Author Archives: Sherri

Give More Than 50%

Many years ago, I heard some relationship advice that stuck with me.  The advice was simple:  Always try to give more than 50% in any relationship.  I took that to mean that if both people tried to give more than 50%, there was a good chance you’d end up pretty even.  And if both people felt that the relationship was “even” then it had a better chance of succeeding.  I tried hard to put this into practice, particularly in romantic relationships.  I found it wholly unhelpful, though.  Be it a romantic relationship, a friendship, a work relationship, whatever, I found that if I consistently worked to give more than 50% then I started feeling resentful.  I was waiting for the kind of reciprocation I expected and I was often disappointed.

My “aha” moment came only over the last few years.  I finally realized the true meaning behind that advice:  Always try to give more than 50% in relationships because there are always things the other person does that you just don’t notice.  The goal, then, is not so much about doing more; it’s about noticing more.

Before Trish and I moved in together, I had been living alone for 10 years.  She had been living on her own for at least that long.  When you live on your own for an extended period, you quickly internalize that if anything is going to get done, you need to do it yourself.  Once we were in the same house permanently, I began to notice little things.  I’d go to empty the bathroom trash can and it would already be empty.  I’d go to scoop the cats’ litter boxes and they’d be clean.  I’d go to unstack the dishwasher and the dishes would have been put away.  Maybe not where I would put them, but put away nonetheless.  It started to become a bit of a competition in my head:  dang it!  She got to the trash before me AGAIN!  I started to get a little worried:  Does she feel that I’m not pulling my weight?  I don’t want Trish to get resentful toward me the way I’ve been resentful toward others in the past.

When I first moved in, I would walk by anything that Trish put on the stairway to upstairs.  She put it there, I figured, so she’d do something with it.  Finally, she calmly (but with an edge in her voice) said, “If something is on the steps, please take it upstairs.  If you don’t know where it’s supposed to go, put in on the couch in the office.”  So noted.  Similarly, we’ve established that I hate talking on the phone, particularly to people I don’t know.  So, when a call needs to be made, it’s usually Trish who makes it.  While this has been a consistent source of strain, she kind of accepts it.  She reads my body language and picks up the phone.  I will occasionally “make the call” during a time of duress, but I typically save it for when heroics are required.  And there are so many little things that one or the other of us just does, like the trash and the litter boxes and putting things back in the fridge or taking Costco purchases down to the basement. 

Like most couples, we’ve worked our way through a reasonable division of labor.  She gets enjoyment out of working the yard, so that’s HER thing.  I guess I should put “enjoyment” in quotes because there is often crankiness, exhaustion, and (this being Trish) a bit of blood, but anytime I suggest we hire a yard service I get a bit of side eye and, “I like doing it.”  Well, ok, then.  Similarly, I like doing the laundry.  More specifically, I prefer the way I do laundry to the way Trish does laundry.  Instead of trying to push “my” way on her, I just take responsibility for it.  Those things can be easily negotiated, yet once they are worked out, it’s still important to NOTICE when they get done.  There are a lot of “thank you”s flying around this house, not out of a sense of obligation or a recognition of extraordinary effort or even being overly polite.  It’s because we both notice when the other does something.  As I noted above, when you’ve had to do it all for so many years, you really notice even the little things.  The added benefit is that I’ve gotten incrementally better at resisting procrastination.  I don’t want to put off doing something that I see needs doing in case she beats me to the punch.

Gift giving is another area where you can tell how much attention someone pays to others.  Trish is a great gift giver.  I was stunned those first few years when I opened gifts that were just, well, perfect.  “How did you know?” I’d ask.  “I paid attention,” she replied.  Conversely, my gift giving tends to be like the little kid who gives Dad a baseball cap—in kid’s size.  In other words, I would tend to give people gifts that I liked myself.  I considered it sharing my joy.  It really was more assuming that if I liked something that the other person would (or should), too.  Not always on point.  I’m finally learning to pay attention better, to notice when someone expresses interest or joy in something and note THAT as a gift for them.  Although, honestly, how many pairs of socks or Penn State branded clothing does one person need?  (EDITOR’S NOTE:  Never question the merit in socks or PSU gear.)

My argument with all this relationship discussion is that I’m finally learning how to “notice”.  This is really important in a work setting, particularly if you are a manager of people.  I wish I had understood this sooner.  I know that there is so much I just didn’t notice every day, particularly when it came to job roles I was less familiar with.  Nothing is more demoralizing at work than feeling that your efforts are not seen or appreciated.  As I look back on how I’ve interacted with a range of people throughout my life, I cringe when I think how self-focused I was.  And still am, to a slightly lesser degree.  I am a work in progress.  As Brené Brown reminds me on my coffee mug every morning:  I’m here to get it right, not be right.  (One of the most on-point birthday gifts I’ve ever received, by the way!)

So, yes, the advice is to always try to give more than 50% to make up for all the little things another person does that you don’t notice, but the real goal is notice more.  I try to “notice” more with every contact I have.  It’s important in friendships.  It’s important in family relationships.  It’s important at work, for sure.  It’s important with random people you interact with throughout your day.  It makes people feel seen and valued.  It deepens connection.  And it will help others to “see” you better, too.

Our Hero Complex

Americans love a good hero.  Heroes are central to our mythology as a young nation.  There’s the American Cowboy, a lone guardian of the range who saves settlers from a wide array of dangers.  There’s the Action Movie hero, who saves the day against all odds by fighting off the villain—usually, again, on their own.  And my favorite—the mild-mannered hero who rises to the moment from obscurity, like Clark Kent becoming Superman.  We love an individual, particularly an underdog, who is able to achieve great things in the heat of the moment.

Today, I want to talk about the hero vs. the…what IS the opposite of a hero?  Not coward, since being a hero isn’t just about being brave.  Ordinary citizen, maybe?  Or foot soldier?  Maybe it’s best to give an example.  In the workplace, there is always that person that “saves the day”.  Perhaps there is a production issue and you need an engineer who can get into the plant, figure out the root cause and put a fix in place as quickly as possible.  Or maybe there is a problem with a customer and you need a salesperson or technical expert who can both solve the problem quickly and manage to keep the customer happy before the whole situation blows up.  Or maybe there is a short deadline to get a project finished and you need someone who can dig in to bring it over the goal line, working night and day to get it finished.  You need a hero.  Heroes usually bring tremendous energy and stamina to a crisis situation and are able to just keep going in the face of a myriad of obstacles to save the day.  They are celebrated when they succeed.  They are not usually blamed when they fail.

I love a good hero as much as the next person.  I was rarely the hero myself since I’m not sure I have the intestinal fortitude.  But the question that always nags me is this one:  Why did we need a hero in the first place?  If there was a production upset, for example, did it come down to a maintenance issue or was it a poorly designed process?  If there was a customer issue, was the supply chain not effectively managed or were the needs of the customer not well understood?  If a critical deadline is looming, was there not effective program management to better ensure that the deadline could be met without heroics?

The issue, of course, is that it is easy to see when a hero saves the day.  It’s not easy to see when good, solid performance avoids a potential problem.  And those people—the “ordinary citizens”, the “foot soldiers”—who simply do the right thing every day, rarely get the kudos they deserve because “lack of a problem” is not visible.  As a manager, I really tried hard to remember to give recognition to those who always got the job done—not with heroics (although these same folks would often step up when needed) but with consistent conscientious effort.  And while you always need heroes since crises do arise, a good manager will do a post mortem to understand why the crisis happened in the first place.  In many cases, it could have been avoided if something else had been done correctly.

Our public veneration of heroes can have tragic consequences.  Beware the “hero” who creates a problem so they can solve it.  Everyone knows a story of a volunteer fire fighter who sets fires so they can put them out.  Or the person who ignores simple maintenance of a situation and has to deal with a much more complicated solution.  We applaud them for their heroic actions, but should we?  The heroes in action movies always seem to leave a lot of collateral damage that, when it happens in real life, is not so invisible.  Where there are heroes, there is pain for someone else—either physical, fiscal, or emotional.

One curious aspect of our “hero complex” is that we seem to be ok with waiting for a situation to get so bad that it can only be addressed by heroics.  Take water main breaks, for example.  To proactively go into our communities and replace aging water mains would take a fair amount of money and create a fair amount of disruption.  We never seem to have an appetite to budget the funds or accept the disruption.  But what happens when one breaks?  Well, we find the money to have crews do whatever they have to do 24/7 until it’s fixed.  I can almost guarantee you it costs more and creates even MORE disruption than if the main had been replaced proactively, but people accept the situation.  They aren’t happy about it, to be sure, but they accept it because “it had to be done”. 

I contrast this situation with the efforts last summer by our local electric company to proactively replace the buried 30-year-old electrical mains in our community and upgrade the transformers for more reliable service.  Was there disruption?  Sure.  But they also did this work by using horizontal drillers to avoid messing up lawns and driveways any more than necessary.  I, personally, think they did an awesome job and made an effort to tell them so.  Those poor guys were yelled at all day every day by people who didn’t want ANY disruption.  Yet, had there been a catastrophic failure of the electric main, we would have had to deal with a power outage lasting for days instead of a couple of hours, and they would have come in with a trench digger and just destroyed everything in their seven-foot abatement in the name of speed.

Finally, there is our cultural approach to health care.  Honestly, it’s not health care.  It’s sick care.  We have THE BEST emergency care in the world, hands down.  If you are really sick or hurt and need emergency attention and medical heroics, you want to be in this country.  But if you want to live a long and healthy life with less medical intervention, you might want to live somewhere else.  With our individualistic culture, we like to do whatever we want, eat whatever we want, sit on our couches and watch as much football as we want (not that there’s anything wrong with that one), and have a surgeon heroically by-pass four blocked arteries.  Other countries have a much stronger focus on prevention and early intervention.  Not only is that better for the individual, it’s less expensive.  We spend more per capita on “health care” than any other country yet have only middling health outcomes.  If you are in need of heroics, you are very grateful for our capabilities.  But we are not asking ourselves enough, “Why do we need the heroics?”

All of this rambling is meant to raise a little awareness in you, Dear Reader.  If you are a leader in an organization, in addition to celebrating the heroes, make sure you look for and reward those foot soldiers who keep the lights on every day.  As an average citizen navigating our complex world, keep your eyes out for those folks who are doing what needs to be done to avoid the next crisis.  Thank them, even if they are causing you a minor inconvenience.  As an individual, ask yourself “what am I not taking personal responsibility for that, if I did, could avoid a crisis down the road?”  Hero worship is fun in the movies.  In real life, the true heroes are the ones who kept us from needing the heroics.

The Year of the Tiger

Chinese Lunar New Year shown on a calendar. 2022 is the Year of the Tiger

I was born in the Year of the Tiger on the Lunar calendar.  I always thought it was really cool to be a Tiger.  I mean, the Tiger is considered the King of Beasts in Lunar Astrology!  Tigers are described as a symbol of strength and braveness and loyalty.  Specifically, this is a Water Tiger year, the same as the year I was born, and since those only come around once every 60 years, you all now know how old I will be.  This has to be special, right?  And, lucky!  But the last Tiger year, 12 years ago, was a very rough year for me and that got me thinking.  As I looked back over my Tiger years, I realized that while in some ways they were indeed lucky, all of them were—for lack of a better word—formative.  Big things always happened in Tiger years.  So, what happened and how have those years changed me?

My first Tiger year was the year I was born—about as literally “formative” as you can get.  No need to dwell on that further.  My second Tiger year was at 12 years of age when I was in fifth grade.  My Mom remembers this year well.  It broke her heart.  Many of us have a “hurt child” story to tell and this is mine.  I’ve spent most of my adult life dealing with healing her.  The details are unimportant.  Suffice it to say that I went from being a fairly happy-go-lucky kid, totally unaware of 12-year-old social dynamics, to a total social outcast.  The dregs of this followed me all through high school to a certain degree.  It was painful in a “kids can be cruel” kind of way and, while I have my suspicions, I never got to the bottom of why this happened.  In a positive way, this situation kickstarted my development of empathy.  In a negative way, it made me paranoid of being blindsided and left me with a desperate need to be liked.  The former can be turned into a productive drive to always do your homework and push for clarity.  The latter is an unfortunate liability for many a manager and leader.  Knowledge of that hurt child is significant.  I can never truly heal her but I can recognize her voice in my head.  She’s still there but mostly reminds me to be kind to others, to remember that everyone is human and has feelings and value.  That’s not such a bad thing.

My third Tiger year, at 24, found me in grad school working toward my PhD in Chemistry.  My education had been a glorious ride up until then.  I was a good student.  I picked things up fairly quickly.  I had few real challenges—Advanced Organic Chemistry being one of them.  But in this Tiger year, I came up against my Oral Candidacy Exams.  At Penn State, this was really your test for the PhD.  Pass your Orals and the thesis defense was essentially a formality.  Fail and you’re out.  At this exam, you present your current research, an original research proposal, and defend them both against questions from your committee.  I faced two headwinds for my Orals.  First, at the time I was developing my original proposal, my advisor was being courted by another university.  He was not around much physically and not at all mentally.  I developed that proposal all on my own and it was admittedly weak.  Second, my advisor just happened to be instrumental the week before my exams in failing one of the students of his chief rival in the department—who happened to also be on my committee and was seeking retribution.  It was a very long couple of hours and I almost failed.  It was a VERY humbling experience.  It brought me down off of my high horse.  It taught me that maybe I wasn’t quite as good as I thought.  It also taught me a bit about office politics and collateral damage.  The “celebration party” afterwards is also the reason I can no longer drink Jack Daniels.

My fourth Tiger year, at 36, brings us to the beginning of my international assignment in Mexico.  Talk about formative! Moving as a single woman to a foreign country, where I didn’t yet speak the language, and had a nearly impossible assignment was the bravest and possibly stupidest thing I’ve ever done (surpassed only by the assignment I took upon repatriating).  But it was also the most spectacular experience I’ve ever had.  Just reread the title essay to this blog.  No period in my life has ever challenged me more, expanded my mind as much, or provided the richness of experience.  I will forever look back on that time as a period of exponential growth that did more to form the person I am today than any other period of my life.  And that Tiger year was the most intense year of that time in Mexico.  Incredible highs; incredible lows.  And I wouldn’t change a moment of it—including getting robbed by a cop my second week in country.

