Create Your Own Happiness

In 1984 I relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles to take a promotion at work.  It was a great opportunity, so I took a risk and made the move even though I didn’t know anyone in LA. 

What happened?  HATED IT!!!!  I arrived New Years Eve, 1984 and lived the first month in a corporate apartment at Marina del Rey.  After work I walked around the boats and just cried.  Everything was concrete, and I was so lonely.

I found a cute little apartment near Redondo Beach, but my job wasn’t going well.  That “big” raise I got didn’t cover the increased cost of living.  And the heat!  I’m a Northwest girl.  Anything over 75 is just too hot for me.  The daily 2 hour commute to downtown LA in a VW Beetle with no air conditioning was hell.  I started actively hating everything – my job, my life, myself.

On New Years Day, 1986 I sat down with my journal and took stock.  At the end of year one, I was a mess.  All I wanted was to go home.  But a little voice inside said, are you really such a quitter?  Have you really tried to like it here?  The answer was no.

I made a conscious decision that day to make an effort to make the most of my situation and be happy.  The bargain I struck was that I’d really try, and if on January 1, 1987 I was still miserable, I could pack up and go home.  Until then, I had to make an honest effort to find the good in my life.

I loved living near the beach, so I walked and jogged along the bike path.  I sought out friends, even if they lived an hour away.  I joined the LA County Art Museum, and went to concerts at the Greek Theater even by myself.  I reached out to a woman who lived nearby and worked in my department.  Hope and I are still close, and I miss her every day. 

At the end of my second year in LA my life wasn’t my dream come true, but I experienced firsthand the power and possibility of taking responsibility for my own happiness. 

Here’s the secret:  happiness comes from inside – you own it.  It doesn’t come to you or find you from outside things and circumstances.   

I have a little plaque on my desk that says:  "Life isn’t about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself."  Same thing with happiness.   Happiness doesn’t find you.  You create it for yourself.

If you’re waiting for Mr/Ms Right to make you happy, you’ll wait a lifetime.  If you’re waiting to find your dream job so you can be happy at work, your career will be drudgery.  Let’s face it.  When you’re miserable, everything sucks.  It’s when you’re happy that you will attract a great partner and can appreciate what they have to offer.  When you’re happy you have the self esteem to create your dream job.

It's not a chicken and egg thing.  If you’re not happy today, try this:  decide to be happy and then implement daily practices that help you break the cycle of your glass half-empty outlook.  

Does this sound woo woo?   It is!  And it works.  Are you saying, yeah, Pam, I know this already – this is nothing new.  My response is, yes, this is common sense.  But if you’re not happy ask yourself:  what are you actually doing about it?  What daily actions are you taking?  Or are you sitting back with your arms crossed waiting to feel happy?

Start with small, everyday actions.  Here are some ideas (even for you macho guys):

Practice gratitude.   My fellow Toastmaster, Brett Dupree, had a great quote at our Kirkland Eclectics meeting last week:  “Celebrate the little things in your life, and your life will become one big party. “ So, party on!  Soon you’ll have bigger things to celebrate.

Mantras and positive self talk.  Here’s a great mantra from Fabienne Frederickson of Client Attraction:  “I did not wake up this morning to be mediocre.”  Find a mantra that works for you, write it down and look at it at least twice a day. 

When you catch yourself saying something negative to or about yourself, even inside your head, stop and say something positive instead.  If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, say:  my eyebrows look fabulous today!  Say anything positive you can think of, no matter how trivial it seems.  The key is positive self-talk.

 

Get those endorphins flowing.  Do things that get you moving and lift your mood like walking, yoga, or kickboxing.  Do whatever works for you and whatever you’ll do consistently.

Make the commitment.  If you’ve got a shitty outlook, acknowledge it and take responsibility for creating something better.  It will take persistent and consistent action, but when your mind is in a better place and your outlook is sunnier, you’ll find that your dream partner/job/life begins to come into being.  Embrace and enjoy.  

3 Steps To A Career Makeover

Are you looking for a new job, thinking about looking for a new job, or just want to step it up in your current job?  It may be time for a make over.  Not the kind of makeover where you get a new haircut or buy new clothes.  I’m talking about changing how you present yourself at work. 

To present yourself differently, you need to see yourself differently.  Here are three ways to stand out from the crowd:

First, understand your strengths and structure everything around them. 

If you don’t know your strengths, head to the bookstore right now and buy a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0.  Take the assessment and download the detailed report, which contains some great coaching for how to develop your natural talents.  Then write down three examples from your current or recent jobs where you’ve demonstrated each of your 5 top talent themes.  If you’re having trouble with this, ask your coworkers.

When I first took StrengthsFinder, my top talent theme was ‘strategic.’  I couldn’t see it.  After all, I didn’t have “Strategy” in my job title, and it felt presumptuous to say my top strength was being strategic.  When I asked my staff, they just laughed.  One person said, “Are you kidding?  You get this look on your face, you start waving your hands around, then you fill up a white board, and we have our work for the next two years.”  OK, that sounded strategic. 

The key to personal success is to do more of what you like to do, and we like to do what we’re naturally good at doing.  Think about it.  Wouldn’t you like to be paid well for doing what you love?

To move in this direction, you need to be conscious of your strengths and build around them.  That includes everything from the direction of your career to your daily activities, your resume, and examples you discuss in job interviews and performance reviews. 

Second, understand, acknowledge, and appreciate the value you create.

How do you create value?  Oftentimes, people aren’t conscious of this, like our strengths.  It’s so ingrained that we just take it for granted.  It’s invisible.  We’re focused on what we do because we’re driven by our calendars, to do lists, and the demands of others. 

When you’re in a job that’s an expression of your passion and purpose, you’re very aware of the value you create. Unfortunately not many of us have that kind of job…yet. 

Think back over your work experience and look for themes. Do you consistently:

Increase productivity?

Improve/contribute to teamwork or resolve conflicts?

Streamline a processes or procedures?

Identify needs or problems and initiate solutions?

Save time and money?

Function as an expert?

Make order out of chaos?

Bring people together around a common goal?

Come up with creative ideas? 

Focus on your contribution, not your job responsibilities and tasks.  When you begin to recognize and acknowledge your own value, others will, too.

I had a client who really struggled to see her value.  When I asked what her contribution was to her organization, she said that she keeps people’s spirits up.  She remembers peoples’ birthdays and did the holiday party planning.  Even to her it sounded junior once she said it out loud.  But we dug deeper and saw that she built strong relationships across the organization that resulted in people being willing to go the extra mile to help out with one of her projects if needed.  She went from having a self-image of a junior ‘party girl’ to someone who forged and maintained cross-functional relationships.  This changed her whole view of herself, her job, and her contribution.

Third, be your authentic self.

In a highly competitive job market where there are two or more candidates with the same experience, the person who lets their self come through is more likely to connect with the hiring manager and therefore more likely to get the offer.

Making a connection requires vulnerability.  Dare to put yourself out there with no guarantees.  Risk a connection.  It’s scary!  Do it anyway.

Patricia Fripp, one of the country’s top public speakers said,  “You’re hired more for who you are then what you know.”  She was talking about professional speakers, but I feel this is a truism across the board.

Activity vs Accomplishment

First thing each morning I have a little ritual.  I read the front pages of CNN and People and my Facebook and LinkedIn pages before going to the Seattle Times to read the headlines, then do the crossword puzzle, Jumble, and Sudoku.  After that it’s over to the Seattle P-I to do the Sudoku and crossword puzzle.  Depending on the day of the week (and therefore the degree of difficulty of the puzzles), this can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.  I cozy up in my PJs with the hot cup of coffee and settle in.

When I first started working for myself at home, I actually felt like I had done something after I had gotten through it all.  Doing all those puzzles required brain power, and once they were done I felt a sense of completion and felt I deserved a break.

It took me a few months to figure out that this misplaced focus wasn’t helping build my coaching business.   Different personal practices were needed.  Now I get up, make coffee, read the headlines, do the puzzles, then get dressed, make the bed, and it’s time to start work.  I no longer confuse doing the puzzles with value-added work.

How about you?  Are you super busy, swamped in fact, but not getting anywhere?  The first time I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey I was really struck by the distinction between ‘urgent’ and ‘important.’  I know I wasn’t alone in having missed this important distinction.  And it’s getting harder!  In our current environment of 24/7 email, phone, and instant message full-frontal access, we feel obligated to be plugged in and respond RIGHT NOW to every communique we receive and to even initiate communications just for the sake of communicating because it makes us feel connected and important.

It’s also a bit of an addiction and definitely a way to distract ourselves from doing something new, or challenging.  Like my puzzles.  I could feel like I had accomplished something, but it was really blatant  procrastination – a distraction from doing the really important but scary stuff like  going to networking events, selling, and marketing my coaching services.

I’ll bet a lot of us could be less busy and create more space in our jobs and our lives for the important things – the things that matter most to us – if we stepped back and got clear about the distinction between urgent and important, and better utilized our time by not confusing activity with accomplishment.

Seth Godin had a great post on his blog last December about the worst and most ineffective boss we’ll ever have: ourselves.   Check it out:

Seth Godin - The world's worst boss

One way to dig yourself out of this corner can be summed up in one word:  impact.  What is the impact of your activities on your goals?  My goal is to grow a thriving coaching business that helps people create the life and career of their dreams.  What impact is an hour of doing puzzles having on that goal?  None, zip, zero, nil.  It’s relaxing and gets my mind working in the morning, so I don’t deprive myself, but I also no longer confuse that activity with accomplishment.  I also have a really long To Do list, but I now put that list through the filter of the goals I have for this ‘growing’ stage of my business.  The questions I ask are all about impact not about how quickly I could cross lots of little urgent-ish, but not important things off my list leaving only one or two monster tasks.  It’s those monster tasks that will have the most impact and are therefore the most important.

Try this approach at home or at work if you’re having a hard time creating space for what matters.   If you need help, give me a buzz.

Building Your Winning Team

My friend and former colleague Dave and I were chatting last week about this blog.  I said that it was my weekly rant where I get to write about whatever inspires me over the course of the week.  He said, “staff meeting!”

He was, of course, reminding me of the soapbox I used to climb onto during staff meetings.  There are things I miss about my corporate job like health insurance and a steady salary, but there are definitely things I don’t miss including form-over-function processes and the bureaucrats who love them.

What I miss most, however, is my team.  I had the privilege of working with so many great people over the course of my career.  But my last team at Washington Mutual was special.  We were running a program to reduce deposit fraud and then supporting the handover to Chase, but I would have worked on anything with these people.

In 2008 I bought my team and a few coworkers copies of StrengthsFinder 2.0, and we shared our results citing examples for each other of how we saw these talents and strengths demonstrated through our activities. 

Having our individual strengths reflected back to us was enlightening, but what really struck all of us was when we mapped out our strengths because they corresponded to the various phases of a project.  If you needed help designing a solution, who better than Dave and Sheree with their strengths themes of Ideation, Analytical, and Intellection.  No one is better at pulling a team together and executing a complex project than Josh who has strengths themes of Communication, Arranger, and Maximizer.  And if we needed to tune into peoples’ needs and boost morale, we could always count on Stacie for Harmony, Positivity, and Empathy.  My strengths of Strategic, Activator and Relator pulled it all together. Through this process we learned how to leverage our teammates for support on activities that were part of our jobs, but not a strength. 

It’s been about 18 months since I started working on my own at home.  It’s a dream come true, but it has been a huge adjustment.  The core lesson I’ve learned is that I have to build a new team that can help me out where I need it.  For me this still corresponds to solution design, execution and morale. I’ve hired coaches, joined networking groups, and reached out to make new friends. I also have a loose-knit advisory group including former colleagues and friends who I can call on to review marketing copy, pilot new coaching programs that I’ve come up with, and generally provide feedback where I’m too close to the action to be objective. 

I’ve always been independent feeling like I can do just about anything on my own.  I’m therefore doubly grateful for the hard lesson I learned from being a manager which is that you have to foster relationships to be successful.  As humans, we’re hardwired to form communities.  It’s been a key to survival since time immemorial.

How about you?  Who is in your community and on your team?  Have you built a strong support structure that will help you accomplish your goals and dreams?  Do you ask for the support you need or are you stubbornly trying to go it alone?  Many of us are only too happy to be supportive of other people, but we hesitate to ask for the help we need.  It makes us feel vulnerable, weak, dumb, needy.

When you get really serious about accomplishing something, get serious about building the support structure to get you there.  It might require you to swallow your pride and spend some money, but hold your head up and do what you have to do to create success for yourself.

Start with making sure you have support for the idea/planning phase, execution/getting it done, and keeping up your morale.  The more specific about what you want to accomplish, the easier it will be to determine what resources you need, what to ask for and how to ask in a way that makes it easy for people to say yes. Of course, having a coach is a proven success strategy, and I’d love to be part of your team (pam.norton@transitionsparkcoaching.com).

3 Ways to Tap Into Your Creativity

You need to come up with a solution, find a new angle, figure out what to do next, but nothing’s coming.  Your mind is blank. Or it’s so full of conflicting thoughts that you can’t find a thread to follow.  You take out a pen and start to map it out, but instead of drawing a picture, you’re scrawling back and forth until all you have is a blotch. You’re frustrated and all clenched up.  Here are 3 simple ways to unclench and move forward.

Find your flow.  You do this by letting go. The harder you try, the tighter you clench, and the tighter you clench the more frustrated you become.  It’s a vicious cycle.  The solution is to break that cycle.  Just walk away and go do something else.  Exercise is great for this.  Take a walk or do some yoga.  For me, I get on an elliptical trainer, plug in my favorite workout mix and get lost in the music.  After about 15 minutes, my mind starts to relax, and my creativity comes through.  By the time I’m done, I have so many great thoughts.  I had to buy a little digital voice recorder to get them all out of my head so I wouldn’t lose them.  Go with the flow.

Trust in the power of the group.  This was one of my favorite pieces of advice to the project managers on my team.  Groups have tremendous creative powers and can come up with solutions and ideas that you, working alone, cannot.  Napoleon Hill wrote the seminal work on this topic  Think and Grow Rich.  Don’t have access to a group?  Even with as few as 2 people working together, the engagement creates a third mind, a mastermind.  A best friend, business partner, mentor, manager, or coach (like me!) is a great place to start.  The give and take of a group will leapfrog you out of your current environment and take you someplace you would never have thought of on your own.

One great group activity is brainstorming.  Sometimes when I’m brainstorming with a client who’s stuck, they spend time trying to shoot down every idea.  That’s a huge no-no.  In brainstorming most ideas aren’t workable, but that’s not the point.  The purpose of brainstorming is to open your mind – to get you out of your own way and expand your thinking.  While a specific idea may not be it oftentimes the answer lies in a derivative of an idea, or a combination of ideas that provides the inspiration for a new way of looking at something. 

Beware of the negative.  When I ask clients what they want to accomplish or where they’d like to take their life, they typically start with a long list of what they don’t want, and that list is always relative to what they have today.  It’s like they’re clinging to the side of a swimming pool afraid to let go and swim out to the deep end.  What if what you really want has nothing to do with what you have today?  How can you possibly hear your inner voice if you won’t let go?  Take all the energy you’re spending hating your current situation and channel it into getting in touch with the voice of your inspiration – your inner Dreamer.  Let yourself want something even if you don’t know right now how you’re going to get it. You have to start somewhere.  Start with what you want.

Oftentimes when I’m coaching my radar sounds an alarm:  does this person really want to move forward?  Are they ready, or do they just want someone to validate their current position?  Funny thing about coaches – we don’t validate the status quo, especially if you’re stuck.  We’re all about forward movement and change.  You came to us for a reason.

Last week I was in the Bay Area attending a course with Dream University learning a powerful ten step process for tapping into your inspiration and realizing your dreams. Contact me for a free consultation when you’re ready to get unstuck and build your life around your dreams. (pnorton93@comcast.net)

Risk Management

During my last two years at Washington Mutual Bank I worked in the Risk Management group heading up a program to reduce deposit fraud.  Fraud is fascinating and scary!  One of the keys to our success was balancing the bank’s sales and service goals with the changes we were implementing to make us a less attractive target.  It was a tricky balance that took a strong partnership across multiple business functions.  

Good risk management doesn’t equate to zero risk.  The best risk management functions embrace the business objectives and collaborate in designing strategies to support those objectives in a manner that minimizes or mitigates risk.

How are you doing as Chief Risk Officer of Your Life, Inc.?  Are you managing the balance between your objectives and risk or are you too risk averse?

People seem to fall into two categories:  those who define themselves by their successes and those who define themselves by their failures.  When we have a setback we tend to ask, what went wrong? When things don’t turn out as planned, we often stop whatever we’re trying to do and shy away from going down that road again – there’s just too much risk as evidenced by firsthand experience. 

But people who are pursing their dreams and have a track record of success will ask, what could I have done differently, what did I learn, and what role did I play in how things turned out?  They then take those learnings and either walk away or make adjustments to reduce the risk of repeating the setback.  Seth Godin wrote a great little book on deciding when to walk away called The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). 

So, CRO of Your Life, Inc., thinking back on 2010, what were your successes over the past year and what were your failures?  Draw a line and put success at one end and failure at the other and list them out.  I know failure seems like a strong word – think of it as things that didn’t turn out and things you walked away from - non-successes.  

Then look at the middle.  That’s where the goals not met often reside, the dreams not pursued, the abyss that creates a ho-hum life.  It might be the zone of work in progress, but it’s usually the zone of inaction or not enough action.  As the economy continues to create challenges, we don’t want failures so we forego creating success.  Things just sit in the middle until they die on the vine.

Now put on the CEO hat of Your Life, Inc. and think ahead.  What do you want in 2011?  Are you willing to dare to dream, take a risk and try for success knowing that a setback could occur?  Is your Chief Risk Officer on board collaborating to develop strategies that will support your objectives while appropriately managing the risk? Or is your CRO sabotaging your success?

I have a client who desperately wants a different life, but she is frozen in place by fear.  She’s afraid that she won’t be able to have what she really wants for her life and won’t even let herself dream.  She’s afraid she’ll get laid off and not have enough money to live, so she stays in a job she doesn’t like which is sapping her confidence.  This pile-up of fears combined with low self-esteem is so strong that she needs to feel safe and be comforted.  Guess what she does to comfort herself?  Shopping – resulting in credit card debt which is one of the factors feeding her fears keeping her penned into her current situation. 

Why do we do this to ourselves?  She’s not alone.  How many of us engage in self-sabotaging behaviors every day to help us feel safe and keep us on familiar ground?  We desperately want a different life but are unwilling to make foundational changes in thinking and actions that would create change and move us to where we want to go.  Our Chief Risk Officer (and Chief Financial Officer in my client’s case) need to get on board!

What about you?  Are you foregoing your own dreams by being unwilling to go for success?  By being unwilling to challenge and change the limiting beliefs and behaviors which keep you tied to your current situation?  Give me a call when you’re ready to have a talk with your Risk Mangement department and get them on board with supporting your dreams.

Rethink Time Management

Do you often feel there aren’t enough hours in the day between the demands of work and your family and other commitments?  If you find yourself saying yes, expand your thinking about traditional time management and try a different approach next time you’re feeling overwhelmed.


Not having enough time is a challenge that I hear all the time.  Many of us juggle work and family and often get to the point of asking:  when do I get time for me, for my hobbies, and my dreams?  Many people are just in survival mode trying to make it through another day or until the weekend.


Cell phones, email, instant messaging, texting.  There’s a growing expectation that we’ll be instantly available to anyone who wants to get in touch with us at any time.  These constant interruptions and demands on our time are exhausting.  We’re also challenged at work with having to get more done with fewer resources due to budget cuts and layoffs. Carreerbuilder.com found that 78% of the people they surveyed say they’re on the verge of burnout.

In one respect, we’re all the same.  We all have exactly 24 hours in every day.  So why do some people make better use of their time?   Do they have a better tool?  Traditional time management tools can help us schedule our time and prioritize our tasks, but finding new ways to slice and dice time is not always the answer.  What else can help? 

Manage your Energy.  Unlike time, which is finite, you can increase your energy. 

You might be thinking, oh, I’ve heard that before.  Become more physically fit so I can have the stamina to cram more into my day.  When people think about energy, the first thing that comes to mind is physical energy.  But, there are other forms of energy which are just as important.  In fact they’re all interconnected.  Begin to increase one type of energy, and it will carry over into the other areas.

Mental energy engages your mind.  It brings focus.  There are a number of practices that can increase your mental energy such as clearing away clutter and eliminating multi-tasking, which I call activity clutter.  It’s anti-focus. There’s also a strong correlation between physical and mental energy.  If I eat something sugary for breakfast my mind gets fuzzy, and it can take hours for me to be able to focus.  On the other hand, after I get back from a morning walk, my mind is racing with creative thoughts.

Emotional energy is charged or drained by your relationships with others and with yourself.  Do you know an energy vampire?  Hopefully it’s not someone in your family or your boss.  Limit exposure or eliminate these people from your life.  That’s easier said than done because sometimes that energy vampire is you.  I asked a client:  what does your inner voice say to you?  He replied, it says I’m shit.  Yikes! Once he started to practice more positive self-talk, his emotional energy improved which enabled him to make other changes.

Perhaps the most powerful energy is spiritual or purpose energy.  Not religious, but being strongly connected to your purpose, values and passions.  An energy deficit here is often the source of feeling disconnected.  When I get a new coaching client I ask them to make a list of 10 things that make them happy and 10 things that give them pleasure.  This can be very challenging for some people because they’re so out of touch with even this level of connection.

Where to start?  Start working with whatever form of energy you most identify with.  It really doesn’t matter as long as you do start.  You’ll create a ripple effect and other forms of energy will begin to increase.  Once you make some headway, you’ll find that you’ll be making better choices and therefore making better use of the finite amount of time you have every day. 

If you’d like to read more on this and be inspired by some great examples, here are two book recommendations:

This is a quick read on the power of creating positive energy.

The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy
This is a great book with lots of examples of changes to make to increase physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energy.
The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
Call me when you're ready to tackle those energy drains so you can have the time and energy to be your best.

Prosperity Meter

A couple of weeks ago my friend, Gary Schmidt, forwarded me an entry from the Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online (http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com/)  This is a great blog – check it out!  Here’s an extract from that entry:

Keith Cameron Smith explains in  The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class that millionaires think long-term, while everyone else thinks short-term. He breaks society down into five groups, and explains how each group thinks:

1.       The very poor think day to day.

2.       Poor people think week to week.

3.       The middle class thinks month to month.

4.       The rich think year to year.

5.       The very rich think decade to decade.

The very poor and the poor seek to survive; the middle class seeks comfort; and the rich and the very rich seek freedom.

The author adds that the middle class wants instant gratification: whatever they want, they charge it on their credit card or make a down payment with the intent of paying out the balance later on. After all, they’re focused on comfort. The rich put freedom ahead of gratifying immediate wants. It’s this long-term thinking that allows them to pull ahead.

The author was referencing financial wealth, but what about other types of wealth?  After all, money isn’t everything.  What about health wealth?  Or career wealth?  Can you think of ways to apply these same concepts to those important dimensions of your life?

It’s easy to see how this prosperity meter applies to health.  When my Dad was in the hospital he was on life support for the final three weeks.  It was truly day-to-day survival for him until the end.  Very, very poor health.  I acknowledge that I’m instant gratification girl when it comes to my daily diet and exercise habits.  I don’t have any serious issues other than being out of shape and too heavy – at least not yet.  But when I read the Abundance blog entry, it hit me:  I’m living on borrowed time. I need to get a grip on this aspect of my life before I slip down a notch on the meter.  I need to start adopting the behaviors of someone who is rich in health, putting off my immediate wants (pizza, ice cream, and a nap...) for long-term benefits.

What about your career wealth?  Over the past month or so I’ve spoken with multiple clients who were so burned out by their jobs they were struggling to get themselves to go to work the next day.  It was a struggle just to make it through the week until the weekend.  Many other people I know have jobs they don’t enjoy, jobs that don’t challenge them or enable them to utilize the best of themselves.  They’ve gotten comfortable with just showing up, and then they stay in those jobs year after year because of that comfort and the money.  People with rich careers have annual goals they’re working on.  They're pushing themselves and taking risks to get that next promotion or start their own business.  The truly career wealthy have a multi-year career plan.

What about you?  How many aspects of your life can you apply this framework to, and where do you fall on the meter?  Regardless of the answer, what steps can you take to begin the process of moving up a notch towards wealth whether it’s financial, health, career or any other dimension.

New Beginnings

October 30 is an important day in my life.  It was 14 years ago today that my Dad died, and it was one year ago today that I walked out of the office and said goodbye to my job at Washington Mutual after 10 years.  On this one day I allow myself to wallow in sadness remembering loved ones and dear friends who I miss so much.

But with each ending has come a new beginning.  An essential part of every hero’s journey is the loss of a mentor, someone who provided guidance and made the hero feel safe.  For Harry Potter it was Dumbledore, and for Luke Skywalker it was the loss of Obi Wan.  Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) lost just about everything in Africa – her health, her money, the love of her life.  She then moved back to her family in Denmark and became one of literature’s most beloved writers.

Loss is a sad but essential step on anyone’s journey, and it doesn’t have to be a death to qualify as a loss.  But through loss the hero is forced to tap into all they’ve learned, to stand on their own and come into their true potential.  Grieving is important, but even more important is how you create a new beginning from your loss.  What will you chose? 

One experience I’ve chosen many times in my career is going to work for a new company taking a job that at a lower level job than what I had left.  When I got laid off as International Product Development Manager at First Interstate Bank in 1991 I moved back to Seattle, played around with running a dress shop, worked for a year as a contractor in a bank that got bought, then got a job with a software company as a temp secretary.  Getting any job in a new industry was interesting and challenging for me.  Also, my self-confidence was not high, so I didn’t think I’d qualify for anything more senior.  After a year I moved up the ranks to project manager, and then after couple of years I got re-org’d to managing product localization, which was an orphan function in a company that wanted to grow international revenues.  I did that job so well that management decided to make localization an integral part of the software development process, and the need for a separate department was gone as was my job.  So I got a job with one of the localization vendors as a sales person.  I had never done sales before so I was back to square one. I sucked at sales! But I applaud myself for being willing to go back to being a beginner – like when I took up ballroom dancing at the age of 39.  I love that about me!

Now, after leaving the corporate environment I’m a beginner again.  Learning to work for myself without an existing structure of goals and processes (and financing) has been a challenge, but I’m learning loads every day from my clients and my experiences.

If you find yourself reeling from a loss and therefore on the threshold of a new beginning (even if you can’t see it yet), you have an exciting, enlightening, and kinda scary time ahead.  Here are two things to keep in mind:

• Give yourself credit for capabilities and knowledge you’ve accumulated that can be put to use in any situation. Try to ‘unbrand’ your experience.  You may have a background in one industry or one type of situation, but think of your experience in generic terms.  In fact, don’t limit your experience gained on the job just to other job situations.  Think of your life as a whole.
• Develop a ‘beginner’s mind.’  If you’re feeling insecure about being a newbie, rather than trying to fake it, have an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions.  You'll learn faster.  One famous saying is:  In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.   

Hiring a coach is a great way to get support, new perspectives, and an accountability buddy.  I know you can do it, and I’d love to partner with you on this stage of your journey – I’ve been there. 

Lessons from Yoga

Just before I turned 30, I starting feeling aches and pains that I had never felt before.  So for my birthday while visiting family in Seattle I bought my first yoga book, Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class. Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class (Second Edtion)I read the entire book on the plane back to LA, and I remember that first day of practice, spreading the book out on the floor in my living room.  I practiced yoga every day after work and on the weekends for the next few months, and the changes were phenomenal. 

I looked different, I felt different, and the way I moved was different.  It surpassed my wildest dreams, but for some unknown reason, once I reached a certain level, my practice began to dwindle to the point where I haven’t practiced for years.  It’s a classic example of knowing intellectually what to do, but not doing it - kind of like reading a magazine about healthy eating while having a burger and fries at Red Robin. (Guilty!)

As I approach my birthday 25 years later I’m resolving to get back to my yoga practice.  In preparation I’m rereading my well worn book, and I’m reminded of two key lessons I’ve applied for many years to other areas of my life. 

First is the concept of ‘perfect.’  What does ‘perfect’ mean to you?  For many it means attaining the ideal that implies comparison with others, being better than anyone or anything, flawless appearance, flawless performance, flawless.   The meaning I learned and have used in my life is “perfect is the best you can do that day.”  It’s not a comparison to anyone but yourself, and it’s not a comparison with yesterday or tomorrow. This lesson is all about releasing attachment to the outcome and focusing on the effort in the now.  It runs counter to many methods by which we’re managed or manage ourselves like: focus on results, bottom line compensation, sales quotas, pounds lost, training time, etc.  These might be great progress measures, but you can’t control every factor, you can only control yourself, and every day is different.

We all know when we haven’t done our best, so acknowledge when that’s the case. But if you did your best with all your heart, it’s perfect.  Be open to the learnings that come with any experience and incorporate them into your future efforts, and you’ll progress from there.

The second lesson is that you will only make progress if you push past the boundary of discomfort.  You don’t have to go to the point of pain, in fact that’s dangerous and risky.  Just go slowly, feel when you start to get uncomfortable and then stretch a little more.  If you’re consistent and give it your all, that discomfort point will move further away.

To grow my coaching business, I need to get out in front of people and start giving speeches.  I know this, and I’ve written a few speeches that got good reviews from friendly readers.  But standing up in front of a room full of strangers and giving a 20 minute talk scares me.  I’ve reached my discomfort point, and pushing past it feels very risky. So I joined Toastmasters to help me develop skills and confidence. 

I gave my first speech last night, and it went great!  I won the grammarian award for best use of language, and I tied for best speech.  But more importantly I got valuable experience.  I tend to get overexcited in front of a group and talk nonstop really fast.  In fact, I didn’t even pause when the audience laughed, and by the end of the 5 minute speech I was gasping for breath.  It seems I had forgotten to inhale.  Many fellow Toastmasters told me they did exactly the same thing, and they gave me great tips and feedback.  Now I’m looking forward to giving my next talk, and I’m confident that soon I’ll muster up the courage to get myself booked to speak in front of an audience of strangers.  I’ve found my point of discomfort and I’m stretching past it, which feels perfect.

Knowing is not the same as doing, and getting support for pushing past your discomfort are two great reasons people hire a coach.  If you find yourself in a similar situation let’s set up an introductory coaching session - I know what you're going through. 

We're All Teachers

When I was 18 my mother took me to have my astrological chart done.  The astrologer told me two things:  don’t get married for another 3 years because the element of change will be in my marriage house, and that I was destined to be a teacher.  Being 18, I rejected both.  The marriage 3 months later and subsequent divorce is a closed book, but I’ve often thought about the teacher prophecy.  At the time, the only image I could envision was being a school teacher, a noble profession (just ask my older brother), but not one that called to me. 

However, over the years I’ve learned that being a school teacher isn’t the only path to teaching.  In fact, I believe we’re all teachers in many ways.  Some of us have the title of teacher or trainer and make a living imparting knowledge to others.  Some of us teach and inspire through example (good and bad), and some of us are mentors at work or as volunteers.  Parenting, for better or worse, is a great example of teaching every day; and one of my favorite Dr. Phil-isms is that we teach others how to treat us through our actions and boundaries.

Unlike high school algebra, the lessons we teach either consciously or unconsciously are like the gifts that keep on giving; they can have an impact today and continue for many years – hopefully in a good way. 

I have a former boss and friend, Jennifer, who has a strong bias for action. Being a hardcore procrastinator, it was a real eye opener for me.  My first response to most things is to put it on my To Do list, especially if it’s something new or unfamiliar.  I need to think about it, prioritize it, figure it out, put it off and secretly hope it will go away.  But it usually just turns into a crisis, so not only am I unproductive, I’m stressed!  Then I got hired by Jennifer.  Her first response is always:  let’s take care of that right now.  She’d then just pick up the phone, call someone, and deal with it.  Over the years I learned from and channeled this behavior at work in my corporate environment, and it created an impression that I was a ‘get it done’ girl. Having embarked on a new career path, I’m now finding that just about everything is new, and I’ve fallen into my comfortable procrastinator mode.  Old habits die hard.  I’m less productive than I’d like to be and more than a little stressed about it.  So I’m going back to that lesson I learned ten years ago.  Thank you, Jennifer!

So how do you teach?  And what do you teach?  Do you lead by example, and is that example good or not-so-good?  Are you generous with your expertise?  Do you contribute the best of yourself to the world around you, and do you inspire others to be their best?  Or are you sometimes a cautionary tale?  Do you walk around with a bad attitude and hair trigger temper?  Griping, complaining, gossiping?  What lessons are you teaching and how might these lessons influence and inspire people today and over the years?  And just as important, what are you learning and how are you using those learnings?

As a coach, my way of teaching is to support others in discovering and appreciating the knowledge and truths that lay within themselves. I’ve finally come to realize that the astrologer’s prophecy has come to pass. 

Think about how you can bring your inner teacher and inner student to the surface each day.  Be generous with your knowledge and experience (without being a know-it-all), be conscious of your impact, and at the same time be inspired by others and be open to learning and growing.