Are you ready to Trade Up?

Just like people, books can come to us in a number of different ways. Sometimes, you get both books and people at the same time. Throw in a three-day immersion retreat type of conference with the author and about twenty other women, and that was my story with Trade Up! Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out by Rayona Sharpnack.

When I start my coaching work with new clients, I ask them about people they consider to be their mentors: Knowing who they are and why they are esteemed as a mentor will provide me with significant clues to the present-day state of my prospective client’s thinking. Invariably, much conversation also ensues about the kind of relationship they thrive in with a coach or mentor.

In one of these conversations about a year ago Rayona Sharpnack’s name came up. My client had read an interview that Rayona gave to Fast Company back in November of 2000. This was the tagline of the article:

Natural Leader

By: Cheryl Dahle

Rayona Sharpnack is a teacher and a mentor to some of the most powerful women in some of the most important companies around. Her message: Don't worry so much about what you need to know. Instead, figure out who you need to be.

In short, that was just the message my client needed at just the right time. Impulsively she searched for the phone number to Rayona’s company, dialed it, and was floored when Rayona answered it herself. They now have a friendship which continues to flourish in its seventh year, and will likely be co-mentoring each other for a long time to come.

I share the FC tagline and article with you, because I think it nicely sums up what Trade Up! and Rayona’s coaching with Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out is all about. I read Rayona’s book in-between the time that I signed up for her three-day seminar and actually attended it (just recently; it was held the last week of February). With a fast read of her book as my background preparation, I was to discover how the person I had grown up to be inside was affecting so many of my daily decisions without my even being aware of it.

By the way, Happy Easter

And no, I am not switching gears on you. As we finalized our editorial calendar for JJL and this, our annual Love Affair with Books, Easter seemed to be the perfect day for this book review. Similar to the rebirth this holiday celebrates for Christians everywhere, Trade Up! invites you to have new conversations with yourself, reborn for the possibilities you can begin to manifest in your life: You redesign your leadership of others by starting with the context you dwell within that determines how you are leading yourself.

I would discover that "context" is Rayona’s favorite word. Trade Up! is about "contextual leadership."

These are the five steps the book outlines and explains, "to help leaders gain awareness of these assumptions and trade up from limiting beliefs and behaviors to those that will help them change the world.":

1. Reveal your context: what do you believe about yourself? What holds you back? How do you impact others? 2. Own your context: take stock of the upside and downside of your context, and examine the intended and unintended consequences of it! 3. Design a new context that gets you what you want: begin by asking yourself “how good are you willing to have life be?” 4. Sustain your new context: develop new practices to get this new context to stick! 5. Activate your context and engage with the world: move out of your own concerns and into partnership and community with others to help change the world around you!

I would also discover that Rayona Sharpnack is quite serious about tapping into our human capacity and coaching us to change the world via new leadership conversations. To Rayona, no dream is too big. The only question is if you are big enough to take it on within your own thinking —your context. Are you willing to step forward with the actions you are compelled to take, when you purposely and passionately reinvent your context so it serves you much better than it ever did before?

This is a book written as the how-to for people who will answer that question with a resounding "Yes!" (i.e. not a wimpy, "uh... okay, I guess.")

The Introduction to Trade Up! starts with a quote I absolutely love:

I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people."
—Nora Watson

Substitute the word/words "job" for "life" if you wish: Leadership in both starts with self-leadership in both, and you can read and use this book either way. As the Introduction continues to explain,

"This book is about understanding the language of trading up and learning its methodology so that you can put it into practice where you need it most... the questions isn’t, Can you solve your problems and achieve your goals? The question is, How good are you willing to let life be?"

Get impatient with your old conversations and have some new ones

Those who know me well (and I daresay, know the post-2003 Rosa Say) will testify to the fact that my impatience with the human race working toward making things better is steadily growing at an accelerated pace. If you want to see Ms. Ho‘ohana Aloha get wild, throw a "Yeah, but…" in my direction whether it is about my workplace reconstruction mission, the state of partisan politics, stewardship of the environment, how to cook the perfect egg over-easy ~~~ or about anything at all: You will see me pounce. In my experience (yes, part of my context), those who say, "I can't" usually mean, "I won't."

Thus, Trade Up! will now be a book I consider to be a companion to my own book, Managing with Aloha, wherein I invite managers to step into a more profound realization of their responsibility when management is treated as a calling, and not a small j-o-b, or slightly bigger r-o-l-e. If you "won't" then you need a new calling where you are always saying, "I will, and I am!"

One thing that really appealed to me about Trade Up! is Rayona’s insistence that context design and redesign happens through our language, where our dialect is our deliberate choice of words and construct of the conversations we have with others and perhaps more importantly, within our own heads. It is the MWA concept of ‘Language of Intention’ taken to the self-attuned extreme: I LOVE IT. She continually asks,

"Do you really want to let the voices of the committee in your head rule your thinking? Put your worries on loudspeaker, and seek out the counsel of your most trusted friends - get them to challenge you."

So I guess you can tell I strongly recommend this book. It is also a PERFECT candidate for full contact reading if you had read the conversation Tim started here, and have been thinking about trying it out.

Start trading up by speaking the language

Here is more about how Rayona defines context, in her own words (direct quotes from the book, with the italics hers):

Context is the often unexamined mind-set or frame of reference we operate from that informs our behavior and evokes behavior from others. In other words, context is the belief system you carry inside. It’s your frame of reference, your paradigm, your view of reality or of life from which your behaviors and behaviors spring.

Context is usually something you have inherited or have had impressed upon you in your formative years, not something you have consciously developed for yourself. Much of it comes "loaded at the factory"; it’s the default setting that your brain and spirit automatically return to, especially in moments of crisis or fatigue.

Context shapes everything we see or do, as individuals and social beings. It shapes who "you be" as a person. Yes, you have physical attributes that distinguish you, but ultimately, what makes you unique is the configuration of preconceived ideas that constitute your reality.

So what then, is trading up? It is replacing any old context which has inhibited you, with a newly redesigned personal context that will free you to be the person you just might be destined to be.

I don't know a JJLer, or any learner for that matter, who doesn't want to Trade Up! in some way... So, "how good are you willing to have YOUR life be?"
~ Rosa Say, JJL contributor, and managing editor

Additional Links:

The Trade Up! website, and

Rayona Sharpnack’s company and Bio Page.

 

• For those of you who want to learn a bit more via audio, prolific author and JJLer Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft, invited Rayona in for one of her Fireside Chats: It is 21 minutes long, and as per Lisa’s intro, "If you are a fan (or just curious) of social construction theory, you will want to check out this podcast. I have toyed, on and off through the years, with doing a book that combines the best notions of social construction with fundamentals of business success. Well, I don't have to now, because Rayona has done it for me!"

• In both her book (just published in late 2007) and her seminar, I found Rayona to be exceptionally focused and consistent with that interview she had done with Fast Company eight years ago. There is an interesting part where Cheryl Dahle asked, "What are some other relatively easy-to-change practices that perpetuate gender inequity?" This link will take you there, to the mid-way point of the article (and Rayona’s response) as online page scrolling can get a bit annoying.

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Post author Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii's Universal Values to the Art of Business, and she currently writes for Managing with Aloha Coaching, Value your Month, Value your Life. Her Value Study for the month of March is Ho‘ohanohano, the Hawaiian Value of Dignity and Respect.

For all of Rosa's writing aggregated in just one place, visit her Tumblr, Ho‘ohana Aloha. For more of her book reviews, check out her page dedicated to Mana‘o on a Virtual Bookshelf; Christopher Bailey has tagged it with, "Here's my favorite model for how to best maximize the learning from my books and connect my library together!"

Comments

[Steve Sherlock]

Well, Rosa, a companion book to your own, that is a good endorsement. I'll add this book to my now lengthy list of new and required reads from this month.

Context is one concept that resonates with me. You may also recall the story I heard Tom Asacker tell about the content within the context.

Tom's story starts with a picture. A hand written sign propped up along a country road. The sign reads: "Fresh fruit and vegetables". The country road, the hand written sign, the text about "fresh" is reinforced by the wholeness of the package. These are likely to be as fresh as they can be. The content in the context works. Second picture, similar setting, similar hand written sign along a country road. The text this time reads: "Free flying lessons". Now, is this something that would convey a warm and fuzzy feeling that this might be the best deal on flying lessons you can obtain? Or does this context send off alarms as probably not a good thing to do? The content in the context does not work so well for flying lessons as it does for fresh vegetables.

So what is our story? Does it fit within our context or do we need to change? I will be interested in reading (full contact style) and see what Rayona says.

[Rosa Say]

Thank you for sharing Tom's story Steve --- and for spending some of your time to comment for me on this Easter Sunday! By "So what is our story? Does it fit within our context or do we need to change?" do you mean here at JJL?

Not to minimize Rayona's writing or impact on me, for I do love her book... I guess I am pretty quick to invite other authors into my MWA curriculum! Just did it on Talking Story in our last JJL Trackback Sunday with Patrick Lencioni, Ken Blanchard, Paul J. Meyer, and Dick Ruhe :) ---http://tinyurl.com/2ueeyz

[Karen Wallace]

Rosa, I am so glad that ALAWB only happens once a year! The quality of books selected and reviewed here by our wonderful contributors just gets better and better... I couldn't hope to keep up with all the reading I now want to do if we did this more often.

This book has jumped onto my list up the top, thanks to your wonderful review - full contact reading all the way.

Will you be sharing your impression of the three-day seminar with us?

[Steve Sherlock]

Rosa, the question was more rhetorical in nature than specific. I wanted to relate the story to the context.

I think it is always a good question to ask periodically. As I see it, much of what your MWA curriculum does is to ensure that the content of the daily actions operate within the context of the overall goals/objectives.

[Rosa Say]

Yes Karen, ALAWB has become quite a gift, hasn't it!

If you take the trackback directly under this post I have a little bit more about the seminar as it is possible for me to share it through the now-public-domain territory of being duplicated in the book, and I will likely write more there (at my MWAC blog) in the future. Before taking the seminar I was asked to sign a proprietary information agreement that I would not disclose more than that (what is already published by Rayona) - all participants were asked to sign it, not just me and the other coaches in the room; of which there were several!

And the book is jam-packed with goodies, so there is much to talk about!

[Rosa Say]

Thank you Steve! You are spot on with MWA being about value-alignment and "walking our talk" at its core --- whatever values that workplace has proudly claimed as the heart and soul (and aloha) of their belief system and vision for the future.

As it relates to Rayona's work, values would be considered one part of our overall context, and so I was pretty fascinated about the interplay as she described it in the book, especially where it relates to organizational culture... the coaching and consultant work I do keeps me in a current day-to-day living (and working) laboratory for MWA, thus for me, my MWAC blog is truly an opportunity to keep MWA alive and a current resource of extended writings for the Ho'ohana Community. Time and time again I marvel at how lucky I am to have published my first book in the age of the blog!

[Robyn]

Rosa, since you read the book and went to Rayona Sharpnack's seminar, you certainly know she has critical information we should consider. When you come right down to it, we have to change ourselves before we can be all we need to be for the people we lead - and, it is an ongoing process.

I look forward to sending you a post for Saturday.

[Rosa Say]

Robyn, sounds like you are very familiar with Rayona's work too - we have to talk!