Author Archives: Sherri

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.

Motivation Part I

I started thinking about motivation during spin class last week. It was at that point in the class when I was no longer in a state of flow and was just trying to get through the last 15 minutes. The instructor began an 8 minute journey of pain that involved 40 second sprints followed by a 20 second “rest” period during which you increased your gear so that the next 40 second sprint would be tougher. I was thinking to myself, as I turned up the gear for the fourth time in as many minutes, that I really need an instructor. I could never motivate myself to do this on my own. My memory went back to the time that I was working out twice weekly with a trainer. I was always amazed that I would just do whatever he told me to do. There was one time he was late to our session.  I had done my warm up and thought, “Well, Sean often starts me off with burpees so why don’t I do a set a burpees?” But I hate burpees. So, I didn’t do them. Just as I was trying to decide on some exercise less unpalatable to do while I waited, Sean came in the door and said, “Burpees.  Go!”  And I immediately started doing burpees.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s wrapped up in priorities, which we have discussed at length before, but is a separate beast. When I asked Siri to define motivation, she returned this from Dictionary.com: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.  The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”  Reasons, desire, willingness.  Alright, that resonates. So, when you really want to do something (priorities) or HAVE to do something (responsibilities), how do you summon that desire and willingness? And if you are trying to motivate someone else, how do you find those triggers that summon desire and willingness in them?

First, let’s talk a bit about types, or sources, of motivation.  Sources of motivation are either intrinsic or extrinsic.  “Intrinsic” means the source comes from within you.  “Extrinsic” means the source is external to you.  Ideally, extrinsic motivation awakens some source of intrinsic motivation.  Afterall, you still need to make the choice to act.  No one can MAKE you do anything you don’t want to do.  They can, however, provide a stimulus that causes you to CHOOSE to do something that, without that stimulus, you would not choose to do.  Based on that external stimulus, you run a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide that the consequences of not responding to that extrinsic motivator are not worth it (negative consequences) or that the benefits of responding are indeed worth it (positive consequences).  Regardless, you are making a choice to act or not act.  Own that.  (See:  Hot Button of Personal Accountability/Not Playing the Victim.)

Back to exercise as an example.  We have established that I am basically a lazy person.  When it comes to exercise, I need extrinsic motivation.  There are some things I will do on my own, like long walks listening to podcasts or moderate treadmills stints watching videos or reading eBooks.  However, these are rarely very strenuous workouts.  If I want to work out hard (spin, lifting) or go through a routine (stretching, yoga) I need an instructor or at the very least a workout partner.  I just do.  It is not a failing that I am not one of those people who motivate myself to workout hard.  It is an understanding of what type of motivation I need to do strenuous workouts.  Afterall, I can motivate myself to put myself in front of that instructor.  I just prefer to have them make the decisions of what exercise I do next, or the accountability of keeping up with a workout partner.  It’s taken me years to figure this out about myself.  Yet, while I have figured out the exercise thing, I’m still figuring out what kind of motivation I need to do other things that I want to do—or at least things that I want to have completed.

Even writing, something that I really enjoy, requires some type of motivation.  What works for me is a deadline.  This is why I will never write a book, unless I can motivate myself to break down that enormous task into a zillion little deadlines (or find an editor who will do that for me).  I write to a deadline, whether it’s my self-imposed every-two-week blog post deadlines or publishing deadlines for the articles I write for Lab Manager Magazine.  I rarely sit down to actually type until a few days before said deadline, which is why my writing is usually limited to 1200-1500 words.  Oh, I’ll compose in my head for days or weeks, but the actual task of writing doesn’t happen until that date-driven motivation pops up.

