Book Review-The Search for Significance: Seeing Your True worth through God’s Eyes

Have you ever had that twinge of pain as you realized how the years have gone by? Maybe it’s you see a friend’s child – and they’re not a child any longer. Maybe it’s the failing health of your parents and you remember when you didn’t want to cross your father. Once I get over the shock of the thought I often am gripped by the mark that I’m leaving in the world. So what have I been doing with my life? Does it matter? As the pizza commercial asked “What do you want on your tombstone?”

We’re all searching for significance to ourselves, to others, to our community and to our world. While The Search for Significance is clearly a Christian book with a God centered view of how we’re significant there are a surprising number of practical discussions about how to live in this world. It starts with receiving love.

Receiving Love

In our ideal world view we see love as something that is received perfectly any time that it is given. However, love is like any other kind of communication (verbal or non-verbal) and can therefore be misunderstood, blocked, or rejected. One of the most heart wrenching challenges is to be in a relationship with someone where they’re not able to receive the love that you are providing.

Having been in a relationship like this I can tell you that it’s maddening to try to figure out how to let love through. I’d find a way that love would eak its way past the walls and barriers only to find that the walls and barriers would get better able to stop love from penetrating. Love is so incompatible with their self-image that it hurts to let it through. And so sometimes the problems with giving and receiving love isn’t on the giving end. Sometimes there’s so much brokenness it is simply not possible for it to work its way through.

Parental Love

Parental love is supposed to be unconditional. It’s supposed to be love that perseveres whether you’re doing what your parents want or approve of – or not. However, too often in this world parents make the mistake of not knowing how to deliver unconditional love to our children, making them hear only that our love of them is conditional on their performance. I personally struggle to help my children know that they’re loved even when they do something stupid – like getting so drunk that they can’t stand up – much less function normally.

Performance-based love isn’t love at all. Instead is often a reflection of the need for the parent to be seen as someone. (See Must-be-seen-as in The Anatomy of Peace.) It’s likely something they caught from their parents. The problem is that this performance based love leaves a hole in us – a hole that prevents us from feeling secure enough to be vulnerable. (See How Children Succeed for secure detachment.)

Dysfunctional Family Tree

We all grew up in a dysfunctional family. I’ve not met a person yet who hasn’t got some sort of dysfunction in their family tree. Perhaps it’s a crazy aunt who no one ever talks about. It could be the uncle that never grew up. It might be closer to home in your own parents. Maybe it wasn’t something “major” like drinking or drugging but everyone it seems has some level of dysfunction in their family. (For more on drugs and covering pain see Chasing the Scream.)

The problem with dysfunction in our family tree is that it blocks us from receiving (and giving) love. When we need love most – when we feel the most vulnerable and unworthy – love isn’t something we can accept because we’ve been taught that it is those times when we’re unlovable. The truth is that we’re always lovable if we’re willing to let it in.

Filling a Leaky Bucket

Sometimes we try to fill the holes in our soul with leaky buckets. That is we try to solve a pain by compensating – we don’t try to go back to heal the hurt we felt instead we try to cover it. That’s where many addictions come in. They’re covering a deep seated pain that the object of the addiction can never address. Whether the coping strategy that we use ever rises to the level of an addiction or not, a coping strategy doesn’t address the problem, it compensates for it.

If you feel unworthy so you go have frequent, meaningless sexual encounters you get the chemical wash from sex and the ability to say that others find you attractive. It doesn’t solve the underlying feeling of unworthiness but it numbs the pain for a while. The problem is that it only fixes it for a while and eventually you end up regretting the decisions and feeling even more unworthy – leading to more activities that bring more guilt and shame. (See Daring Greatly for more on guilt and shame.)

Fixing the Bucket

It’s easy to try to add another encounter, another drink, or another drug to our bucket and feel better for a while. It’s much harder to take a step back – to take a step out of ourselves – and see where the holes are. It’s harder to recognize and admit that we do have weaknesses and faults. We all have flaws. Recognizing these is risky because we risk becoming unlovable to see them – if we’ve been taught that we’re only lovable when we’re good. The first step – the step of recognition – is in some ways the hardest part. It’s no accident that the first step of a twelve step program is one of recognition – that your life has become unmanageable.

If you can see the holes in your bucket you at least have a chance at plugging them – though that isn’t to say that the process of plugging the holes is easy. Plugging the holes in your bucket is about finding ways to plug those holes in your soul that weren’t filled when you were growing up. That might be about finding someone who can demonstrate unconditional love. It might be finding someone who can teach you how to forgive yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made. It might be someone who can practice acceptance of you. (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more on acceptance.)

There’s no “Fix a flat” for the holes in your bucket of life. There’s no magic formula that will fix any hole in your bucket no matter where it is. That’s why the short term fixes are so appealing. With sex, drugs, alcohol, or eating it doesn’t matter what the problem is. It seems to go away for a moment and you don’t have to find and fix the root problem.

Belonging

While Diffusion of Innovations may praise the innovators and early adopters for their cosmopolitan-ness we all need to feel like we belong. We need the community that comes with being human. Change or Die emphasized how the community of released prisoners helped prevent recidivism – by being a community. Changes that Heal describes people who can’t make emotional attachments as being in a perpetual state of hunger. They’re unable to attach to others and thereby to fulfill what God desires for us all – to be in relationship with one another – to belong.

Unfortunately as Bowling Alone describes, we’re not getting our belonging from the social clubs that our parents used to be members of. Fewer of us are joining clubs – and fewer of us are getting involved in the clubs – where we can feel like we belong. We’re not building communities around us of deep connections. We’re cocooning into our houses. We’ pull into our garages and close the garage door before we get out of our cars to prevent the need to interact with others – including our neighbors. It’s no wonder that we’re suffering from loneliness and a lack of belonging.

Sure we have Facebook and our “friends.” However, the research seems to indicate that for most of us we’re depressed by seeing our Facebook feed because we’re able to see our friends living their lives and we wonder what we’re doing with our lives. It’s not that before our age and Facebook that people didn’t travel to Fiji or jump out of planes. It’s that we didn’t know about it – unless they cornered us into watching a boring slide show about it.

True belonging, the ability to be accepted by our friends, is a fundamental need of every human. Recently I sent out my yearly update to my LinkedIn connections. It’s roughly analogous of a professional Christmas letter. It talks about the things that I’ve been doing. It talks about the challenges I’m facing. It asks for feedback from the folks I know about the course I’m taking. I only send it once a year. I don’t want my connections hammering me every day or week with their goings on and I don’t want to do that to them either. I ultimately settled on the idea that once a year was the right frequency.

What was interesting is the three people who wrote me to ask to get off of my mailing list. These are all folks that I had a LinkedIn Connection with. They didn’t even want one update a year. My response was to get unconnected with them. If the extent of our relationship doesn’t support one update a year, how could it possibly be useful to me for anything that I need – or that they need from me? In our world we’re more connected than we’ve ever been. We have hundreds of Facebook friends – but all too few of us have friends that we can share the deepest desires of our heart or our deepest fears. We belong when someone else knows who we are – and accepts us for who we are.

Controlling Desire

One of the paradoxes of life is that everyone wants to control – but no one wants to be controlled. Glasser talked about how we seek to inflict our choices on others – and control them – in his book Choice Theory. J. Keith Miller dedicates an entire book to the impact of control in Compelled to Control. McGee’s perspective on control is that we seek to control ourselves. We see our close relationships as reflections on us and as a result we attempt to control those around us. The irony of this is that we can’t control ourselves so we seek to try to control others so that we can create the greater illusion of control.

Significance

You may – or may not – find significance in the eyes of the world. However, it’s worth seeing if you can figure out your significance to God through The Search for Significance.

Book Review-Man’s Search for Meaning

It’s odd to think that the secret to finding meaning in our lives might have come from a senseless situation. In the midst of the holocaust a man by the name of Viktor Frankl found the secret to surviving impossible circumstances and in the process developed a perspective on the meaning of life. In Man’s Search for Meaning we get a glimpse of the experiences Frankl had as a prisoner in several concentration camps but more importantly we get a glimpse of the Logotherapy that he developed after he survived the ordeal.

Relatives of Suffering

There’s a game that sometimes gets played by adults and teenagers. The rules are simple. Your goal is to out suffer the other players. You complain about your day. They complain about theirs. Eventually someone pulls the crazy mom card and the game is over. We’ve got a strange preoccupation with sharing how we’ve been mistreated in our lives. We’ve got a strange desire to get others to feel like we’ve suffered more than they have.

The truth is that our suffering is all relative. It’s not about our relatives or from our relatives but it is all relative. A hard day for you might be that you were in an automobile accident. A hard day for someone else might be that they lost their spouse. It’s all relative.

