least put them on hold until I felt better, but I knew better – that’s how growing pains work! Instead, I made up my mind that I wouldn’t fall prey; I would not be derailed.

This happens to organizations and companies in transformation, too. The vivacious, energetic new hire gets sick as soon as she comes on board. Turnover spikes and angst proliferates among formerly happy staffers as a company rebrands, reorganizes or reboots. Here in Silicon Valley, where companies start tiny then put the gas on, big time, before they plan to go public, the gripes can practically be heard walking down any startup-studded street:

“I was employee number 20, and we’re at 300 – we’re just too big.  It’s not fun anymore.”

“We’re so corporate now!  It takes forever to get anything done!”

“If I wanted to work for a big company, I would have.”

“I loved it when we were scrappy.  Those days are long gone.”

“I’d quit, but I can’t afford to leave until after the IPO.”

“We’ve tried that before – it’s never worked, and it won’t work now.”

“We’ve never done that before and I don’t know why we’re doing it now.”

“This [initiative] is stupid.”

“So and so [new VP] thinks they know everything. But she’s clueless about how we do things here. She knows nothing about our culture.”

I recently talked with the owner of a small chain of thriving yoga studios whose unlined face frowned into a pained grimace when talking about the stalls and plateaus she was hitting in the areas of HR and organizational development as she tries to scale the business.

Companies are not immune from the literal pains of growing, no matter how small or large they are.  And you can see how they impact transformational efforts. Growing pains are one of the most common derailers of our efforts to:

  • Create change
  • Bounce back from failures
  • Innovate new approaches
  • Adapt to new circumstances, and
  • Course-correct in our businesses and our lives.

The young baseball player with the blisters on his lungs?  He’s just fine, and should be back on the field soon. I hope this young man is done with this entire experience and never has to face anything this scary and painful again. Unfortunately, blebs often recur in tall men as they gain inch after inch in their teen years, growing faster than their lungs can keep up. Knowing this is at the root of the lung malfunction, (real) doctors will often treat recurring blebs by gluing the outer lung to the chest cavity, so that the lung cannot collapse in the future. They take extreme measures to ensure that this known problem cannot create the same threat to the patients’ health and growth in the future, and that he can grow without being felled by those insidious blebs.

In the same way, as we try to grow in our businesses, careers, families, relationships, finances, friendships and lives, if we can (1) understand, (2) anticipate, and (3) neutralize or address growing pains in advance, we can deactivate their potential power to derail us as we try to evolve and adapt.

So, let’s hit number one, here – understanding what underlies growing pains. (Part II will take on how we can predict and deactivate them.) As I see it, there are at least four primary reasons growing pains are a fact of the transforming life or business – and why they so frequently derail the changes we want or need to make:

1.  Transformation promises/threatens to bring about the end of the world as we know it. By definition, major changes represent the end of the world as we know it. Even if that world has lots of friction or pain points, even if it is functioning sub-optimally or barely functioning at all, it can be terrifying to anticipate that what we know how to do and the resources we’ve always relied upon might no longer be able to serve us in the unknown territory ahead.

This uncertainty is uncomfortable at its mildest, and unhinging at worst.  It also happens to be a necessary precursor to optimization, growth and evolution.

2.  Transformation creates great risk and exposure. Many leaders and overachiever types are so used to succeeding (and so self-critical when they don’t) that the concept of exposing themselves or their teams to external criticism or to the prospect of failure makes their bodies and organizations buzz, physically and energetically, with painful, chemical distress. These are the sort of growing pains that spark a knee-jerk return to status quo behavior, as we try to simply make the pain stop!

When we do this, we lose sight of the fact that exposure and risk are inherent, even elemental, in taking on transformation.

3.  Growing pains can be the vehicle for lessons, equipment, readiness we need to execute the new vision. Sometimes, the growing pains themselves create the precise opportunity and space to acquire the skills, connections and insights we’ll need to manifest our new vision and thrive post-transformation.

You might need to gain the skill of recognizing misaligned staff resources and terminating employees you care about for a challenge that you’ll have post-transformation and get that skill only when you step on the gas pedal of your organization’s vision and a beloved team member tries to put on the brakes.