What I have a really hard time with is motivation around small personal or household tasks.  This drives Trish absolutely nuts.  Take a guess at how long I’ve been “promising” to organize the stacks of recipes I’ve been collecting?  Or organizing the shelves lining the wall beside our basement steps.  Or any number of little tasks around the house.  It’s not like I don’t have the time.  It’s not like I haven’t made a zillion lists (and I do love a list).  It’s not like I don’t get enormous satisfaction when I complete one of those tasks—when I take Trish on a tour through some little task I’ve completed, I’m like a child showing off an “A” on a class assignment.  I haven’t found the right intrinsic motivator yet for those things and I don’t think it would be good for our marriage if I asked Trish to be the source of extrinsic motivation.  I know that my activation barrier is around my paralyzing perfectionism.  I know that when I DO actually start something that I finish it to reasonable satisfaction.  But I just.  Can’t.  Get.  Myself.  To start.  It’s important to note, here, that Trish does not have this issue.  In fact, one could say she has the opposite problem.  When she gets a task into her head, she cannot sit still until it is done.  She will drive herself to exhaustion.  And there is usually an injury involved, a bandage or two, and some blood.  That is not my goal, either.  There must be some happy medium.

This had been an issue throughout my working life as well.  I’m sure my former co-workers who are reading this are rolling their eyes.  They could probably comment on the techniques they developed to motivate me to do things they needed me to do, be it a capital expenditure justification document or a conversation with someone or a phone call.  I probably should not let Trish know this, but I think what worked best was putting me in a position of personal and/or public embarrassment if I didn’t complete the task.

What’s super frustrating is that I know all the tricks.  I know that if there is something you are dreading that you should do that FIRST.  Get it out of the way.  I know that I do my best work of any kind in the morning hours—I’m writing now at 9:30 am.  I know that allowing myself some time to do something fun and/or mindless will absolutely keep me from ever tackling whatever it is that I want to motivate myself to do.  And I know that sometimes I just need to give myself a little grace and try again tomorrow.  No epiphanies, here.  No fancy wrap-up sentences that describe how I’ve tackled this issue.  Like most personal growth, it’s just going to be a forever journey, a daily battle.  What I can commit to is to keep trying to get better.  Writing about it like this will help me for a little bit.  I now, at least, feel a bit of public accountability over those recipes and those shelves.  I will NOT share with you what else is on that list!

I’m not sure which is tougher:  motivating yourself or motivating action in others.  I will tell you that I’ve found it a lot easier to motivate others within the structure and hierarchy of the work environment than in my personal life.  Incentives help sometimes.  Simply applying what works on you usually does not.  We’ll tackle that next time.

Coping Energy III

Yes, this is the third time that I’m writing about coping energy.  It’s been quite the humbling month, as evidenced by the fact that this essay is posting a week late, after the one before it was half a week late.  Anyone who knows me knows that I really don’t like missing deadlines or being late—even if no one but me cares.

Ever since I retired and then started this blog, I’ve been very proud of myself.  Thinking about all these life and leadership lessons as I’ve been writing about them had gotten me feeling something like a mountain climber summiting a peak.  The peak, in this case, is Maslow’s hierarchy and I guess I convinced myself that I had reached that rarified air of self-actualization.  At the tender age of 59 I had reached enlightenment and could now calmly pontificate from the top of the mountain and spread my wisdom.  My life was now a joyful string of days full of calm, happiness, rainbows, and unicorns.  Yeah, no.  My humbling lesson over this past month is that I have not reached some enviable skill of managing life’s stressors.  It’s that I had managed to remove a good number of the stressors I’d dealt with throughout my life through a combination of good fortune, retirement, and a life partner that I thank the Universe for every day.  And when a series of unforeseen and uncontrollable stressors came flooding back, I found that my ability to roll with the punches just wasn’t there.  So, we’re going to talk about coping energy AGAIN.

I just reread my first two essays on this topic.  You can find the first part here and the second part here.  I could have benefited from reading them these last few weeks.  What happened?  Well, it started on September 1st when the remains of Hurricane Ida, smashing up against a cold front, spawned a number of tornados in our area, including an EF2 that spun 130 mph winds right through our neighborhood.  RIGHT THROUGH.  That’s what my last essay was about.  The disruption was more than the power outage and the debris.  It was the constant irritation of the sound of the generators and chain saws and wood chippers.  It was the PTSD of going around the area and seeing everything changed.  It was the Y being closed and not wanting to do any other type of exercise and eating takeout and being thrown totally out of our routine.  It was trying to celebrate both of our birthdays and being happy and joyous but feeling exhausted the whole time while trying to hold it together.  It was navigating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in the middle of all that, which had me reliving all the horror, distress, and disorientation of those days.  All of this messed with my sleep, which is messed up enough as it is, and just aggravated the whole situation.  I had a hair trigger moodiness.  I was exhausted.  And I couldn’t really explain why I was feeling so off balance.

Then I had to get on a plane and fly to Atlanta for a family visit.  I love seeing my family!  What I dislike is the travel to Atlanta—on a good day.  This time, I had to deal with my stressed-out mood which meant a pit in my stomach every time I thought about any aspect of the trip.  Tropical Storm Nicholas had decided to park its tropical self west of Georgia, which meant a rainy forecast the whole time I was there.  That meant I was going to have to navigate “driving” around town in the rain—“driving” around Atlanta being some cross between the Indy 500 and a demolition derby.  To top it off, my sister’s car had taken in some water during a recent flash flood, so there was always the little concern in the back of my mind that something electrically kerflooey might happen at any point. 

There were other things going on, too, that I just don’t want to share.  The details are not important.  What matters is that I kept getting pinged by one stressor after another combined with a change in my schedule that kept me mentally and emotionally off balance for the first three weeks of the month without a break.  I did not handle it well.  Stuff that normally did not bother me much turned almost incapacitating!  I was teary all the time and had to keep going off by myself to let that emotion out.  I just wanted to sleep all the time, but I couldn’t sleep at night.  I wasn’t exercising.  I ate Very Bad Food and lots of it, which also left me feeling lethargic.  I slid very far, very fast.  I had no coping energy and was not able to regain any reasonable amount until these last few days.  That humbled me big time.

I thought I had conquered the coping energy challenge!  I thought I had developed the skills to catch myself, to maintain perspective, to practice effective self-care, and keep my coping energy reserves full (or at least not totally empty).  Instead, I found myself back in those old patterns of short temper, thinking only about myself and my own needs, making poor choices, and just feeling like I was drowning.  I disappointed myself and that made everything worse.  I felt like a failure.

Trish, members of my family, and friends who have seen me during this time were all kind of puzzled by this behavior.  It just didn’t seem that bad to them.  None of the stressors by themselves were enough to knock me off kilter.  Driving around Atlanta is never fun but I used to be able to do it without feeling like I was going to throw up when I got behind the wheel.  It was the combination and the unrelenting barrage—sort of like a boxer weakened by blow after blow.  He could withstand any individual hit just fine, but after so many so quickly, he went down for the count.

So, here’s what I’ve learned though all of this.  When someone tells you about things that are stressing them and sapping their coping energy, don’t try to fix it.  If they want your suggestions for solutions, they will ask you.  What they want is for you to listen, to really hear them, to validate that the situation sucks, and to know that you care.  Look, I’m a problem solver.  Most of us are.  We’ve spent our careers doing that and it’s hard to resist the urge to fix something or someone.  I’m telling you, resist that urge!  I did not want all the well-meaning suggestions that came flooding in.  I knew I could right the ship.  I just needed to vent about the storm and hear from others that, yeah, the storm is rough.  I am reasonably good at asking for what I need, although sometimes I need to reach a breaking point and that ask comes with tears.  (Very effective for getting what you need, by the way.)  Others may indeed need a little prodding, but ask gently.  Ultimately, if the person feels safe and supported, they WILL ask for what they need.  And if you are the one struggling, let yourself struggle a bit and then take one little step forward.  Don’t beat yourself up but don’t get stuck.  And ask.  For.  Help.  Just having Trish take me to the airport instead of driving myself made a world of difference.

I’m mostly out of the storm, now, as evidenced by the fact that I can write about it.  A visit from a dear friend helped to fill me back up.  The bathroom scale has fortunately not moved appreciably and my eating is reverting to the mean.  I’m still looking forward to getting back into regular exercise.  I’m going to work on the hubris.  I’m not invincible.  I don’t have all the perfect techniques to avoid a crash.  I learn a little more each time I go through a difficult period, which is why the difficult times are so important.  This time, I am reminded of the importance of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone a little more frequently so that I am better able to handle unexpected upsets more easily.  And I will work even harder to have that compassion for others whose coping energy is sapped for whatever reason.  “We are here to get it right, not be right.”

Prayers and Chainsaws

This essay is posting a few days late and you’ll understand why when you read it.  My last essay, When Plans Change, was an unintended precursor to this one.  Last time, I wrote about rolling with the punches when someone else gets punched.  That essay was about compassion and empathy.  This time, I’m going to talk about when you get punched yourself.  It’s an essay about resilience, gratitude, and so many of the topics I keep writing about.  Life sure tries to teach you the same lessons over and over again.  And what’s my mantra?  All together now:  We’re here to GET it right, not to BE right.

Our story begins last Wednesday, almost a week ago, when I was still noodling on what I wanted to write about for this essay.  I still have that more humorous one buzzing around in my head and I WILL get to it, but for some reason it just didn’t feel right.  We were anticipating the residue of Hurricane Ida coming through that afternoon and I was thinking about the impact that 3-5 inches of rain might have.  “Don’t forget to check the sump pump,” I thought, “to make sure it’s not cockeyed and won’t kick on.”  I was thinking about the potential of losing power and maybe not being able to make my biweekly Zoom call with my college friends.  I was thinking about cooking dinner.  I was NOT thinking about a tornado.

The TV was off around 5:00 because I was just reading and Trish had gone upstairs to take a nap.  My BFF, who lives a half hour south and east of us, texted that they were under a tornado warning and were heading downstairs.  Now, tornados are NOT common in this corner of southeastern PA.  We’d had a surprisingly strong one just a few weeks before and some straight-line winds that did damage the week before that.  But tornados are just not a thing here.  I turned on the news and started cooking dinner.  I saw that the “cone of danger” emanating from Beth’s warning was heading in our direction.  I chopped potatoes and put them in the oven to roast.  In minutes, my phone went off with a warning of our own.  I honestly wasn’t worried, but I’m a person who follows directions.  I turned off the oven, went upstairs, woke Trish up, we grabbed the cats and my iPad and headed to the basement—only the second time in the five years I’ve lived here.  Bridget was upset to be separated from her food bowl.  It was raining fairly hard, as expected, but we still had power so I started streaming the news.  Two meteorologists were tag teaming at this point since there were three of four warnings at once.  Very unusual.  Then, they both gasped and pointed to a slowly moving white feature on the radar.  That, they said, was a debris field.  This was now a confirmed tornado.  And guess which warning that was associated with?  Then, for dramatic effect, the power went out.  We looked up at the small basement window.  We could see absolutely nothing.  Just sheets of water and an occasional glimpse of trees swaying like paper caught in a fan.  We were barely breathing.  After a couple of minutes the power flickered back on, to our amazement, and we watched the radar with Adam and Cecily (the meteorologists) until the storm was past us.  Then wandered upstairs.  We didn’t see any daylight above us when we opened the basement door, thank goodness.  The rain had slowed to a drizzle.  Trish went outside as the neighbors all gathered.  I, like the conductor of the band on the Titanic, finished cooking dinner.  I didn’t know what else to do!  We never ate it.

Trish came back in and told me to come outside.  The first thing I noticed was the massive branch from the neighbors’ tree lying in our driveway, right where Trish normally parked.  For some reason, she had been driven to pull her car back to the end of the driveway before the storm, wanting the rain to clean mud out of her spot.  Her car would have been totaled.  Then I looked across the street.  The large, dense tree line behind our neighbors’ houses was gone.  Just gone.  I could see sheared off trunks peeking out a few feet above the roof line, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and snipped them off.  The trunks were just bare.  Ripped of all foliage.  The street was flooded.  Some neighbors lost siding or had other damage from flying debris.  Everyone was just milling about; some were collecting garbage cans flung a couple hundred yards away.  I was stunned but had no idea the extent of the damage.  The rain came back so we headed inside.  I don’t remember turning the TV on.  No one really knew the extent of the damage then, anyway.  I started the call with my college friends and the power went off promptly at 9:00.  Trish and I worked from 9:00 pm until 3:00 am bailing out our sump well to keep the basement from flooding.  Eight inches of rain puts a bit of hydrostatic pressure on a foundation!

Many of you reading this know what happened.  An EF2 tornado with 130 mph winds ripped through our neighborhood.  The tree damage I saw when I first poked my head outside was repeated across a path that stretched several miles.  At some points the tornado bounced down and took out some roofs.  It had a particular appetite for power line poles.  And the trees!  So many big, old trees ripped out of the ground or sheared off and stripped!  Trees across roads.  Trees into houses.  Skeletons of trees standing alone in what used to be solid wooded areas.

After a restless three hours of sleep, we awoke to a beautiful day.  Why is it always a beautiful day after a horrific storm?  Is there just nothing left in the atmosphere or is it a way of giving hope?  The first thing I noticed was the drone of the generators.  I like some white noise, but there was something about those generators that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.  It grated on your nerves like a tooth ache.  That was quickly drowned out by the chainsaws and wood chippers.  The streets were filled with crews, dozens of them.  Our power was only out for two days but it felt like forever.  We were so fortunate.  No damage to the house.  Minimal tree and limb loss.  We spent most of the day helping neighbors and walking around.  Everything looks different.  I have this vision of my guardian angels (Dad, Grandma, Trish’s parents) lifting that funnel cloud up and keeping it above the roof line for us and Trish’s two sisters (we all live in a line that defined the tornado’s path).

The disruption wasn’t so much the power loss or even the road closures.  Trying to get out of the ‘hood was like figuring out the Hogwarts staircases—every time you went somewhere, different roads were shut in different spots as they first cleared the roads, then pulled out enough of the downed trees to assess the utility damage, and then fixed the damage.  These guys are freaking heroes.  All I could think of, though, was that feeling of powerlessness, of being totally at the mercy of Mother Nature.  I also thought about the earth’s power of renewal and how all those stripped wooded areas would lead to new growth, new habitat.  Even the deer are thrilled at all the yummy leaves now within reach!  But us humans, we are fighting entropy to put things back the way we like it, the way we need it, as quickly as possible.  It feels futile and comforting at the same time. 

As I write these words, it is the first day of Rosh Hashanah—a time of introspection and assessment.  Fitting that life has given us this reality check.  It sounds trivial to relate this, but I think about how I felt that first morning.  We had no power; the roads were blocked; I wasn’t clear headed enough to realize that we could still use our gas stove and that we still had water.  I just thought, “I can’t eat breakfast.”  I was panicked for just a minute wondering where my next meal was coming from!  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve found myself on that bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy, worrying about basic safety and needs.  I’ve been so busy anguishing over those upper levels of the pyramid, with not enough gratitude about not needing to worry about those lower foundational levels; not enough compassion for those who do.  Trish and I are still mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, sentiments echoed in the eyes of our neighbors.  We know we skirted a disaster and so many others were not so fortunate.  I’m still serenaded by the sounds of wood chippers and the roads are still clogged with repairmen, but I’m feeling normal enough to write.  “Prayers and chainsaws” said the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer; gratitude and resilience.

When Plans Change

This is an essay about empathy, compassion, and roasting vegetables.  I had been working up a funny essay for this weekend, but my plans have changed.  Oh, I still intend to write the lighthearted one, probably next week, but oftentimes life just whispers what needs to be said.  Something happens and I just start noodling on it and then I start discussing it with Trish and then, well, I have to write it down to get it out of my head. Buckle up, reader, because this is going to be a deeply personal essay.  Then again, most of my essays are.  A by-product of embracing authenticity and vulnerability is that I just don’t know how to write any other way anymore.  I know I am not discovering new deep thoughts or breaking new philosophical ground.  Writing helps me work things out and by sharing this writing, I hope that I can help you put words to similar thoughts that have been swirling in your head.

Last time, I wrote about intentionality—choosing to act consciously and on things that I decide are important to me.  I wrote that Trish and I are both struggling to differing degrees with a sense of purpose these days and that embracing intentionality has helped me find meaning in things that used to be somewhat mindless activities.  That’s all well and good but I knew there was more.  The “more” has really come out over these last couple of weeks as I’ve worked to put “intentionality” into conscious practice.  As I wrote last time, I’ve started taking a couple of minutes in the morning to write a few lines in my journal to “set my intention” for the day.  I put that statement in quotes because it really does sound like loosey-goosey, crunchy-granola-spirituality that cries out for quote marks.  But it actually works.  Until it doesn’t.  It’s the “until it doesn’t” part—when your plans change—that I want to write about today.

I’ll start with a simple example.  One night last week, Trish and I sat down after dinner to watch the evening news, to be followed by my nightly call to my Mom.  Then I got a text from a friend.  She lives a few hours away and her son had recently moved to the area to start his first post-college job.  She was asking me if there was a pharmacy that delivered because her son had a terrible migraine and didn’t have any medicine.  I could have ignored the text.  Or I could have given her the number of the local CVS.  And I am embarrassed to admit that not too many years ago I would have chosen one of those paths.  Instead, I did a quick mental calculation.  The nightly news bums me out anyway and I could afford to skip a night; I could text Mom and tell her I’d call a few minutes late; and he lives five minutes from my house.  When I added into the calculation a few seconds of imagining being a Mom, several hours away from my son who was in pain, feeling helpless and wanting to help my child…well, it became a no-brainer.  I hopped in the car and brought the kid some Excedrin Migraine.  And a chocolate bar. 

I’ve often heard the advice that if you are feeling down or sad, go do something for someone else.  For most of my adult life I had not been able to embrace that because, honestly, I was just too self-centered.  But, man, is it true!  I felt so good after running that errand!  And I realized what a gift my friend had given ME by giving me the opportunity to help her son out.  I’ve beaten myself up regularly over the years because I’ve felt like I did not give back enough to the community.  I wrote checks, which certainly were needed, but I hadn’t given much of my time.  I’m not sure what made me so hesitant to volunteer.  Maybe it was reluctance to making an open-ended commitment, since I tended to go for one-off “day of caring” events.  Maybe it was fear of an emotional commitment—either making one myself or feeling compelled to make one by someone else’s needs.  This has torn at me for decades.  I tried to assuage the need and the guilt by writing bigger checks but even giving away my whole net worth wouldn’t have been enough.  I wanted the feeling of doing good without having to put in any effort.  I still don’t know from what I was protecting myself.  It was really only when I wrote that last essay that I realized, to paraphrase myself, that I was looking for meaning EVERYWHERE without realizing I could find meaning ANYWHERE.

Part of that realization was opening my eyes to what Trish and her posse of friends have brought into my life.  Every one of them, but especially Trish, has shown me the value of doing something that makes someone else’s life a little easier.  Trish seems to always go that little extra step to do something nice for someone.  She isn’t afraid of the effort; she isn’t protective of her vulnerability.  My bestie, Beth, is the same way.  They are both very aware of the needs and preferences of those around them and look for ways, large and small, to address those needs.  Little by little, I’ve started putting that into action myself.  Seriously, Sherri, you never were aware of that before?  Well, yes and no.  During my working years, especially, I just ping-ponged from one reactionary activity to another.  I rarely stopped and asked myself, “What (and who) is really important here?”   While I have always had a strong sense of empathy, it tended to just make me anxious and sad for others.  Or angry.  What it rarely did was inspire action on my part, as it does for Trish and Beth.