At the same time this game teaches that we’re not alone in the world. We’ve all seen suffering. We’ve all been harmed, limited, and held down. The game of suffering helps us know that we’re not alone. More than that the game frequently ends with us learning that at least in some respects there is someone else who has it worse than we do. Somehow these two things. First, that we’re not alone. Second, that there are others that have it worse help us accept our condition and seek to move past it.

Why or How?

The Rise of Superman has a series of amazing stories about action-adventure sports athletes that continued to perform even after they were seriously hurt. Pain that most of us would find crippling was managed. Those who had a clear purpose and objective managed to continue where most of us would stop.

Nietzsche said “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” That is when we have a reason for our lives, when we can rationalize our pain for a purpose, we’ll be able to survive unspeakable conditions. It seems that Hope has a twin sister and that sister is Meaning. Hope can sustain us for a while in difficult situations but its Hope’s sister that lifts us outside of the situation that disconnects the reality of the pain we’re going through and creates for us a path that allows us to walk outside of the pain.

There isn’t a universal meaning that all of us are born with. Certainly we have ingrained things like our need to be connected to other human beings. However, the meaning that I find in my life and the meaning that you find in your life aren’t likely to be the same. I might be focused on making the human condition just a bit more understandable. You might be more focused on reducing the harm that befalls children. Both are noble purposes and sufficient meaning but they’re – obviously – not the same.

If you have a meaning, a purpose, a true goal in your life, then the challenges that you face aren’t so overwhelming. For me if I ever write my biography (which I’m certain no one would trouble themselves to read) I’ll probably call it “A Few Hard Weeks.” My life seems to be a series of challenges that are a few weeks or months where I’ll pour myself into something. I don’t mind the hard work because of the results that come at the end. Having author credit on 25 books comes one at a time. Rarely do people hear that I’ve written several books and they don’t wonder about my sanity for having done it the second time. Sure it’s hard work – but it’s worth it.

Changing Meanings

Have you ever noticed that after one member of an old couple dies that the spouse often joins them in death within a year? Certainly this can be attributed to the depression that naturally occurs after the loss of a spouse. However, in many cases it seems like the remaining spouse has lost their meaning and purpose. If you’re not carrying on to be a part of the union with the missing spouse then what are you doing?

What about the lottery winners who have worked hard all their lives to just make ends meet and suddenly their basic needs are more than covered? Why do so many of them end up depressed and bankrupt only a few years later? The daily grind as uninspiring as it may seem provides some context for meaning in most of our lives. We’re providing for our family. We’re providing them “the good life.” We’re preparing them to have a better life than we have. We want for them a college experience and the opportunity to do more than we have done. What, however, do we do, when the challenge isn’t there any longer?

How Children Succeed says that “that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.” From cradle to grave we need challenge. We need meaning. We need to do something that matters. When that disappears we’re lost until we find that next meaning to our lives.

We hear stories of “empty nesters” who have lost their children to college who are suddenly thrust into a new world and often don’t know what to do with it. For my wife and I we’re relishing the idea that the kids won’t live in the house. However, our meaning is defined multi-generationally. That is to say that we’re looking forward to supporting our children and their grandchildren. We don’t view our mission as getting the children to college. We view our family mission as supporting the children and grandchildren.

Multiple Missions

In my criticism of the book The ONE Thing I mentioned that there isn’t one thing. There’s one thing in each area of your life. However, as it relates to keeping from entering a tail spin when you accomplish one of your missions, this is a good thing. For family your mission might be getting your kids ready for college. In your professional career it might be getting the next promotion. Your community/social goal might be restoring a club of civic organization to its former glory.

While this argues against the central point of The ONE Thing, it does support a balanced life and it does help you when you accomplish your mission. (Emotional Awareness speaks about the sukha state of flourishing that comes from balance.) Accomplishing one of your missions only leaves you directionless in one area of your life – not in your life in general.

Blunting Emotions

In my review of Chasing the Scream I shared how addictions are really the bubbling up of pain. It’s how people are trying to suppress the pains of the past as they leak into the present. Frankl says that some of the long prisoners “needed schnapps.” He was speaking about how they needed something to help numb the pain of the camp and their current life situation.

Creating the Very Thing We Fear

I used to give out Chinese finger traps in some of my presentations. For the presentation it was an illustration for how knowing how to solve a problem made the problem easy. The Chinese finger trap is a simple device. You place your index fingers in and try to pull them out. The harder you pull the harder it gets to get out of the trap – until you break the trap or you break the cycle. By pushing into the trap a bit more and leveraging your thumb to push up the trap once the pressure is released your fingers can be freed.

Frankl shares that sometimes our hyper-intention makes it impossible to get what we want. Consider for a moment someone who desperately wants a mate. They approach every interaction from a position of need. They “need” to have the other person around. They allow the other person to have their own space and their own experiences. (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more on allowing.) The net result is that the person that wants the mate drives them away. On the surface this looks like that they’re being too needy. However, on reflection, I have to wonder if the problem isn’t that they’re so focused on what they want that they can’t allow it to happen. (Otto Scharmer’s books Theory U and Leading from the Emerging Future are booth? at explaining how to allow things to “read” the environment to know what’s natural and allow it to happen.)

Essence of Logotherapy

Without claiming that I fully understand logotherapy, I want to share that Man’s Search for Meaning shares that it’s more focused on the future and less on retrospection. It’s less about how you were victimized and more about how you heal yourself so that you don’t become a permanent victim. (See Boundaries, Beyond Boundaries, Daring Greatly, and Change or Die.)

Logotherapy also focuses on our lives as a way to accomplish our meaning – and not for our self-gratification. In the words of The Time Paradox we’re not all hedonists.

In Man’s Search for Meaning I didn’t find my meaning, but the picture seemed to get a little bit clearer. Can you find your meaning in Man’s Search for Meaning?

Book Review-The Rise of Superman

Ultimate human performance, peak performance, optimal performance, and other terms have been used to describe people operating at the limits of what we are capable of doing. Research and broken records have demonstrated that our long standing beliefs about the limits of the human body are incorrect and are limiting. In The Rise of Superman Steven Kotler takes us on a walk through action-adventure sports to see how athletes are able to transcend previously believed limits and perform amazing feats never before possible. The road to these super human feats isn’t evolution, the road is a mental state called flow.

What we believe are our limits aren’t really our limits. Most perceived limits are only the capacity that we’re able to access. Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a kinesiologist at Penn State says that the average person can access about 65% of their real total strength. Trained athletes can access perhaps 80% of the real biological limits of their strength. If in strength we can only access 80% of our capacity, then how much of our other capacities do we use? What we learn from flow and The Rise of Superman is that what we believed were limits may just be speedbumps.

What is Flow?

Flow has been known for centuries by multiple names but its current name – flow – was provided by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I’ve written about his work before in my review of Finding Flow. Flow is an operating state of peak performance where things just seem to flow together. Flow is the balance of challenge and skill and in this state many things become less important. People fail to eat, sleep, or take care of other bodily needs. Time seems to flow rapidly at times – and to nearly stop at others. Time has no hold on flow.

Flow is an intrinsic motivational state. That is once in flow you want to maintain flow because flow is its own reward. Daniel Pink in Drive makes a compelling case for motivation with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This motivational strategy is a better strategy than traditional “carrots and sticks” motivation when we need to be creative – when we need to transcend existing boundaries. Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University is quoted in Theory U as saying that today is “the rise of the creative class.” He estimates that 30% of all employed people belong to this new class. As the percentage of creative, heuristic workers grows, flow provides one important intrinsic motivation to drive growth and performance.

Most of us have experienced flow in our lives – and most remember it well enough to want to be back there. We want to recreate the conditions where our fears and failures faded away as we became hyper productive and intimately involved with what we’re doing. Some people spend much of their lives seeking out the illusive state of flow. Kotler believes that he’s found some of the triggers that can be used to get us back into flow.

Triggers

Csikszentmihalyi described three conditions for flow: Clear goals, immediate feedback and challenge/skills ratio. Kotler calls these three conditions triggers and adds an additional eight triggers in two additional categories:

• Psychological (Csikszentmihalyi’s list)
  • Clear goals – Knowing the specific desired outcome
  • Immediate Feedback – The ability to create iterative feedback loops for rapid corrections
  • Challenge/Skills Ratio – Skills just slightly less than the challenge
• Environmental
  • High Consequences- Perceived danger in the environment
  • Rich Environment – Novelty, unpredictability, and complexity
  • Deep Embodiment – Total physical awareness.
• Social
  • Familiarity – A common language and culture
  • Blending Egos – A shared identity or lack of competition
  • Sense of Control –Ability to guide challenges through competence and autonomy
  • Close listening – Completely engaged in the present and interacting with others based on now, not preparation
  • Always Say Yes – Additive contributions rather than competitive or negative

I disagree with this Kotler in calling this list triggers. I believe that Csikszentmihalyi’s initial three are conditions – that is they are requirements to be met before one can enter a flow state where I believe that the eight additional items that Kotler provides may be catalysts, I don’t believe they’re conditions or prerequisites.

