When energy meets purpose
Goals are easy when you first set ‘em.
It’s exciting! It’s the 3rd of January and the new habits are going well!
Even better, people are watching! They see what you’re doing and that feels great!
I’m really interested in what keeps us going on the 3rd of August. When the habits are boring and no one is watching any more.
This is where the real magic starts to happen, but it’s also when our enthusiasm fades (if not way sooner).
There’s a lot out there to help with this; people like Simon Sinek talk about connecting to your why. I agree, your purpose is the driving force.
One thing I’m thinking about recently is how we come to our why. We can’t think about our why and expect it to instantly move us. We have to meet it with energy.
Have you slept enough?
Have you moved?
What are you eating?
Check all your fuel inputs- then check in with the why.
Our ultimate purpose will only energise if we meet it with that same zest first.
The scientist’s reframe
Scientists, engineers and architects know about this.
They know that to get anywhere we must experiment. And experimenting means that most of the time we aren’t getting the desired outcome.
So why is it so hard for us to come to grips with?
How can we make like a scientist with the endeavors of our lives?
How can we take joy in the process of figuring it out and discovering unexpected things along the way?
They do it. We can too.
Distorting time
We are all Marty McFLy. Yup, we’re masters of time distortion.
Recently I had a morning-long battle with myself to go for a walk. I was editing and writing and as each ‘pomodoro’ 25 minutes went by I said to myself:
“I’ll walk on the next break”
And of course I never did. I had distorted the time in my head. You can usually catch it in the language:
“That’ll take forever” I thought. Of course I don’t really mean that but the imprecision in my language is what helps me to distort it.
After a few hours my brain began bulging and fuzzing and I knew the walk was no longer a nice to have- it was needed.
So up I get and out I go- air pods in and happily strolling along the road to my favourite power pole. I check no one is looking, then turn around to head back (why do I always find it so embarrassing to do a 180 in public?)
I get back to my desk feeling refreshed and thinking why didn’t I do that hours ago?!
Here’s the crazy part- the from desktop, around pole, to desktop took me nine minutes.
NINE MINUTES!!
In that time it felt like I had visited another dimension, I saw my power pole for goodness sake! It felt like an eternity (there I go again) and the time away completely reset my brain’s ability to keep logging deep work hour.
But it only took me nine minutes.
Note to self, stop arguing with yourself- just go on the walk.
It’s always a good idea.
Failure into feedback
Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t.
That is so great.
The trick is to be able to stay curious and cheerful for both. And this can be trained.
What is the feedback we give ourselves and others when things don’t work? When you misplace and finger and don’t get that new jazz chord right on the guitar do you grunt in frustration? Or do you smile to yourself and try again?
I’m willing to bet it’s the grunt. It seems natural to have a frustrated response when something doesn’t work the way we planned. But each time we do that, we condition ourselves like Pavlov’s dog to associate negative feelings with trying and failing.
The key to growth is the exact opposite. How can we associate feelings of excitement, fun, curiosity and a hunger for more to those moments of “failure”.
One step is to stop calling it failure. Call it feedback. We always get ‘an’ outcome, it may not be ‘the’ outcome but you will always get some feedback.
This isn’t just positive thinking, this is practical to your growth and crucially to the growth of those you lead.
I love Benjamin Zander’s exclamation when things don’t go as planned (he teaches all his music students to say this when things go wrong):
“How fascinating!”
Let’s train ourselves to celebrate the micro failures and lean in more, it’s win win really
Honour the ‘or’.
Here’s a belief we should be actively fostering in our younger generation:
If something hasn’t been done before it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It Just means it hasn’t been done before.
We can be forgiven for thinking that if something hasn’t happened so far then it won’t at all. After all, we use the past as evidence for what will happen right?
Sometimes.
And other times unprecedented things occur. Sometimes completely new things happen. Massive discoveries are made.
Breakthroughs are breakthroughs because they are breaking through what was once thought impossible.
The past does not equal the future. It might be the same as it was…
…or it might be vastly different.
We must honour the ‘or’.
We owe it to the younger generation to keep the door open to new possibilities.
We must take seriously the way in which our language might infer things that limit others.
If something hasn’t been done before it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It Just means it hasn’t been done before.
What is a teachers job?
Teachers are the ultimate Swiss army knives. They have a very practical job to do that also requires them to pour their personality and heart into the work. They’re a lot like actors in that sense.
At a minimum, as teachers we must plant the seeds of doubt.
Not the bad kind of doubt either- the generous kind.
We have to plant seeds that begin to pick apart the destructive narratives that can form in our kids’ heads. You know the ones:
Other people can, but I can’t.
I’m not good enough.
I shouldn’t take up space.
I’m dumb.
I’m too loud.
Yes- at a minimum our job is to day by day plant seeds. Seeds that say these stories belong in the trash of the fiction section of a library that’s at a dump.
An outstanding teacher? Well, they don’t stop at planting these seeds.
They not only remove these stories by creating doubt in them, but they create empowering alternatives.
They give mountains of evidence, anecdotes, experiences and unquestionable proof that they can have it all.
Create doubt to collapse that which disempowers and build a ocean of evidence that tells them the truth:
You can do anything.
Overchunking Medusa
These aren’t just two random words I put together, I promise.
There’s a balance we have to strike between dreaming big and actioning small. It’s a tricky one to get right.
If we spend all our time focussing on the giant goal- or even the just big task for the week- we can freeze. A bit like Medusa has paralysed us.
This is called over chunking. It’s looking at too many chunks of information or tasks at once.
It’s being daunted by the giant elephant, the whole mountain or the entire dissertation…
I think back to some monumental tasks I’ve undertaken in the past and I’m almost certain I’d never have even started if I knew all it took now.
So when we are at the foot of the mountain, we have to simultaneously know about the peak while just taking one proverbial step at a time.
Get this balance right and I’m pretty sure we can do anything.
Email batching- thanks Tim!
Some say 6, 7; I say 12 and 4!
This idea is from Tim Ferriss. I read this over 10 years ago and I keep coming back to it over and over again.
Tim’s advice is simple- we get more time by eliminating things. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we miss out on things, it just means we are smarter about what we get rid of and when. So it becomes possible to have your cake and eat it.
Like most, I sometimes feel like I’m a professional email responder. My email inbox is a GREAT place to go if I want to feel ‘productive’.
The problem with that is we are being reactive to the needs and the to do lists of other people. I open my inbox and suddenly an hour and a half would disappear.
My day becomes a continuous stream of processing the request that leak in from people whenever they feel like sending me an email. Over time, this removes my energy and ability to do what’s important and non-urgent to me.
Tim suggests instead we batch our emails, let them accumulate and check them only twice a day.
So I check my email at 12pm and 4pm. That’s it.
The amazing thing is, when I go to my inbox with the singular focus of processing what’s there- it takes all of 15 minutes. Its because I’m a lot clearer on my own priorities and can cut through them quickly. I’m also not kidding myself thinking I will split focus between what I’m doing and the emails as they come in- I am focussed solely on the inbox during these chunks.
The unexpected thing was I found it hard to wait! I had become so used to the magical task-giving inbox that I almost needed it.
“Oh! I wonder what emails I have!”
It became a discipline of it’s own not to check it outside of my allocated times.
I had become addicted to having an instant task someone gives me with a finite end!
When I feel productivity waining, I can pretty much guarantee it’s because this habit has slipped.
When I want to reconnect again to powerful focus on what actually moves the needle on the work that really matters to me, I go back to 12 and 4.
When in doubt, 12pm and 4pm.
Optimism is in the tide
My parent’s live right on the water- it’s gorgeous at full tide. When you stand at in a certain spot and look out at the view, you literally feel like you’re on a boat.
I’ve struggled a bit with low tide. It goes quite a way out, and it gets muddy and rocky. I much preferred the high tide view.
Because I saw it like that, it meant I could only be happy about the view half the time. I felt lucky when it was full tide and like the low tide was something to be tolerated.
Today during the lowest tide I went for a mid afternoon stroll along the small beach. It was shelly, muddy, wet and rocky. And I loved it.
I realised how mean I had been to the low tide!
I realised that, like the best things in, life it’s win win.
On high tide I get that beautiful view I love so much. And low tide I get a long stretch to walk along to reset during the day.
I win either way.
I wonder what other losses I could make into wins?
Rehearsals build certainty
An actor in rehearsal is building the future.
You’ve heard of vision boards, right? Don’t lie I know you have one!
They seem kind of embarrassing when others see yours, but they are powerful visualisation tools. When I first heard of them I thought it was all a bit mystical, but the older I get the more I understand how important it is to see something before it exists.
To build a house you draw up the plans for it.
To take a road trip, you use a map to see and plan the journey.
I knew all this in theory, but I recently realised that the actor’s rehearsal process is also a visualisation exercise.
To get a desired outcome, we have to have a sense of certainty of what it will be like when you do it.
The first day of school is daunting because we can’t picture in our heads what it will actually be like- who will I sit next to? What do the classes look like? What will happen? (Sometimes we imagine it worse than it will be). We don’t have a store of images and experiences ahead of the first day of school, we can’t visualise it, therefore it’s a difficult experience before and possibly during.
The 513th day of school on the other hand, is a lot less daunting- or at the very least we know exactly what to expect.
An actor in rehearsal is laying the foundations and ruts of certainty.
“I will go here, I will do this and then this and then this. The audience will be there, the lights will be there and then I go backstage and have 7 minutes to get changed, have a drink and get the rubber chicken.”
Without this methodical and gradual process, actors don’t have the certainty they can perform at their peak come curtain.
When I think forward to 3 months from now when we’re remounting a show I tour in the US, I get zero nerves because I have laid hundreds of ruts of certainty. I can visualise exactly what it will be like.
So a fun game I’m playing is to create that level of internal certainty for things I don’t yet have in my life.
I think this is what the vision boards are all about. If we can make our desired realities as clear, as vivid and as real as our actual realities, we’re a heck of a lot more likely to get them.