If you believe, as I do, that a divine plan exists for your life, or that your products and services are destined to create great change in the world, it’s a short logical leap to be able to find the lesson or the meaning in the catastrophes – small and large – you encounter in your efforts to grow. If you don’t believe this, you can get to the same conclusion by taking Steve Jobs’ advice and trying to “trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

4.  Growing pains can manifest our resistance to change. Norman Mailer once said, rather indignantly, “I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.” One of the ways we shrink from the immensity of our personal or company’s purpose is by allowing our transformational efforts to be distracted and derailed by growing pains.

Chaos and crises of finance (corporate or personal), insufficient human resources (including depleting and draining ourselves through overwork!), and physical health are common ways our resistance to change manifests as growing pains.

Question: Have you ever experienced growing pains when you made an effort to change something in your life, or at work? What happened? Do you feel like they forced you to up your game, or did you get derailed?

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When Your ‘Worst Case’ Happens: 3 Steps to Process Failure, Pivot and Thrive

In a five-year period of time, as many of my worst-case scenarios came true. My health, home, business, marriage and even my children – it seemed as though nothing I cared about was left unscathed.  You can read more about my story here [in the What do You Really Need to RETHINK? Guide], and how nearly every one of these worst-case scenarios turned out to be a step on the divinely laid path to living, working and enjoying my life all the way out to the edges.

Lessons learned – among others:

1. Stop ruminating on what worst-case scenarios *might* happen. Doing so simply forces you to live the pain of them out hundreds of hypothetical times. Then, if any of them does come true, you’ll just have to live it again!

2. No one is exempt.  No matter how special, smart, beautiful, strategic or hard-working a person is, no matter how much they have already been through, there is no universal rule or God-granted exemption that says another bad thing will never happen to you. Sound pessimistic? Maybe at first, but when you get it in your soul that bad things are sometimes unavoidable and often work out to our good, that can reduce the feeling of shock, trauma and outrage when something does happen and relax our tendency to fixate on what might be coming down the pike.

3.  Process the past, then pivot.  Don’t avoid feeling whatever you need to feel – processing the painful experience deeply allows you to harvest the lessons of it and move in a new direction – the direction of thriving. This applies to you as an individual, or family and corporate groups.

Here is the 3-step flow I’ve found to be particularly powerful in processing painful past experiences, traumas, disappointments and failures, so we can get on with the business of transformation:

Step 1: Dive into the pain. Feel it.  And I mean, let it be excruciating, if it needs to be. When you have some down time, whether it be at home or at an off-site or meeting (i.e., not when you or your team needs to be incredibly “on”), allow the experience to come to mind, and give yourself permission to acknowledge the failure and sit with the feelings that arise.

Could be grief.  Could be sadness.  Could be frustration or anger.  Maybe even guilt or shame. Or panic, fear or terror at the consequences or karmic chain that might have been set in motion.

Whatever it is, let it come up – and whatever you do, don’t fight the feeling.  Leaning into these feelings, experiencing the grief or pain that comes up organically, is a critical step toward completion of the painful event or relationship.  You can’t grieve what’s not over, so feeling these emotions is the most fundamental, necessary way to declare the experience over and clear the slate for forward motion.

For some this is easy – tears flow freely. I, on the other hand, once spent about 6 weeks listening to sad songs (which Pandora kept shutting down), reading sad news stories (without trying to figure out how I can personally supply clean water to an entire continent) and giving myself permission to cry, all in an effort to grieve.  And I got a measly two flipping tears. Probably a result of having had a “1-cry-a-year, max” policy since childhood.

If you’re like me, and have built into your persona a resistance to these sorts of emotions because you are afraid of they might lead to a breakdown or make it harder for you to be The Competent One, hear this: a number of recent studies have shown that widows who were strong and resilient when their husbands dies had much longer-lasting physical and emotional effects from their grief than those who had a so-called emotional breakdown in the days after their spouses’ deaths.

Breakdown in order to break through: there’s a rethink for you.  Or, as Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, “ruin is the road to transformation.”

Harvard neuroscientist and massive stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor found that any human being’s physiological capacity to deeply experience excruciating grief and pain lasts a grand total of 90 seconds.

Yes, 90 seconds – and here’s the transcript of my own mental chatter from that minute-and-a-half:
“I can’t believe that happened, my heart is completely broken, oh – woe is me, the agony! What will I ever do?! I can’t imagine I’ll ever recover from the pain of – hmmm, wonder if I can score some of that Kalamata olive bread for cheat day?”

However, we do have the power to extend the duration of our deep pain, for years even, if we attempt to avoid feeling the appropriate emotional response to a situation, or if we simply choose to keep revisiting or being stuck on thoughts and memories of the event, which typically results in us circling back to the painful circumstances ad infinitum.

Dr. Taylor elaborates:

The 90 second rule is totally empowering. That means for 90 seconds, I can watch this happen, I can feel this happen and I can watch it go away. After that, if I continue to feel that fear or feel that anger, I need to look at the thoughts I’m thinking that are re-stimulating that circuitry that is resulting in me having this physiology over and over again.

When you stay stuck in an emotional response,you’re choosing it by choosing to continue thinking the same thoughts that retrigger it.

Step 1 to powerful ‘past processing’ is to lean in, feel your pain, let it be excruciating. 90 seconds, 90 days, 90 months or a lifetime – you get to choose.

Step 2: Metabolize, Part I: Extract the Lessons from Your Losses.  Whether your team has failed at an initiative and had to pull the plug, you had to fire an employee you cared about or you lost your home to foreclosure, if you want to turn your painful failures and losses into fodder for progress and transformation, it’s essential that you do what Dr. Henry Cloud deems “metabolizing” these experiences.

The parallel is to what your body does when it metabolizes food: it takes the nutrition it can extract from the food, then expels the rest as waste product.

After you’ve felt your 90 seconds of trauma and drama (or thereabouts), set about the process of extracting and gleaning insights and lessons from the experience that will serve you as you move onward and upward. If you’re in an organization, it might make sense to put a systematic process to this, including documenting the learning and analysis that will be applicable and useful to future endeavors and projects.

Step 3:  Metabolize, Part II: Get Over the Past by Eliminating What Doesn’t Serve You About the Painful Experience.  When it comes to expelling the superfluous elements of a painful experience like a waste product, do not underestimate the power of making an intentional decision to stop fixating, ruminating or perseverating on what has happened. Having some clarity on what you’ve learned will help you discard what doesn’t serve you (or anyone else, for that matter) about the painful experience by focusing you on the future.

Some other powerful tools for eliminating the pain and toxic remains of a failure or experience, organizationally or personally, include:

  • Rituals and symbols of endings. Dr. Cloud recommends having a “funeral” for the dead division, product, or other ending – these can include going away parties to commemorate even bittersweet personnel moves, team retreats, or even grief or recovery support groups and classes, on a personal level.  I’ve always thought those divorce parties you see on reality shows were très déclassé, but I suppose that, for some, they serve a purpose.
  • A corporate culture and personal values system that views some failures and losses as a normal part of the cycle of innovation, evolution and thriving.
  • A clear, galvanizing vision for the future. Having an exciting, declared vision and commitment to an inspired future, for yourself or your company, is probably the single most powerful motivator for leaving behind the patterns and emotions that do not serve you and will hinder you from creating the future you envision.
  • Avoiding “rebound” projects, endeavors or relationships until metabolism is complete. For example, if I had a dollar for every foreclosed homeowner whose home hasn’t even yet hit the auction block before they’re trying to perform mortgage wizardry to qualify to buy another, I could personally fund a Main Street bailout. Time and time again, I’ve advised: “Slow your roll!”  Instead:  Sit still, feel the pain of the foreclosure, move from the grief stage of denial and anger into the stage where you figure out what you would have done differently in your mortgage decision-making or personal finances (i.e., what you will do differently next go-round) , heal your finances and credit from the trauma of losing your your home (and/or job, etc.). Get all the way out of debt.  Save up.  Your next home purchase, a couple of years down the road, will be much more sustainable and drama-free for it.

You can’t hold onto waste products – the bitterness and pain left over after the lessons have been metabolized out of a disappointing or painful experience – and also be nimble, flex with the circumstances and thrive.

So, lean in, learn and let go – then go!