The M.A.P. Maker

Saving the World at Work

There are around 155,000,000 people currently going to work every day in the US alone. What if a big chunk of those people started incorporating one simple question into their career decisions:

What kind of difference do I want to make?

Let's take a reasonably conservative portion, say, 10%. Imagine the ripple effect from 15,000,000 people all asking that question and - more importantly - acting on it! And doing that day-after-day and year-after-year.

That whole idea is a big piece of what lights me up about my work. I'm fond of saying, "I want to change the world - I just don't want to do all the work." It's my tongue-in-cheek way of talking about a part of my work that both energizes and inspires me: being a catalyst for others' positive change efforts. [More of my thoughts on the personal benefits of making a difference here.]

That's why I'm psyched about Tim Sanders' new book, Saving the World at Work. In it, Sanders makes a case for a new paradigm that is unfolding in the business world, one he calls the Responsibility Revolution. He writes:

The Responsibility Revolution has arrived. It demands that companies make a difference to society - not just indirectly, but directly, through their products, through their manufacturing methods and operational systems, through their environmental efforts and community outreach.

In short, people are starting to demand that companies be a force for good, not just a mechanism for creating financial profit.

Consumers, employees, and investors are changing business. They expect the companies with which they do business to join them in taking responsibility for the planet on which we all live, and for giving back to the larger world.

That paradigm shift is opening the door for people to seriously ask the question "what difference do I want to make" and act on it. Sanders describes the focus of the book:

The premise of Saving the World at Work is simple. I want to recruit you, and train you, for the Responsibility Revolution. I want to help you feel good about your company and grow more good within it. I want to help you feel more fulfilled by your job, by helping your company to see the value of giving back to the larger world.

Heady stuff!

Sanders describes what he calls saver soldiers, "a highly motivated individual who leverages work as a platform to help save the world."

After exploring the trends and forces at work in the Responsibility Revolution, Sanders outlines The Six Laws of the Saver Soldier, which he distilled from conversations with many dozens of people successfully using work as a platform for positive change.

The book originally came out just as the financial world imploded last fall. Needless to say, with people up to their eyeballs in fear, it didn't get the attention it deserved. So Sanders decided to embark on a "relaunch campaign."

Want to help spread the word? Read more about it here. 

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Use mistakes to propel you to success

Do you want to stay energized and inspired in your career? If you do, at some point you're going to need to jump headlong into the unknown and the new (in fact, you'll probably need to do it over and over again).

Without the ability to move into new territory, you'll be stuck repeating the same tired cycle over and over again.Exploring unknown territory is a vital part of the equation of staying fully charged.

The trouble for many people is not so much that they don't want to embrace the new. It's that they don't want to make the mistakes that inevitably come along with it. Their minds play a recurring story about what mistakes mean, and it's always negative.

"See? I'm no good at this. I don't have what it takes. I'm a screw-up. I can't do anything right." There are a bazillion variations on that theme, but they all have two things in common. They are all negative reinforcement, and none of them are especially grounded in reality.

In the excellent book Self-Esteem, the authors talk about different ways that we can reframe how we view mistakes. One of those is to view mistakes as invaluable teachers. They write:

Mistakes are a function of growth and changing awareness. They are an absolute prerequisite for any learning process...

There is no way you can learn any task or skill without errors. This process is called successive approximation: getting closer and closer to successful performance through feedback provided by mistakes. Every error tells you what you need to correct, every error brings you incrementally nearer to the behavioral sequence that works best for completion of the task...

...Mistakes are information about what works and what doesn't. They have nothing to do with your worth or intelligence. They are merely steps to a goal. 

Next time you are tempted to beat up on yourself for a mistake you made, reframe it. Ask yourself, "How has this moved me closer to my goal? What have I learned here? Where is the insight this mistake is offering?"

Follow that up with, "Now how can I apply that insight?" Your goal is to use your mistakes as a catalyst for forward motion, rather than a roadblock that shuts you down cold.

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Is your career wasting your time?

