The M.A.P. Maker

Power your potential with promises

Every day, whether you are aware of it or not, you are doing something that sculpts both the way other people see you and the way you see yourself. Depending on how you handle it, that action can paint a picture of you as trustworthy and reliable or flaky, unreliable, or even dishonest.

What is that? You're making promises. 

Until a recent conversation with Jason Womack (co-author of The Promise Doctrine), my definition of a promise was pretty narrow. When I tell someone "I promise," well, that's a promise. Pretty simple. But in Jason's view, any time you create an expectation, you're making a promise. And the sum total of your kept and broken promises has a big impact on your potential. 

Your promises might actually involve the words "I promise," or they might be something like telling someone when they can expect something from you (e.g., a completed project),telling someone you'll send them some information, or even setting a time for a meeting. When you set up a meeting, implicit in that is your word that you are going to show up when you said you would. If you're late, you've broken your promise. 

If you interact with people, you make promises. It goes with the territory.  

Raising the stakes

There's something about the idea of treating every agreement as a promise that really struck me. I think part of it is that it raises the stakes on what you say you'll do. There's more of an emotional association (for me, anyway) with "I broke my promise" than with, "Oops, looks like I'm not going to get that to you when I said I would." 

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of creating unnecessary guilt or self-flagellation. But the benefit to upping the ante by seeing your commitments as promises isn't about beating up on yourself. It's about recognizing that whether people feel like they can trust you, and whether you feel like you can trust yourself, plays a key role in the potential you have in life. And whether or not you do what you say is a big part of how that trust (or lack of it) gets shaped. 

Managing your promises

Raising the level of emotional importance is just the start, though. If you do that and nothing else, your best-case scenario is that nothing changes. More likely though is that your inner critic will have more ways to club you over the head. 

The real power of raising the stakes is that it makes each commitment you make more important. You start asking, "Is this a promise I'm really committed to keeping?" It can make you more conscious of what you say yes and no to. And that can help you be more realistic about what you take on and what you tell people you will do (how many people do you know who are chronically late to meetings because they try to shove four meetings in where there is only space for three?). 

Not only that, it makes it harder for you to slack off on keeping one of those promises just because you don't feel like it, or it's inconvenient. It raises your personal stakes. 

Creating self-trust

Keeping your promises isn't just about the internal perceptions you create. It also has an internal component. The more you keep your promises, both to others and yourself, the more you can trust that you will really do what you say. And the more you trust yourself, the greater your confidence. And the greater your confidence, the more potential you have to stretch yourself and achieve your dreams. 

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, or employeed by a Fortune 500 company, success in your career depends not on just your ability to deliver, but on people's belief in your ability to deliver. And that belief is built by promises. 

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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

Career & life planning: Look at your 360-degree ROI

What if you were an over-the-moon success in your career, but the rest of your life was miserable? What if you were at the top of your field, but your personal relationships were in tatters? What if you achieved everything you set out to do in your career, but your health was on the skids? 

How successful would you feel?

Your life is an interconnected system

We live in a culture where career takes precedence and life is something we shove in around the edges if there's room. The trouble with that is that life doesn't work that way. Your work and the other components of your life are all interconnected. 

To counter the culturally-ingrained tendency to give work a disproportionately large piece of our focus, stop breaking your life into isolated, disconnected silos. Think of it as a system. 

When you see life as a system, you see that you can't realistically focus on one thing without taking into account the other aspects of that system. You can't say, "I'll do whatever it takes to succeed," and not ask, "Do the 12-hour days I'm putting in align with my goal of having a rich, fulfilling relationship at home?" 

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those 12-hour days, but unless you consciously make the decision in light of how it affects the rest of your life, you're in dangerous territory.

360-degree ROI

One way to increase your whole-system awareness is looking at what I call your 360-degree Return on Investment (ROI). Most of us think of ROI - if we think of it at all - in terms of the money we get in return for the work we do. And maybe the power and prestige. But the investment we make there (time spent working, education, etc.) doesn't happen in a vacuum. 

