The M.A.P. Maker

Positive change: The BIG power of small

As you embark on the new year, you might be tempted to use it as an occasion to make wholesale change in your life. My advice? Don't!

Wholesale, grand scale change almost never works. You run at it fueled by an initial adrenaline rush, maybe feel that first blush of successful change, and then almost inevitably start to falter as old patterns start to take over again. 

Instead of going for that wholesale, grand scale change, do something different. Tap into the BIG power of small. Twenty small steps in pursuit of a big change is exponentially more likely to bring the results you want than one gargantuan one. 

Training for change

One way to think about it is using your time through the year to train for a marathon. Except in this case you're not training for a marathon, you're training for a substantial positive change in your life. 

If you're training for a marathon, what is likely to be more successful, breaking your training into ongoing, consistent effort or trying to cram all your conditioning into the beginning of the year? 

Clearly, if you do the latter with a marathon, you have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. Your chances aren't much better taking that approach to making a positive change. 

Instead of making a wholesale change, think about the small changes you can make that would add up to the larger change. For example, let's say you're tempted to make a sweeping commitment to eating healthily. Great! 

Real change is like playing with LEGOs

To tap into the big power of small, resist the urge for instant gratification. Instead, brainstorm what building blocks to that change could look like.

So maybe your first change is in your level of understanding and awareness. You decide to educate yourself on what your body needs and the impact of various foods on both your physical and mental state. You can start incorporating more healthy foods into the picture as you feel called to, but it isn't your focus.

Maybe the next step is to simply commit to eating the recommended minimums on fruits and vegetables. No wholesale change to your diet. Just adding the positive impact of nutritious food. 

Maybe another step would be to minimize your sugar consumption, or to start drinking more water. 

As you make small changes and give them time to gel, you can start building on them. If you take the approach to change I talked about in yesterday's post, looking at it as a year-long project, by the end of a year's time you can have made significant and - even more importantly - long-lasting change. 

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

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Unplug to energize yourself

When was the last time you slowed down and got out of your daily grind? When was the last time you unplugged and let your daily distractions fall by the wayside? 

Most of us stay plugged in for way too much of the time. The result is drained energy and decreased effectiveness. 

Power up by unplugging

Over the last couple months, I’ve been having trouble focusing and getting traction in my business. I’ve felt distracted and unable to get anything of much substance done (at least that's how it has felt). Occasionally I would get a burst of productivity, but for the most part I was slogging through gumbo. 

Last week, I took the week off and went to a week-long program held by Mata Amritanandamayi, an Indian spiritual teacher more commonly known as Amma, or the Hugging Saint. I checked my e-mail once, about mid-week. I had my cell phone, but didn’t use it for any work-related calls. 

In short, I was nearly completely unplugged for eight days. I hit pause in my work life and focused my attention elsewhere. 

When I pulled out my computer again yesterday, I felt a change. Where before I had a big case of brain constipation every time I sat down to write, now the ideas started flowing easily. I felt excited about planning for the possibilities that 2012 has to offer. I felt positive and energized. 

I don’t think it was just that I had a change of location for a week (though that certainly helped). A big part of the shift has been the result of staying unplugged the entire time. I was able to let work go. I was able to let that field lie fallow so it would be more fertile when I started working it again. 

Experiment: Unplug yourself

Even if you don’t have the opportunity to unplug for a whole week in the near future, there’s a lesson to be learned there. Every time you plug into work when you’re not working – whether that is checking your e-mail, or your work voice mail, or just doing a little work on that budge spreadsheet before you go to bed – you’re taking yourself out of rest and relaxation and into work mode. 

Try this: For the next week, commit to unplugging when you’re away from work. Don’t check your work e-mail. Don’t check your work-related voice mail. Resist the temptation to do “just a little bit more” on that project. Let yourself be fully present in the rest of your life, without your attention seeping away to work distractions. 

If you have obligations that you absolutely, positively need to take care of during off-work hours, create a confined space for them. Don’t let them sprawl across your non-work time. Create a space in your schedule for them and outside of that space, put them down. 

You might be amazed at a) how hard it is to unplug (which is all the more reason for experimenting with it) and b) how good it feels. 

Are you up for unplugging? Let me know how it goes!

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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

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

One small question that can change your life

If you want to know what will life look like for you in five years, or even next year, look no further than the choices you are making and the actions you are taking today. You're manufacturing the future through those choices and actions. 

Some of what happens in your life will be beyond your control, true, but you also have a tremendous ability to shape, sculpt, and direct how it unfolds. In fact, whether you realize it or not, you're already doing that. You're already making choices and taking actions (or not making and taking them), and that is defining your future. 