So, this week there was another change in plans.  One of our best friends is the only child of a really feisty 95-year-old woman, whom we all adore.  She has continued to insist on living alone with only help from her daughter.  Earlier this week, our greatest fear was realized when she fell at night and wasn’t found until the morning, her hip broken.  The wagons have quickly circled and when the posse says, “We’ll be there” you can take it to the bank.  Today, Trish and I were asked to go to her Mom’s house and gather up trash for garbage day tomorrow and take care of a few other tasks.  There was no question, no hesitation, just asking ourselves, “What else can we do?”  Since my love language is cooking, I immediately went to the grocery store and roasted a tray of vegetables and grilled some chicken breasts.  Our friend needs healthy food when she gets home at night from the hospital!  We looked around her Mom’s house and did everything we could think of that would help.  No matter what happens next, the posse will be there.  Not out of obligation.  Out of empathy, compassion, and love.

I realize that I am much more aware of little things that will make life easier for people around me.  Sure, I try to do lots of little things for Trish, as she does for me.  But I also pulled our trash cans out from the curb this morning because it would be hard for the trash truck to get around the vehicle parked there and I didn’t want the guys to have to get out of the truck.  And I hold the door for people at the Y.  And I ask if I can cook when I go visit people.  (OK, I’m still a little unsure about my cooking but I’m going to trust that Trish would tell me if it’s not really that good.)  I don’t do these things out of obligation or because I expect something in return from them.  I do it simply because I have made the conscious decision that doing these things is important to me.  And it just feels good to do something nice for someone, especially when they don’t expect it.  All this sounds so obvious as I write it, but this has truly been revelatory for me.  Oh, I still write checks to charities that can reach many more people.  But the real meaning for me comes from those acts that I choose to do for those I care about, or who just cross my path. It’s been conscious.  Purposeful.  And it has meaning.  Even when—or especially when—it requires a sudden change in plans.

Living the Second Quadrant

Trish and I have both been struggling lately with a bit of angst around a sense of purpose.  When you are working, a sense of purpose is not difficult.  Nor is a sense of futility, but that’s another essay.  Anyway, when you are working you have a job description and a business goal and all kinds of things banging at you requiring your attention.  While a TRUE sense of purpose might get buried under feelings of urgency, you rarely find yourself at a loss for what to do.  On the contrary, you probably find yourself ruminating on a list of things you’d RATHER be doing if all these other demands on your time and attention would just go away.

When you retire, those work-related demands do indeed go away.  All at once.  And sometimes you might find yourself at a loss for a sense of purpose.  I wrote about that a bit in my three-part series on transitioning to retirement (here are links to parts one, two, and three).  I have a friend who was so busy with other purpose-driven commitments that he retired because he didn’t really have time to work anymore.  Neither Trish nor I had that issue.  I was fired (thankfully) and just decided to retire.  She retired for her sanity.  After my detox period, I did a year’s worth of contract consulting and then settled into this blog.  It gives me a pretty decent sense of purpose but I’ve still felt nudgy.  Trish had to detox quite a while and now “purpose” is really nagging at her.

I had an “Aha!” moment a couple of weeks ago during a walk, listening to a podcast.  It was Brené Brown’s “Dare to Lead” podcast (naturally) and she was interviewing Charles Duhigg.  He is a journalist and author who has written a couple of bestsellers on habits and productivity.  They were talking about choosing to work on only what is important to you and about how to figure out what actually IS important to you.  OK, that makes sense.  Then Brené asked the question that I wanted to ask: “I get all that, but HOW?  HOW do you actually get yourself ignore all the noise and work on what’s important to you?”

Before I answer that question, I must take you back in time a bit and explain the title of this essay.  We all have probably read Stephan Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  It’s a classic and has been read by something like 3 billion people (maybe a slight exaggeration).  Lots of good stuff in there but there was one concept that really hit me and stayed with me.  He showed a two-by-two matrix, that old standby of corporate America.  One axis was labeled Urgent; the other labeled Important (This is the picture that accompanies this essay).  There were four quadrants in the grid.  The first was things that are both urgent and important—things that can and should be done and usually do.  The second was things that are not urgent but are indeed important—things that should be done but often aren’t.  The third quadrant was things that are urgent but not important—things that shouldn’t be done but often take up a lot of your time.  Finally, the fourth quadrant was things that were neither urgent nor important—things that shouldn’t be done and rarely are.  The challenge, of course, was to resist Third Quadrant activities and prioritize Second Quadrant activities.  Simple in concept.  Horrifically difficult in practice.

There are tricks galore out there to help you focus on Second Quadrant activities.  I had a mentor/boss who, whenever I would come in for a discussion with my list of topics, would invariably ask, “What’s the last item on your list?  Let’s start there.”  He knew that instinct usually encourages us to put the item we consider most difficult or unsavory at the bottom of the list, unconsciously hoping that time will run out before we get to it.  This habit of doing first the task you most dread is a staple of productivity training.  That worked for me only occasionally—usually when I was well rested and had gobs of energy.  It rarely worked when I needed it to work.  My tired brain, my sapped coping energy, my frayed nerves all found themselves soothed, more often, by tackling Third Quadrant work (email, anyone?) as a way to build up energy for the Second Quadrant work.  More often than not, time ran out that day before said energy was sufficiently mustered.

Which brings us back to the podcast.  Charles answered Brené’s “how” question with a discussion that almost stopped me in my tracks.  The method (not trick) to getting yourself to work on what you know is important instead of what is just urgent is….intentionality.  Seems obvious, no?  But it’s not the knowledge of the concept that is so earthshattering.  It’s putting it into practice.  “Intentionality” means, to me, making conscious and active choices instead of reacting.  It means be wholly present most of the time and being very purposeful in the choices you make—and owning the consequences of those choices.  Often it’s around your own Second Quadrant activities vs. Third Quadrant and that battle is difficult enough.  Other times, other people are involved.  You see, sometimes a need is important to someone else and not to you.  Whether or not you choose to do that thing requires thoughtful assessment of a number of factors, such as “Is there some benefit to me if I do this?” or “Is there some repercussion to NOT doing this that I want to avoid?” or “This person is important to me, so I’m going to do this to help them out.”  That takes energy when just DOING the thing often seems easier.  And if you choose to NOT do the thing?  Then there is the energy-sapping activity of confronting this person making demands on you.  Again, it is often easier to just do the thing.  But.  If you consistently spend your time on things that may be important to someone else and not to you, guess what?  You never get to YOUR OWN important things.  If you CHOOSE to do that—if you act with intention and purpose—so be it.  You’ve also chosen the consequences.

So, I’ve been noodling a lot on intentionality and how it relates to a sense of purpose.  Everyone knows someone, or has been that someone, who searches endlessly for a sense of purpose or happiness.  Maybe it’s the right job or the right partner or the right house or town.  The list of requirements is usually undefined; the person only knows when something is NOT what they are looking for.  It took a long time for me to understand that you don’t need to search for purpose or happiness EVERYWHERE; you can find it ANYWHERE—if you choose to live intentionally.  It is around how you choose to spend your time and energy each day.  It begins, of course, with the authenticity to embrace what is important to you and what might be keeping you from spending time on those things.  We’ve discussed before the steps required to make a change in priorities and a real commitment.  And now I understand the final piece: once you’ve truly aligned your priorities with what’s important to you and made that commitment, action and purpose come from intentionality.  Every day.

How is that working for me?  Well, I’ve started spending a few minutes most mornings capturing a few lines in my journal about what my intentions are for the day.  It’s usually a combination of tasks and mindset.  Reminding myself what’s important.  Sometimes I need a little reset, like today when our cat Beau inoculated the living room with breakfast trying to get out a hairball.  But I did indeed reset.  I took a deep breath and said, “What’s important to me today?”  At the top of the list was getting these thoughts out on a first draft.  Your sense of purpose does not have to have a big societal impact, although that’s wonderful if it does.  Your purpose can be to live honestly; to be kind and compassionate to everyone who crosses your path, stranger or friend; to be the kind of person people can depend upon; to spend the majority of your time on things that are important to you, even if some days that means reading an issue of the New Yorker cover to cover or helping good friends split wood from felled trees.  It’s about living consciously, not mindlessly.  My goal is to live that, with intention, every day.