Because we don’t see it that way doesn’t mean that there’s not another way to see it.
There are things we can realize that we can’t change because they are immutable (like gravity, which is causing people serious injury, as you read this) or we simply don’t have the resources of time or money to effect the change (such as stopping global warming or changing someone’s intractable preconception about a culture). Those realities we can simply accept or ignore, perhaps just sending good thoughts that the situations turn out for the best.
What’s visible yet not seen here? It is the fact that the world is simply what it is – neither good nor bad – but how we are engaged with that world is always our free choice, and that creates either a positive or negative experience thereof. When individuals and organizations adopt the standard of outcome-and-action orientation for each and every thing that emerges as tensions in their ecosystems, hallelujah! We would start to live in a world with resolution/solution orientation instead of one with kindergartens of whining, recalcitrant children.
The activity of complaining or worrying (which is the passive form of complaining) assumes that something should be better than it is, but avoids a positive engagement in making it so. We bother others and ourselves about what we don’t like – what is going on that we wish or assume should be different. But mostly we engage in those acts of criticism when we have not personally decided or defined what, if anything, we intend to do about them. And the if anything factor is critical.
This is not something simply relegated to esoteric or philosophical discourse, nor to the seemingly shortsighted, self-interested, and constipated nature of many of our political climates and conversations. It affects how we all deal with the day-to-day realities of our worlds.
In my work with some of the best, brightest, and most sophisticated people in the world, we have invariably uncovered issues, problems, and opportunities that have taken up residence in their psyches. There are circumstances creating stress and internal spin, but no forward motion. Indeed, these are often subtle and ambiguous – a disgruntled staff person, a frustrating organizational process, an uncomfortable aging parent. Applying the simple but highly effective thought process of identifying what has these an individuals’ attention, and clarifying a desired outcome and a specific next action to take, has totally reframed their outlook and relieved tons of pressure.
The primary issue is often that they are the victims of their own creativity! Paradoxically, it is usually the most aspirational, motivated, and productive people who wind up being the most overwhelmed with the stuff of their work and lives – things they themselves have put into motion.
Say that a senior person on your team is not performing up to expectations. Or your personal financial and legal affairs are not in order in case something should happen to you. Or you’re not sure if the company’s going in the right direction, you have aging parents for whose care you feel you’re going to be responsible, or you know you should exercise and meditate more.
How do we create positive relationships to those things yanking our psychological chains, potentially waking us up in the middle of the night? Trying to ignore them doesn’t do it. Practicing mindfulness doesn’t do it. Drinking doesn’t do it (though in random moments that may give you a little false courage to engage!). What’s required is the cognitive practice of making some decisions about what those things are that are grabbing our attention and what we’re going to do about them, exactly, if anything.
In my experience, what we’re here to do and learn on this planet is simple, but sublime. We’re here to become aware of and accountable for where we have placed our attention and our attachments; and to recognize who we are as creative beings, optimally directing our energies going forward.
I don’t share that often with my clients. Frankly, I haven’t found it necessary. If it’s the truth, they’ll find that out for themselves, in their own perfect timing. If it’s not, then I don’t have to be perceived by anyone as wrong!
What I have uncovered is a personal productivity methodology, which embodies that dynamic and gets people involved in it, but in the easiest, most mundane and practical way.
The first step is having someone identify everything that has his or her attention. The reason something would be on someone’s mind is because he or she has some interest in it being dealt with, but has not yet decided exactly how to approach it.
Why is that e-mail still sitting there? What’s that document on your desk asking you to do about it? Why is that receipt still in your briefcase? What are you going to do with those meeting notes?
The things we have allowed ourselves to get involved with will continually demand our attention until or unless we unhook from them completely (resign from the committee) or we appropriately engage with and commit to them (identify the desired outcome and the next action, parking reminders about those in the right places).
The simple act of deciding what you really need to do about a piece of paper on your desk or an e-mail lurking on your computer is the microcosmic embodiment of moving from being a victim of your world to being in the driver’s seat.
Interestingly, I’ve watched how challenging it is for some of the best and brightest people to avoid that kind of thinking and decision making, about even some of the most mundane stuff.
You have four free tickets to the game; who do you invite? Even the more subtle and serious stuff remains nagging; is divorce an option for us?
And yet, how simple could this be if we reframed our dilemma as a project rather than a problem? What’s the outcome we’d like to have happen? What’s the next action required to move toward that appropriately? It’s very simple, but often very challenging.
How many of our politicians are focused on an outcome of looking good to their constituents instead of achieving some desired result that would benefit their base? How much political activity is invested in criticizing instead of defining, clarifying, and taking real action toward some positive outcome?
What if every news story went like this: Here’s the current reality. Here’s who’s invested in making a difference there. Here are their desired outcomes in the situation. Here’s how they’re approaching this.
This actually is how many stories are framed, to some degree, as in the case of a wildfire raging in the national forest. Here’s what’s going on, as best we see it. Here are the people and resources being allocated to deal with it. Here’s their game plan.
It’s not, however, how we see much of the rest of world’s news positioned and delivered (and likely ingested by us). We often see terrible situations and seldom the stories of who and how people are engaged in correcting them.
There is an equal responsibility to engage appropriately with what you have accepted into your universe as you have with allowing it in in the first place.
This clarity of definition for ourselves – What’s mine or theirs? Is this something I can be involved with? What’s my interest or investment in doing something about this? – is key to staying optimally clear and productive.
What would it be like if this were the behavior of all of us?
What if your son or daughter wants to take karate classes or have a birthday party? Would they have come to you with a desired outcome predetermined – learn karate? Would they be taking a decided next action – talk to mom about taking a karate class? They could. Few do, though, at least not in a consistent, emotionally neutral way.
What if your parliament decides to take a different tack on handling the budget? What are we really trying to produce, as a positive outcome here? If we agree on that, who owns making that happen?
The best of the consultative and rigorous decision-making processes would buy into this approach – outcomes desired, actions required – though they often lose sight of those key foci when they get mired down in the weeds of discussions and negotiations.
But, the whole world? Why are we not trained yet to approach our experiences and our environment from
an outcome and action focus? Of course, there are many things going on in the world produced by people who do have that focus, but toward results that we might consider bad. Granted. But in my experience, in the long haul most of the negative behaviors engaged in stem from insecurity – a lack of awareness of our own worth and power. There’s a direct correlation between feeling the victim and being a victimizer. If, from the beginning, we were trained to see every problem as a project, that empowerment would allow us to more readily step into and express the greater goodness of who we really are.
Worrying and complaining can serve a valuable purpose. They can identify those things that present an opportunity for change and improvement. The problem may be visible, but we must also stay focused on a desired positive outcome and a path forward. In other words, we must look out the window to see what is not yet seen.
Reflection Questions:
Consider how you view obstacles in your personal and professional lives; where did you acquire such a perspective?
How can changing your perspective from looking at challenges as problems to projects create a greater sense of empowerment in you? In those you lead?
Think about how you determine responsibility in any given situation. How do you decide who is responsible for what, and what your responsibility is?
How do you frame the relationship between outcomes desired and actions required? What steps do you take to move from one to the other?
31
A Cheerleader at Heart
Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson brings a strategic eye and long-range vision given her multifaceted professional experience. In addition to great success as a Wall Street investment equity analyst, she co-founded (with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen) and managed Rose Park Advisors–Disruptive Innovation Fund. As a classically trained pianist, she has special insight into discipline, practice, and perseverance.
Whitney is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption and specializes in equipping leaders to harness change by implementing the proprietary framework she codified in the critically acclaimed book Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work. She’s been named a Thinkers50, Leading Business Thinker Globally, and a Finalist for Top Thinker on Talent, 2015. Her guests as host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast include such luminaries as Patrick Pichette, former CFO of Google, and Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40.
Whitney coaches C-Suite executives across a variety of industries and has a deep understanding of how executives can create or destroy value. Her approach to coaching is grounded in the disruptive innovation theory, based on the premise that the individual is the fundamental unit of the disruption. Building on this foundation of personal accountability, she works with executives using the stakeholder-centered coaching approach devised by Marshall Goldsmith: Change must come from within, but it is facilitated by the ecosystem.
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Confession: I was a high school cheerleader.
This was a dearly held girlhood dream, an aspiration I worked hard to make happen.
Hard work wasn’t foreign to me. I was a good student, and had, at a young age, been willing to get up early and practice piano. But that was more my mother’s dream for me than my dream for myself.
In fact, I would major in music in college, somewhat unwillingly – mom again, inserting her ambition where mine was inchoate – and exit with a BA that was the culmination of many years of consistent effort. But I didn’t possess any particular desire to perform (much less the drive demanded to be a concert pianist) or any realistic venue in which to do so. At that point in my life, being a cheerleader had been the one passion that I had articulated to myself clearly enough to make it happen.
Post-university life was headed in a different direction anyway; at about the same time I graduated, my husband completed his MS and we transplanted to New York City so that he could pursue a PhD at Columbia University. I found Manhattan intimidating; I would never have moved there on my own. But my husband’s program in microbiology was going to take five to seven years. There were bills to pay and food to put on the table. I needed – and wanted – a serious job, so I turned to Wall Street.