In a post on building effective patterns of action (constructive habits, essentially), Laura Schenck said something that struck a chord and pointed the way to a simple yet incredibly powerful question that has the potential to change your life dramatically. She said:

Each small behavioral choice that you make is either taking you closer to or further away from your true goals.

You can flip that observation into a question that, if asked regularly, could make a world of difference in the life you create. The question is:

Is this choice moving me closer or distancing me from my goal?" 

Simple as that. One little question with two potential answers, asked over and over and over again, will effectively keep you on track and moving in the right direction. You can replace "goal" with "the life I want to create," or "my vision," or whatever else your big picture inspiration might look like, but the basic concept is the same. 

At the micro level asking this question can help you avoid veering off course and create an ongoing awareness of the results of your choices. 

At the macro level, the cumulative impact (of both consciously choosing to direct your choices and actions towards your goal and of refraining from choices and actions that lead you away from it) can be enormous. 

Try this: For the next week, pay attention to the choices you make and the actions you take and ask whether or not they're taking you where you want to go. You don't have to do anything different. Just notice. The goal is just to start building a more habitual awareness.

Once you start to more habitually pay attention to the long-term impact of your choices and actions, you can start taking the next step, which is asking, "What do I need to do differently?"

One little question. What do you have to lose? Or perhaps more importantly, what do you have to gain? 

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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

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Do the people around you energize or drain you?

Yesterday I had an amazing phone conversation with Fabeku Fatunmise. I had first connected with him via Twitter, and we decided it would be fun to escalate that to an actual ear-to-ear phone call (I know! How bleeding-edge!). 

I came away from the conversation feeling energized and inspired. I had new ideas knocking around in my head, and more energy about some of the ones that have been bumping around in my cranium for a while. The conversation was a great addition to my week. 

That same day, I unfriended someone on Facebook. (Gasp! Heartless!) I didn't know her well, and found her posts to be consistently bitter and cynical. Every time I saw a post it created this little sense of irritation and negativity. 

I finally thought, "This is adding nothing but negative energy to my life. Enough of that." So with one simple click, I unfriended her. 

In one day, I added someone to the picture who left me feeling energized and inspired, and deleted someone who had created a steadily dripping drain. The net effect was a step in the right direction.

No doubt you'll find similar examples when you look at the people around you.

Audit the transactions in your personal energy account

Want to improve your life? Want more energy to put into your career or any other aspect of your life? Want a more positive attitude? Take a look at how the people you expose yourself to affect you, and start making choices to move that in a positive direction. 

Think of those interactions as transactions in your personal energy account. Do those they make a deposit to your energy account, or are they making withdrawals? 

Unless someone is a source of significant pain or irritation, most of the time we go about our business with only a vague awareness of how the people we come in contact with effect us. But just because we're not paying attention, it doesn't mean they're not having an impact. 

Look at the people around you. Who do you interact with? Whose thoughts are you consistently exposed to, whether in person or via social media. 

Now ask yourself, "What impact is that person having on me? Are they building me up or eroding my foundation? Are they energizing me, or are the depleting my energy?" 

You may not have complete control over how much of a role certain people have in your life. But the more awareness you have of how each person impacts you, the better equipped you are to make decisions about which people you choose to invest your time with, and how. 

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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 

 

 

Career lessons from a linguaphile

I'm a bit of a language geek. I love languages. I love the doors to insight and understanding a new language opens. I love being able to communicate with people I wouldn't otherwise be able to connect with. I speak reasonably fluent Swedish, decent Spanish, and marginal French. 

Along the way in my language learning adventures, I have learned several things you can apply to your career, or anything else worth doing in your life. 

Trying and failing doesn't mean you have failed

Besides English, I speak three languages to varying degrees of profiency. It would be hard to make a case that I'm a failure at learning languages. Yet I have failed with twice as many languages as I have been successful with. Language learning attempts that have gone splat along the way include:

• Danish
• Finnish
• Japanese
• Khmer
• Thai
• Malayalam (actually, this one has just ground to a halt - I'm not ready to throw in the towel on it yet)

It's no different in your career. If you want to step off the cardboard cutout path and do anything that resonates deeply and feels uniquely important to you, trying and failing along the way is likely to be part of the game. 

Past failures don't predict the future

By the time I finally hit the language I'm most fluent in besides English - Swedish - I had already tried and failed to learn Danish and Finnish. After Swedish, I took a big belly flop with Japanese before teaching myself Spanish. And while both Khmer and Thai fizzled, and my efforts to learn Malayalam have taken a bit of a holiday, I have no doubt that I still have reasonable fluency in more languages ahead of me. 

It's harder to feel that same way with your career, of course, because we tend to identify with what we do for a living more than we do with the languages we speak. But if you step back and take a truly objective look, you will see that it's no different. 

Make it matter

My language successes have been the languages that I had a reason for studying. I started teaching myself Swedish when I decided to try to get a traineeship (short term, full time work) in Sweden after college, refined it at a company in Finland where I used it to communicate with a co-worker with poor English, and polished it when I landed a traineeship in Sweden. 

The fire beneath my Spanish came from a bet with a friend who started studying Spanish at the same time. We made a wager on who would be most fluent by the end of one year, and planned on hiring a Spanish teacher to test us when the year was up (we never did). The competition between us kept my nose to the grindstone with my studies. 

The languages that fell flat, on the other hand, didn't really have any compelling reason to them. They were just languages I thought would be fun to learn and might use someday. 

No surprise, I see a career parallel. The more meaningful your goal is to you, the more personally compelling it is, the more it keeps you focused and on track to making it happen. 

I've experienced that in my own career. I have experienced a lot of ups and downs in my Passion Catalyst work. Some of those downs have been really challenging to work through, and I can guarantee that I wouldn't have stuck with it if I didn't feel so irresistibly drawn to the difference I have the potential to make with it. My work has meaning, and it matters to me, and that makes all the difference in the world. 

--

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 

 

 

2 questions to stimulate a fresh perspective

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?' 

- Rachel Carson

Do you feel stuck or uninspired? In a mental rut? Have the colors faded in your world? 

What if there were a way to jump out of that rut without making a single change in the external circumstances of you life. As you may have guessed already, there is. 

Take a minute to really spend some time with the questions in the Rachel Carson quote above. Imagine using them to create a lens through which to look at your life. What difference could that make?

What if I knew I would never see it again?

On occasion I go to an ecstatic dance event here in Seattle. After one dance a couple years ago, a woman described her experience dancing with her boyfriend. She said, "I started imagining, 'What if this were our last dance? What if this were the last time I got to do this with him?" 

That one little question made that night's dance especially powerful and moving for her, because it put her in a place of being truly aware and appreciative of what she had, rather than experiencing it on autopilot.

Part of the power of asking these questions is that it forces you to take yourself off autopilot and engage the world around you with fresh eyes. 

What if I had never seen this before? 

Have you ever been delighted with something new, then gotten so used to it that you scarcely even notice it any longer? Imagine that effect, but instead of that one thing, apply it to your entire life. That's how many people go through their days. 

To start countering that, experiment with looking at things as though you had never seen them before. Spark your curiosity. The world is a pretty amazing place, if you stop and pay attention. 

To help you look at something as though you have never seen it before, here are some questions to ask: 

• What could this be used for?
• How does this work?
• How was this made?
• Who would use something like this? How?
• Where was this made? 
• Who made it? What human hands touched this?
• How did this get here?
• Who came up with the idea for this? 

Questions like these can start to make even the simplest and most mundane of items objects of curiosity and wonder. 

A variation on the never-before-seen theme is looking at someone you know well - a loved one, for example - and imagining never having met them before. Try to look at them with fresh eyes and ask yourself what you notice. What do you appreciate? What do you enjoy? What are you currently taking for granted?

Try this: For the next week, practice looking at things with fresh eyes. Make a habit of asking questions like the ones I listed above. Challenge yourself to find wonder in the mundane. 

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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

Laughter yoga: Laugh your life better

Have you ever had one of those rolling-on-the-floor, I-think-I'm-going-to-pee-my-pants fits of laughter and come out the other side feeling much better than before you started? Maybe you felt some stress peel away, or you just felt lighter. If so, you know the power of laughter to change both your perspective and the way your body physically feels. 

As part of my workhelping people create careers and lives for themselves that energize and inspire them, I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve our experience of the here and now. One of my favorites (though I haven't participated in it myself) is laughter yoga. 

Laughter yoga sounds faintly ridiculous, but research has shown that tapping into laughter has very real benefits. I came across a short video clip this morning featuring John Cleese that takes a look at laughter yoga in India. It's worth watching. 

Even if there are no laughter yoga groups in your area, it's worth keeping the benefits of laughter in mind. If you don't have enough laughter in your life, what can you do to bring more of it into the picture? Who makes you laugh? What makes you laugh? Go to a funny movie. 

Read a funny book. Go to comedycentral.com and find something that makes you guffaw. Make a commitment to yourself to bring more laughter into your life. Conduct a 30-day laughter experiment. Commit to consciously seeking out something every day that makes you laugh and see what effect it has. At worst, you'll get a few chuckles. At best, it could shift your entire outlook. 

[Hat tip to Tim at 360 Degree Self for the video link]

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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

How are you feeding your tenacity?

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

~ Louis Pasteur

Do you want to raise the odds that you will succeed in turning your dreams into reality? Give the heave-ho to the notion that it's all going to happen with the flip of a switch (because in all likelihood, it won't). Replace it with a commitment to tenacity.

One of the biggest obstacles standing in our way as we look at creating a career and a life that energizes and inspires us is our cultural obsession with immediate gratification. We want results and we want them now, and if we can't get them now we deem those results to be impossible.

Instead of asking, "How can I make this happen RIGHT NOW," ask, "How can I support my long-term commitment to making this happen?"

Tenacity doesn't happen in a vacuum. Yes, some of it has to do with sheer grit and guts, but there are many other factors that feed that tenacity. For example:

Your goal: Is what you're trying to achieve something you really care about? Is the drive to make it happen coming from deep inside you, or are you driven by surface-level motivators (like what other people think)?

The more personally compelling your goal is, the more determination you naturally have to see it through to fruition.

Support: The more external support you can incorporate into the picture, the less you have to fight your way through alone. And the less energy you have to put into fighting your way through alone, the more energy you have to put into taking ongoing action.

Self-care: The better you take care of your body, the more energy you have to keep moving forward. Diet and exercise can play a huge role in having the juice to keep going. Care of your mind and spirit is important as well. For example, incorporating a practice like meditation can help ground you and keep your energy from fraying and flying off in all directions.

What about you? What are you doing to nourish your tenacity? What could you do?

Try this: Sit down and brainstorm as many things as you can think of that would feed that tenacity (you might start by reading my recent post on the US News & World Report blog, 7 Steps to Sustain a Career Change).

Pick one thing from the resulting list and start taking steps towards incorporating it more fully into your life. If you make a habit of doing that on a regular basis, over time your tenacity will be more and more deeply nourished.

--

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

How are you spending your energy budget?

In my work, I talk a lot about personal energy management  (see this blog post on The Gain-to-Drain Ratio, for example). In many ways, how you manage your energy is how you live your life.

This morning I was looking at the transcript from my M.A.P. Maker podcast featuring Daryn Kagan. In it, she had a great take on her own energy management approach that she describes as choosing how to spend her energy budget.

I do like to talk to people about what I call my energy budget. And just like every business has a financial budget, there’s only so much you can spend, I think every day we each have so many units of energy we can spend as well. And I think it’s really important to decide how you’re going to spend them.

So I don’t really spend a lot of them on critics. And I don’t spend a lot of that on people who tell me why this isn’t going to work. And I think that’s been a really good investment. Because to me, just like that would be throwing money down the drain, I think that’s throwing your energy down the drain as well.

I love that idea. It takes something abstract and creates a concrete concept around it.

Try this: For the rest of the week, pay attention to how you are choosing to spend your energy budget. (You might want to keep track of what you find with an End-of-Day Review.) Where is your energy going? Is it contributing to building the life you want, or are you throwing energy down the drain?

--

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

Create a positive reference guide to yourself

When it comes to pursuing (and achieving) your dreams, self-belief plays an enormously positive role. But even the most confident of us can occasionally get caught up in a downward spiral of self-doubt. So what to do?

One idea is to create a positive guide to yourself. Start by asking some questions:

• What have I done that I am proud of?
• What have I achieved?
• Where have I succeeded?
• What have I done well?
• What would others say I have done well?

The answers can be big things or small things. Basically what you're doing is creating a list of positive outcomes.

For each of the things you come up with, ask yourself, "What is it that allowed me to do that? What skills do I have that helped me accomplish that? What characteristics do I have? What knowledge do I have?"

Start building a picture of not only what you have done well, but also why you have been able to do that. The more you understand about why you have succeeded in the past, the better equipped you are to see how those things might apply to success in the future.

This exploration focuses your attention on the positive, but more than that, it creates a positive reference guide to yourself that you can refer to in the future. You can pull it out when you're starting to feel down on yourself, or any old time you want a reminder.

Try this: Instead of doing this in one positive binge, try making it an ongoing part of your weekly habit. Start by making the list from the questions above (and any others that come to mind) and each week pick two or three to explore.

By making it an ongoing habit, you incorporate a regular, systematic positive focus into your week.

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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