The first rule of writing is “write what you know.”  When I first started this blog almost four years ago (yes, it’s been almost four years), I had a lot of pent-up writing energy around the kinds of topics that kept coming up when I coached younger employees.  Now that I’ve mostly exhausted that list, my writing is inspired by whatever is going on in my life at the time I sit down to type.  Not surprisingly, observations about life always seem to tie back to those coaching lessons.  Human beings in life and human beings at work are still human beings.  The same rules tend to apply.

As I mentioned several essays back, Trish and I are embarking on a major renovation of our house and I anticipated that stuff surrounding said renovation was going to dominate my writing for a while.  There was a flurry of activity in the spring and early summer as we went through the selection process around design and then a lull as we awaited our construction date.  Well, that date is nigh upon us and for the last many weeks, Trish and I have been getting ready to move out of our house so the guys can have the run of the place.  The process has been, shall we say, unsettling.  And being unsettled is just no fun.

I’ve touched on this topic before from some different angles.  I talked about pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and the needed coping energy.  Today, as I was “leaving it all on the bike” at spin class, I was ruminating on this whole unsettled thing and, despite all my learning and growing and stuff, it still can throw me for a loop.  I’m trying to get back to a more even keel, so I’m going to write about it and you’re coming with me.

I have to begin by admitting that I clearly lead a very cushy life.  While the pandemic stressed a lot of people to the max, little Ms. Retired Introvert here settled into a very comfortable existence.  I’ve always been a homebody and the pandemic reinforced that tendency.  Adding to that the weight loss journey Trish and I went on during lockdown and finding out that I actually like to cook, I got really REALLY comfortable staying in my cozy little home bubble.  I am enjoying getting out more again, for sure.  But I always look forward to walking in that front door.  However, “walking in that front door” is different now as we live amid boxes and empty walls.  I know the valley is beautiful but all I see right now is the huge mountain in front of me that I first need to climb.

This feeling of being unsettled is manifesting in a number of ways.  First and foremost is disruption of routine.  I can’t seem to write.  My journal has sat untouched for weeks and writing these essays has been sporadic and a bit painful (particularly for my editor who has been using a lot of red ink these last months).  I don’t seem to be able to focus to read, which is another self-soothing activity.  That means magazines and email digests are piling up alongside books and that makes me anxious.  Some days, I just don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m nudgey.  And, I’m sure, annoying.  Here’s a fun example:  Trish was on the land line when the builder called on her cell phone.  Since we have been waiting anxiously for him to give us a start date, she implored me to pick up the phone and deal with the call.  Brian wanted to stop by Monday at 10:00 and I said, “Great!”  When Trish got off her call and I relayed the message, she asked why I didn’t push for a later time so it wouldn’t mess with her/our exercise schedule.  (We are, at least, desperately clinging to our exercise routine!)  I, then, burst into tears since that is how I deal with any stress or extreme emotion.  (Bassners have an extra tear duct.  We’re known for being a bit weepy.)  She tried to back track but is unsettled herself so it resulted in me stamping my foot and saying, “I’m going upstairs!”  It’s been a little rough around here.

Once I got upstairs, I tried to write.  That didn’t work.  I tried to read.  That also didn’t work.  So I slammed down the top of my laptop and went back downstairs.  “We need a list,” I said, being a good Virgo.  Since Trish is also a good Virgo, we made a list of everything that has to get done before the construction starts inside the house.  It’s still a disappointingly long list, but writing it down at least got it out of our heads.  It also gave us discreet tasks we could do, which is also a good thing for Virgos.

I’ve identified two things to get me through this unsettledness.  The first is to be present, which is a pretty good tool to get through most difficulties in life.  Know what one of the best things is to force me to be present?  When our 25 pound Maine Coon-mix cat, Beau, decides it’s snuggle time.  He will announce his presence with a forceful meow, jump up on your lap, settle his bottom on your lap and, forcing you to slouch, spread the rest of himself up your chest and under your chin.  There will be a little kneading of tummy and then he will settle in.  Your job is to hold him so he feels secure and kiss the top of his head between his ears.  That is all you are able to do with that much cat on you.  So, while that warming, vibrating (purring), heated blanket is on me, I am just present.  I think about what I want to write.  I think about what I want to do.  I kiss the top of his head again.  There is nothing better to calm you down.

