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This is one of my favorite holidays, so many ways to be creative and have some fun! This is one in a series of Li'l Hawks done by hawkstudios on Flickr.
Last year, Opus was Carmen Miranda, remember?
Enjoy your day, and if you have a moment, visit my Kākou in Pictures; it is a new learning of mine done as an October 2007 Flashback.
Happy Halloween!
~ Rosa Say, JJL Contributor, and author of Managing with Aloha Coaching.
I was moved by the reaction to the last post I wrote that included a part on signature story.
I have composed a post to go further with this. My mother, Genevieve Zinger, was born on November 11, 1926. She passed away a number of years ago but in honor of her I will publish this post on what would have been her birthday and what is also known as Remembrance Day in Canada.
I promise a heartfelt post that offers guidelines on signature stories and ends with the declaration of my own signature story.
In the interim, I hope that you fully live the story that you already are.
Photo Credit: Don Quixote, McNay Art Museum by http://flickr.com/photos/cobra/167133761/
Me in one word? Manager. Been learning it, doing it, writing about it and coaching it for as long as I can remember working for a living began for me.
Yet when I first went into business for myself, there was this radical difference immediately challenging my level of confidence.
Suddenly, the people I coached were paying me and then listening to what I had to say, versus me paying them to do the work at hand, with listening to me as what came with the territory.
So at first I was highly sensitive to whatever they might say they already knew. The moment they would get the merest hint of an "oh yeah, I've heard that before" look in their eyes I would switch gears, and offer up something else. Now however, four years into my own coaching business and fortunately blessed with a healthy amount of clients and speaking gigs, I know better. I know that "I've heard that before" may not necessarily mean "...and I have learned it enough, and learned it well."
It takes some practice and coaching chops, and sometimes it just takes a tough skin to look past a person's resistance. What helps me most however, is remembering why they asked me to coach them in the first place, recalling my own desire to truly help them learn.
April Groves and Tony D. Clark talk about this in two great articles, and I encourage you to do two things:
From April, at Making Life Work for You: Turn Around Tuesday
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” - Doris Lessing, 2007 Nobel Prize Winner
So, I didn’t know who Doris Lessing was until today. But, as soon as I read her quote, I had to look her up. Sounded very Rocky-esqe when he told his kid, “Let me tell you something you already know.”
Being told something you already know can be irritating. Ask my six year old. She’ll sigh real deep, lean her head back a bit, and say exasperatedly, “I knnnooowww.” Then she has to be reminded about her attitude and we move on.
Being told something you already know can also be energizing, comforting, and refreshing... continued at April's place.
From Tony, at Success From the Nest: The Point Of View May Be New To You
“What worked for you in the past,” I asked.
“Usually I’d grab a success book or motivational CD, and it would give me the boost I needed to get going again. But I’ve heard all that stuff, and read and listened to hundreds of different books and CDs,” said Graham.
Then I told him this — I guarantee you haven’t heard it told by everyone.
It was as if a fog had been lifted. He had a look of clarity that you see with those moments of epiphany.
There was a new book by an author he hadn’t read before, but that covered many of the concepts Graham was familiar with. He put off buying the book, because he figured the author had nothing new to say.
Graham was right, and he was also wrong... continued at Tony's blog.
Come on back if you want to talk story about it here with your learning support group; we're here for you, and we like listening.
~ Rosa Say, JJL Contributor, and author of Managing with Aloha Coaching.
Can we talk?
Curt Rosengren, author of The M.A.P. Maker has a fabulous idea, and I’m jumping on his bandwagon with an MWA twist. Curt started a 30-day experiment last week Monday, explaining;
People can be a huge source of energy and inspiration for me. Talking to people, hearing their stories, listening to their ideas, bouncing my ideas out there and listening to others' perspectives. It all leaves me feeling amped up and juicy.
And yet, as a solo self-employed guy, I often find myself sitting isolated in my cave, hunkered down over my computer and convincing myself that the e-mail exchange I just had really was a meaningful human interaction.
I frequently resolve to reach out and connect with more people, but that typically only lasts for a conversation or two before the inertia of isolation overtakes me again. To change that, I decided I needed to turn it into a challenge.
My solution? 30 conversations in 30 days with people I've never actually spoken with (as in voice) before. No particular agenda to the conversations – just seeing what I learn, how I’m inspired, and what new ideas pop up.
Curt’s M.A.P. stands for Crafting a Life of Meaning, Abundance & Passion. My MWA stands for Managing with Aloha and at its heart, Aloha is about revealing our abundance and passion for life. The word I use to connect action to Aloha is Ho‘ohana (on-purpose work), for that ho‘o prefix means to make something happen —to make aloha happen. So as you might imagine, I adore Curt’s initiative, and I wrote to him;
I agree Curt, I love your idea! I have long talked to folks about something I call the Daily Five Minutes, a workplace practice we use in Managing with Aloha to bring better quality to the everyday conversations we have within the workplace. At first, people give me a bit of push-back, saying, “but Rosa, we talk to each other every day!” but going through the motions and “same ‘old- same ‘old” does creep in to their familiarity, and soon they love the D5M for the way it changes things up, and freshens their connections with each other.
Your campaign is a fabulous way for us to freshen up our D5M too, enlarging our normal relationship circles. You’ll have my email address with this comment; may I get on your call list? Send me a time that’s best for you and I’ll call - Let’s talk!
Why am I posting about this here?
Look for the Daily Five Minutes in Managing with Aloha, and you will find it in my chapter on ‘Ike loa, “to know well,” the Hawaiian value of learning, for I believe we learn best from the beauty within other people. We enjoy learning in the company of other people, and if we need more practice at that, the conversation-reinvention of the D5M is a great place to start.
The beauty of the D5M in the workplace, is that once you get it going, it truly does take only 5 minutes, and that “I’m just too busy now” resistance melts away. When people know there is a 5-minute agreement, they plan for it and stick to it with the objective of respecting each other’s time.
Now Curt’s experiment, is “30 conversations in 30 days with people I've never actually spoken with (as in voice) before.” Therefore, my twist is calling it the D30M, as in Daily 30 Minutes, because I think we’ll need a bit more time!
So what do you say? Don’t be surprised if you hear from me soon!
Are you a JJL reader I have not talked to yet? Want to talk story for about a half hour tops in the next 30 days? If you want to get on my call list, comment here or send me a note with your first and second choice on a time I can call you. If you are on Skype, I can call you that way too.
Then, think about starting your own Reconnection Revolution to Rehumanize the Blogosphere, or just to learn in the Hawaiian way of ‘Ike loa, with D30M and your Aloha. As Curt coaches,
The common thread with all the people that I'm talking to seems to be that each of them, in their own way, is working to make a positive impact on the world around them. I have long thought that a key ingredient in maximizing the potential for positive change is that human connection. People start talking, building relationships, exchanging ideas, even finding ways to collaborate. Next thing you know – hey presto! – the positive potential has just grown exponentially.
Come join the Reconnection Revolution and give yourself a 5 in 5 challenge. Or 10 in 10. Or 30 in 30. You never know what seeds you might plant.
~ Rosa Say, JJL Contributor, and author of Managing with Aloha Coaching.
Update: 1 down, 29 to go! Just spoke with Priscilla for the first time :)
Did you ever read one of your kid's homework assignments and think of all the interesting adult things you could do with it? "Gee, I could do this and turn it into a story or my own personal project."
I found this piece titled, Developing a Sense of Place, written for 5th to 8th graders. Two thoughts came to mind. The first was what a great project to have your kid do! Save this stuff for them to read when they get older. It will help to give them roots, connection and identity. Secondly, what a great project for one's self to do. Even if we are fifty years old, it will give us roots, connection and identity when we look back upon it at age seventy-five.
I love this posting by marketing guru Seth Godin, called Permeability for the management lesson it gives. However there is another quote within it that brought me back here to JJL to re-read the RFL contribution that David Zinger had posted for us too. In his post, Seth says,
“That's how most CEOs and top managers make decisions. Not based on unemotional data, but on emotion-rich, experience-based stories.”
I think that’s how most of us make decisions, not just CEOs. Many times we look for the data after our gut-level, visceral decisions have been made. We look for the data to give us affirmation that our emotional intelligence is just that – intelligent!
David Zinger recently wrote that,
“Sometimes I read an article here [at JJL] and don't even know the impact. I will write about something 3 weeks later and find that the article I read influenced me without any conscious awareness.”
Well, I confess that this permeable posting from Seth may have jumped out at me because of David’s conversation here this morning with Bridget about creating your signature story. David had said that, “We do not only tell stories, we are stories,” and Bridget asked,
“Signature Stories...give me more details, how do I create mine? What exactly is a signature story? Is this a story about who you are in a nutshell, where you want to go, where you've been, and where you are going?”
In part, David replied,
“Here are a few tips to find your signature story:
It is the story you love to read.
It is the story you can't help but tell.
You keep learning from your signature story.
It embraces a fundamental element of your life and work.”
David, Bridget, Seth... you ... I want to learn more... it is so cool the way that the comments work around here!
~ Rosa Say, JJL Contributor, and author of Managing with Aloha Coaching.
The universe is made of stories, not atoms. ~
Here are my rapid fire five for October:
1. WE Power. WE power is no small thing. I have worked with 3 different partnerships this month and the power of WE is so much more than the power of me.
2. Breathe into feedback. Keep breathing when receiving feedback. I got quite a bit of feedback this month. It is wonderful to get the feedback and it enriches me but I know I tend to tighten when I begin to hear it. I have really focused on breathing into the feedback and using the feedback to inspire myself.
3. Make the other look good. I have been taking an improvisation course. I have learned so much but I love the line in improvisation that we are there to make the other look good.
4. GEMO gets things done. I have relied on the statement "good enough, move on" to avoid dithering and to set a very high level of accomplishment this month.
5. We all have a Signature Story. I taught a three day course at the University of Manitoba on the Power of Story. I suggested that everyone had a signature story. It was so helpful to the participants as they tried to uncover their signature story and to see how their story influenced who they are and what they do. Sometimes the story is not just one story but a theme. We do not only tell stories, we are stories.
We enter into stories,
we are entered into stories by others,
and we live our lives through stories.
~ Michael White
What is your signature story?
Photo Credit: I caught a bushel of oranges by http://flickr.com/photos/kt/49174317/
Rapid Fire Learning is here again this month of October. I was tempted to look back over the year that this group has been joyfully and jubilantly learning together but I would not have been able to limit myself to just 5 things. So here goes:
1 - Learning and Play go together. I am and have been intrigued by the relationships between learning and play. I found a new quote when reading Scott Berkun's book The Myths of Innovation
"Like the child in the park, creativity is intertwined with the ability to see ideas as fluid, free things. Ideas come, they go, and that's OK; to an open mind, ideas are everywhere (something I'll prove momentarily). It's the willingness to explore, experiment, and play, to invest energy, hit a dead end, and then chase a new direction that allows minds to find good ideas. All of our notions of play, and its freedoms from formal judgement, are inexplicably linked to finding good ideas."
Reminds me that I need to allocate time to play. Do you make time for play?
2 - "Make a Difference" is really a year round event. The Center for Public Education has a nice flyer for use in local elections, particularly for school board candidates. The "All in Favor" flyer can be adjusted from a school committee focus to a town council focus to almost any position. It has some key tips to frame the discussion on what you would be looking for in a candidate.
Thanks to the learning challenge which was set forth for us by Blog Action Day, I have learned much in October about the different ways we leave our footprints on the earth. Some things I’d call re-learning, others un-learning, and as always gets us charged up here at JJL, new learning. Here are three examples we’ve talked about ‘round our dinner table in this environmentally-flavored discussion.
1. We are re-learning Recycling
We realized that our family had gotten a bit lazy about recycling, and that some of the good habits we’d started years ago have been neglected in the name of ease and convenience. For instance, it’s a 30 mile drive from where we live to the nearest recycling center for our bottles, cans, and paper, and packing those deliveries into the car when we’re headed in that direction hasn’t been happening for quite some time now. We all recommitted to getting it done.
Further, it’s clear that because we don’t enjoy this chore, we’ll naturally cut back on producing much of it in the first place! It’s connected to the next thing on my list:
2. We are un-learning our Consumerism
Second, at the urging of Steve, Tim, and others, we’ve joined the mantra that “water from a bottle is passé. Importing bottled water consumes gasoline and wastes plastic, and helping reduce consumption of these fossil fuels speaks to a forward-thinking consumer.” This is a pretty easy one for us in Hawai‘i, where we have wonderful tasting water straight from the tap and needn’t even filter it. Bottled water is hereby banned from the Say house.
And that is but one example. Less materialism, less clutter, less cleaning around the stuff, less maintaining it all. Minimalist living looks more and more attractive to me every day.
3. New learning: E-Waste
It’s long made perfect sense that we’ll have less paper to shred and haul to the recycler if we don’t use it in the first place, and we have all groomed increasingly digital habits, reading the local paper and favorite magazines online etc. However my new learning has been in the call to action many Blog Action Day writers made in regard to keeping hazardous wastes our of our landfills. It had not occurred to me that we were swapping one problem (forest consumption in paper goods) for another (highly toxic e-waste) — yikes!
For example, cell phones are becoming an ever-larger factor in this ecological challenge, and “One in three Americans will replace their cell phones this year, adding to the 500 million unused phones currently waiting to be discarded or recycled.” This is what I’ve learned to do the next time I get another phone (these three tips are from USAA, my insurance carrier):
And not just cell phones; think PDA’s, pagers, computers, and your digital cameras too.
As my title suggests, this is the kind of learning you can feel great about, don’t you think?
~ Rosa Say
More from the JJL Community:
Knowing how powerful great questions can be, I love to ask seemingly off-the-wall questions of the people I am coaching. Every so often they will turn the tables on me, as happened recently, when within a discussion about their current goals, one of my clients asked me,
“If you had to choose between them, and you could only pick one, would you rather people thought of you as successful, or as interesting?”
No hesitation in answering this one. Definitely, emphatically, interesting.
If I were always interesting to other people, I would feel successful. Ends up being a twofer!
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8. Be interesting. Read voraciously, and listen to learn, then teach and share everything you know. No one owes you their attention; you have to earn it and keep attracting it. From my 12 Rules for Self-Management |
I do believe this IS a goal: Being interesting is something I continuously need to strive for, and learn. The learning we talk about and share translates to currently interesting.
The continuously part is important, because interesting today can be old news tomorrow.
Old news, “been there, done that” and such is not interesting.
Not learning can make you stagnant, and stagnant is boring.
Variety also helps, and that can be my challenge when variety sneakily slides into multi-tasking scatter-shot versus focus-and-nail-it productivity; busy-work versus accomplishment.
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4. Unveil your passions. Talking only about business is boring. Your passions make it interesting. |
What are your passions? Guy’s quote made me think twice, because I do think of business as one of my passions too!
What are you learning that makes you interesting? [Lisa Haneberg had once shared some thoughts with me here.]
What will be the stuffing in your conversation the next time you need to make some small talk with big impact?
By the way, we would still love to hear from you here on what makes Joyful Jubilant Learning interesting for you: The Beauty in Learning: JJL in Year Two.
~ Rosa Say
Be interesting! I felt that smile of yours...
Comment on this posting, or play the Learning Links Game: Of the eleven Links in this post, which one did you take, and what did you Learn there?
The cinema is so diverse, and movies are pretty universally experienced. They are magical, mystical, mythical, mania-creating...
But what have we learned from them?
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