If you are paying attention, you are probably noticing that each Tiger year I experience is more intense on its impact than the last and my fifth Tiger year at 48 was no exception.  I had two of the most momentous and formative experiences of my life in that one year.  After 22 years at my first company since leaving grad school, I changed jobs and companies.  I went from being a mid-level manager of a support function deep within the bowels of a $10Bn global company to becoming a business manager who owned the P&L of a small business within another global enterprise.  I had long since gotten used to owning the cost side of the equation and fighting the internal battles to support my organization.  Now I owned the revenue side as well and boy did that change things.  I grew more, professionally, in that first year than at any other time in my career.  And less than three months into that transition, I went home to watch my father die from colon cancer.  I grew more, personally, in those ten days than I ever want to grow again.  There is no aspect of life that I do not view differently from before I went home that September day.  I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it here.  Those of you who have gone through this know what I mean.  Being there for the passing of a loved one changes every fiber of your being.

So, here we are on the cusp of another Tiger year.  “Water” years are supposed to be times of extremes.  Big highs.  Big lows.  I am excited and nervous about what this year will bring.  (And after reading this essay, Trish is very anxious!)  It’s not that “formative” experiences ONLY happen in Tiger years; it’s that they ALWAYS happen in Tiger years.  Regardless, I’ve got all the lessons from my previous Tiger years to prepare me.  The hurt child is there to remind me of the humanity of all those with whom I cross paths.  The scientist who almost failed her Orals is there to remind me to be humble.  You are never as good as you think you are.  The brave soul who ran off to Mexico is there to remind me to push outside my comfort zone because the reward is worth the anxiety.  And the introspective soul who whose life changed so profoundly twelve years ago is there to remind me to breathe deeply and be grateful for every single day.  Bring it on, Water Tiger!

Normalization II

Everyone knows the popular myth about frogs and boiling water:  If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it senses the danger and gets itself out of there pronto; if you put a frog into cool water and slowly raise the heat, the frog will allow itself to be boiled to death because the slow change does not seem alarming.  Fortunately, this is indeed a myth.  Frogs are smarter than you think and will jump out of that water as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.  In fact, in some ways frogs are smarter than humans.  They don’t sit there ruminating on the increasing temperature, rationalizing that they just have to accept it.  (No, this is not an essay about climate change.)  We humans run the risk of metaphorically letting ourselves get boiled to death because it seems mentally easier to normalize a slow change than it is to push back.

I wrote about Normalization before, mostly ranting about how Big Food has normalized really unhealthy eating habits, to the detriment of us all.  I’ve been thinking about Normalization again as we move into our third year of this pandemic and watch as the Omicron variant wave sloshes over us.  I have been as guilty as anyone else of normalizing the impact of this virus by saying, “Well, the data indicate that Omicron is less vicious than the previous variants so there will probably be fewer serious cases and deaths.”  I am also as COVID-weary as anyone else, even though this pandemic has not been a severe financial or even mental strain on my life (sometimes it’s good to be an introvert who likes to shut in at home).  It’s like we think it’s ok that “just” 1500 people a day are dying from complications of COVID.  How did we get here?  I remember at the beginning of this whole thing, people throwing around the number of the 12,000 people who died from Swine Flu in 2009 as a number so horrific that we couldn’t even contemplate that happening again.  We pass that in less than 10 days, now.  And barely blink an eye.

I started keeping a more rigorous “COVID journal” a couple of months into this pandemic and captured daily numbers of infections and then deaths.  Levels that horrified me 18 months ago would give me comfort today (“It’s getting better!”).  I remember an interview with an infectious disease physician maybe a year ago.  The interviewer asked, “We typically lose 20-40,000 people a year in this country to seasonal flu.  Should we be ok with that?”  The doctor responded, “No!  We shouldn’t be ok with that!  It doesn’t need to happen!”  Nor should we be ok with losing approximately 650,000 people a year to heart disease, or 600,000 to cancer.  But we kind of are.  Certainly not every death is preventable, but we all know many of us engage in socially normalized behavior that helps to push that number up.  We are sad when someone we know dies from a preventable cause that they chose to not control, yet we sue when someone dies from a negligent action by another.  Why don’t we hold ourselves to the same account to which we hold other people?

I’m not trying to depress you.  I’m asking a serious sociological question: why do we allow ourselves to normalize behaviors in ourselves and others that lead to negative outcomes?  For me, it comes back to Thermodynamics:  It takes energy to resist the expansion of chaos.  And I don’t have infinite energy, so I have to pick and choose when to fight.  I am also in a fairly privileged position of being way up at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  I don’t need to worry about my basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter) or my basic safety (I live in a low crime suburb and am financially secure).  I am surrounded by love from my family, friends, neighbors.  Continuing to work our way up the hierarchy, I constantly work on the self-esteem part and am working toward self-actualization.  So, my mental efforts are luxuriously focused on my own development.  Like all people, when I choose to fight, it’s because of something that threatens my own physical or mental well-being, but I am incredibly fortunate that I’m not threatened much.  My angst tends to be around things I see that just don’t feel “right”, yet the negative effect is mostly on others, not on me.

Where am I going with all of this, you ask?  Let go back to the pandemic.  Early on, I was incredibly fearful for my own safety and, of course, for that of those close to me.  We knew so little about how the virus worked and had no natural protection.  Every day was driven by angst-ridden personal fear for basic physiological safety—right back down on the first rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy.  Each infection and death recorded felt personal.  It felt like the Grim Reaper was circling and coming for me.  Over time, as the numbers rose yet I stayed safe, the edge came off.  You can only hold your breath for so long and after a while, the negative impacts of the mitigation efforts started to overwhelm my fear of COVID.  We all started to rationalize and normalize the risk, as we do all the time.  How many of us think about the risk of serious injury in a car accident every time we decide to get behind the wheel?  It’s higher than we’d like to think but if we fixated on it, we’d probably never get in a car.  So, we make the choice to accept that risk, do our best to control what can control, and head to the grocery store.  The same seems to have happened with COVID—a combination of rationalizations (some of which are indeed appropriate) and normalizations.

The problem, of course, is that each time we accept a risk and nothing happens, we are tempted to accept a little more risk.  It’s kind of like a toddler testing the boundaries of his parents’ patience.  He will push until he hits that boundary and there are consequences.  For us adults, though, normalizing those risks and consequences can ultimately have devastating long term impact.  Once we realize that those negative impacts are real and consequential (meaning they impact us directly), changing course can be really difficult.  I talked last time about how long term normalization of unhealthy food and eating habits has led to a really unhealthy population.  Chronic underinvestment in our infrastructure has led to a normalization of addressing things like water mains and bridges only when they fail.  The people fighting hard for change are usually the ones negatively impacted by whatever the rest of us have chosen to normalize.  Must we wait for the impact to hit us before we insist that something isn’t right?  I’m being intentionally vague here since I want each of you to think about what YOU have allowed to normalize that maybe you shouldn’t accept.  Is it something about your own behavior or choices?  It is something societal, like access to healthcare or food insecurity or education?  Is it some policy or strategic or even social norm at work?  Find something that is important to you and decide to just not accept it anymore.  The frog is smart enough to jump out of the boiling water.  Are we?

How I Want to Remember 2021

Let’s be honest.  We all had high hopes for 2021.  We knew 2020 was going to be a shit show and it did not let us down.  By the end of 2020, we had a vaccine and figured, “This has got to be better.”  Yeah, no.

2020, thumping its chest:  I will go down as the worst year in your memory!

2021, smirking:  Yeah.  Hold my beer.

I do not want to minimize the range of difficulties we all navigated in 2021.  In fact, the next essay I publish looks to be rant on how we’ve normalized all this death and struggle and generally bad behavior.  But this essay will publish right after New Years when we all want to be at least a little hopeful that 2022 will not turn out to be “2020, too”.  With that in mind, here is what I want to remember about 2021:

 JANUARY: This is not usually a top month for me.  It’s cold and gray.  I think the best thing I can say about January 2021 is that Presidential tweets became boring again.

FEBURARY:  This month we got into virtual wine tastings from a favorite vineyard in New Jersey.  For an exorbitant amount of money, which we rationalized as a charitable contribution to help keep the winery open, we were shipped two bottles of wine and some sort of accompaniment (cheese or chocolate or ingredients to make a calorie laden dinner).  Then we dialed into a Zoom call and were talked through the wine tasting.  When neither of you has to drive home afterwards, both bottles of wine disappear.  Even more fun was starting up private chats with people we became better and better friends with as the nights worn on.  They are still in my phone, listed under their first names with the last name of Wine Tasting.

MARCH:  Besides a couple more virtual wine tastings, the true highlight of the month was actually going away for the weekend to the Poconos home of good friends.  We had all maintained a really tight COVID circle and just needed to be together.  Never, ever, ever discount the importance of being with friends.  We ate and drank and generally ignored all WW eating guidelines.  We filled our hearts.  Boy did we need that!

APRIL:  Without a doubt, the highlight of April was getting our COVID shots.  As a chemist, I dove into understanding, as best I could, the mRNA technology.  While I am not a virologist nor epidemiologist, I believe I understand enough of the biochemistry to know that this technology is freakin’ amazing!   While this is the first commercial vaccine, it’s not new technology.  It’s been under development for decades and was ready for prime time.  It is an incredibly elegant solution to helping the body fight intruders.  I got a little thrill when I got that first shot.  I felt like I was a part of history.  And this technology is so versatile that it will become the standard approach, I predict, to vaccine development.

MAY:  The big highlight of May was starting up my biweekly workouts with my BFF again.  It’s not the workouts that I missed, although her trainer worked my body in different ways which is good.  I missed the BFF time.  We work out.  We lunch.  We run errands.  We play with the dog.  We talk and talk and talk.  It’s not that we hadn’t been talking regularly throughout the pandemic.  We’d even had a few lunches when we could eat outdoors.  But there is just something about being TOGETHER.  My soul needs that.

JUNE: This was a big month.  My first trip home to Atlanta in 18 months.  My last trip home was December of 2019, for my Mom’s birthday.  And I had a horrible head cold the whole time I was there.  Everyone has their COVID reunion stories, I’m sure.  To be able to hug my Mom and my sister again, to spend time in the same room together instead of on the phone or over Zoom, to just BE together was amazing.  The amateur social scientist in me again goes back to the power of in-person relationships.  Yes, we have the technology to never have to be face-to-face with anyone again.  In many cases, that is a wondrous improvement over being together live, but there is so much more to our connection with other human beings than voice and two-dimensional body language.  There is stuff we don’t really understand.  And there is stuff we DO understand—like the power of a hug.

JULY:  The highlight of July was going to the Philadelphia Zoo.  Not just because it is the oldest zoo in America, which it is.  Nor because I love zoos and I haven’t been to the Philly Zoo in decades.  It’s because we went with some of our favorite people.  Specifically, we went with two little munchkins who have wormed their way into our hearts along with their parents.  This is a long story, but suffice it to say that while this is a new relationship for me, it is a dramatically important homecoming for Trish.  They are family, pure and simple.  And when a shy 18 month old tries to say your name and gives you an impish grin, or a three year old reaches for your hand, or when he gives you a full body hug as only a kid can do, or when he smiles and says, “I love you!”….  Well, you know.  There is nothing like it.

AUGUST:  This is the month I was able to renew my Lesbian Badge—for the full five-year renewal!  I went back up to our friends’ house in the Poconos to help them cut, split, and stack wood.  This was a glorious weekend!  There was no flannel, but there were work boots and gloves and chain saws and a wood splitter and beer and total exhaustion.  And sore backs.  And a little blood.  Just a little.  There was a lot of laughter.  A lot of deep talk.  A lot of comfortable silence.  And a few really good nights’ sleep.

SEPTEMBER:  September brought the visit of a dear college friend and her husband.  They stopped in Philly for a few days as part of an East Coast trip.  She is part of the biweekly Zoom crew that have helped keep me sane over the last two years.  Again, seeing her in person was so much more meaningful than the Zoom calls.  And we went to a Phillies game.  And it was Dollar Dog night.  Yes!  $1 hot dogs!  And the weather was perfect.  And the Phillies lost.  To the Orioles.

OCTOBER:  Lots of fun things happened in October, but my favorite has to be Beau’s first lion cut.  Beau is our maine coon mix cat, with beautiful think long fur that he gets all knotted up by rolling around on the floor.  And he won’t let us brush him much because he has sensitive little skin.  When the groomer felt his knots she suggested a lion cut: leave his fur long around his head, on the tail, and legs.  Close cut on the body.  He looks freaking adorable!  And he seems to really like it.  He’s become a total snuggler since we did this—and not just because he’s cold!  There is nothing like a 25 pound warm soft purring mass spread from your lap up to your chin.  Who needs a weighted blanket!

NOVEMBER:  We had our first solo babysitting gig with the munchkins.  We had the now-four-year-old all to ourselves since his sister was already asleep.  Besides being scared to death that she might wake up and scream bloody murder since neither of us are Mommy or Daddy (she didn’t wake up), we had an awesome time.  We watch TV, we played games, we learned all about the Goo Jit Zu characters and watched all the Season 1 episodes at least twice.  It was a glorious night!

DECEMBER:  I will admit that December was a tough month.  COVID hit too close to home.  But the year ended in wonderful fashion.  Throughout the pandemic, my major non-home activity was going to the grocery store.  I got to know the woman who helped out at the self-checkout area.  It’s not that we talked a lot.  We just had these brief weekly interactions that got more familiar and friendly over time.  We share little tiny bits of our life and I realized how much I appreciated her constancy.  I wrote up a little card to tell her so and put in a little holiday “cheer”.  Christmas Eve morning was a busy time at the grocery store but she made a point to come over to me during my checkout to wish me Happy Holidays.  I handed her the card, then, as she dashed off to help a customer.  A week later, on a much quieter New Year’s Eve morning, she came up to me at checkout and asked if she could give me a hug.  We spent a few minutes chatting.  She told me the card made her day.  I said giving it to her made mine.  I made a very real connection with another person.  Two people who only slightly intersect in each other’s lives took the time to recognize and embrace the humanity in each other.  And THAT’S how I want to remember 2021.