Clear goals is the first of Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions. This means you have to know the outcome you want to achieve. Whether that’s an article or a book, or a program – clear goals means simply that you have an end in mind. This aligns with the motivational research around autonomy mentioned in Drive. When I’m writing code the goal is often crystal clear with the path to take being not so clear. When I’m writing an article, I often find that I’m not fixed on the endpoint. I know that I want to convey a message but often during the processing of the writing the endpoint changes. The goal in this case is simply to share my experience with other humans and that is clear enough for me.

Immediate feedback is the second condition. In this case the definition of immediate is relative. For the developer the “immediate” feedback might require a recompile and a test run of the data. This is different than a skier who immediately receives feedback from the environment as he’s skiing. Developers often process immediate feedback through the development of their mental models about how the computer will process the instructions. Gary Klein in Sources of Power explained how deeply mental models are embedded into the way we work and the way we make decisions. Sometimes immediate feedback is feedback generated by the mental model that we have developed.

The challenge to skills ratio is Csikszentmihalyi’s final condition and it follows the same pattern of being defined relative to the individual experiencing flow. Certainly the gap between the challenge and the individual’s belief of their skills is essential – however, it’s really about the belief of the person in their skills. If the challenge is perceived to be too great then it will never be attempted. If it’s too little then it will be boring. Getting and keeping the ratio right is what keeps us in flow. If we ever decide the challenge is too great we’ll break out of flow – until we can change the perception of our skills or the perception of the challenge. Similarly if the amount of challenge remains too low for too long we’ll fall out of flow as we’ve no longer got the challenge to sustain the flow state.

Kotler’s additional eight triggers don’t fit these essential conditions. While high consequences will encourage flow state to begin there are many flow states that people enter while writing, developing code, creating art, etc., that don’t require high consequences. They don’t require a rich environment – in fact for a developer a rich environment might inhibit flow because it drives a higher than acceptable perception of challenge. So from my point of view, while the eight additional are triggers – they’re not exactly like Csikszentmihalyi’s original three.

However, many people have found these triggers as gateways into flow. When you’re chasing the impacts of flow, sometimes anything that will point you in the right direction is valuable.

The Impact of Flow

Flow is an immensely productive state. It has surfaced in numerous places in my reading and in general research. Peopleware was the first place I encountered the concept of flow – even though I didn’t include mention of it in my review. Flow and the need for flow has been woven through the writing on best practices for software developers for years. The first edition of Peopleware, for instance, was published in 1987.

McKinsey researched executives that regularly experienced flow and determined they were five times as effective as their non-flow peers. James Slavet of Greylock venture capital called “flow state percentage” – defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow – the “most important management metric for building great innovation teams”

While the state of flow is meaningful enough in and of itself to be desirable the residue – what is left when you’re done with flow – is perhaps more important. The research points to the fact that those who experience flow report greater creativity long after being in flow. Those who have a high amount of flow in their lives tend to be happier than people who don’t experience a large percentage of flow time. Perhaps flow is the answer to happiness that both Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness and Johnathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis were looking for. Maybe it’s a happy place that we can use to escape the world.

Flow as an Escape

It’s no secret that everyone has places where they’re broken. As I mentioned in my review of Chasing the Scream, many of the issues that we see as addiction are really pains bubbling up from inside of the person – getting expressed as an addiction. In truth addicts, whether they’re of the workaholic variety, the alcoholic variety, or illicit drug variety are in their hearts are silencing their inner voices and soothing their pain. They can make the voices and the pain go away for a while. The athletes Kotler interviewed admitted that in the state of Flow they could stop the “ghosts” from following them. “The edge (flow) is the one place that the ghosts can’t follow.” And so on one level the moniker of adrenaline junkie fits. The athletes get hooked not on the adrenaline but on the flow. As Kotler points out most of the so called adrenaline junkies hate the adrenaline but love the flow and will chase it.

Adrenaline is nasty stuff. While it might be necessary for a fight-or-flight world where you might get chased by a lion. In the world we live in today it makes people jumpy. It narrows our focus to whatever the perceived threat is. The impact is more than psychological, it’s physiological – it reduces the body’s immune response (As was discussed in Emotional Intelligence.) This makes sense because the body is primed for a fight that it may or may not win. Why spend energy on long term survival activities when short-term survival is at stake.

Adrenaline then is used to narrow our focus to only those immediate and pressing needs of the moment and yet flow is an expansive state where we’re able to consider many possibilities and where our lateral thinking is dramatically expanded. We’re able to come up with creative solutions to problems. How do we get from narrowed focus to broadened focus? The answer may be in the cycle of flow.

Flow Cycle

Before The Rise of Superman I knew what flow was and I routinely entered it – however, I didn’t have language to describe the entire cycle that I’d go through. The flow cycle starts, as Kotler explains, with struggle. This is the place where you’re facing the challenges and are gearing up for them. Like an airplane that’s struggling to break the speed of sound — things shake. Figuratively the ground rumbles. This state can only be maintained for so long. In the case of the aircraft analogy you’ve either got to get faster than the speed of sound – or not. You can’t stay in this state forever.

The next stage is the release cycle. This is where the struggle still exists but you’re not consumed by it or frustrated by it. Often this is accompanied by a diversion of a walk, another project, or another activity. You need this stage so that your body can get primed to be able to enter flow. You need the relaxation to allow the next stage to happen.

The third and next stage is flow itself which we’ve described extensively here. It’s a wash of neurochemicals and transient hypofrontality that shuts down parts of the frontal lobe. It’s what the adrenaline junkies live for. It’s an extremely productive state – and an extremely expensive state for the body to maintain.

The fourth and final stage is recovery. In this stage you’re coming down from the state of flow and your body is starting the process of recovering from the expenditures of flow. It feels like an unproductive time – but it’s a necessary one.

However, the end result – after recovery – are happier lives. In study after study, those who routinely experience flow are not just more productive. They’re happier and that happiness can last for a long time after the flow state. Csikszentmihalyi’s Finding Flow quoted “You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.” That’s the power of flow. You don’t feel like it is work and that positive feeling sticks with you.

From Narrow to Broad Focus

It’s the struggle phase of the flow cycle where we get our rush of adrenaline. It’s that stage where we get the energy to kick start the cycle but whereas a natural consequence of the adrenaline our focus narrows. In fact, stress of any kind is known to narrow our focus. It’s one of the reasons, as was thoroughly explained in Drive, we can’t always assume that providing incentives will result in better performance.

It’s the release stage that transfers our focus from the narrow to the broad. A wash of nitric oxide is a part of the parasympathetic response that happens when we relax. (For more on the parasympathetic system see The Science of Trust, Hardwiring Happiness, and Emotional Intelligence.) Nitric Oxide is a rapidly released and used neurochemical transmitter which explains why peace can “wash over us.”

With nitric oxide in our system we’ve got the chemical cocktail we need to enter flow. We’ve got adrenaline which has a long half-life (20 minutes or more) providing us with energy for the process and focusing the body’s efforts. As a result it’s possible to shut down parts of the brain resulting in transient hypofrontality. That is parts of our executive function are quite literally shut down.

This is the same kind of energy exchange that adrenaline is known for. Digestion and immune responses are suppressed in order to improve our available energy for fighting or running. Nitric oxide is the rapid response unit for the parasympathetic nervous system signaling that all is well. So with parts of our executive function suppressed we enter a relaxed state. It is this relaxed state that allows us to dramatically broaden our focus and improve lateral thinking.

So we start the cycle of flow by narrowing our focus with struggle and adrenaline. When we’re able to relax we’ve activated the parasympathetic nervous system and we’ve layered nitric oxide on top of the adrenaline and thereby have created a situation where parts of our brain have additional energy available and other areas of our brain – like the area for our inner critic – are shut down.

My Flow Cycle

I’ve chased flow less aggressively than the action-adventure athletes in The Rise of Superman, but I’ve chased it none-the-less. Before I even started my career I was writing computer programs and I can remember the stages. Struggling to design a structure to solve the problem, the release of designing an approach that seems to work, and the flow of banging out the code to build it. The end was mindless watching the compiler compile the code and fixing the inevitable typos and small logic errors.

In writing I saw the same struggle. I’d start dropping concepts on the page. I’d try to order them. I’d struggle with it until a textual flow seemed to emerge. I’d relax and get about the real task of writing. Afterwards I’d shutdown briefly before writing again – I needed time to get ready for the next iteration.