If time be of all things most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again.

- Benjamin Franklin

We live in a culture that values productivity and abhors wasting time. It's that old Protestant work ethic. We create systems to help us make the most of our waking hours. We admonish ourselves to be always industrious and never idle.

But looking at time from a productivity standpoint, while valid, is also an incomplete picture. The value of how we spend our time is more than just the sum total of widgets we can crank out. It's also about what we experience, and how we use our unique gifts and abilities.

It's not just about quantity; it's also about quality. 

You have heard me say many times, "You can never be anybody else half as well as you can be you." And yet most people spend their careers attempting to do just that. They cram themselves into ill-fitting careers that will never let them truly shine.

Here are some questions you might ask as you ponder whether you are making the most of the few precious ticks of the clock you have on this planet, or whether you are squandering it.

• How well does what I'm doing align with who I am?
• How well does what I'm doing align with what I'm here to do? 
• Does my work feel natural, or does it feel like a constant strain to force myself to fit?
  
• Do I feel like I'm making a difference that I care about?
  
• Am I getting to use the skills and abilities I love to use?
• Does what I'm doing leave me feeling positive?
• When I think of the way I feel about my work, is that a feeling a would wish for a loved one?
  
• Does the way my work makes me feel create a positive ripple effect in my life, or a negative one?

I have nothing against the productivity picture of how we use our time. It helps us make the most of whatever it is we're doing.

But when the sole measuring stick is quantity, and quality gets left out of the picture, we risk being incredibly effective at doing something that neither energizes nor inspires us and wastes what we have to offer. 

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Why finding career passion is an unbeatable investment

In my most recent FUEL! newsletter (FUEL = Fully Energized Life^TM), I took a look at why finding passion in your career can be one of the best investments you can make.

Why is passion so important? Here are five big benefits I have seen over and over again in my clients as they move into a career path that is more deeply aligned with who they are. Passion...

• Energizes you and fuels your success
• Strengthens your confidence
• Inspires persistence
• Reduces stress and improves health
• Enhances relationships

Want to know more? Read The Passion Advantage: How work you love helps you thrive in the FUEL! newsletter archive.

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Passion at work: Does your career fit?

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

~ Carl Jung

At the heart of my Passion Catalyst work is the idea that each of us is both incredibly complex and incredibly simple. It's important to keep each of those in mind as you work towards creating a career that energizes and inspires you.

Complexity

We're complex because the source of that energy and inspiration is unique and individual to each of us. There is no one-size-fits-all cookie cutter solution to finding a career (and a life) that lights you up. A path that would send me over the moon with delight might leave you yawning, and vice versa.

The key then is finding that unique, individual source of energy. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks you should do. The big question to ask yourself is, "Where does the juice come from for me?"

My definition of passion is even based on that uniqueness: Passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do. The key is figuring out what the underlying characteristics are that tend to be in place when you feel engaged. 

The primary way I help people uncover their own energy sources is to have them make a list of things - work or play - that have lit them up over the course of their life. Then we pick one and start asking, "Why?" We reverse engineer them to identify the underlying reasons why they love them.

As they explore, common themes (reasons why) start to emerge. They start to get a picture of the underlying characteristics (e.g., exploration and discovery is a big one for me) that tend to be in place when they're on fire. I call these underlying characteristics "Passion Factors."

Simplicity

On the flip side of our complexity, we're a vision of simplicity itself once we have identified those Passion Factors. Those underlying characteristics keep showing up over and over.

So while you might not think that my Passion Catalyst work, travel photography, and genealogical research have anything to do with each other, when you look deeper you see that they all have the Passion Factor I mentioned earlier - exploration and discovery. I'm oh-so-predictable!

When you understand those Passion Factors, you can answer the question, "How do I bring more of ME into what I do?" In a nutshell, you look for paths that are chock full of those underlying characteristics that tend to be in place when you feel energized and engaged.

Does your career fit?