The second thing I do is choose just one thing to get done today.  “Begin by giving yourself a little grace,” I say to myself.  “And choose just one thing to get done.”  Today it is getting this draft done.  I’m pretty sure I’ll get more than just this one thing done, but if that turns out to be it then that’s ok.  I think back to the stressful time periods in my life.  Some of them were time bound and fairly short, like preparing for this construction.  Some of them were open ended and exhausting.  One nice thing about being older is that I’ve known shown myself I can get through these things, big or small.  As I wrote recently, it gets better.  There’s nothing wrong with being unsettled.  It’s part of life.  It makes for good stories when you get out the other side.  Take a deep breath.  Do one thing.  Yeah, I do believe that was a coaching lesson!

I am not talking literally, of course.  Sometimes picking at a physical scab is necessary and it’s always gross, but I don’t need to write an essay about it.  I’m talking about metaphorically picking at scabs—when you just can’t let something go.  This is a huge issue for me (see: Righteous streak, mile long) and has put a strain on my marriage here and there, not to mention other relationships.  You, too?  Well, then!  Join me in a little written therapy session as I try to gain some insight into this behavior.

Here’s a typical situation:  You are having a conversation with someone that has become something of a debate.  It could be a discussion of current events, or defending a project proposal, or answering questions at meeting, or even just discussing the reasons behind someone’s behavior.  You walk away from that discussion feeling unsatisfied, that you just haven’t gotten your point across.  Often, you’ll wake up at 3:00 am and say to yourself, “THAT is what I should have said!” 

I, personally, don’t like to be misunderstood, so I get rankled when I don’t think I’ve been heard or when I can’t think of a response quickly enough to persuade my debate partner.  I will noodle over the conversation for days, replaying the dynamics and imagining my more eloquent responses.  Sometimes I will talk it over (and over and over) with someone, trying to get my words right.  Most of the time, I just turn it over (and over and over) in my head.  I spend a lot of time reworking conversations.  It’s exhausting.  But at some point, I am going to want to correct the record.

There are a number of reasons that I might pick at a scab with you.  They are all interconnected but by far the primary reason is because you matter to me.  I care what you think and how you feel about me because you are important to me.  Take that as some measure of solace when I keep nagging you about something that you’ve either forgotten about or don’t want to talk about or consider so minor that you can’t believe I am STILL picking at it.  If I feel that I have been misunderstood by someone who matters to me, I can be relentless and endlessly annoying in trying to make my points heard.  If you are not important to me, then after maybe a brief period of feeling annoyed or wronged, I will (mostly) let it go. 

This issue is trickier at work.  You want to correct the record, but in the workplace, there is often a power imbalance that makes picking at scabs inappropriate or even detrimental to your future success.  As referenced in earlier essays, I lost a big power struggle at work just before a new senior leader joined the company.  I wanted him to know The Truth (or at least my truth) but he was totally uninterested in the past.  I knew he was forming an opinion of me based on other discussions but my attempts to provide my perspective was just picking at a scab he was uninterested in discussing.  Sometimes you just have to the swallow the injustice and hope that an ally will support you at the right time.  This is why I am glad I am now retired.

I will admit that while I return to issues mostly because the other person involved is important to me, I also will continue to argue because I truly believe I am right.  If you matter to me and yet you disagree with me, I will often do whatever I can to make sure that you see the light.  It’s not about me being right.  It’s about not wanting YOU to be wrong.  This, of course, is a tricky rationalization that happens to be tightly wrapped up in the third reason I will pick at scabs with you:  my long-standing fear of being blindsided, of being rejected, and my self-doubt.  What if I’m actually wrong?  After first resisting that possibility with all my might, I will listen carefully (and usually research on the web) to see if I really AM wrong.  I like to think that after years of years of keeping those errors to myself, I will now readily admit when I remembered something wrong or just didn’t have the facts straight.  Just because I believed something to be true doesn’t mean it really was true.  I go back to my favorite Brené Brown mantra:  I’m here to get it right, not be right.

I’ve been thinking about all this because we are in the Hebrew month of Elul, the run-up to the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement).  It’s a time of significant introspection; a time to take stock.  As such, I tend to think about people I have wronged over the past year, knowingly or unknowingly, as well as those with whom I’m laboring under some misunderstanding.  It’s a time to make amends.  But sometimes it’s just not that easy.  Maybe I don’t even know that I should be apologizing.  Maybe the recipient doesn’t want to hear it.  Maybe they think they were wronged by me, but I was misunderstood.  Maybe all of the above.

Where this takes us, then, is to some thoughts on being the recipient of scab picking.  When someone is nitpicking with me, I try to remember all the dynamics running through my head when I’m the one nagging.  First is to give that person the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe you HAVE misunderstood them.  Maybe there are facts you’ve missed.  Then, truly listen to what they have to say.  From personal experience, I’ve learned it is really important to repeat back to them whatever they are saying to you.  If you don’t recite their argument to show you’ve heard them, they will just keep on picking at you until you confirm they have been heard.  If you still disagree, that’s the time to argue back.  I am well aware that there are people out there who argue for the sake of arguing or who only want YOU to hear THEM and not vice-versa.  That’s not who I’m talking about in this essay.  I’m talking about regular human beings who just want to be heard and understood and hopefully validated.  I promise you that if you can do that for others, they will do it for you.  And then maybe we can all learn a little something, turn down the temperature on all the division, and stop waking up at 3:00 am with the perfect comeback!

I remember fellow students, in high school, complaining about having to learn algebra.  “When am I ever going to use this?”  The teacher would come up with some lame example about dividing pizzas or something like that, but people were rarely convinced.  Well, I am going to do you one better:  I’m going to talk about the importance of calculus in your daily life—specifically, the concept of the derivative.  I promise that there will not be a quiz at the end.

A derivative, in calculus, represents the slope of a line tangent to a curve at a particular point.  The steeper the curve, the larger the derivative.  I real life, this means that the derivative represents an instantaneous rate of change.  Why should you care?  My thesis, today, is that we are more sensitive to a rate of change than we are to the change itself.  I find that weirdly fascinating, yet also helpful.

Take gas prices, for instance.  Gas prices dropped dramatically during the early days of the pandemic.  Most of us noticed (and were pleased) but since we weren’t driving much, we didn’t much care.  And we rarely gave much thought to a change that impacted us in a positive way, except to think “Cool” when we filled our tank for $20.  As our world started to open back up and we started driving more, prices started to creep up.  Supply and demand started to match up and prices recovered to where they were before the pandemic.  There was grumbling, since even though logic tells you that those pandemic prices wouldn’t last, we very quickly got used to those lower prices.  Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the global price of a barrel of oil shot up on fears of short supply.  (I know this is an over simplification, but I don’t think you want me diving into the details of global supply, reduction in refining capacity, and how pricing on commodities works.)  What we saw was the price of a gallon of gas rising at an extremely rapid rate.  The derivative was super large.  Now, I don’t want to minimize the impact of going from $3/gal gas to $5/gal gas on people with very limited flexibility in managing unexpected costs.  However.  For most of us, the increase in cost to fill our tanks hasn’t really changed our driving habits.  There are still plenty of people out driving around at 80 mph, heading to the Poconos or the Jersey Shore.  Maybe people have cut back in spending elsewhere, but that hasn’t really shown up in consumer spending data.  But there sure is a lot of complaining about the price of gas, because the price went up so quickly.

This concept of the importance of the derivative, of managing the rate of a change, is critical in understanding how to create any change that will last, be it in your workplace, society at large, or even within yourself.  Push too much change on people too fast and there will be swift and harsh resistance.  Meter change out at a slower rate, a smaller derivative, and the chance that the change will be accepted and internalized is much greater.  I’ll start with a scary negative example.  Hitler did not create Nazi Germany over night.  It took over a decade of careful meting out of small changes that built on each other over time.  This did not happen by accident.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  He started by recognizing how beat down the German people were after WWI and, taking advantage of the need to build national pride again, gave people little steps to take to reestablish their sense of self and empowerment.  Had he tried to go directly to “Kill all the Jews and conquer Europe!” he would have been met with swift resistance.  The derivative would have been too large.  He kept the slope on that rate of change low.

This concept can also be used in a more positive way!  I believe in the MLK Jr. statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Many of us may be impatient to see greater social change—especially those of us who live with negative impacts daily.  I’m well aware that progress often happens in a “two steps forward, one step backwards” progression, but progress does happen.  It has to happen at a rate that can be absorb by the larger society.  In the mid-90’s, during my years at the bench developing products for use in industrial paints, I had the chance to meet the guy from the EPA who led the efforts to reduce solvent content in these paints.  It was at a summer Gordon Conference, which were very informal get togethers on the campuses of sweltering New Hampshire prep schools without air conditioning.  There would be a topic (in this case Industrial Paints and Coatings) and people from all walks of life—government, universities, industrial companies—would get together to share the latest scientific research on the topic and play really pathetic games of basketball.  One night session, I was sitting up in the back row of the seminar room where there was a nice cross breeze from open doors.  I ended up sitting next to Jim and we started talking about the state of the industry.  He was feeling down because we were at a point in time when industry members were pushing back hard on the latest round of EPA goals for solvent content, giving him all sorts of grief about how unnecessary they felt the next stage of regulations was and how the performance of paints was going down and costs were going up from more expensive ingredients, yadda yadda yadda.  He began talking as though his entire career was worthless.  I reminded him about where we were back in 1970 when the Clean Air Act first came out and these regulations started to be created.  “Jim, look how far we’ve come!  And, more importantly, WE ARE NOT GOING BACK THERE!  The bar of minimum acceptance has moved permanently higher.”  I really do not think people would want to go back to the paints with these high levels of solvent and the carcinogenic compounds in them.  Even though industry fought him every step along the way, those regulations spurred innovations that have given us products that are, for the most part, better and definitely safer.  The changes and developments happened over decades.  And that combination of performance and safety is now what we’ve come to expect.  It’s been normalized.

Human beings seem to be naturally resistant to change.  I’m sure that is for some evolutionary reason.  The difference between people today seems to be that we have differing levels of comfort with rates of change.  While I hypothesize that this may be a fundamental difference between Progressives and Conservatives, it is also a function of who is affected by the change at hand and how.  If the change makes your life better, you’ll want it right now.  If you perceive you’ll be unaffected or disaffected, you’ll resist.  I have this annoying tendency to say “No” to almost everything when a change is thrown at me.  Trish has learned to plant an idea, let it marinate, and then come back and prod a little bit.  When I’m cranky about something, though, it’s amazing how quickly I will agitate for change.  The more unhappy a person is with the status quo, the more they will want change to happen and to happen quickly.  Waiting for someone to “get comfortable” with putting out a fire, when you are burning and they are not, is really frustrating.  And when enough people are burning, well, that’s when bloody revolution tends to happen.

Most change, though, doesn’t have to involve such dramatic urgency.  I want to leave you with that thought of the derivative—understanding that someone who seems resistant might be reacting to the rate of change more than the change itself.  Give people time, but keep nudging.  Don’t let them off the hook in accepting the status quo.  Remember, also, when YOU are resisting that you might be responding more to the derivative.  Challenge yourself on that.  We are resilient creatures, us humans.  We can get accustomed to a lot of things.  Is that good or bad?  Well, that was in the other essay.

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 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.

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.

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 1^st 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 20^th 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.”