When you look at your 360-degree ROI, you ask, "How does what's happening here affect the whole picture?" How are these 12-hour days affecting my relationships? How are they affecting my health? How are they affecting the joy I get out of life?

It's not just about work, either. You can look at any decision in terms of its effect on the whole. How does my decision to eat fast-food for lunch every day affect my energy levels? And how does that affect my work? My relationships? My ability to fully engage in the hobbies that add a savory richness to life? 

More than money

Typically when we think ROI, we think of money. While that's definitely a valid and important piece of the puzzle, life would be pretty grim if that's all we got. When you're looking at your 360-degree ROI, consider what else you would like in your life. For example:

• Love
• Health
• Rich interpersonal connections
• Energy
• Fun
• A sense of meaning
• Spiritual connection/experience

This is far from an exhaustive list of other kinds of return you might gain from your investment of time, effort, and attention in various aspects of your life. It's simply an off-the-top-of-my-head list of examples.

System scan

"OK," you might be thinking, "nice idea, but it sounds waaaaay too complex." Here's a simple way to think about it. Instead of a deep system check, practice doing a quick scan regularly. Take a look at each of the following areas and ask, "How is what I'm doing affecting the other areas?" 

• Work
• Relationships
• Health
• Finances
• Hobbies & Fun
• Contribution / Making a difference
• Spirituality

As you look at how each area impacts each of the others, assign it one of three options: positive, negative, or neutral. 

You can do a quick mental scan of this, but if you want something more concrete to work through,trying making a spreadsheet with each of those areas along the top and along the side.

Create a habit

One nice thing about this approach is that, repeated often enough, it becomes a habitual check-in with yourself. "OK, what's going on in the full picture?" When you regularly pay attention, you don't have to wait for things to become critical before taking action on them. 

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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

4 reasons you should celebrate your success

A friend and I were talking recently about growing up watching ABC's Wide World of Sports on the weekends. While one mention of the line from their intro - "the thrill of victory...and the agony of defeat" - immediately brought to mind the image of a ski jumper biting it on the way down, I realized that I couldn't for the life of me remember what the accompanying clip for the thrill of victory was. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people live their lives that way. They remember the failures and face plants. Sometimes they even obsess on them. But when they do something well, they scarcely pause to acknowledge it, much less remember it down the road. 

When it comes to pursuing their passion, focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive can be a dream-killer. It's vital that you celebrate your success along the way. Why? Because when you focus on the negative and don't reinforce the positive...

It eats away at your self-confidence. 

When you jump off the cookie cutter path and pursue a career that is uniquely right for you, it is almost by definition about taking the road less traveled. And navigating that road successfully takes self-confidence. 

Dwelling on the failures and face plants along the way does anything but build self-confidence. It repeatedly sends the message, "You're not good enough. You can't do it right. When you try, you fail." Even if most of your efforts result in success, focusing on your failures is guaranteed to paint a dismal picture. 

It distorts reality.

Minimizing (or ignoring) your successes and enlarging your failures distorts your picture of reality. It's like one of those fun-house mirrors that make you look short and fat or tall and skinny. And because your experience of reality is created by your perception of it, everywhere you look you see the negative element relentlessly confirmed. 

It creates a falsely negative pattern.

When the majority of your attention is aimed at the face plants, that's the pattern you will see. Each failure becomes a clear confirmation that you don't have what it takes. After all, look at all these other botched efforts you can point to to back that up, right? 

It numbs you to your positive achievements.

When you're not in the habit of acknowledging the positive, it takes an ultra-blast of success to get your attention. Run-of-the-mill achievements scarcely make it onto your radar screen as you turn your attention to what's next. 

The more you practice acknowledging the positive, the more positive you will notice. It's a bit like when I start making an effort to remember my dreams in the morning. When I do that consistently, after a few days my brain will automatically start going over the dreams when I wake up. When I focus on remembering dreams, eventually the number of dreams I remember shoots up. 

Try this: Start training your brain to acknowledge your successes, both large and small. For the next week, challenge yourself to find at least three things you did well each day. They could be work-related, or relationship-oriented, or hobby-focused, or any of a bazillion other ways you show up in life. 