Unfortunately, for most people the career path they've taken is often at odds with the sources of their energy. Like an ill-fitting shoe, it pinches and chafes as they try to get ahead.

It's only by really understanding where the energy comes from that we can make conscious choices to bring it into the picture.

How about you? Does your career fit, or is it giving you blisters? Is it time to get "new shoes?"

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Big Dream Guidance System

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

~ Michelangelo

Stop for a minute and really think about this quote. Apply it to your own life. How high are you reaching? Where are you selling yourself short? Do you have aspirations you won't let yourself pursue? Most of us have potential that far exceeds the goals and dreams we actually allow ourselves to have.

Part of the reason we don't aim as high as we could is that the idea of having a target that is so far beyond the horizon we can see feels scary. What if we fail? What if it really is out of our reach? What if we aim at it and fall short? "See? I told you it was all just an unrealistic pipedream!" Ouch! With thoughts like that, no wonder we avoid the big dreams. 

The Big Dream Guidance System

One way to shift how you think about those big dreams is to see them as a way to define the direction and scope of your efforts. Think of them as a guidance system, rather than goals that must be achieved. 

For example, my big dream might be to be able to reach millions of people and help them create a life that lights them up while making a difference that inspires them. The idea of that many people making the world a better place by living a life they love is incredibly energizing.

To be more specific, I might want to have a string of best-selling books. I might want to be one of the top speakers in the world, touching thousands of people at a time. I might want to be a regular on Oprah and other talk shows.

If I look at that as my Big Dream Guidance System, it tells me that my primary focus - regardless of scale - is to help people make the world a better place through a career and a life they love. That is a constant whether I am doing it at a local level or an international level.

It also gives me a scope: writing and speaking. Again, these are things I want to focus on regardless of the scale I achieve. And as I focus on the things within that scope, I can see that other things I might find really interesting and fun - travel photography, for example - won't necessarily fit. That focus keeps my energy moving in a direction I really care about most.

Step by step with sub-dreams

Having that direction and scope then allows you to dream targeted "sub-dreams," smaller-scale dreams that aim your energy in the direction of your big dream.

One of my sub-dreams might be a single best-selling book. Or even just having a book accepted by a publisher. Or writing a book - published or not - just to show myself I can do it.

This is similar to the idea of identifying a big goal and chunking it down until you get manageable bites. But in this case, it's about harnessing the energy inherent in dreams.

You may never reach your big dream. But when you use it as a guidance system instead of a goal, that doesn't really matter. What matters is that it helps you plot a course for your life that will leave you feeling energized, inspired, and engaged.

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Mindfulness: Reduce stress with slow motion chores

One of the stress management buzz words that has been flying around in the last few years is "mindfulness," the art of being fully focused on the here and now.

In his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests a simple way of practicing mindfulness through every-day chores like washing the dishes. He writes:

...while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes...The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves. 

I have to confess that I'm not good at remembering to do this. But when I do and go on a mindfulness spree, I'm always amazed at what a difference it makes.

One thing that really helps me focus on the moment is to do things in slow motion. So if I'm washing the dishes, I do it at half speed, or quarter speed. Slowing myself down helps me focus on what I'm experiencing. The heat of the water, for example, or the weight of the dish in my hand.I can't rush through it.

You can apply the slow motion approach to anything you do. Today I showered and shaved in slow motion (in fact, the idea for this post came in the shower). You could weed your garden, or do your laundry, or cook dinner in slow motion, focusing on what you feel, what you smell, how your muscles are moving, etc.

The thing I love about this approach is that it doesn't take any special time out to go sit on a cushion with your legs wrapped around your head while chanting OMMMMM. The opportunities to de-stress are right there in front of us every day, doing things we need to do anyway. 

Try this: Do a seven-day experiment. Pick one chore each day and do it in mindful slow motion. Do more if you like, but at least do it once each day. Notice how it feels. Notice the effect it has on you. Notice where the resistance is. Notice what you enjoy.

If you like the results, extend it to a 30-day experiment. Who knows? It might just become a habit.

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst