by Helena Escalante | Goals, Mindset, Planning, Time
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 11 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
Create an intermission to get started on your mission: We need to purposefully take some time off to give deep thought to what we want
— From: This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love by Tama J. Kieves
We’ve all heard the saying: “There are seven days in a week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday… and ‘Someday’ is NOT one of them.” So why do we tend to push our dreams, wants, and longings for someday?
Tama Kieves says, “You have no idea how much your current job [read: business / activities / routines / lifestyle] affects your thinking about your future and keeps you chained to your past. On vacation from my law firm, I got a suntan and what seemed like a brain transfusion… Outside my office, not everybody scowled and snapped and neither did I… I could not assess my job and my life while in the thick of my job that was my life.” She continues, “I’ve just noticed that we only tend to find our mission once we take an intermission from the work life that doesn’t work.”
Finding or making time off to give some serious thought to what you want, or find your true calling, or your life’s purpose is not easy. It’s not a lunch-hour activity or something you can do while running on the treadmill. Bill Gates takes “think weeks” every year, and paid and unpaid sabbaticals are on the rise in corporations. Entrepreneur Mike Karnjanaprakorn wrote about the benefits of his time off in this article. But if you absolutely, positively cannot take time off, then use your weekends to set aside time to think and then time to act.
I’ll leave you with one last beautiful quote from Tama:
“All you have to do is take a time-out and honor the purpose of that time. Then inclinations start to tap you on the shoulder. Then dreams. Then means. Just clear the space. Consciously let go of what tires you, and what inspires you will take its place.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take some time to think (1) how much time you could take, (2) when you could schedule your intermission to think about your mission, and (3) roughly how much money you’ll need to make it happen. Whether you plan to take time off in full days / weeks / months or in chunks over weekends and holidays, put it in your calendar and honor that purpose. Note that this time to think and ponder about your dreams, aspirations, goals and how to make them happen should not be a burden, nor should it deplete your savings or derail your career. NO! Just the opposite: it should give you a respite from everyday-life’s routines and craziness; and it should bring you great joy to know that you are creating the space and the time to figure out how to do what you love. Enjoy the time that you have set aside for doing this!
FUTURE: In this article from Forbes, Helen Coster quotes Dan Clements, author of Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, who talks about three steps to put your plan into action: “[1] Start an automatic savings plan, and sock away anything from $10 to $1,000 a month. [2] Choose a departure date and a length of time, and book it on all of your calendars. [3] Then tell a handful of people about your sabbatical plans, so that they can both help you plan and make sure you follow through with your decision. ‘If you don’t carve that time away, it tends to be taken from you,’ says Clements. ‘A sabbatical is one of the easiest things in the world to not do.’”
Psst! Do you know someone who could use a sabbatical or intermission? Please share this post with them and tell them to join us for daily ideas and inspiration!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 9 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
There are 4 steps that we must go through if we want to change something
— From: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth by T. Harv Eker (read a sample)
I’d venture a guess that when you look at the different areas of your life, you are pulled in two different directions. One side pulls towards feeling immense gratitude and counting your blessings. The other one pulls towards feeling that there is so much potential in you, that there’s so much more that you can do, that you are pleased but not satisfied in the area of XYZ and that if you could only… __________ (fill in the blank with your answer).
Whatever that answer is, it just means that you need to change a few things (big or small) to make it happen. However, change is easier said than done. That’s why I love what T.Harv Eker has to say about it:
“The roots create the fruits.” Imagine a tree with fruits. “In life, our fruits are called our results. [If you] don’t like them, there aren’t enough of them, they’re too small, or they don’t taste good […] you cannot change the fruits that are already hanging on the tree. You can, however, change tomorrow’s fruits. But to do so, you will have to dig below the ground and strengthen the roots.”
By digging below the ground, of course, he means taking four steps to transform our current mental blueprint and start yielding better fruits. (While in this book the methodology is applied to wealth, I believe these steps apply to all changes we want to implement.)
- Awareness: “You can’t change anything unless you know it exists.”
- Understanding: “By understanding where your ‘way of thinking’ originates, you can recognize that it has to come from outside you.” You didn’t come to this world knowing what you know. This thought that is not letting you get the best yield of fruit has had to come from some external source—family, school, culture, work, etc.—and you simply adopted it as true.
- Disassociation: “Once you realize this way of thinking isn’t you [and it isn’t serving you or holding value for you anymore], you can separate yourself from it and choose in the present whether to keep it or let it go—based on who you are today, and where you want to be tomorrow.”
- Reconditioning: Feeding your mind with new patterns of thought and actions that will guide you towards achieving your goals.
ACTION
TODAY: Set aside some time to look at the area(s) in which you’d like to yield better fruits. Examine carefully the actions that have led you there. It’s hard to look objectively at yourself, but one way I find that helps me do this, is to pretend that I am giving advice to my best friend. Detaching myself that way let’s me look at my situation differently. The “best friend” approach takes all judgment and criticism away and instead provides just constructive feedback and resources.
FUTURE: Disassociate yourself from thought patterns that no longer serve you by being aware of them when they pop up in your mind. “Unlearn” those things or habits that have not worked for you. Determine which new patters of thought and action you are going to learn next. A good way of doing this is modeling after someone who has already reached the goal you want to attain. Look for those people, ask them, or read about them, look at their mindset so that you can start emulating it.
My wish for you is that your tree of life will soon bear plenty of your desired fruits!
***
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by Helena Escalante | Mindset, Networking, Planning, Resources, Tools
TODAY’S IDEA:
There is a method to “hack” networking events for best results.
— From: Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People by Vanessa Van Edwards
Happy Friday! It’s social Friday. And whether you are at a social event for business or pleasure this weekend, you may find yourself in a room full of strangers and need to make the most out of it. Instead of dreading it, now you can hack the social scene in your favor.
Vanessa Van Edwards, behavioral investigator, and her team at Science of People studied superconnectors (those people who make the most quality contacts and who have the most robust network on LinkedIn). Science of People studied many networking events by placing cameras on the venues and looking at the patterns of people. They analyzed the foot traffic of those individuals who easily worked the room as a way to see if there were networking hacks that could be learned and applied by anyone. The verdict? Yes, there is indeed a way to work a room successfully!
Take a look at the room. “Whether you are at a networking event, holiday party, wedding, dinner at a friend’s house, or in a conference ballroom, most events have this basic setup… a social map… the start zone, the social zone, and the side zone.”
Image courtesy of Portfolio/Penguin
The start zone is where you check in, enter the room, hang your coat, etc. This is where you land when you arrive to the event and where you get prepped to network. This, as well as the side zone (where the rest rooms are or around the food tables, are the not the best zones to stay in, psychologically speaking, as people in these zones are not necessarily ready to network at that moment. Areas marked with X in the map are traps to avoid.
The social zone is the best part to stand in, optimally, as people exit the bar (areas marked with stars and the triangle between them). That is when they turn around, drink in hand, and are ready to meet and greet. At that point they’re thinking: “Who do I know?” “Who do I talk to?” And you become an instant savior if you stand there and say “Hi! It’s so nice to meet you.” It is right then and there that they will be ready to network and you can start making meaningful connections.
Who would have thought… Makes total sense, doesn’t it? Want to learn more about this? You can read here and here, and watch this five-minute video. Also, since I adapted this post from a longer book review that I wrote for The New York Public Library, you can read that here.
ACTION
TODAY: If you are going to an event today, put this to the test! If not, simply study the zones and make a note in your schedule to revisit this when you have a social event next.
FUTURE: Figure out when your next networking/social event is taking place. Make a note in your calendar to come back to revisit this post. Then when you get to your event, remember the social map, identify the zones and work the room. Once the event is over, analyze how you did compared to other times. What worked? What didn’t? How can you adapt the learning for future events?
Make a note in your calendar to come back to this post after your event and let me know how it went in the comments, please, I’d love to know.
Happy networking! 🙂
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Leadership, Planning, Tools
TODAY’S IDEA:
KISS = Keep It Super Simple
— From: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
This is one of my favorite books (yes, I know, I have so many…) because the Heath brothers manage to distill the art of effective messages down to a model that they’ve called SUCCESs. The first step is an idea that applies well to messaging and also to many other areas of business and life. The concept? Keep It Super Simple (remember it by its acronym: KISS).
The important thing to understand is that by simple they don’t mean dumbing down, what they mean is finding the core of the idea. This means “stripping an idea down to it’s most critical essence.” Yet the hard part is not “weeding out superfluous and tangential elements” but discarding other ideas “that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.”
To further explain, the authors describe what the Army calls Commander’s Intent. “Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of a soldier at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.”
This is important because you can plan all you want but “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Unpredictable things always occur, yet when that happens, the goal should be to keep the intent in mind. If everyone does that, you’ll inevitable get to where you want to go, or at least move closer into that direction. Note that the Commander’s Intent applies as well to people from all walks of life: “No sales plan survives contact with the customer.” “No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.”
The way in which you can arrive at your Commander’s Intent is by asking these two questions:
- If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ____________.
- The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ____________.
Simple enough, don’t you think?
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
ACTION
TODAY: What are you working on where the plan did not survive contact with the intended recipient? Take a moment to ponder the two questions above to arrive at the Commander’s Intent for your project. Once you have found your core idea, then you and all involved will be able to move forward in that direction.
FUTURE: How about setting a Commander’s Intent for each project that you work or collaborate on? Share the concept of Commander’s Intent and the two questions with your team, that way everyone involved will have clarity to move towards the common goal.
by Helena Escalante | Celebration, Goals, Leadership, Mindset
Neil Gaiman*
TODAY’S IDEA:
We all have impostor syndrome.
— From an anecdote in The Official Neil Gaiman Tumblr
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is the day of love and friendship, and I hope you celebrate it with your loved ones.
As busy professionals, we are constantly juggling many priorities, and focused always on other people. We seldom stop to appreciate our efforts, to love and thank ourselves for what we do, and to celebrate our wins.
Why do we tend to neglect ourselves this way? Very likely because we suffer from impostor syndrome: we attribute our accomplishments to luck or some other factor as opposed to our efforts, and we fear that somehow, someway, we will be exposed as a “fraud” because we are not qualified or good enough to do what we do. Hmmm, sounds familiar?
The term impostor syndrome was coined by Pauline R. Clance who observed that “it’s not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness, it’s something almost everyone experiences” and we need to “understand [that we] are not isolated in this experience.”
I know I battle impostor syndrome every single day (especially before hitting the send button on my daily emails!). And since I’m guessing that you might likely belong to this same club, I want to share this wonderful anecdote from Neil Gaiman, the famous English author, with you:
«Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”
And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”
And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter**, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.»
This anecdote is beautiful because it illustrates that no matter who we are and what we’ve done, big or small, we ALL feel the same way. We’re in awe of others’ accomplishments and doubt ours. Let’s embrace our shared human nature today, Valentine’s Day, and besides celebrating our love for others, let’s celebrate, thank, and love ourselves too.
ACTION
TODAY: I completely understand that this idea of celebrating our accomplishments and loving ourselves makes some of us squirm. Make this as big or as small a celebration as you feel comfortable: throw a party, or just meditate for 3 minutes, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that today you take a bit of time to think and give yourself credit for the things that you have accomplished. If you suspend any and all judgment as you’re doing this, a flash flood of gratitude will come pouring in.
FUTURE: Make this a habitual practice: as much or as little, and as often as you can (I strongly suggest though, getting out of your comfort zone in terms of frequency and intensity). Surround yourself with a circle of trusted people where you can be open about your accomplishments and where they will celebrate your wins and cheer for you.
And remember that I’m here cheering for you too! 🙂
*Photo: Kyle Cassidy [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
** Impostor vs. imposter? Both are correct!