At the end of each day, write them down. Spend five minutes acknowledging to yourself that you did them well. Better yet, acknowledge to someone else that you did them well. Get it out of your brain and into the open. 

One last idea to help you tilt the scale in the direction of a positive perception. Every time you find yourself dwelling on something you did wrong, stop yourself and ask, "OK, what have I done right today/this week/this month?" Redirect your mind and celebrate your successes.

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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

Success tip: Learn to surf your changing reality

In a comment on my recent US News & World Report blog post on how to be your own career expert , a reader described a situation where his dream job turned into his nightmare due to changes beyond his control. Noting that he ended up in a situation where he was miserable despite pursuing a path he loved, he wrapped up his comment asking, "What did I do wrong?" 

Pondering what I should write in response, I put my finger on what I think is one of the most important success skills you can have - the ability to surf your changing reality as it unfolds. 

Why do I think it's so important? Because, as the saying goes, the only constant is change. It would be nice to say that you can pick a path and you'll be on track for life, but it doesn't seem to work that way. No path is guaranteed. Trying to hang on too tightly to any situation is a recipe for getting stuck. 

That doesn't mean you have to jump ship in the middle and change careers every time things get challenging. It simply means that your reality today isn't likely to be your reality ten years from now. You have the choice to either acknowledge those changes and sculpt your path accordingly, or feel the increasing pain of trying to stay rooted in a reality that no longer exists.  

In the above-mentioned reader's experience, for example, what had been a dream job turned toxic when a bad boss entered the picture. In that situation, surfing might have looked like acknowledging earlier that the situation wasn't tolerable and resolving to make a change. Maybe it would have involved saying, "OK, why was this my dream job? What are the characteristics I had here that I want to carry forward? What else is out there that might allow me to experience that?"

The more ability and willingness you have to adjust and adapt, the more potential you have to stay in the flow of the energy. A big part of staying energized and inspired for the long term involves recognizing changes and surfing to adjust to them, aligning ourselves with new directions and opportunities. 

--

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

Success tip: Disconnect your past from your future

Flipping through my marked-up copy of Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness earlier today, I came across this snippet:

Do you believe that your past determines your future? This is not an idle question of philosophical theory. To the extent that you believe that the past determines the future, you will tend to allow yourself to be a passive vessel that does not actively change its course. Such beliefs are responsible for magnifying many people's inertia.

That got me thinking about the degree to which so many of us do - consciously or unconsciously - connect the past directly to the future. And in a way, I suppose we're right, but only to the extent that we allow the momentum of the past to continue unchecked.

Think of your life (or your career, or your relationships) as a rail car being pulled by a train engine. That engine represents the inertia built up by the past. If the car stays attached to this engine, and keeps going on the same rails it always has, then yes, the past absolutely does predict the future.

But, if somewhere along the way we pull into a switching yard, decouple from the engine, and hook up to an engine headed in a different direction, then the only relevance the past has is that it got us to the point where we could meet up with the new engine.

The great news is that you don't have to wait to make that change, because you're at a switching yard right now...and right now...and now...

As I explored in my post about the crossroads of possibility, each moment holds the potential for a new direction.The transition from one engine to another may take some time, but the present moment always holds the opportunity to start the process.

For example, let's say you tried something new and failed. Maybe you took a step toward your dreams and fell flat. Rather than following that engine on into the future, you might ask, "Why did I fall on my face? What was I missing? How can I learn that? How can I incorporate that into future efforts?"

Is your life hooked up to any engines that are powered by the inertia of the past? What would it take to switch to a different train? What one small step could you take right now to begin?

--

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 your legacy one ripple at a time

100 years from now, will it matter that you were here? If your definition of "mattering" is that you set things in motion that people still attach your name to (think Susan B. Anthony, the Wright brothers, Einstein), then no, it probably won't.

But if you get beyond that ego-driven idea and focus on whether or not your presence here matters, people's memory of you is irrelevant. The reality is that the legacy we leave is has nothing to do with whether or not people know about us.

Your ripples are your legacy

Every day, for better or worse, you are creating your legacy. That legacy is the cumulative result of the ripples that spread out from your choices, decisions, and actions - big and small.

And while some of those ripples die out or get lost in choppy seas, others will keep creating more ripples. Take Bill Strickland's story, for example. Growing up in a rough neighborhood with bleak economic prospects, Strickland's life was turned around by a high school art teacher who said, in essence, "Hold on, you don't have to let your situation define your future. You have potential."

The seed of hope and belief in himself that the teacher planted ultimately grew into Manchester Bidwell Corpation, an organization whose ripples have affected the lives of hundreds of inner city youth and adults, opening the door to the same sense of potential that he experienced. (Listen to my podcast with Bill Strickland.)

Long after you are gone and forgotten, the echo of the ripples you create will still be heard.

Ripples are unpredictable

Don't get caught up in the ego-notion that the ripples you create have to be grand and splashy. It's fun when they are, but in truth we are often not even aware which of our actions create the biggest ripples.

I've been reading a book by Caroline Myss, Invisible Acts of Power. In the book, she draws from 1200 stories people had sent her about either how people had made a difference in their lives or opportunities that they had had to make a difference in someone else's.

One of the things Myss discovered was that the impact on the recipient was often out of proportion to the perceived "size" of the effort. People who reached out to help in a way that seemed simple and easy found that it was just the right thing at just the right time. Perhaps it rekindled someone's hope just when it was going out, or inspired them to take a self-empowering step that would help them get unstuck and start to fly.

I'm willing to bet that you have no idea of the size of the legacy you have already created. I'm also willing to bet that you underestimate the potential you have for making a long-lasting positive impact without ever making it into the history books.

Try this: Starting today, ask yourself, "What ripples am I creating?" Sit down and make a list of ways that you have been the source of positive ripples in your life. Keep adding to it over time as instances occur to you.

Then ask yourself, "What ripples do I want to create?" Keep your eyes open for ways to start those ripples, large or small. Weave ripple-generation into the fabric of how you approach your daily life.

--

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

Success is a numbers game

Do you ever get so caught up in trying to create the perfect outcome that you end up not really moving forward?

When I show people my travel photography, they often make some comment about how much better my pictures are than their vacation photos. What they don't see is the fact that the pictures they're looking at only represent a fraction of the total number of pictures I took.

Going through my shots when I got back from a trip, I'm often struck by how completely underwhelming many of the pictures are. Sometimes it's because what I was trying to capture just didn't quite work. Other times it's because I'm exploring various facets of the same subject, looking for the most interesting and visually appealing approach.

So while I am pleased with the pictures that I end up showing to people, many of the pictures I take end up "on the cutting room floor," so to speak.

When it comes to photography, National Geographic has always been the gold standard in my mind. A few years ago I went to a presentation by a National Geographic photographer, and one of the things that stuck in my mind was the sheer volume of pictures he took for a story - 400 rolls of film (14,400 pictures).

See a trend here? If you're getting caught up in trying achieve the perfect result, you're probably limiting what you can realistically achieve. The more things you try and the more attempts you make, a) the more chances you have to learn and improve and, b) the more chances you are creating to align your luck and skill with opportunity.

Is there anywhere in your life where you're limiting yourself by not letting yourself be imperfect? Is there anywhere you need to take a high volume approach? What could that look like?

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Need simple steps to re-energize your career?
Get started with 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work!

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

How not to measure success

Do you ever compare yourself to others and feel like you just aren't measuring up? Alexandra Levitt recently wrote about the perils of basing your internal feelings of worthiness on how you compare to others.

What's the danger of that? As she notes, there will always be someone who is "better" than you in any given category. So it's a game you can't win.

That got me thinking about another aspect of it, which is that when we compare ourselves to others, we typically aren't comparing ourselves to reality. We're comparing ourselves to our idealized version of what we think we see.

We often don't have the full story. For example, we see people's ultra-success, but don't see the warts-n-all reality behind the scenes. We don't see the bumps and bruises they've had along the way, or we don't see the fact that behind the face of public success lies a personal life in shambles.

So we end up comparing ourselves to a one-dimensional caricature, and then wonder why we come up short.

Looking at others can be good for goals and guidelines, but it's a poor way to measure actual success. Instead of an external measuring stick, try an internal one.

Start off by spending some serious time taking a 360-degree look at your own definition of what success really means in your life. Don't just blindly accept the definition you've been handed. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? What's important to you? Do this for all facets of your life, not just work, because it's all interconnected.

Use benchmarks and measure your progress. Take stock of where you are today, set a goal, and then regularly check in to see how you're doing.

And while you're at it, take time to CELEBRATE your positive progress (but that's the topic for a whole new post).

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Need simple steps to re-energize your career?
Get started with 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work!

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Success secrets of Olympic athletes

When it comes to success in achieving goals, you can't get a much better role model than an Olympic athlete. With that in mind, I was fascinated by this study from the  US Olympic committee that looked at, among other things, the factors to which Olympic athletes attribute their success.

Here are the top ten factors:

• Dedication and Persistence: 58.1%
• Support of Family and Friends: 52.0%
• Excellent Coaches: 49.4%
• Love of sport: 27.1%
• Excellent Training Programs and Facilities: 22.3%
• Natural Talent: 21.9%
• Competitiveness: 15.0%
• Focus: 13.0%
• Work Ethic: 11.6%
• Financial Support: 11.5%

Many of those things are equally applicable in our career efforts. 

One of the things that struck me was how important the support of others is. I found the same thing over a series of interviews with people who have successfully pursued their passions. I summarized the most commonly occurring themes in those interviews in my e-book The Five Fundamentals of Occupational Adventure (which you get as a free gift when you order The Occupational Adventure Guide).

One of those fundamentals is "Don't Go Solo." Whether it is emotional support from friends and/or family, or professional support from a mentor (i.e., "excellent coaches"), having others we can turn to is a key factor in achieving our dreams.

Take a look at your own path, your own environment, and your own efforts. What are the secrets to your success? What can you learn from the Olympic athletes' success factors? What resonates with you? Is there any way you can build more of that into the picture?

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

What would make success your only option?

The next M.A.P. Maker Podcast is from an interview with Brian Johnson, founder of Zaadz.com (now Gaia Community since he sold it late last year) and currently founder of thinkArete.com. It was an inspiring conversation, and I'm completely psyched to share the results with you (watch for it next week).

During the course of the interview, we got to talking about the secret to his success as an entrepreneur. Here's what he had to say...

I had a conversation recently with a young entrepreneur who just won a competition in Texas, and had a great idea and was asking me for advice...

My success [didn't come from] the experience or particular skill in building businesses. I think that hands down what allowed me to be successful was my absolute commitment to an idea. That when I come up with an idea and it really takes hold of me, success is my only option. And a willingness to go through that wall and that wall and that wall and that wall, because it’s an idea that I love creating, and I think the world needs, and I feel called to go out and bring to the world.

When I look at the M.A.P. concept, what Brian is really talking about there is the amazing fuel that results from blending both passion ("I love doing this") and meaning ("I'm inspired to make this kind of difference") in what you do.

I've experienced that in my own journey. When I look back, there have definitely been times when I felt like I was just banging my head against a wall. Like I had the talent, but not the skill to breathe life into my vision. There have even been times when I've said, "Screw this! I give up!"

But any time I said that, I would know immediately that it wasn't true. Part of it is because I'm over the moon in love with what I do, and I'm not really willing to give it up. And part of it is because the idea of cheating the world of the positive impact that my work has the potential to make makes me almost sick to my stomach.

Is success actually the only option? No, of course not. I've never been trapped on one path. I could hang up my hat and find some other direction any time I wanted. What it really boils down to is that the pull of that success is greater than the pain of whatever bumps I might experience along the way. And that is because of the powerful mix of passion and meaning.

Take a look at your journey. Where is that intersection of passion and meaning for you? What would give you that unquenchable fire in the belly to turn those dreams into reality? What would make success the only option?

 

Check out 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM