meaning

Sabbatical Out Loud: Working on Vision and Anger

Our vision is actionable only if we share itIn the spirit of #WOLWeek – Working Out Loud Week – and feeling kicked in the butt inspired by the above quote from Simon Sinek, here are two things I’m working on.

1. My next job

The biggest project for my sabbatical is: figure out what work I want to do. I want a really clear vision that I can work towards and use as a touchstone. What will I truly enjoy doing? What can I feel connected to? What is important? What’s a good use of my time? Where and how can I use my gifts? How can I provide value? After bumping around with these questions for a while – reading online, reading books, talking to people, journaling, day dreaming – I’m finally seeing some themes that feel right to me. They include:

  • Relationship, connection, caring about people. My gift is to help people feel seen, valued, liked, and supported. This gift is also my drive. I can’t NOT do it.
  • “Delighting the customer” as a core business value.
  • Putting employees first as a core value – valuing, celebrating, supporting.
  • Humanizing work / the workplace / business. “Humanize” isn’t my favorite word. I was sad to read that “being human” is becoming a buzzphrase (i.e., stripped of impact), just like I was sad when authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency became buzzwords. But I suppose the good news is that more people are becoming interested in relationships, connection, and treating each other as people, not as robots or productivity resources.
  • Who says you can’t express love at work? OK, a lot of people have said that. But a shift has started. Here’s a whole list of companies that are making the shift.

I feel like I’m gathering ingredients for a stew, simmering them, stirring. I don’t know yet where these themes are leading or what the result will look like. Do I go work for a company, become a consultant, create something new? We’ll see!

2. Anger management

I’ve known for a long time that I have an anger pattern. (My poor mom and husband are nodding.) When the going gets tough, uncomfortable, scary, or frustrating, I get mad. This comes up in so many areas of my life, personal and professional. I get mad, and then fight-or-flight kicks in. I either come out swinging, or I have an urge to run away to avoid fighting. Geez, no wonder I’m so tired and grouchy so much of the time!

My trusty therapist told me that anger is a cover-up for other feelings. When I get mad, I can use it as a signal to stop and check: What am I really feeling underneath? With that awareness, how do I want to proceed? I’m going to experiment with using TAGteach to shift the anger pattern and create a different behavior.

  • Current behavior: Get triggered, get mad, stay mad, and react from there.
  • Desired behavior: I want to be calm, curious, relaxed, and open.

I haven’t created tag points for myself before. I wonder if this will work. A tag point is the desired behavior. “Don’t get triggered” or “don’t get mad” are not good behavior change goals, and they aren’t tag points. Triggered and mad are gonna happen. I think my tag point is “relax”. Notice myself feeling angry, choose relaxation. (And then click / reward / treat. Mustn’t forget to celebrate!)

Why am I working on this? I think it will be useful for me in so many situations:

  • When I’m faced with differing opinions and (feel like I) have to convince someone. Those interactions can quickly feel like a fight to me, rather than a conversation.
  • When I feel frustrated. Triggers: Unmet expectations, mis-understandings, disappointment, lack of clarity.
  • When I feel impatient. Which is often! (aaack!)
  • When I feel hopeless. “This will never work / change / go anywhere / matter anyway.”

My hope is to shift the anger and channel the energy for good, not for grouchiness. I see how my fight-or-flight problem has sent me running away from so many things. Or worse, not trying at all. That’s not who I want to be.

Wrap-up

I’m working on:

  1. Creating my vision for the work I want to do. It will be related to helping people feel seen, valued, liked, supported, and well-served.
  2. Shifting my hair-trigger anger pattern.

Why I’m sharing:

“Our vision is actionable only if we share it.” This is a step for me to take action. I’m reminded of AC4P – Actively Caring for People – and what their mission stands for: Caring about people, and showing it via action. Caring is not enough; you actually have to do something. Working out loud helps me along the path to doing something.

How you can help, if you’re so moved:

  • Ask me questions
  • Offer suggestions or ideas
  • Tell me about stories that may have come up for you as you read this post

… or leave me a comment with other help that I should have asked for, but didn’t think of. 🙂

——
Mentor credits (mentoring via me stalking them):

Learning from the Red Bull… Tom Peters style

tom-peters

I love this interview from Tom Peters. I’ve spent most of my sabbatical reading, so it sure feels nice to get Tom’s stamp of approval on that! 😉

Feel free to click through and read the interview for yourself. If you’d like the summary version, here are some of my favorite sound bytes:

“beating the drum for personal meaning and significance… it’s not about accumulating wealth or getting promoted to the top”

During my time off, I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring what is meaningful to me, and discovering the importance of my “I want” power (a la The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal).

“If you’re a leader, your whole reason for living is to help human beings develop—to really develop people and make work a place that’s energetic and exciting and a growth opportunity, whether you’re running a Housekeeping Department or Google… if you don’t get off on [helping people], do the world a favor and get the hell out before dawn”

Such a great sentiment. The best managers I had fall into this camp. People, development, and relationships first. Addressing performance and meeting milestones are more meaningful within the context of caring management.

“any idiot with a high IQ can invent a great strategy. What’s really hard is fighting against the unwashed masses and pulling it off—although there’s nothing stupider than saying change is about overcoming resistance. Change is about recruiting allies and working each other up to have the nerve to try the next experiment…

You bring [about change] one person at a time, face to face—when we discover we have some common interests and we’re both pissed off, say, at too many CEOs who talk about charts and boxes. And so we create a conspiracy. It’s a subversive act, and being coconspirators in a subversive act requires trust and intimacy.”

BOOM – there it is. As I always say, business is personal. Relationship, allies, like-minded people, trust, and intimacy. You don’t get to these places without getting personal: sharing of yourself and being open and interested in others.

“We tend to confuse 5 percent of leading-edge companies with the entire economy. And that’s a real problem. It’s also important to recognize that there’s Silicon Valley and then there’s ROP, Rest of Planet. The fact that Google and Facebook might be doing this or that particular thing is interesting, but they don’t exactly employ all four billion of the working people in the world.”

Great perspective and reminder. Living in the footprint of Silicon Valley, looking at what the tech giants and the startups are doing, it’s so easy to forget about ROP, the rest of the normal people out there, and how we can be serving the wider population.

“[per] former US labor secretary Bob Reich… put more women in management. They know how to do a work-around. Men don’t know how to do work-arounds… The male response is, “I can’t do anything about it ’cause my boss is really against it.” And the female response, by and large, would be, “Well, I know Jane who knows Bob who knows Dick, and we can get this thing done.” They do it circuitously.”

Wow. Good on ya, Robert Reich and Tom Peters! Women have had to work harder to get things done. We work around the systemic obstacles. We rely on connection and relationship to move work forward.

Where does relationship and getting personal fall in your work and leadership priorities?

Image credit: tompeters.com