I had never taken a course in accounting, finance, or economics. No business credentials whatsoever. No connections in New York City. Looking back, I’ve often marveled that I attempted something that I felt so singularly ill-equipped to do. I landed a secretarial position, a not atypical entry-level role for a woman on Wall Street in the late 1980s.
It being the era of Liar’s Poker and Bonfire of the Vanities, there was near my desk a bullpen of almost exclusively male, aspiring 20-something stockbrokers. They spent their days cold-calling prospects, enduring frequent hang-ups, trying to persuade prospective investors to pounce on the stock du jour. The pressure was intense to make their numbers – phone calls logged, accounts opened, and dollar amounts sold. The hard sell was always in play. One of the default persuasions I heard them employ again and again was this: “Throw down your pompoms and get in the game.”
I was offended. I was offended as a woman by the blatantly sexist tone of this challenge; quit being womanly and act like a man. But this also offended me personally as a former cheerleader, a woman for whom cheerleading had been a highly sought-after rite of passage. I hadn’t come up in the era when girls’ athletics were commonly available in school or community. Cheerleading was my sport and an important opportunity for extracurricular participation at a time when opportunities for girls were much more limited than they are today.
Then one day, sitting at the same desk, listening to the same routine of cold-calling across the way, hearing “throw down your pompoms and get in the game” yet again, I had an epiphany. Suddenly, the challenge felt personal in a different way and I thought, “I need to throw down my pompoms and get in the game.”
I was, for the foreseeable future, the primary breadwinner for my family. Why would I settle for earning X, if I could earn 10X? Why would I be a Wall Street spectator, bench warmer, or cheerleader for others, if I could, with extra work and discipline, become a game-changing player? Was I looking for a supporting role or did I want to be a star?
This was a pivotal moment.
I enrolled in accounting and finance courses at night, doggedly pursuing the dream of moving from the third (or fourth or fifth) string to becoming a starter in the Wall Street game. A few years passed and the hard work was coupled with the good fortune of having a boss who was willing to build a bridge for me. I moved from support staff to investment banking analyst. From there, I moved into investment research, becoming an Institutional Investor-ranked stock analyst. Then I ventured into entrepreneurship with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, and now I’m an executive coach, speaker, writer, and all-around thinker about career management. I want to help put others at the helm in driving their own success stories by moving from the sideline of their professional lives to center field.
For a long time, I used the “throw down your pompoms and get in the game” experience to encourage other women and girls to do what I had done and turn a ho-hum job – or no job at all – into an exciting, growing, fulfilling career path. After all, research demonstrates that our cultural norm is still to cast women in supporting roles and that most women still feel more societal approval if they stick to the sidelines, offering support and encouragement to others, rather than leading themselves. I wanted every woman to have the tools, especially the confidence, to make their career dreams a reality. I still do, but with this caveat: Is the dream really theirs, or is it someone else’s dream for them? In fact, is it my dream for them, rather than their own?
Today, women constitute 50-plus percent of both the workforce and the university population, and though we still lag behind men in higher-level positions across most sectors, the demographics over time favor us to continue to improve in career opportunity – for those for whom this is the dream.
But the demographics also indicate a g
rowing loss of dreams among our male counterparts who are unemployed in unprecedented numbers; the United States ranks 22nd in male labor force participation out of the 23 developed nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Almost 32 percent of men 20 and older are without paid work, as reported in Nicholas Eberstadt’s book, Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.1 These are men, Eberstadt alleges, who for the most part are not seeking work. They are occasionally at home as primary caregivers to their children, but not often. They are voluntarily unemployed and for the most part, they are watchers of television and players of video games.
This is a complex problem, heavily, though not entirely, rooted in the consequences of the recent Great Recession. I am concerned that this is a symptom of demoralization in our society and want to issue a new rallying cry to these men: Throw down your joysticks and get in the (real) game. We all need to be dreaming. We need an objective to strive for, a purposeful occupation that gives meaning to our lives.
I began my career as a secretary, a cheerleader of sorts for men who were doing the really interesting work I longed to do. Once I got into the game I wanted to play, I became a cheerleader for women, encouraging them to believe in their ability to become the stars of their own stories. Now I feel compelled to be a cheerleader for men as well, challenging them to be the masters of their own destiny, the scripters of their own leading role, not junkies of the latest role-playing game.
It doesn’t really matter what your dream is so long as it’s something of worth. Career dreams are great. Ditto dreams for your family, your parenting, your children. Perhaps you want to invent something, start a business, or engage in an artistic endeavor. Maybe philanthropy is your avenue to stardom, or volunteerism. I have a long-time friend whose most dearly held dream for retirement is to volunteer with hospice, helping people at the end of life compose their personal history as a legacy for their loved ones and bring the curtain down gracefully on the pageant that is uniquely theirs.
Work is Love Made Visible Page 24