In editing I’d see the cycle too – but it would be different. I’d struggle to get control of my environment to start the process of blocking things out. I’d get into a groove, I’d relax, and enter flow. I can vividly remember a conversation with my girlfriend at the time about how long it took me to respond to her. She asked me a question and according to her it was a full five minutes before I acknowledged or responded to her. Obviously she was patient – but it demonstrated to me that I really did completely lose track of time not just in the long term but in the short term as well.

I still experience flow in these situations but now the most interesting entry into flow is speaking. While Seinfeld may believe that most people at a funeral would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy, I love it. While not an extrovert at my core, I enjoy being able to share with so many so quickly. For a typical keynote (or big speech) I’ll get the adrenaline rush. It’s sort of a twitchy feeling where you feel like you want to crawl out of your own skin. Next is me doing self-quieting exercises which candidly are best done with music. When I step on stage and start speaking I rarely think about what I’m saying. I’m completely engrossed in watching the cues from the audience and looking to keep things loving. In a recent keynote at SPTechCon I was told that I pulled out many “voices” and used them during the talk. The voices are impersonations or characterizations of ethnic groups. I had planned one into the talk – an Irish voice. However, apparently several more made it into the talk. I wasn’t aware of it until I was told later.

Equally interesting is that coming off stage from an event like this I’ve got maybe 20 minutes before I need time to shut down and be alone. I need to just sit in quiet or near quiet allowing everything to quiet down and for my energy levels to return. That’s my recovery. It’s my time to reintegrate into the real world where time has meaning again.

My Flow Kickstart

While action-adventure athletes leverage one of Kotler’s triggers to get flow started, for me I’ve found another way. A way that didn’t make sense until I understood the cycle. I start with a bit of biofeedback where I trick my body into a stress response – goosebumps and a higher heart rate. This is a trick I learned a long time ago when I was in bed at the hospital with a kidney infection. I couldn’t really do anything so I started playing with what I could get my body to do.

The next step for me is to play music loud. This causes me to relax and drift into the music. I realize that loud music seems hard to ignore but because it’s familiar patterns I can start to block it out. In that process is the relaxation. It’s soothing to me like the sound of waves crashing on the rocks. The resulting release frequently lands me into flow. I say frequently because there are times when I can’t quite get the sequence right and I continue to struggle with a problem rather than experience flow – but it’s effective for me more than 90% of the time.

Interestingly I don’t seek flow every day or even every week. I will only attempt the kick start when I know that the challenge/skill ratio is right and that I can get the time I need to stay in flow long enough. Very few things are more frustrating for me than having gotten into flow only to be interrupted. I hate losing the feeling.

Wiring and Rewiring

If you can remember when you were first learning to drive you’ll remember the amount of focus it required to drive. It was an all-consuming activity. It required your complete focus to ensure that you didn’t violate a rule or injure persons or property. However, if you’ve been driving for a while you are likely to barely remember how you got from one place to another. Generally the process of driving has been wired into our brains so that we don’t require conscious attention to do it.

Daniel Kahnman in Thinking, Fast and Slow speaks of our two brain systems. System 1 is the automatic system, the one that does its work subconsciously. System 2 is our executive function and the result of our concentration. System 2 can always be fooled by System 1 because System 1 is the one that holds all the data. However, System 2 is the one that programs system 1 – there by leading to a circular causality of how we process information.

Gary Klein in Sources of Power spoke about how fire captains couldn’t explain how they knew the right approach to take to a fire. There wasn’t rational decision making taking place. Instead there was what he called recognition primed decisions where experience had created mental models of the ways that fires worked. The fire captains would simulate the fire with these models and decide the best course of action.

In this way the fire captain’s novel experiences activated system 2 – where they had to think about how to solve the problem. Ultimately the results would be encoded in such a way that it was accessible to System 1 so that future executive function wasn’t required.

So it is that we wire our automatic responses through our world. We see something and it becomes a part of our experience and therefore the default responses that system 1 will use. “When the brain finds a task it needs to solve,” writes Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman, “it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish this task with maximum efficiency.”

The key in rewiring our brains for optimal processing of any situation is creating the experiences necessary to rewire the brain. Kotler quotes Malcom Gladwell from his book Outliers about needing 10,000 hours of practice to become the best. He further challenges the idea that the 10,000 hours has to be deliberate practice failing to see how Shane McConkey’s practice of deliberate quoting him as saying “What I love to do on the hill is find an interesting way to do something fun.” I, on the other hand, take little issue with this. Hidden in Shane’s goal is an unstated one – to become better at what he’s doing so that he can have even more fun.

Anytime that you’re enjoying what you do and are interested in becoming better, you’ve got the opportunity to convert practice (or experience) into mastery. We are, as Carol Dweck says in Mindset, able to change ourselves. If we’re willing to feed ourselves with the right experiences and the right mindset we can wire our brains – or even rewire them. Perhaps it’s in our ability to rewire that we think that we develop a creativity for our world.

Creativity Time

IBM surveyed 1,500 top executives in sixty countries and determined that the most desirable quality of the CEO was creativity. When Partnership for 21^st Century Skills – a collection of 250 researchers – looked for the most critical skill that our children need to thrive in the future creativity was the top answer. Creativity is key whether you’re a captain of industry, a craftsman creating something new, or a child trying to survive in a complex and changing world.

However, creating creativity is a challenge. In Creative Confidence we learned about how we’re held back from creativity by voices and expectations. While Creative Confidence gave some tools for becoming more creative and described the barriers, it didn’t create creativity. However, it’s possible that introducing more flow into people’s lives can do this.

Flow introduces a state of transient hypofrontality – reduced executive function. In the process flow shuts down our inner critic. Flow removes the barriers to creativity while also improving lateral thinking. As a result, creativity is boosted.

Equally interesting for me was the research from David Eagleman who found that our sense of time isn’t centralized in one part of the brain but rather is a coordinated activity with many different parts of the brain working together. Why is that interesting? Well, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator includes a Judging-Perceiving dimension that I oversimplify to a definite sense of time. Judging people are on-time. Perceiving people prioritize people and things above time. They’ll lose time in order to connect with people.

If time is an activity that is not centralized then those people who have a strong sense of time have a brain whose natural state is to be communicating across the different regions. Shouldn’t these people be more prone to creativity than their perceiving colleagues? If creativity leans it’s ladder on the wall of lateral thinking, shouldn’t those whose brains are literally wired to connect different regions have an advantage?

Looking Inside the Brain – Electricity

In the desire to understand how we think and how flow works there have been a number of tools that people have used to see what’s happening. One effective way is to watch brain waves with something called an Electroencephalograph or EEG. This relies on a set of sensors placed around the brain which detect the electrical impulses of the brain and record the waves that this electrical activity makes. Here’s a quick listing of the kinds of waves that an EEG finds:

• Delta – Between 1hz and 3.9hz – An indication of a deep dreamless sleep
• Theta – Between 4 hz and 7.9 hz – Present in REM sleep, meditation, and during the processing of novel stimuli.
• Alpha – Between 8hz and 13.9 hz – The brain’s basic resting state
• Beta – Between 14 and 30 hz – Learning and concentration (low end) or fear and stress (high end)
• Gamma – Above 30 hz- Present when different parts of the brain are coordinating and binding disparate thoughts

What researchers found is that decision making requires a six-stage cycle involving different brain waves and patterns. One of the characteristics discovered for flow was that people in flow could move fluidly between the stages – they don’t get caught up in any of the stages.

Looking Inside the Brain – Chemistry

However, the brain isn’t an electrical engine. Our brain is an electro-chemical engine. We work as much by our chemistry as our electrical forms so what’s the neurochemistry behind flow? Well, here are the actors:

• Epinephrine – The kick start into the process is adrenaline or more specifically epinephrine. It powers the system up for the fight-or-flight reaction.
• Dopamine – Engagement, excitement, and creativity are the way that dopamine shows up on the scene.
• Norepinephrine – Signals the body to speed the heart rate, trigger a glucagon response from the liver to release energy, and increases respiration the net effect of which is to make energy available in the bloodstream.
• Endorphins – Relieves pain and increases pleasure. When your brain wants to reward behavior – like sex – this is the first choice.
• Anandamide – Bliss like the effects of marijuana come from this neurochemical
• Serotonin – A mood stabilizer which forms the basis of most anti-depressants which are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)

With the exception of Serotonin all of these neurochemicals are present in flow. Effectively there’s a massive amount of energy in the system through epinephrine and norepinephrine which is harnessed by converting the energy into engagement and creating a positive and blissful state which sets us up for the ability to make decisions without the impact of our inner critic or the focusing effects of stress.

Serotonin which appears on the back end keeps us from falling into a deep hole of depression because of the exhaustion of the other neurochemicals. It’s the mood stabilizer that eases the pain of coming off the high.

Flow as it turns out is always a good trip – unlike some illicit drugs. So at some level chasing flow is much safer than the use of other escapes that we use to cover our pains. However, certainly in the action-adventure sports arena flow has claimed many lives. Living on the edge of human performance it turns out is dangerous business.

