by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Drop the Story
— From: Habit Changers: 81 Game-Changing Mantras to Mindfully Realize Your Goals by M. J. Ryan
The reason why first impressions are so important is because, in those first few seconds, the brain takes in the new information and gives it some meaning. M.J. Ryan, leading expert on change and human fulfillment, says that this meaning is built on information, stories, conclusions, and assumptions based on filters from the past.
“[Our brain] does this automatically, below our conscious awareness. Like everything else our brain does, this has an upside—we couldn’t function well if everything coming in were new to us… But there’s also a downside: our unconscious story can get in the way of our seeing the new information so we can respond in a fresh way.”
And right after the initial story we tell ourselves, comes in confirmation bias: “the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.” (Britannica). This happens to everyone and in any situation, not just at the beginning of something.
So what can we do to think clearly and in an unbiased way?
Ryan suggests being aware that we need to “drop the story.” To illustrate this point, she tells a story of a client of hers whose sales “were tanking and he was convinced it was because he didn’t have the right person at the helm. Why? Because years ago he’d swapped the role out and sales had gone up.” Ryan asked him, “What would happen if you drop the story that your problem is caused by the sales leader?” To which he replied, “I’d have to look to other factors, like market forces.” Turns out that he discovered the real problem: “his products were not competitive anymore, and quickly made manufacturing adjustments to cut costs.”
Dropping the story, in any situation (whether personal or professional) brings a fresh approach to thinking. It allows us to depart from our unconscious assumptions, focus on other ways to look at the problems and find solutions.
ACTION
TODAY: Where are you stuck? What one issue has been in your mind that you can’t seem to find a solution for? State what you think your problem is, and then drop the story. Examine other angles and ask why 5 times to get to the root of the problem. Once you have correctly identified what it is, you will be able to move forward to solve it.
FUTURE: Keep this “drop the story” mantra in your toolbox. It will come in handy the next time you are trying to solve an issue. It works well by itself and is also a great complement to asking why 5 times.
Have a friend who is racking his brain about something? Please share this post and tell him to drop the story via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 57 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: You are not your past
— From A Second Chance: For You, For Me, And For The Rest Of Us by Catherine Hoke
Spoiler alert: The ideas in this book will change your life for the better. It’s all about love, empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and a keen eye for business.
Catherine Hoke is the Founder of Defy Ventures, an “entrepreneurship, employment, and character development training program for currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, and youth.” Defy teaches character building and business to inmates so that when they are released, they can become the CEOs of their new lives and new businesses, productive members of society, and legal, role models for their families and their circles of influence.
The statistics speak for themselves: under the regular prison system, 76.6% of previously incarcerated individuals will return to prison; whereas 95% of Defy “graduates” never go back. What is Defy doing that it has lowered the rate of recidivism (return to prison) down to only 5%? This book will tell you! It’s a combination of the story of Hoke, her healing and second chance, and the wonderful work that she does along with her team at Defy to give second chances to inmates who sometimes have never truly had a legitimate first chance (some of them are locked up before the age of ten for playground fights!). Here’s a TED Talk with more details and many success stories.
As all the (true) stories in the book unfold, we—readers—are taken into a parallel journey of our own, filled with paradigm shifts and empathic reflection, because Hoke walks us through the prisons we build in our minds. “We are all behind bars—the bars of perfection, the bars of shame, of judging and being judged.” This fits me, unfortunately, like a glove, as I am a recovering perfectionist and have also beaten myself much, over and over, for a long time, for many mistakes I’ve made in business and in life.
“What would it be like if you were known only for the worst thing you have ever done? Think back to the worst decision you’ve made, the one you regret the most, the one that caused you or others the most pain. Maybe it was something criminal. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was emotionally or morally or spiritually wrong. Maybe it was an act of omission. What labels could people have attached to your mistake?”
You are free to cast the first stone if you have never done anything wrong, but as the book says, “Aren’t we all ex-somethings?” We’ve all made big and small mistakes… and the beautiful idea that I want to take from the book for today is “You are not your past.” Focus on yourself today and on who you are becoming. Forgiveness is for ourselves: it’s a choice and a decision we make. “When we don’t choose forgiveness we live in the past.”
Don’t tie yourself to the past. Give up the hope of a better past because it just weighs you down. Instead, level up now and work towards the hope of a better future. “Forgiveness doesn’t mean the offense was okay. […] No one is suggesting the doormat model. Forgiveness is not about inviting people to hurt you again, break your heart again, disappoint you again. You’re free to refuse to work with someone or to not engage with someone you can’t trust. But when we forgive someone, we open two doors: a door for them to improve and demonstrate that they have a contribution to make to others, and a door for us, to find a path forward.”
ACTION
TODAY: Identify where you are clinging on to the past. Whether its business or personal, where have you not let go of something you did or something that someone did to you? Ask yourself if you like living with that feeling or if you’ve just grown accustomed to it. Think for a moment: wouldn’t it be liberating to forgive? Make the choice and try it, wholeheartedly. If the choice doesn’t work out you can always come back to where you were before forgiving, but I bet it will be life changing.
FUTURE: After you’ve done the action for today, know that after you think, “I choose to forgive me/him/her/them” you may not feel warm and fuzzy and your brain will fight you back. Maybe immediately, or maybe the following day (it’s a habit that needs to be changed), but your brain will tell you all the reasons why you want to revert to a state of unforgiveness. Every time that happens, choose forgiveness. Build the new habit. And choose forgiveness again. And again. “Forgiveness is as much about the forgiver as much as the forgiven. It allows us to take our attention off the past and put it on the present and the future, where it can do some good.”
Want to learn more about Catherine Hoke, the book or Defy Ventures? Here’s a podcast with Tim Ferriss. And if you know someone who needs to forgive, please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Opportunity
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 58 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
You lead. Your tribe communicates.
— From: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
Seth Godin asks “What does it take to create a movement?” Take, for instance, “microfinance as a tool to fight poverty.” And he cites the answer he got from the Acumen Fund regarding Mohammad Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank, “the problem (and its solution!) were recognized more than thirty years ago.”
So why did it take so long for the idea to get traction?
“There’s a difference,” says Seth, “between telling people what to do and inciting a movement. The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing… Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate.”
That’s how Skype grew all over the world. That’s how Wikipedia grew. That’s how social movements spread. Communication is key, and real leaders know how their tribe communicates and enable them to do so.
The book tells a story that Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen (a non-profit global venture capital fund whose goal is to use entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty) shared with Seth about Unicef spending a lot of money in creating posters to promote child vaccinations to the mothers of Rwanda. “The posters were gorgeous—photographs with women and children with simple messages written in Kinyarwandan (the local language), about the importance of vaccinating every child. They were perfect, except for the fact with a female illiteracy rate exceeding 70 percent, words written in perfect Kinyarwandan made little difference.” Jacqueline noticed “that the way messages spread in Rwanda was by song. One group of women would sing a song for other women, both as a way of spreading ideas and as a gift. No song, no message.”
The bottom line to all this? “Your tribe communicates. They probably don’t do it the way you would; they don’t do it as efficiently as you might like, but they communicate. The challenge [for you as a leader] is to help your tribe sing, whatever form that song takes.”
Here’s a video (17 min) of a TED Talk Seth gave called “The tribes we lead.”
ACTION
TODAY: No matter how big or small your tribe, you are indeed a leader. Stop for a moment to think how your tribe communicates and how you can motivate and enable this communication to take place better. OR… want an even better action for today? Watch the video above, at the 16:40 minute mark Seth says that to start a movement it only takes 24 hours. Go start your movement!
FUTURE: Make a list of the various tribes that you lead: your family, your company, your team, your friends, other social circles, internet groups, and more. What is the way in which each group communicates? How can you motivate and connect them? How can you enable, elevate and empower (3 Es) this communication for your movement to gain steam?
This post goes out with much gratitude to Seth Godin for his wonderful books, for being a ruckus maker and starting a movement, and–especially–for the tribe he leads, the altMBA. It was out out of the communication from within the tribe that this blog was born. I’m a proud alumna! Here’s a conversation Seth and I had on Facebook Live where I talk about my altMBA experience.
Know someone who leads a tribe? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter! Curious about the altMBA? Hit me up and I’ll gladly share my experience and answer your questions.
by Helena Escalante | Celebration, Goals, Leadership, Mindset, Opportunity
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 43 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
Give Yourself an A.
— From The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, by Rozamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.
Because we live in an ultracompetitive society, we are constantly comparing our results to others and others’ results to ours. The result? Disappointment that we don’t measure up or that others don’t measure up to our standards, with the consequent anxiety, despair, and a bunch of other symptoms caused by this unnecessary stress. However, Ben and Roz Zander in The Art of Possibility rightly state that all of the labels we assign are merely human inventions, “so we might as well choose to invent something that brightens our life and the lives of the people around us.”
As such, they describe a fascinating tactic, the practice of giving an A*: “It’s a shift in attitude that makes it possible for you to speak freely about your own thoughts and feelings while, at the same time, you support others to be all they dream of being. The practice of giving an A transports your relationship from the world of measurement into the universe of possibility.”
You can give yourself an A, and you can also give it to “anyone in any walk of life—to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the opposite team, and to the drivers in traffic… This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.”
Ben Zander, who serves as musical director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (on the date of publication of this post) says that he gives all students in his class an A at the beginning of the course in exchange for writing him a letter (within the following two weeks and postdated at the end of the course) in which each student should detail “the story of what will have happened to [him/her by the end of the course] that is in line with this extraordinary grade. [The students] are to place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired and milestones they attained during the year as if those accomplishments were already in the past.” In the letter, Zander wants them to highlight, and is especially interested in, “the person [the student] will have become [by the end of the course]… the attitude, feelings, and worldview of that person who will have done all she wished to do or become everything he wanted to be.”
“I tell them I want them to fall passionately in love with the person they are describing in their letter.”
So why not give ourselves an A today and see what happens? And how about giving it to the people that surround us? Let’s give it a try, for all we know, we may make our corner of the world a much better place!
ACTION
TODAY: Write yourself a letter explaining why you’re giving yourself an A, and date it a year from today. Describe who you will have become and why a year from now. Fall passionately in love with the person you are describing in the letter. Go make it happen!
FUTURE: Every time you find yourself unnecessarily stressed or in a pickle about something, give yourself and the people involved in it an A (no letters involved here, you can simply give them an A in your mind). See how your attitude changes. Ask yourself, “What happens if we pretend that this isn’t hard?” It’s game changing!
In my mind and in my heart you are all As, and my wish for you is to always dwell in possibility and marvel at yourself and others. I am so grateful for you being with me on this journey: EntreGurus is celebrating one month, and we have so much more to share, woo-hoo!!
Please let me know in the comments the ideas that EntreGurus has sparked in you! And a favor, please: help me share these ideas with more people via email, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you!
NOTES:
* For our international gurupies**: Grades in school in the United States are measured in a scale of A to F, with A being the highest and best grade a student can get. In other countries this would be the equivalent of 10 or 100. Simply substitute the A in this case for the highest and best grade that students can get in your country and this tactic will immediately resonate with you!
** Gurupie = blend of guru and groupie = how we fondly refer to the EntreGurus’ community, because we all follow the ideas of the gurus.
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!