Delayed Gratification

In 1972, Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel undertook his famous marshmallow experiment.  Kids were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow.  The researcher left the room and the subject was observed.  Would the kid delay gratification for greater reward or eat what was in front of them?  Follow up studies indicated that those who delayed gratification had better life outcomes than those who didn’t, which placed a judgment on waiting and willpower.  While those findings have fortunately been mostly debunked (correlation does not necessarily mean causation, remember?), I can certainly tell you one thing:  I would have eaten the marshmallow in front of me.

I got to thinking about this topic lying in bed this morning while I was deciding on breakfast.  I’m telling you, this is my favorite time of day: I wake up, decide what I’m going to eat, and then I get up and eat almost right away! (I have to feed Bridget first.)  I know this behavior is more than not wanting to delay the gratification of breakfast.  This whole “delayed gratification” issue is wrapped up with “anticipation” and the well-studied phenomenon of me needing to eat at regular intervals and ON TIME (breakfast no later than 7:00, lunch at noon, dinner at 6:00).  Today, however, we will focus on “delayed gratification” in honor of the upcoming holidays and the fact that I already titled this essay and I’m too lazy to change it.  Come to think of it, “laziness” is wrapped up in my behaviors as well.

“Delayed gratification” has been an issue for me for as long as I can remember.  Besides the anticipation and laziness aspects, I am also impatient and have had issues with impulse control, especially when it comes to food.  Thanks to Weight Watchers, that has gotten A LOT better, thank goodness!  I am really bad at denying myself what I want if it’s clear to me that I can have it.  In the past, this created real problems in my romantic life.  (Now that wild oats have long since been sown, this is no longer an issue.)  This problem expresses itself nowadays most often around gift giving, hence thinking about it now.

Trish knows this well.  As soon as I get a gift for someone, I want to give it to them RIGHT AWAY.  I’m excited about what I’ve gotten them and I can’t wait to see their reaction!  Here is a reenactment of a typical morning on a gift giving day:

Me:  Can we open gifts now?

Trish:  It’s 5:30 am.

Me (later):  We’ve eaten breakfast.  Can we open gifts NOW?

Trish:  No.  Let’s wait a little bit.

Me (one minute later):  Now?

Trish:  Ugh

It’s not so much that I want to open MY gifts.  I want her to open HERS.  And let me tell you, the weeks leading up to The Day aren’t much better.  Every time I come home with a gift for her (or, more likely, one gets delivered), I want to give it to her RIGHT THEN.  And I’ve really made it hard on myself this year.  I will say no more, but Trish will understand on December 25th.  So, why does this happen and is it really a problem?  Let’s unpack that a bit, shall we?

As an amateur social scientist, I spend a lot of time observing and analyzing behaviors.  Since that behavior tends to bug the crap out of those around me when I point out my “observations” about them, I most often turn that spotlight back on myself.  I can’t really think of anything in my childhood that may have created this inability to wait. I do have the attention span of a gnat, so maybe that plays into things: I’m afraid I’ll forget if I don’t do something right away.  We’ve established my obsession around regular feedings, which is why I’m horrible at trying to fast on Yom Kippur (sorry, Gd; sorry Dad).  Maybe some of it is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)—if I don’t do something right away, I fear the opportunity will pass forever.  All I know is that I want that marshmallow.

There is a danger with this tendency, of course, that life becomes all about the destination and not the journey.  And I will admit that for most of my life that held true.  I was always in a hurry to get to somewhere else, either physically or metaphorically.  The unspoken part of this angst was that how I was feeling at that time was not such a good place and that I would be happier or more content once I got to where I wanted to go.  I didn’t want to delay gratification because that meant it would be that much longer until I could feel happy.  Actually, that’s not right.  I don’t want anyone to have the impression that I was always sad, although I’m sure I had my moments.  I think I was laboring under the impression that I wasn’t happy ENOUGH.  If there was the possibility that I could feel happier, I didn’t want to wait.  (I can almost FEEL all the head nodding, especially from my college friends and people who walked with me during my younger adult years.  I think if you went to the word “angst” in the dictionary, my picture would have been there.)

That’s why I’m so grateful for where I am now.  Lots of things changed to calm me down.  Experience taught me that my instincts were pretty darn good and to trust them.  I took some really hard looks in the mirror.  I accepted who I really was and started the on-going work of making changes around the parts I didn’t like so much.  I purged some toxic people from my life.  I learned to speak my mind.  I found an incredible partner who validated what needed validating (both the good things and the things that needed to change).  And I actually started to enjoy the journey.  Wow, am I blessed!

So maybe this impatience, this aversion to “delayed gratification” is not such a bad thing.  I’m not hoping to be happier so much as excited about what comes next!  Let’s open some gifts!  And eat some marshmallows.

Why Is Direct Communication So Hard?

Here’s one thing I think we can all agree on:  no one likes annual Performance Reviews.  We don’t like preparing for them.  We don’t like receiving them.  We don’t like giving them.  And this concept of providing direct feedback—or just direct communication—extends far beyond the workplace.  For some reason, most of us have difficulty sharing our honest thoughts with people.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Most of the time, it just creates problems.  The question is:  Why is it so hard?  That’s what we are going to unpack today.

I’m writing about this topic because I experienced a communication miscue when I went home for Thanksgiving.  I’m guessing many of you will have experienced something similar.  When people who don’t spend a lot of time together suddenly find themselves in a room fishing for topics while the string bean casserole bakes, things can happen.  I won’t detail the story here.  Suffice it to say that an opinion was asked for and enthusiastically given; the actual truth came out the next day thanks to a text from another family member.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It just surprised me.  And it got me thinking about communication.

Lack of direct communication is a core competence in many families and social groups, including the workplace.  I believe that at the heart of this issue are two truths:  giving AND receiving direct communication are both learned skills; and, many people believe they are being kind by not telling their truth.  The corollary, of course, is that HOW you communicate makes a big difference in the impact of your statements.  However, I still believe that people hide behind examples of bad “how’s” to avoid speaking honestly. 

Let’s go back to the dreaded Performance Review to discuss how both giving and receiving communication are learned skills.  Most large corporations provide training in this area, but the emphasis is almost always on the “giving” part.  The directions are to: 1)make sure you gather well-rounded feedback on the individual in question, not just information from one or two people; 2)provide specific and/or quantifiable examples of behaviors and actions; and, 3)engage in “constructive feedback” as part of a “compliment sandwich”—provide an example of something positive, give the constructive feedback, provide another example of something positive.  The reasons for the first two are obvious.  The third suggestion is meant to reinforce an important concept—no one is perfect.  We all have things we do well and things we could do better.  That’s what “growth” entails.  But we usually don’t want to hear about the things we could do better, at least not from someone else.  We say we want to hear the truth, but we want “the truth” to be “you are perfect”.

What we don’t talk about often enough is that RECEIVING feedback is also a learned skill, exactly because we don’t like hearing it.  In my field, I worked with a ton of insecure perfectionists (yours truly included).  Many of us, upon receiving feedback from our boss on areas we could improve upon, immediately go down the rabbit hole to “I’m worthless and am going to get fired.”  I had an extreme example of this at one point in my career.  I was preparing to give a performance review to an exceptionally talented individual who was crippled by this insecure perfectionism.  She had a lot of outstanding accomplishments to trumpet.  That part was easy.  She also had a few areas she could have improved upon, although none of them were of high concern.  I simply believe that all performance reviews should provide areas of improvement.  We all can get better at something or learn something new.  Knowing I had a mountain to climb, we first spent a full half hour a few days before the review discussing the skills around giving and receiving feedback and how a good performance review should work.  Since our focus was on mechanics, the discussion was relaxed and productive.  When it was time for the actual review, I reminded her of those mechanics.  She was ready, she said!  I began the compliment sandwich, reviewing all of her many accomplishments.  I then leaned into just two areas I wanted her to focus on for improvement and growth.  You would have thought I’d run over her dog with a truck.  Her face dropped and she totally shut down.  I never even got to the second string of compliments.

At the root of that behavior is one of the big “why’s” of why direct communication is so hard!  It is that to be open to speaking or hearing a real truth, you must first fight that internal battle of authenticity:  knowing your authentic self, learning to like that authentic self, and being able to be vulnerable enough to share that authentic self with others.  To paraphrase another of my favorite Brené Brown mantras:  Work on your own shit so you’re not constantly taking it out on others.  The authenticity part is hard enough.  To be able to be vulnerable enough to others requires mutual trust and respect and, wow, we all know how difficult and scary that can be.  That is why being authentic and vulnerable are two of the most difficult and courageous things a person can do.  I am most assuredly still working on that.  Those of you who know me and have known me at different points on my journey know that I am absolutely not the poster child for direct communication.  But I have gotten a lot better.  Part of the reason is the experience that comes with age—seeing how much better things work out when you find the right way to be direct and listen without judging.  A big part has been finding the right partner.  (This is my contractual obligation to compliment Trish so she continues to edit my essays.)  Seriously, though, our ability to communicate directly and compassionately has not just led to a strong relationship.  It’s given me the confidence to be direct and compassionate with others.

Which brings us to the final point I want to make.  I said above that people often feel that avoiding direct communication is compassionate.  It’s usually not.  And it is often used as an excuse when you are fearful of a negative reaction.  What it often leads to is passive/aggressive behavior in an attempt to hint at true thoughts, sometimes using another person, and that just leads to worse feelings.  Most of us do want to hear the truth or at least honesty.  What is required to do this well is good old empathy.  Ask yourself if there a power imbalance in the relationship.  Is this person new to the group or new to you?  What might make them uncomfortable to hear what you are saying or hesitant to say what they need to say?  What can you do to make them more at ease?  It’s important at this point to say that you can only control your own behavior.  If you make the effort to smooth the way and they still choose to resist or, worse, employ passive/aggressive behavior, so be it.  Their discomfort might explain their behavior but it doesn’t excuse it—nor would it excuse your behavior if you chose to take that route.

Direct communication is a constant challenge for me—both giving and receiving.  While not the perfect empath, I have found myself paralyzed by trying to consider the impact of my actions on others.  But I’m trying to get better every day, every chance I get.  If we all keep doing that, then little by little, direct communication won’t be so hard.

It’s All Relative

With that title, what could this essay be about?  This is being published just before Thanksgiving, so maybe it’s about spending time with family.  It could be another essay on Perspective (you can read a previous treatment here).  Maybe it’s about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity?  I do like throwing in a little science here and there.

Let’s start with Einstein.  No, I’m not going to teach you about the General and Special Theories of Relativity.  First, I don’t understand them at all, much less have enough knowledge to teach others.  Second, it’s not really the theories I’m interested in, but how Einstein first got his inspiration that led to them.  What I find very cool and very inspiring about Einstein is how he used curious observation about the world around him to develop a deep understanding of said world.  In one of his “thought experiments,” he puzzled about trains.  Let’s say you are riding in a train and you’ve got a baseball in your hand.  You are tossing that baseball up and down, just playing with it.  To you, that baseball is simply moving up and down in a straight vertical.  But to someone outside the train, watching the train go by, that ball is also moving forward at the speed of the train.  We’re not talking about two separate balls, here.  It’s the same ball being tossed around by the same person in the same train.  But the perceived movement of the ball—either straight up and down, or translating forward as it’s moving up and down—depends upon the observer.  An observer in the train sees the simple vertical movement.  An observer outside of the train sees the parabolic movement.  This concept forms the basis of our thesis today:  what you see in the world depends upon you, the observer.  Two people can look at the same thing, like the characters in the cartoon accompanying this essay, yet see something very different based on their position as the observer.  Just as important, they may each think they are right and the other person is wrong, but they are both right.  It’s all relative.

I got to thinking about this while on a little getaway last weekend.  This getaway involved several hours driving on highways with lots of other cars—something I haven’t done a lot of these last couple of years.  I am always struck by the fact that when we are driving along, we are mostly only aware of our speed relative to the speeds of the cars around us.  Some are going a couple miles an hour slower, some a few miles an hour faster, but we’re all moving somewhere around 70-75 mph.  As the observer inside the car, you usually forget about that absolute very fast speed.  If you are standing by the side of the road and someone goes ripping by you at 75 mph, you have a true (and scary) sense of exactly how fast that is!  However, inside the car, you are really only aware of the difference in your speeds, which makes you feel like you are moving much slower.  In my opinion, that makes people drive much less safely.  They follow more closely, they cut over more quickly.  They are responding to that small relative difference in speed instead of the absolute speed at which everyone is tearing along.  And now you all can be as petrified as I am on crowded highways!  (This is why Trish does most of the driving.)

This impact of the observer also comes into play in how we perceive our own politics.  It highly amuses me to know that almost everyone considers themselves a “centrist”.  Why?  Well, first, your own opinions seem eminently reasonable to you so therefore you believe they should be eminently reasonable to everyone else.  And since you believe all reasonable people should agree with you then you must be centrist.  Additionally, you can ALWAYS find someone more to the right of you and someone more to the left of you.  Therefore, once again, you MUST be centrist.  Some of us admit to being center-left or center-right, but the “center” dominates.  (If someone can’t find others more extreme to them on the right or the left then they probably don’t care to be labeled centrist anyway.)  That’s a big part of the reason that Congress always has such a low approval rating.  Everyone has their own idea of what is reasonable and productive legislation.  Unless Congress produces exactly that, you will promptly label them idiots.  So no matter what they pass, a good chunk of the electorate will think they are wasteful and incompetent. (I still don’t understand why anyone would go into politics.)

There is another part to our views on public policy, too.  The priorities that you’d like to see Government act upon are absolutely aligned with what YOU consider important.  And what any individual considers important will depend highly upon their individual situation.  A business owner wants to see low taxes on their profit, minimal regulation to restrict how they do business, and sufficient infrastructure and services (police, fire) to enable them to conduct business.  A local resident might look at that same business and want to see limitations on how much of their waste stream gets dumped into the local environment because the discharges stink and make it hard to breathe at times or their water bill keeps going up because of increased treatment costs.  Someone else might want to see that business go away entirely because of the traffic snarling their neighborhood due to an abundance of truck traffic.  And someone else might want to see the business expand because they need a job.  Everyone wants to see their tax dollars spent on things they see as important and not spent on things they don’t see as important.  But here’s the thing:  everything is important to someone!  Your idea of “waste” is someone else’s lifeline!  And the job of the government is to support the needs of the whole populace, even when those needs conflict.  At least, that’s the theory if not the practice.

So why am I rambling on about all of this?  It’s because I try to stay aware of this “impact of the observer”.  Like Atticus Finch, I try to walk a metaphorical mile in other people’s shoes.  Many times, people focus on a different aspect of an issue because they are simply making different choices on what they consider most important.  The business owner prioritizes profits over environmental impact.  The land owner the reverse.  It doesn’t mean the business owner doesn’t care at all about the environment (hopefully) nor that the land owner doesn’t recognize the importance of profit.  It’s a matter of what they consider MORE important.  They both can be right.  The challenge is balancing both priorities.  No one gets everything they want. 

This pattern of thinking and discussion can make people think I am wishy-washy because I often challenge anyone who offers only an authoritative viewpoint.  I’m not wishy-washy, though.  I have my opinions but I stay open to new information.  As a scientist, I’ve been trained to almost never speak in absolutes.  I am constantly looking for new data to challenge my hypotheses.  Newtonian physics explained the whole world until it didn’t.   The rise of Quantum Mechanics did not invalidate Newtonian physics.  It just put boundaries on the conditions in which it is valid.  There is no such thing as a theorem that is proven true—you can only say that all current data are consistent with the theory.  So, as you sit around the Thanksgiving table with family this year (see what I did there?  Wove it all together!), remember that you may see things differently, but it doesn’t mean someone is wrong and someone is right.  You just have different priorities and different perspectives.  Your job is to work to see things from that other perspective.  It’s all relative.

[DISCLAIMER: Before you start commenting up a storm, I’m not talking about people who have fallen prey to conspiracy theories and misinformation.  There’s just nothing you can do about that.  Smile and change the subject to football.]

Pushing Outside of Your Comfort Zone

Where the magic happens & Comfort zone road signs on highway

One thing that have noticed as my years in retirement march onward is that my comfort zone is continually shrinking.  By “comfort zone” I mean tasks and activities that I pursue with no dread, no hesitation, and that do not tax my coping skills much at all.  When I was younger—particularly during my working years—I clearly had a huge comfort zone.  I think back over some of the things I did regularly and know that those same activities today would push me into heart palpitations.  Back in the good ole ‘90s, I would routinely fly out to cities I’d never been to before, armed with only an Avis map and handwritten directions from the customer, and drive all over creation looking for their site.  Today, if I leave the house without my cell phone to go one mile to the grocery store, I feel ridiculously vulnerable.  When I had responsibility for a business in New Jersey, I used to drive out there a few days a week traveling with morning commuting traffic heading into NYC.  Talk about a harrowing drive!  Now, if need to drive a four mile stretch on the Turnpike in the middle of the morning on a Tuesday (when there are maybe three other cars on the road), I stay in the right lane and grip the steering wheel for dear life.

What has happened to me?  What happened to the single 35-year-old woman who said an enthusiastic “Yes!” to moving by herself to Mexico?  I spoke no more Spanish than “Hola!” and “Dondé está el baño?”  The job was horrifically ill defined and the best I could expect to do was to only disappoint everyone a little.  And yet, off I went!  Today, I freak out navigating a direct flight to Atlanta to visit my family.  Maybe the real question I need to answer is not “What has happened to me?” but “Why does it matter?”  So that’s what we are going to explore today.

This whole topic has been on my mind lately because Friday I gave a lunchtime webinar for ALMA (The Association of Laboratory Managers).  This was the first time I’d give a seminar in about a year and, believe me, the couple of webinars I did last fall for Lab Manager magazine were equally horrifying.  I am well aware that for most people, giving a public presentation is more fear inducing that the prospect of dying (seriously!), but I had gotten really comfortable with public speaking.  I spent my whole career giving presentations.  By the time I retired, I could get up and spontaneously give a 45 minute seminar on something I knew virtually nothing about using slides someone else put together.  The audience would shed tears of joy and throw flowers at my feet.  I was that good at public speaking! 

By comparison, let me describe for you what these last couple of weeks have been like preparing for this on-line seminar.  To start, I am a very linear thinker and when something is weighing heavily on my mind, I can think of nothing else until it is done.  I know this about myself, which is why I didn’t sit down to draft the slides until a couple of weeks before the presentation date.  I was completely incapable of doing any other task on my To-Do list because all of my energy was consumed by thinking about this seminar.  It’s like if I took the time to call McAfee to negotiate a renewal of my anti-virus software that I would somehow have no capacity left to do an effective job on the webinar.  I continued to bathe regularly and call my Mom every night, but that was about it.  Trish was extremely patient, even when she knew I was sort of using the webinar as an excuse. (“I can’t cook dinner tonight.  You know, webinar in 10 days and all.”)  DDay-2, I sat myself down to do a dry run.  I stumbled awkwardly through my slides, although I did hit my 40 minute target.  For the next 24 hours, I played games on my iPad while I thought through slide transitions.  DDay-1, I did another dry run and this time it went quite smoothly.  I managed to sleep that night without pharmaceutical intervention but did manage to bite my tongue (imagine that), raising a nice painful ulcer.  Yay. 

On the Big Day, I was bundle of nerves.  What if I lose my place or forget something important that I want to say?  What if I start to ramble or, worse, rush along and finish too quickly?  I remembered my first public presentation very early in my career.  I was so nervous that I motored through a 20 minute presentation in 10 minutes.  I think I only took one breath during the whole thing.  Well, spoiler alert, it went fine.  I settled in quickly, made a few good jokes, told a bunch of stories, and only forgot a few things or snubbed a few transitions.  Since this was a webinar, I was speaking into the Great Void so I can’t tell for sure how the seminar was received.  However, I did get some positive feedback through chat, had a whole bunch of hits on the blog site and even picked up a new subscriber (my personal measure of success).  The sense of relief I felt that afternoon was like having successfully defended my PhD thesis!

So why does all this matter?  Well, I accepted the invitation to do this seminar for two reasons.  The first being that I was flattered to be asked and wanted to say yes.  The second is that I instinctively know how important it is to push myself outside of my comfort zone.  This was effortless when I was younger!  I just did what I needed to do.  There was no fear or at least fear didn’t stop me.  I don’t want to get more and more fearful as I get older.  I don’t want my sphere of activity to get narrower and narrower.  Your comfort zone is like a muscle.  If you don’t stress it regularly, it gets weaker.  And a weaker comfort zone means that your range of experiences and richness in your life gets weaker, too.  No, I didn’t work this hard for so many years to let my world close in on me.  So I push.  Probably not often enough nor hard enough, but I have been trying to say “yes” more often than “no”.  This is how I learn.  This is how I grow.  This is how more wonderful people and experiences and general richness come into my life.

Trish, bless her, kept her mouth shut throughout all of this.  She didn’t say, “What is wrong with you?  This should be a piece of cake for you!”  She knew instinctively to not judge someone else when they are pushing outside of their comfort zone and that’s an important message as well.  No one should be ridiculed or shamed for struggling with something that you may find easy to do.  If someone is uncomfortable, they are truly uncomfortable and they are not going to get past it through shame.  What they need from you is validation, encouragement, and, if needed, help finding a workaround if the trigger is just too much.

I will leave you with this thought:  don’t let the fear of being outside your comfort zone stop you.  If you don’t push back against those walls, they will continue to close in on you.  Don’t let that happen.  Make yourself drive downtown every now and then.  Do something that you dread—you will most likely feel very glad you did so and find that it wasn’t really all that bad.  And, sure—say “yes” to giving that presentation!

Motivation Part II

It’s 7:18 am.  I’ve been awake since 3-ish, on and off, and up since 5:30.  Why?  In part, because today (Friday) is the day that I knew I needed to get up and put electronic pen to paper for this essay, which is due to post on Sunday.  Crunch time is upon us and my most effective intrinsic motivator (my self-imposed deadline) has finally gotten me on this computer.  Beau has given up trying to jump up on my lap for morning snuggles.  Mommy is focused.

As we discussed last time in the first essay around motivation, even though I love to write and get enormous satisfaction from it, I still require a bit of motivation to actually do it.  I’ve been writing this essay in my head over the two weeks—I’ve even jotted down notes to remind me of points I want to make—but sitting down and actually drafting and editing rarely seems to happen until the deadline is upon me.  That’s the motivator I’ve discovered I need.

We talked about motivation in general last time, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and more deeply about personal motivation through the examples of my own struggles.  This time, I want to talk more about motivating others, as well as how lessons on motivating others can give you some insights into motivating yourself.

There is a huge body of work on motivating others, particularly in the workplace.  I’m sure most of you reading this have been to at least one training class on this topic.  Not surprisingly, there is no consensus on what actually works.  This is because we are talking about motivating people, not, say, carbon atoms.  I’m a chemist so you know you’ll get science analogies!  If I want to “motivate” a carbon atom to bond with, say, an oxygen atom, I know how to do that.  A carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom.  And the reaction is well studied and will work every time since I can control the conditions to my liking.  Unlike carbon atoms, all people are different and even if I COULD control conditions to my liking, each person will respond to different sources of motivation.  Frustratingly, even the same person will respond differently depending on the context.  For example, fear can be a powerful motivator but circumstance is critical.  If you fear for your life, you will be motivated to do extraordinary things.  You may even be highly motivated if you fear for your job.  But if a manager chooses to regularly motivate his staff through fear and intimidation coupled with the threat of firing them, he will get the bare minimum effort he requires and even that only for a short period of time.  I am fond of saying that the difference between a good organization and a great organization is the discretionary effort put in by people.  Few choose to put in consistent, excellent extra effort out of fear.  Shame is another poor choice of motivation.  It might get you one action out of a particularly reluctant colleague (and make you feel better for an instant), but likely the trust in that relationship will be gone.  If you choose to use shame, it had better be worth it.  If you consistently use shame, don’t expect to be a manager for long.

There is a lot of controversy over the use of incentives for motivation, be it in the workplace or with, say, kids.  I was subjected to a segment on financial incentives during a leadership training program in which the takeaway was “financial incentives never work so don’t bother proposing them to us.”  My belief is that well crafted financial incentives do indeed work, but only in the right context.  If the work environment is toxic, if no one believes in the mission of the business (or has no idea what it is), and if the reward is really small compared to the effort, then I agree that financial incentives won’t work.  Nor will dangling days off, or a big celebration event, or any other “reward” that requires the recipient to actually appreciate the workplace and their co-workers.  Get your culture right, first.

Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, is one of the most annoyingly optimistic people I’ve ever met and he has some good thoughts on getting that culture right.  I subscribe to his blog, geared towards entrepreneurs who want to do really big things.  I am not one of those people, but I appreciate his perspectives and how his thinking challenges me out of my relentless incrementalism.  In a recent blog, he talked about employee motivation.  For workers to be motivated to do great things, he says, they need three things from you and the culture you create in your company: 1) Autonomy—the freedom to work within a framework that is not overly restrictive; 2) Mastery—the opportunity and support to get better and better at what they do; and, 3) Purpose—self-explanatory, but which I will dig into more below.  If you create an environment in which your employees have these three things, he says (and I agree), they will do Great Things.  The devil, of course, is in the details.  Creating this kind of culture and maintaining it clearly fight against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It takes a lot of work and a lot of nurturing, which is why it doesn’t happen that often.

So, let’s talk about one particular aspect of that environment: purpose.  In my leadership life, I tried to always be clear with the organization about what our high level business goals were (sales, profitability, scientific excellence and differentiation, etc.).  Once they were stated, I’d work with individuals to connect their particular goals and responsibilities to those business goals.  This “line of sight” in goal setting helps to instill that sense of purpose.  If you understand how your efforts contribute to the larger goals, that is a piece of the motivation puzzle.  Of course, you have to believe in the mission of the business and the worthiness (and achievability) of the goals, as well.  Plus, you need feel trust in and from your workmates to believe that you are not toiling in vain.  This is when financial incentives tied to workplace achievement work.  They work because those extrinsic motivators provided by leadership inspire you to access your intrinsic motivators—pride in your work and your own sense of accomplishment.  That is what gets the job done.

And this brings us full circle, back to motivating yourself in your personal life.  Thanks to a great comment by a reader in response to Part I of this essay, I was reminded of the connection between how I have motivated others in the workplace and how I might better motivate myself—this connection to higher level goals.  It’s easier in the workplace, because those higher levels goals are discreet and measurable and time bound.  And you expect to achieve them!  In your personal life, those higher level goals are aspirational.  You don’t really expect to fully achieve them; your goal is to continually move toward them or at least take actions that are consistent with that aspiration.  I am talking about goals like “I want to be able to grow old maintaining my physical and mental health well into old age” and “I want to treat everyone with whom I cross paths with kindness and compassion” and, for my fellow Jewish tribesmen out there, “I want to embrace my responsibility toward tikkum olam—healing the world”.  Those are big, hairy aspirations.  How do I tie organizing recipes and shelf contents to THAT? 

There’s a clue to that in something I wrote earlier, in Living the Second Quadrant, about living with intention.  This means choosing to do things that are important to me, not just reacting to what others wanted from me or mindlessly doing less important things because they were in front of me and/or easy.  The “how” I do that, this motivational piece, must then be tied to what I consider those high level aspirational goals.  Sounds like a lot of work and that’s the rub.  There’s that Second Law of Thermodynamics, again—nature tends towards increasing chaos and we have to put work into reversing that inclination.  I’m ok with that, as long as I believe in what I’m working towards.  I’m starting to articulate that better.  I’ve got work to do.