Group Flow

When working as an audio engineer for churches I’ve been able to see what group flow looks like. Most of the time when you’re working with a band they’ll be playing the same tune at the same tempo in the same key but they’re not really totally together. There are tricks that we can use to help them stay in time. We can put more bass drum in the monitors so that they get a more precise set of time. We can provide the drummer more of the click track if they tend to drift their timing.

We can even help musicians know when they’re being too aggressive with their instrument. If you have a musician who is pounding the ivory off the top of the keys you can feed them more of the piano to get them to subtly and instinctively reduce the amount they’re pounding on the keys. Similarly if they’re playing too tentatively, you can drop the amount of their own instrument. It’s all subtle and with the goal of helping everyone “get into the groove.”

When that happens, the results are amazing. They don’t need the cues. They’re no longer focused on their own playing. The mechanics of their instrument aren’t being considered. Instead they’re thinking of how the music fits together. They’re not having to hear the bass drum to know where the tempo is. They can feel it.

I have to sit on the periphery of these experiences. I get to help be a catalyst to support the experience but in reality I have very little impact on getting it all together. While I can support getting the band into flow – I don’t in anyway cause it. I do, however, get to see how amazing it feels when it fits together.

There are two distinct things that we’re discussing when we talk about group flow. The first is the situation like the one above where multiple people are entering flow together and are doing something collectively. This is a difficult state to achieve but one that’s powerful.

The second thing that we lump into group flow is the amplification effect of being in a group of like-minded people who are looking to improve their game in the same way that you are. This is where communities of flow junkies are gathered together to feed and support each other in their desires. Whether it’s staying year round at Yosemite at Camp 4 or entrepreneurial incubation centers that are springing up around the country. By creating population density you can amplify the effects of a group of people.

However, the amplification relies upon two things. First, everyone must be encouraging. They’re collaborators on the goal of raising everyone’s level. Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence speaks about how teams should and shouldn’t behave. Though not everyone is employed by a common organization, they should be bound together in a cooperative that makes them a team.

The second factor is that they should be focused on “Yes, and…” Shortly after I took the standup comedy course, I took an improvisation course with Michael Malone. Michael is gifted. He owns a stage unlike any other comedian I’ve ever seen. During our training Michael helped us to understand the rule of “Yes and” in improvisation. When doing a scene you don’t respond with “No it didn’t” – instead you respond with “Yes and…” Improvisation – like life – is about bigger, weirder, and stranger. By responding with “Yes and…” you can move the story line forward instead of freezing it.

If someone says there’s an elephant in the living room the response is and it’s wearing a tutu. This is the kind of amplification effect that drives an entire group of people forward. This is group flow of a different kind. It’s a group of folks entering their own individual flow more frequently with more productive results.

Flow Requires Action

Kotler insists that flow requires action. It’s not about dry research. It’s about doing something. I agree. Whether the action is small or large you have to do something. Maybe you should reach out and grab The Rise of Superman so you can start finding your way to flow more often.

Book Review-Find Your Courage: 12 Acts for Becoming Fearless at Work and In Life

I used to modify the serenity prayer to swap the word strength for courage because I rarely found myself lacking the courage to change the things that I can. (The serenity prayer starts: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.) In fact, I spend my time changing things that seem to need to be changed. I did, however, frequently find myself exhausted by the process. So reading a book on courage was a bit weird. I found that many of the things in the book weren’t new – but they were refreshing to read. Find Your Courage was a journey in what courage is – and how to be more courageous.

Courage in the Moment, In Relationship, and With Yourself

Sometimes when folks think about courage they think about charging into a burning building to save a baby from a fire. However, how many of us are going to be confronted with that situation? Hopefully there won’t be that many of us. However, we’re faced with dozens of opportunities each day to be courageous. Being courageous is about the moment-to-moment decisions we make to be honest, to be vulnerable, and to be our real selves. (See Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy for more about vulnerability requiring courage.) Courage is about telling folks how you feel even when it will be unpopular. Courage is about being real.

Another way to say this is that courage is living wholeheartedly. It’s about taking action even in the presence of fear. Everyone has fear. It’s not that courageous people have no fear it’s that they don’t allow fear to get in the way of them doing the things that need to be done. It’s about living a life that’s aligned with your core beliefs.

Courageous people have grit and perseverance. When a horse throws them off they get up and get back on – not because they didn’t feel the fall – but because riding the horse is what needs to happen – for them and the horse.

I posted separately my thoughts about How to Be Yourself. It’s a guide to the first part of being courageous – knowing who you are and living who you are. While this is a great start for some of what Find your Courage shares, it’s not the complete story.

The Meaning (Fear Of) Failure

So what does failing mean to you? Is failure OK – or is it a death sentence? Do you believe that you will become a failure – in your own eyes or in someone else’s – if you fail? Does failure threaten your value as a person? Does failure threaten your ability to survive? What if failure was no big deal? What if failure was just like walking up to a bowling alley and not getting a strike? Few people would blink if they didn’t get a strike on every frame in bowling but if your bar is set on a perfect 300 then anything less is a failure.

Sometimes failure is about the bar you set – the standard – and sometimes it’s about the persistence, just continuing to try until you succeed. If you look back at any successful person, you’ll probably find that they’ve failed more than others. They’ve failed to meet their own expectations – and the expectations of others. If you want to soar, you have to be willing to fall out of a few trees.

In Schools without Failure Glasser writes that he believes that we shouldn’t be inflicting the label of failure on our students that we should be creating ways for them to be successful. This isn’t failure-less schools in the sense that everyone gets a participation award but rather it’s about helping students accept failure. It’s trying to protect Creative Confidence and ensure that we don’t become debilitated by our fears.

Setting High Standards

Those who are courageous dream big. They dream about dreams that put a ding in the universe (aka Steve Jobs). Having high standards means that you’ll fail more often than you succeed. Steve Jobs – for instance, failed with the NEXT computer – at least commercially. However, that didn’t stop him. He went back to Apple and returned the company to a position of respect in the computer community. His high standards – and awareness of user experience – fueled his failures but also created some enormous successes.

The higher your standards the more frequently you’re going to miss the mark. The more perseverance you’ll need to develop. How Children Succeed calls this perseverance grit. Emotional Intelligence calls it persistence and unflappability.

Patiently Persistent

How many times do you have to fail before you succeed? Embedded into this question is hope and determination. Failure is simply the path to success. It’s never the destination and rarely a stopping point. As the saying goes “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” When Thomas Edison – the Wizard of Menlo Park – set out to create an electric light most people thought he was crazy. He knew it was possible but didn’t know how to do it.

For Edison it was failure after failure after failure. He’s often quoted as having failed at creating a light bulb over 1,000 times. We all know that he ultimately succeeded. However, most people don’t know that he was learning something with each failure. He was consulting with top experts in related fields. He himself learned a great deal about how gas lights worked. He knew that if he would keep at it, he would ultimately get what he wanted.

While most folks remember the Wizard of Menlo Park they don’t realize that not everything that he invented was a commercial success. He did in fact have commercial failures as well. He created the invention but wasn’t able to sell enough of them. He didn’t stop inventing because he couldn’t sell his first invention – an electric vote recorder.

Perhaps perseverance is fine for Thomas Edison but what about for you and me? We tend to hear and believe in overnight success stories. We think that Starbucks and Wal-Mart and Chick-Fil-A burst on the scene in a moment. They didn’t have their setbacks, failures, and obscurities. However, the actual results are very different than what we believe.

Starbucks was a maker of coffee equipment until Schultz took the helm and started selling coffee directly. Wal-Mart was Sam Walton’s five and dime in rural Arkansas until the momentum eventually kicked in and elevated them to national status. Chick-Fil-A was the outcome of the Dwarf Grill restaurant run by S. Truett Cathy until it started rapid expansion. Dwarf House was started in 1946.

But those are organizations that have been successful, what about people? As Malcom Gladwell cataloged in Outliers, there are many people who became successful only after they had put in their time with 10,000 hours of practice. (Based on research by Anders Ericsson.) Howard Gartner studied extraordinary people for his book Extraordinary Minds. He found that they reframed failure as a way to learn.

Being Responsive

If you want to consider what it means to be responsive to the world that surrounds you perhaps you should watch the infamous last lecture series presentation by Randy Pausch titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” You see Carnegie Mellon University had a lecture series that was intended to be what professors wanted to leave to the world – their last lecture. However, Randy, a month before presenting his lecture was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer – so this was quite literally his last lecture. Though they changed the name of the lecture series, the lecture he gave was spot on and became an Internet sensation. Early on in the presentation he comments about how he cannot change his cancer, he can – however, choose his response to it. He’s careful to point out that he’s not in denial – he’s clear that he’s got a terminal illness and he knows what that means. (Check out my review of On Death and Dying for the stages of grief someone goes through related to death.) The message – so poignantly delivered – is that whatever life deals to us we can’t change. We can only change how we respond to it. Whether we decide to choose positive and life-giving responses (even if you’re dying) or whether you choose responses that subtract and take away from what you have and what is remaining.

Normally we’re not confronted with situations where we must face our own mortality. However, even in these cases, we must choose how we’re going to respond. (Remember that choosing not to respond is itself a response.)

Journey not destination

When will you know that you’re truly courageous? Well in truth you’ll never know that completely. Even though I feel like I live most of my life in a way that others would describe as courageous, I know there are times when I cannot muster the courage to admit a fault, or to apologize to someone that I’ve wronged. So I’ve come to realize for me, in my life, that being courageous isn’t a destination. It’s not some place that I arrive at. It is instead a journey that I’m on to become more courageous each day. I’m learning how to be courageous in times that I would normally not be courageous. Even though I opened with the idea that I’m normally courageous I have to acknowledge that there are times when I’m not courageous at all. I’m far from it.

You see, courage is an active verb. Courage is mostly about the doing. Whether you succeed or fail isn’t the point. Even when being courageous is letting things happen to you – courage is about making the conscious decision to live out your beliefs – to be the person that you’ve decided that you want to be.

Predicting the Future

Crystal balls aren’t clear. Tarot cards have never spoken to me. I’m not even sure how people would read tea leaves – and all I see on my palms are wrinkles. In short the ways that the world believes that you can predict the future don’t work for me. However, there is one way that does work. That is that you can most accurately predict the future when you’re the one who is making the future. When you create the future you’ve in essence already predicted it. You’ve already had the vision – no matter how cloudy – in your mind’s eye before it becomes reality.

We all want to predict the future. There’s a certain fear about the future. Will I be happy? Will I continue to make enough money for the family to live – and enjoy themselves? Will I continue to love my spouse? Will my children be successful? There are so many future worries. There is so much potential for anxiety. So how does one calm their fears about the future? The answer is that they create it. They seize the day. They prepare for tomorrow. The courage here is that once you decide that you’re going to predict – and make the future – you become responsible for it. You’re responsible for your own destiny. There’s no mythical god to praise or blame. There’s no point in blaming circumstances. You’re predicting the future because you’re making it.

Hallmarks of Openhearted People

Find Your Courage speaks of the hallmarks of openhearted people as:

• Candor. They can share their successes and failures, their joy and heartache, and their temptations and weaknesses openly.
• Honesty. They have integrity in who they are and in how they live their lives. They are sincere in what they say.
• Generosity. They are wonderful givers.
• Affection. They are able to express their love freely.
• Depth. They think and feel deeply because they do not repress their emotions.
• Joy. They have a huge capacity for joy and, therefore, can sometimes be childlike (as distinct from childish), because they show so much delight in so many things.
• Gratitude. Openhearted people embrace an abiding sense of gratitude.
• Courage. This goes without saying. Courage comes from the same place as love—from the heart.
  

Courageous Anger

To be courageous you have to express your whole self. However, what if your “whole self” is angry? What if your sense of self is angry? In short, so what? While anger is generally not socially acceptable, it is a valid and important emotion. Anger can be the catalyst to get things done. Johnathan Haidt’s model of the Rider-Elephant-Path from The Happiness Hypothesis is perhaps the most potent example of this. If you want to get something done, talk to the elephant. It’s the elephant that will get things done.

Expressing anger in a constructive rather than a destructive way leads us to the thoughts of the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman in their conversations recorded in Emotional Awareness. Buddhists, they explain, see emotions as afflictive and non-afflictive. In western cultures this is most frequently described as destructive and non-destructive emotions. The challenge is that the view of what is afflictive and non-afflictive is situationally contingent. That is if the emotion is appropriate to the conditions and realistic. Anger isn’t itself afflictive. Anger is only afflictive (destructive) when it is out of proportion.

We’ve learned that people don’t like receiving our anger. We’ve learned that we should suppress or hide it. However, there are some kinds of anger such as the anger one feels when others are harmed that can be appropriate.

Learning to push past the expectation that anger is bad to a point of acceptance that it can be good – and can be good to express – is itself an act of courage.

Humility and Courage

My favorite definition of humility comes from Humilitas. It says that humility is “power held in service to others.” That is that whatever power I have – whether internal or external, directly or through influence – should serve others. This contrasts with the typical Western cultural view that humility is a lack of self-confidence.

A common criticism of those who are living courageously is that they’re arrogant. That is that they don’t consider or care for other people or perhaps they believe too strongly in their own righteousness. However, this is often misguided. Often courageous people are willing to speak passionately about their beliefs – not out of lack of respect for others but for respect for themselves. The line between self-confidence (courage) and arrogance is razor thin – and measured in the eye of the beholder.

In Emotional Awareness the Dalai Lama addresses humility and courage by saying that it’s wisdom that reconciles the two. That is that wisdom helps you to know how to speak your truth and when to allow others to believe their truth.

Lost Without a Dream

What are your great life dreams? What are the dreams that you gave up so long ago that you barely remember you had them? Did you want to be a ballerina or an astronaut? Did you want to be a rock star or a captain of industry? Where did these dreams go?

The dreams we dream at night might be passing fancies or distorted of the echoes of the day we had. However, the dreams of our heart should be protected. Dreams are goals, places that we want to end up in our lives. Ideally these dreams are the landmark at the end of the road. They’re a place for us to head to.

Without a land mark to head to – a vision of what we want – how possible is it to get where we want to go? “If you don’t know where you want to go any road will take you there” said the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

Success Principles implored us to dream bigger because big dreams attract big people. The Innovator’s DNA quotes Steve Jobs as saying “dream bigger.”

Dreams can pull us into being courageous when we might not otherwise be. They can fuel our growth and continued progress. Dreams are achievable. We must convince ourselves of this fact. We must find a way to break the dream down into meaningful steps. As Extreme Productivity pointed out we may not be able to directly plan our path forward, we do know how to take steps that move us towards our dreams – or that make us more prepared for them to happen.

Being Better One Day at a Time

I’ve spoken about what Maxwell calls the Power of Mo’ – Momentum that is. It’s what happens when you build into a system just a little more over and over and over again. Albert Einstein said that “Compound interest is the eighth natural wonder of the world and the most powerful thing I have ever encountered.” That’s momentum when building bit-by-bit on top of the existing money created powerful results. Wayne Dyer said “True nobility isn’t about being better than anybody else, but about being better than you used to be.” We can leverage the power of momentum in our lives by striving each day to be just a little better than we were the day before.

The amazing thing about a one-day-at-a-time approach is that it works for addicts and non-addicts. By worrying about today you create a small measurable and immediate goal that you can use to guide your life. By looking out at the destination of the person that you want to be, you’ll not have specific actions that you can take today. You’ll never begin the journey because the steps will be too large.

Courageously you can step out in faith that if you work to be just a bit better today and a bit better the next day that you’ll eventually get there. You’ll never get there if you don’t start but all too often we fail to start because we’re scared of the effort necessary in the journey to reach the destination. Learning to step out in faith – to take a small step is at the heart of being courageous and living whole heartedly. It’s the path to keeping ourselves out of the trap of depression and suffering.

Depression and Suffering

For me it’s an amazing thing. We believe that others have perfect families. They have everything together. They never have struggles. At least that is how it seems until you get close. When you get close you realize that every family has its struggles. However, there are other families that seem stuck in their struggles. There are others who seem to be moving from one struggle to the next. When you look deeper here you see that they’re not moving from one struggle to another, they’re staying in the same struggle. They’re reliving the same pain over and over again.

So everyone – whether having the appearance of being perfect or having the appearance of having nothing together – has the same struggles. They have pains inflicted upon them by their past, their present, or the threat of their future. There is no escaping pain and yet some are able to escape suffering. How is that? How Children Succeed talks about secure detachment and limiting the number of adverse childhood events (ACE). There are discussions of delayed gratification and its power to help people power through the challenges of the present and look for a better future.

More fundamentally though, those who are suffering are choosing to remain in the pain. They’re choosing to be depressed. As Glasser writes in Choice Theory – they’re choosing to depress. If you confront someone who is suffering and you tell them that they’re choosing to stay where they are you’re not likely to get a good reaction. They want to believe that their condition has been inflicted upon them. They don’t want to take responsibility for their condition. It’s easier to be a victim than to work your way out of the darkness and into the light. (Victimhood is a theme in Choice Theory but I’ve also discussed it in my review of Boundaries, Beyond Boundaries, Daring Greatly,
and Change or Die.)

Victimhood is fundamentally opposed to courage. Courage is perpetually preventing yourself from taking up residence in victimhood. Courage is accepting responsibility for how you’re going to live – and making your life better one day at a time.

Courage to Read

The journey of a thousand steps begins with but one. Are you ready to start your journey by reading Find Your Courage?

Book Review-Strengths Finder 2.0

Do you know what you’re good at? What your natural talents are? Do you have any thoughts on how you might better leverage your talents to drive your mission and purpose? Well, Tom Rath’s immensely popular book Strength Finders 2.0 is designed to help you focus on your inherent strengths – your talents – and to improve upon them.

Immensely Popular

When I say that the book is immensely popular, I say that with conviction. The book consistently outsells every other book in the category. You’ll find that on list after list it consistently gets the top long-term spot. However, there’s a bit of a twist to the story. The book itself is an introduction, a listing of the talents, followed by a closing. It is in fact little more than the details of all of the potential talents from the Clifton Strength Finder test.

On the surface this doesn’t seem that interesting. However, what’s interesting is that whether you buy a physical copy or an eBook version you get a code that allows you to take the test which indicates the top five talents that you have. This means that in effect many people are buying the book to get the test. Still it’s quite impressive to have sold as many units as they have. I also have a deep respect for this book as a marketing tool approach because it’s the same thing as I did with the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users.

The Test

Taking the test is a series of comparative statements where you have to indicate which one your feel like best describes you on a scale from one to the other. These sorts of tests are frustrating to many people because they feel pulled to neither of the options – or both. It makes the tests effective at finding our core personality traits. (This is like the approach John Gottman uses to determine which couples are destined for divorce. See Science of Trust for more.)

The output of the test is, as I mentioned above, the top five talents that you have. The detailed report describes how you should respond and how you’re motivated based on the indication of these types of talents. The language of strengths was substituted for talents in the title – but it’s just different language for the same thing.

I’ve spoken about all sorts of other metrics that we can use to assess people including Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, as well as the work that Steven Reiss did in Who Am I?.

The Talents

One of the interesting things for me about the talents is that some of them seem clustered very close to one another. For instance, Input and Learner. These two talents seem very similar to me except that one is focused on the acquisition of data and experiences and the other one on – well – learning. They’re very similar but at least slightly differentiated.

Futuristic and Strategic are two other talents – that were both on my results that also felt very similar. One sees the future and the other plans for the future. I’d love to see the science behind the questions and how they arrived at these 34 talents because it feels to me as if several should have been collapsed.

However, the full list does accurately describe many of the different kinds of folks that I see.

The Results

For me there were a few interesting things about the results. However, the most interesting is comparing my result of Strategic and my Enneagram result of Reformer. The Reformer is under responsive to intuition. That is to say that they don’t listen to intuition as much as they should. However, the feedback from Strategic talent is to trust your intuitive insights as much as possible. This is an interesting space for me to consider whether I’m accepting my intuition as much as I should.

If I go back to the Enneagram it’s possible that I’m a high functioning reformer and therefore I’ve minimized the natural tendency to not trust my insights. Further as I look at my scores again I’m not substantially placed in the reformer category. If I took the test again my results might move. However, I found the discrepancy or apparent conflict between the two measures interesting.

The rest of the results include Learner, Futuristic, Achiever, and Connectedness. However, as I read the talents though I must admit that I believe that many of the talents apply to me – not because I want to be arrogant (or because I have the Self-Assurance talent). I could just identify with many of the things that were said for each talent.

The Short Route

There is one thing, however, that I take particular exception to in the book. That is the ideas that the traditional thinking that you can become anything that you want to be and that you should work hard to reach your goals aren’t right. Rath is careful to say that he believes that developing your talents by providing the raw materials for them to improve are important, he doesn’t believe that we should spend time working on our weaknesses. I find this to be inconsistent with folks like Carol Dweck’s work in Mindset about us having control of our own destiny and our own ability to grow. The argument Rath provides is that we should be focused on our strengths.

He’s saying that we can take the easy route and skip the 10,000 hours of purposeful practice that is described in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Conceptually the idea is great. Only work on things that you’re good at. Improve your talents where you’re already gifted. Do what you enjoy to do. The idea is that success comes if you’re able to focus on just those things that you enjoy. However, I find that this is a bit too simplistic. While I don’t advocate beating yourself up on things that you simply don’t get, I recognize that performance comes through creating Flow and flow is a delicate balance between challenge and skill.

There have been plenty of books that I’ve forced myself through which have become very important over my career as a source of information. Diffusion of Innovations is one good example of reading something difficult but that was absolutely worth it. So I’m concerned that Rath’s message may be interpreted as an excuse for not working hard and perhaps more importantly not working on small skills that inhibit us from reaching the heights that our talents would allow.

Compensating Weakness

Here’s where it gets muddy like it did with The ONE Thing (which said you should focus on one thing then gave you five different areas of your life to find the one thing.) How do you know what your talents are and what you should and shouldn’t work on? Let’s say that I want to get better at stand-up comedy. However, I’ve got a bad habit of looking down instead of looking at the audience. If my talent isn’t connectedness should I work on this? What if it inhibits my real talent which is communication? See the rub?

Where do the individual skills that make up the talent end and where does the talent begin? Should I work on something that is difficult for me if it unlocks the potential of my talent? From my point of view the answer is yes – particularly if the skill is easy to acquire.

Back to the stand-up comedy example, what if my issue isn’t that I can’t make eye contact. What if the issue is that I don’t know how to use a microphone? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a friend help me use a microphone more effectively? Wouldn’t it make sense to ask someone to watch and remind me when I’m not using the microphone well? Most folks would say yes – and yet microphone usage probably doesn’t fit into any specific talent.

Ultimately, there are weaknesses that we all have which prevent us from reaching our potential. If we have poor vision and don’t have glasses or contacts it will have a substantial impact on our ability to be successful at almost anything. However, with vision correction the weakness is hardly noticeable. So how do we do as good leaders do and work around the weaknesses and support the development of the core talents of our friends, subordinates, peers, and superiors? (Learn more about this idea in Multipliers.)

Finding Value

Whether you agree that you should only work on your strengths or agree with me that you should focus on your strengths while making sure that you address any limiting weaknesses, I think you’ll find Strengths Finder 2.0 a good start at becoming

Book Review-The Success Principles

I started reading The Success Principles because it was the book that CJ McClanahan was going to do next in his book club. While that idea got redirected, I finished reading the book – several months after I started. Part of that is because the book is long. It’s not quite 500 pages. Where most business books weigh in around 200 pages. So there was more content here than in two average business books. Another reason is there are 64 chapters. I have a habit of reading a chapter at a time from a few books at the same time. So with short easy to read chapters this book ended up taking longer.

No matter how long it takes to get through the real question is was the information impactful. In a word, Yes. However, you know I’m not going to leave it at just one word.

Establishing Context

Before diving into the content of the book it’s important to understand Jack Canfield. Jack is best known for his co-creation of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. These books have been a consistent encouragement for over 20 years to millions of people. As a result Jack has direct experience in being successful. Along the way he exposes that success is the result of your responses to events – and perhaps a bit of luck.

The other context that you need to understand about The Success Principles is that the book is over 10 years old having been first published in 2005. It’s not going to be about the newest fad or phase. It’s designed around timeless principles rather than the psychology of the moment. It is in fact, much like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, a collection of best practices which may have been seen in other places before. That doesn’t make them less valuable – in fact it makes them more valuable. The Success Principles is frequently referring to other books and experts for more on a principle being revealed.

Talk and Action

Do you have friends or acquaintances who routinely complain about their circumstances to you? Do they feel underappreciated at their job or slighted by their family – and they’re telling you? It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do anything about any of the situations that they’re talking about. However, they inflict their pain on you because complaining feels better than doing the hard work of addressing the problem whether that problem is in them or in the other person. Their ego (See Change or Die for my discussion of The Ego and Its Defenses) won’t allow them to see that there are things they need to work on like setting boundaries (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries for more on boundary setting.) While you can have sympathy for these folks, the fact is that until they’re able to address the barriers in their life – the barriers that they have the power to remove, they’ll likely be stuck complaining about the same things to the same people who can’t help them.

Every book on success has a component of its message which is action. This shouldn’t be surprising because it takes action to change the circumstances in which you live. However, sometimes there are recommendations to wait until you know where you’re going to go. There are sometimes four easy steps to figuring out your mission in life. Once you have that figured out then you can start to take action. I was recently reminded that I often say that I have no idea what door God is going to open for me but in the meantime I’m going to be putting on my running shoes. That means taking actions that lead me to the success that I want. Not that I don’t feel abundantly blessed – however, I also feel like there is more I’m supposed to do for humanity. So I take action to better myself and my environment every day.

The key to changing your life for the better isn’t in thinking about a better life. It’s not a dream that you can grab ahold of and suddenly reach. It’s a thing that you have to strive for.

Delegation

There are some things you just have to do for yourself. I recently reorganized the garage and mini-barn at the house. The unfortunate reality of this is that I couldn’t delegate this to anyone else. I needed to make the decisions about what to keep and what could go away. I needed to organize things in a way that made sense to me. It simply wasn’t something that I could delegate. Jim Rohn said “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you.” So this is a time consuming thing that I had to do.

Conversely there are still many things that I do that I should delegate and don’t. That’s one reason why I bought a stoplight for my office. Yes, a real, full sized stoplight. The goal was to help me to remember the rules for delegation. The reality is there are a large list of things that I can do. I can clean the office. I can mow my yard. I can go to the post office. These are the yellow lights. For me the things that I can do aren’t necessarily the things that I should do. The things I should do are a green light. These are things like reading books and writing blogs. They are the things that require me and not someone else. Finally there are the things that I should not do. Not that I can’t just that I shouldn’t. For instance, I shouldn’t do plumbing. I learned how to sweat copper for a little project – but just because I can doesn’t mean I should go replace a water heater. There are things that are better left to experts and I need to know when to hire those out.

Finding Your Mission in Life

One of the greatest aspirations of people is to determine their mission in life. The goal is to figure out what they should do with the time that they’re given. However, at the same time this is also one of the most elusive things. We hear of people going through mid-life crises knowing that they didn’t accomplish what they wanted to accomplish and realizing they need to make a change. So they buy a sports car or decide to run a marathon or make other changes in their life that they believe will move them closer to their mission. However, these changes are superficial and often don’t lead to the kind of lasting joy that people want.

Canfield says that joy is your inner guidance system. It’s the thing that leads you to knowing where your mission lies. If you’re working on things that bring you joy whether you’re monetarily successful or not doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re joyful.

While it’s easier to reach a goal when you know what it is, if you’re like me sometimes the hardest part is figuring out what the goal should be.

Belief in Your Dreams

There’s a careful balance to be struck between entitlement – the belief that you’re due something – and availability – that if you work towards the goal you’ll achieve it. We live in a world where millennials have been conditioned to believe that they deserve things. Their parents wanted to make sure that their children weren’t being overlooked. Whether it was equal playtime in the junior soccer league, getting the lead part in the church play, or even just getting the biggest slice of the pie at the party. As a result we’ve created a group of people that as a whole believe that they’re entitled to a better life. I’m appalled to hear stories where parents are going to interviews with their children – their college graduated children applying for professional positions.

On the other hand there are far too many of us who are being held back by limiting beliefs that we’re not worthy or that we don’t deserve success and happiness. We believe that success can only come to those people who have something that we don’t. Carol Dweck in her book Mindset makes the point eloquently that we aren’t a fixed point that we can change, adapt, and grow. Sometimes it’s not that we believe that we’re not good enough but instead we believe that we don’t have the right circumstances. Perhaps you weren’t born to a rich family. Perhaps you didn’t go to college. However, these barriers aren’t real. We’re taking generalizations like more education equates to more compensation. We’re forgetting that buried into any statistic are the outliers. (See Malcom Gladwell’s book called Outliers for how to become an outlier.)

The fact of the matter is that 20% of America’s millionaires never set foot in college and nearly 10% of the Americans listed as billionaires didn’t get their college diploma. If you’re thinking that you can’t be successful without a college degree – there are some folks who would beg to differ. In fact roughly 75% of the folks that make their fortunes are entrepreneurs. Only 10% of the wealthy are executives – which is the way that we typically think of the wealthy. The entrepreneurs are united by a belief that they can do something. Their battle cry is “Let’s try.”

If you feel like you can’t then someone in your life has taught you self-limiting beliefs that have to go. The fact of the matter is that you’re never really stuck unless you give into those limiting beliefs. The only losers are those who don’t get back up on the horse.

Consider for a moment that 80% of lottery winners file bankruptcy within 5 years. That’s crazy. Their success wasn’t limited by money as we’ve been taught to believe. Their success had to be tied to something else. Perhaps it’s the way they view money or perhaps it’s their self-control. Whatever it is, it’s clear that their problem wasn’t a lack of money.

Converting Dreams to Reality with Persistence

If you can hold onto your dreams and never let go then you’ll eventually achieve them. Whatever you call it grit (in the language of How Children Succeed), Stockdale Paradox (in the language of Good to Great), perseverance (in the language of Seeing What Others Don’t) or simply persistence (in the language used by Emotional Intelligence) the fundamental point is the same. That is, that there’s a power in just being persistent. Persistence created the Grand Canyon. Water didn’t carve the canyon in a day. The Golden Gate Bridge was initially conceived in 1916 and didn’t finally open until 1937. The Sagrada Família started construction in 1882 and it’s estimated that the construction will be completed in 2028.

Persistence pays off. Consider that 44% of all sales people quit trying after the first call and 94% of sales people quit by the fourth call but 60% of all sales are made after the fourth call. So 94% of all of sales people aren’t eligible for 60% of the sales because they’re unwilling to invest in getting the four rejections they need to earn the right for the remaining 60% of the business.

Not every endeavor or every dream requires the level of persistence as some of the above examples but anything worth doing – anything that will be truly rewarding – requires a level of persistence to make it happen.

The Truth and Small Changes

The truth is that the difference between wildly successful and relative mediocrity is very small. Consider that in baseball the difference between great players (> .300 batting average) and the mediocre (> .250 batting average) is just one hit in twenty. The truth is that the differences that put someone at the top of their game and the rest of us are just a few small things. (See Three Plays in Launch!)

However, despite the relatively small changes necessary to achieve great success most people are afraid of the truth. They don’t want to know that they slouch when they speak or that they slur certain words. They don’t want the negative feedback. Their ego doesn’t want to be harmed (See Change or Die for more on the ego and its defenses).

The problem is that the truth is the truth whether you’re aware of it or not. Babies don’t suddenly float because they’re not aware of the law of gravity. The truth doesn’t hurt us less because we don’t know it. We just don’t understand its effects. (See Thinking in Systems for more on not understanding how a system operates.)

One of the challenges with finding the truth is understanding what the truth is. The problem is that we don’t get the truth. We simply get perceptions and feedback. I once was speaking in LA about abstraction and wrapping classes and I made the offhand remark that I had to be careful about talking about rapping on stage because I might get shot. At the time there were a lot of rappers getting shot. One of the pieces of feedback that I received (and I’m not making this up) was that I was a racist. It was that one comment that they believed made me a racist. The interesting thing about this is that one could say I was stereotyping rappers – guilty as charged – but saying that I was a racist didn’t make any sense.

The point of this story is that people only have their perceptions and can only provide their feedback. It’s up to us to find the truth – sometimes the hard truth – in what is being said. Jack Canfield quotes Jack Rosenblum as saying “If one person tells you you’re a horse, they’re crazy. If three people tell you you’re a horse, there’s a conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you’re a horse, it’s time to buy a saddle.” The point is that you’re going to have to ask for a lot of feedback to find the truth – whether it’s that you’re a horse or not.

Asking for feedback is an act in humility. (For more on humility see Humilitas.) It’s placing yourself in a stance that is willing to learn. Sometimes this is called a palms up stance. It’s a willingness to learn from what is around you like the Jesuits did. (See Heroic Leadership.) To act in a way that allows you to be that open requires a great deal of inner strength to be able to accept the feedback. For me that’s a stable core – knowing who I am and what I stand for. I talk about this in my post The Inner Game of Dialogue and how the martial arts core of centering is key to being able to accept the feedback of others.

Core Genius

What is it that you do better than anyone else in the world? If you can’t answer that then perhaps you can answer what can you do better than anyone else in your world? Or perhaps what do you feel like you’re the most naturally gifted or talented at? If you’re like me the question is still rather hard, however, I’m developing some answers.

I decided to purchase the Strengths Finder 2.0 book and take the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment. I scored top three talents in Learning, Futuristic, and Strategic. These talents lead me to not have one thing that I’m good at – one core genius. Instead, as a learner, future focused person (See The Time Paradox for parallels), and strategic thinker I tend to learn lots of things – sometimes well and sometimes less well.

For me, there are many things that I can do which are powerful. From my point of view the adaptability and deep reservoir of things I’ve learned over the years are my core genius. However, that’s like saying that your core genius is the next thing that you encounter – it’s not very fulfilling from the “find an answer” point of view.

If you’ve got a better, more focused answer, the question is how much of your time do you spend doing that thing – and how much time do you spend doing “everything else.” Even without focus I’m careful to consider those things I can, shouldn’t and should do. The things I should do are those things where they match key skills that I’ve developed or will energize me. The rest of the things that I do I need to try to delegate. It’s estimated that entrepreneurs spend only 30% of their time in their core genius. Can you imagine what it would be like if we could spend 70% on our core genius? Perhaps you would find your own Success Principles.