Work – Encouragement is Personal

Aggressive Confusion

What happens when someone leads with their confusion?

It’s easy to be confused.

To be unclear about new information.

To ask for more explanations.

To need more practice.

But what happens when someone leads with their confusion, defending themselves behind a shield of doubt and uncertainty?

What if they wield their confusion like a weapon, merely to strengthen their grip on the status quo?

Is their objective to understand an idea or to avoid any responsibility for it?

Exploration (of anything) is a journey into the unknown and unexpected. It can be overwhelming, even confusing. It should be. Finding our way through the confusion is how we grow.

We make the choices:

Will we decide to push through our confusion?
Will we put in the effort to find new clarity?
Will we choose to grow?

Or, do we prefer to hide in our comfortable bubble of confusion?

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Serve others first…

Tim Ferriss asks a question of most of his podcast guests:

“If you had a billboard that millions of people would see every day, what would you put on that billboard?”

Tim’s guests have given answers ranging from the comedic to the serious. Some have talked about a cause that is their passion, or an inspirational passage they’d like people to see.

Each time I hear the question, I come up with the same three words:

Serve others first.

Serving others first means:

taking others’ needs and desires into account before our own
looking out for their best interest first
our decisions are more thoroughly considered because we’ll be taking time to think about how our decisions impact others
trying to make someone else’s job easier and more rewarding
showing someone gratitude for the work they’re doing
minding our manners (as my mom used to say when I was a kid)
listening to, and respecting others (even if we disagree with them)
looking for ways to improve a situation rather than making things worse
being the first to forgive.

It’s easy to focus on our own interests and challenges first. It’s easy to think everything happening in the world is directed toward us, personally. This “me first” mindset is hard-wired into our DNA…our DNA is selfish about 99.99% of the time.

The tougher path?

It’s the one that leads to serving others first. It goes against our wiring, which takes significant effort.

None of us will be perfect on this path. We’ll stumble, and we may even wander a bit. But, we can be a blessing for others along our journey, and that’s what we should be seeking.

The good news is that following this path gets easier with practice.

Photo by Adrià Crehuet Cano on Unsplash

The Reasons We Quit…

A post about authority and responsibility…

Are usually not the real reasons.

Sure, we’ll have our story about how someone or something created the untenable situation that pushed us to quit.

We can talk about how continuing would have been a waste of our time and energy.

We can even describe how the emotional toll was so great that we needed to make the change before some type of permanent damage occurred.

All these reasons contain elements of truth. But, not the whole truth.

The whole truth lies in the balance of authority and responsibility.

Authority and responsibility live on opposite sides of life’s biggest equation. When we perceive that the authority we have matches up with the responsibility we’re carrying, we feel balanced. Satisfied.

But, get them out of whack, and our dissatisfaction begins to climb. Left unattended, the dissatisfaction we feel (subconsciously at first) will begin to overtake our patience. The cascade toward departure begins.

A world where we have ultimate authority and no responsibility would be nice. The “power” to do whatever we want without any ownership of the outcomes. Of course, this is a fantasy world.

Having authority over anything means having responsibility.

The key is the balance.

So, back to the quit or don’t quit decision:

If we stay the course, we’ll be forced to take ownership. We’ll need to assume authority and expend a ton of emotional energy. We can’t blame the “other.” When we decide not to quit, we’re deciding that it’s okay to be responsible for making the situation a success (however that gets defined in our heads).

Quitting is the easy way out of this “authority-responsibility” conundrum. It requires a lot less energy and eliminates our risk of failure. It doesn’t matter that the act of quitting may be an admission of failure in the first place. That’s just a sunk cost. The key is how much emotional energy we’ll have to expend in the future.

Why does any of this matter? We aren’t planning to quit any time soon. It’s not in our nature.

True, but what about everyone around you? What about the people who report to you? What about your teammates? What about your friends?

It turns out they’re working through this same authority-responsibility equation in their own lives.

And guess who has both the authority and responsibility to help them with balancing their equation.

You.

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

The Power of Graduality

What future do you want for yourself?

Most things happen gradually.

A roof appears on a newly-constructed home only after the gradual process of building the foundation and walls first.

A child “suddenly” learns to walk only after they’ve gradually learned how to roll over, sit up, military crawl, real crawl, stand next to furniture, and finally take their first awkward steps.

A pitcher makes it to “the show” after working nearly every day of his life.

That amazing motivational speaker you saw this morning got amazing by speaking to hundreds of audiences over the past five years. Truth be told, she probably wasn’t amazing five years ago, but now she is.

The raging river you’re rafting down began its journey as a few drops of melted snow and built from there.

That guy in the gym who knocks out 50 pushups between weightlifting sets got there by doing one pushup at a time, thousands of times…when nobody was watching.

Even when we see the results of graduality all around us, it’s easy to miss.

Make no mistake. Graduality is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

But it carries a price few are willing to pay: self-discipline and self-belief. The discipline to work tirelessly, and the undying belief that you’re doing the right thing.

What future do you want for yourself?

Do you believe in that future? Do you have the discipline to work for it every day? If so, the power of graduality is there for you.

The good news is that when you harness graduality the right way, your destination becomes much less important than the journey itself.

“Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.” –Lou Holtz

Personal note: Something I’ve worked on gradually for nearly six years is writing blog posts like this one. This is my 220th post. While I’m proud of this achievement, I enjoy the journey of writing them much more than the realization that I’ve amassed so many.

I’d love to hear what you’re gradually working to achieve. Let me know in the comments.

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash