The M.A.P. Maker

New year's resolution success: Make it a 1-year project

If you're like most people, your new year's resolutions are anything but a path to long-lasting positive change. You make a resolution, stick with it for a couple weeks before letting it lapse, and then beat up on yourself for not being able to stick with it. 

Instead of setting yourself up to fail (and let's face it, that's what most people do with their resolutions) by expecting magical change in one fell swoop, take a different approach. 

Rather than a flick-of-the-switch change, look at your resolution as a year-long project. Take action on it, but don't assume that your current decision to make a change will be enough to power it forward through long-term integration into your life. 

Instead, commit to doing the work to integrate it over the next year. In all likelihood that integration process will have its share of backsliding. But think about it this way:

If every month you take two steps forward and one step back, by the end of the year you will still have taken twelve steps in the right direction!

To support your project, here are some ideas to keep in mind. 

Set up monthly checkpoints

When you make your resolution a year-long process, it creates the opportunity to check in on a regular basis. Once a month, stop and take a look at how things are going on your resolution. Ask questions like:

• How well am I doing?
• What do I need to do differently?
• Where am I falling down? What can I do about that?
• What is getting in the way of my progress? What can I do about that?
• What support do I need? Where can I find it?
• What knowledge do I need? Where can I find it?

Look at your experience as research and development. You work on implementing your resolution for a month, and then bring it back into the lab to look at how it went.

What can you learn from the experience so far? What's going well? How can you build on that? What is challenging? What might you do to overcome that?

Checking in once a month lets your learn from the process. It also gives you twelve built-in chances to get back on track when you wander. 

Create accountability

One of the benefits my clients find in my coaching is accountability. Knowing that someone is going to be asking about what they have committed to do adds an additional incentive to actually do it. 

The same is true any time we express our commitment to something to someone else. It's much easier to let something slide when you're the only one who is watching it lapse. 

Is there anyone in your life you can use as an accountability partner? It could be as simple as checking in with them once a month to update them on your progress, what you've learned, and how you plan on moving forward. 

Find a partner

While we're on the topic of the value of incorporating others into your efforts, you might want to find someone who can be your resolution partner. In this case, instead of just you creating accountability by reporting in to someone, you partner up with someone who is also working on their own year-long resolution project. 

Acknowledge your progress

Finally, acknowledge your progress as you move forward. Spotlight your successes. Recognize the steps you have taken in a positive direction. Give yourself credit for those positive steps, without taking it away with a yeah-but focused on where you haven't been up to snuff. 

Reward yourself. Praise yourself. Ask someone else to give you kudos. All too often the only feedback we get from ourselves is a kick in the ass when our efforts fall short. How motivating is that? 

Trying setting up a reward system where you get a reward each month if you meet certain goals. For example, if you're cutting down on sugar, treat yourself to something special each month you hit a target goal (like 25 days out of the month where you keep your sugar intake within a set range). 

At the end of the day, real change takes time. Making your new year's resolution a year-long project will make that time an inherent part of the process. 

--

If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

 --

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

 

Making progress: Take a tip from a tightrope walker

Sometimes making progress when you jump into something new can feel as precarious as walking a tightrope. You're up to your eyeballs in the new and unfamiliar, and you're struggling to stay upright. 

 As I was watching a tightrope walker on a Cirque du Soleil DVD the other day, it occurred to me that there was a lesson there to apply to our careers and our lives in general. Here are some of the thoughts that came up. 

Focus on change where it happens: Right here & now

The tightrope walker had to cross a huge gap from one platform to the other. But to get there, he couldn't be focused on the whole distance. He had to keep his attention in the present moment. He had to focus on the step he was taking. Getting caught up in thinking about the whole distance would only serve to distract him.

So many of us look at our goals and get distracted by the big picture. We get caught up in fantasies about what is going to happen and neglect the nuts and bolts work that needs to be done right here and now. Or we let fear of falling somewhere along the line keep us from putting our best focused effort into the present moment. 

When you focus on doing your best in the step you're taking right now, the future takes care of itself. 

Take a small step and build on it

Sometimes staying in balance is the result of simply not throwing yourself offbalance. The tightrope walker didn't take big open strides as he walked forward. Instead, he put one foot immediately in front of the other, then slid it forward. 

One benefit of doing that was that there was a minimum amount of time for his foot to be potentially off track and throw his balance off.

That got me thinking of how we can do the same. Essentially it's about taking a step in the right direction and building on it, rather than feeling like we need to get it all done in one giant leap. 

Any number of things can throw us off balance as we're creating something new. Uncertainty. Fear of failure. Not knowing how to do something. Feeling overwhelmed. Not feeling up to the task. The list goes on (and on, and on). 

Taking small steps and building on them is one way to minimize the likeliness that those things will knock you completely over. As you take steps, you gain insight, understanding, and a level of mastery that you can apply to moving forward. 

Use your vision and goals to help keep you on track

Finally, as the tightrope walker slid his foot forward, the wire acted as a guide for where to keep his center of gravity. It's the same in our efforts to move forward in life, except in our case the guidance comes from sliding our feet along the trajectory that leads to the goal and the vision. 

It's easy to get lost and off balance as you move towards your goal. The busy demands of life, the shiny new ideas and opportunities, they can all distract us from what we originally set out to do. 

Make it a frequent habit to check in with that trajectory. Is what you're doing leading you where you want to go, or is your foot dangling perilously out of line? 

The tightrope walker made it to the other side. You can too. 

--

If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

 --

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 stick-wielding chimpanzees

What do monkeys, bananas and sticks have to do with your career's potential? Believe it or not, a whole lot. 

I'm reading Change Your Life Now by William J. Knaus. In it, he describes an experiment back in the 1920s where a banana was put outside chimpanzees cages, just out of reach. While the chimps couldn't reach the banana, they could reach a stick, which they used to sweep the banana within reach. 

Knaus then points out that the chimpanizees in question had occassionally played with sticks while growing up. But if the experiment was repeated with chimps who didn't have that stick experience, they missed the connection and couldn't get to the banana. 

His point is that not only does not trying new things due to fear of failure limit your potential because of doors you never open, it also limits your potential by reducing the range of your experiences and the resulting insights and frames of reference they create. 

Simply put, the more experiences you have, the more information you have to both make decisions and come up with creative approaches. With that in mind, Knaus offers this advice:

To widen the range of your constructive experiences, consider putting aside fear of failure, and start experimenting. 

 Think of everything you do as an experiment that will give you insight and information. Sometimes the results will be the ones you hope for, and other times they'll be less preferable. But you will always get insights. And you can use those insights to build your future. 

--

If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

 --

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 can you "be the change" in the new year?

Be the change you want to see in the world.

~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

Here's a question for the new year. What does this quote actually mean to you? Not in general terms, but in very specific terms, as it relates to your life. If you were to be the change you want to see in the world, what would that actually look like?

This has the potential to be an incredibly powerful quote, both in your life and for the world around you. But most people miss its potential, not because they don't agree with it, but because they leave it at a broad, generic level. They don't translate it from concept into implementation. 

To truly be the change in the coming year, ask these questions:

1. What change do I want to see?
2. How does my current life contribute to that change?
3. How does my current life inhibit that change?
4. How could I be the change?

To go deeper into each of these questions, read on...

What change do I want to see?

If you want to be the change, you have to know what change you're trying to embody. Explore what change you want to see.

Don't just leave it at the broad level (e.g., I want to see more peace). Challenge yourself to look at what that means in detail.

Using peace as an example, you would ask, what contributes to more peace? What inhibits peace? What are the different components? Think of it as creating a map of the change you want to see. 

Off the top of my head, here are several things that build toward peace. 

• Compassion
• Openness
• Non-judgment
• A desire to understand
• Groundedness
• Abundance / prosperity

On the flip side, the lack of any of those things inhibit peace. 

Any of these things can be experienced on multiple levels, including:

• Personal
• Community
• National
• Global

Ask, for example, what contributes to developing compassion on a personal level, both for yourself and for others. Then you can ask the same question for the other levels. 

How does my current life contribute to that change?

Now that you have built a map of the change you want to see, you can plug your own life into it. The first step is taking stock of your current situation. What choices are you making that contribute to any of the components you identified above? What actions are you taking? 

Look at it from both an internal and an external perspective.

Internal

What is going on between your ears can have a profound impact on how you show up to be the change. Take a look at how your internal perspectives contribute to the change you want to see. 

• What beliefs do I have about myself that contribute to the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about myself? (e.g., "I can make an impact," or, "My ideas are worth listening to.")
• What beliefs do I have about others that contribute to the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about others? (e.g., "People are basically good," or, "Most people will work to make the world a better place, given a chance.")
• What beliefs do I have about the world in general that contribute to the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about the world? (e.g., "The world is full of opportunity," or "Things frequently change for the better.") 

External

Once you have taken stock of your internal contribution, take a look at how you are directly impacting the change you want to see. 

• How have the choices I have made in the last year contributed to the change I want to see? (e.g. "I have chosen to engage people who disagree with me with curiosity and questions instead of a sledge hammer," or "I have started choosing locally grown, organic produce.")
• What action I have take in the last year contributed to the change I want to see? (e.g., "I have invested in helping people thrive by making loans on Kiva.org," or, "I have offered a friend who was going through a challenging time an impartial, compassionate ear." )

How does my current life inhibit that change? 

Odds are good that there are choices you're making and actions you're taking that inhibit the change you want to see in the world as well. By identifying these, you have the opportunity to be the change by subtracting those choices and actions from the picture. Addition by subtraction.

The questions to ask are the flip side of the questions about how you contribute to the change you want to see. 

• What beliefs do I have about myself that inhibit the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about myself? (e.g., "I can't make an impact," or, "There's no point in trying, because I'll just screw it up.")
• What beliefs do I have about others that inhibit the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about others? (e.g., "People can't be trusted," or, "People are inherently selfish.")
• What beliefs do I have about the world in general that inhibit the change I want to see? What stories do I tell about the world? (e.g., "The world is a dangerous place," or "Things always go wrong.") 

External

The next step is taking a look at how you are directly inhibiting that change. 

• How have the choices I have made in the last year inhibited the change I want to see? (e.g. "I have habitually argued heatedly with people I don't agree with," or "I have consistently chosen to buy products I know are harmful to the environment.")
• What actions have I taken in the last year that inhibit the change I want to see? (e.g., "I have posted inflammatory comments on online articles slamming 'those people' I don't agree with," or, "I avoided someone I knew needed my help." 

What could I do to be the change?

Now that you have a deeper picture of how you are currently being the change (or not), it's time to ask, "How could I be the change?" Given the components of that change you identified, what actions can you take and what choices can you make?

A great place to start thinking about this is my recent newsletter article about 7 ways to change the world. 

Remember this is a long-term deal. Being the change is a lifetime effort, not a one-year flash in the pan. 

Your choices and actions are the paints on your palette that will paint a picture that is either closer to or further away from the world you want to see. The question you have in front of you is, "Which colors will I use?"

--

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 

 

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. 

--

If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

--

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

Get results: Create a public deadline

This morning I had coffee with my friend Lori Richardson. Over the course of our conversation, I committed to deadlines on two products I'm working on. Both of these are products that have been "under development" for much longer than they need to be. 

Now that I have committed to a deadline and actually told someone to expect that I will meet that deadline, the odds that I will get traction on both products have just gone up exponentially. 

Deadlines are great drivers, but if you want to get the biggest bang for your deadline buck, tell someone else. It's waaaaaay too easy to set a target and then let it slide when life gets in the way. Making it public - if only with one person - creates an accountability that doesn't exist when it's all just knocking around in your head. 

For some of my clients, the accountability that their work with me creates is almost as important as the clarity and direction that comes out of it. Because they know that every week someone (i.e., yours truly) is going to be asking, "So how did that go," they stay focused and keep taking action. 

Think of something that you have been wanting to get traction on. Maybe it's a project, or maybe it is finally taking steps towards a new career. Whatever it is, set a goal, set a deadline, and tell someone. Better yet, tell multiple someones. You might even get a group of people together for some mutual deadline accountability reinforcement. 

Try this: Identify a goal you want to achieve. If that goal is something really big (e.g., a career change, or writing a book), identify a sub-goal that you can accomplish within a month. Set a target date as a deadline for that short-term goal. Then find someone and tell them your intent. Ask them to hold you accountable to that goal. Once you reach that goal, do it again. 

--

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

Positive change tip: Get traction with a singular focus

Have you ever dived into personal development, only to find yourself feeling overwhelmed by all the bazillion ways you can grow, improve, and expand? It can feel a little bit like you're drowning. 

What's worse, because there are so many things you're trying to put into play, you end up getting marginal traction on all of them. The result is often a lot of energy expended, but little substantive change.

If you really want to get results in the long-term, pick one main thing and commit to exploring it thoroughly. Give it a chance to really take hold and make a difference in your life. 

Maybe you decide to make it an experiment to see what kind of results that technique or idea yields if you really embrace it. I'm fond of 30-day experiments. Some of them end up sticking and become part of my repertoire, while others fall by the wayside. One possible area of focus I'm looking at right now is EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping). I want to take 30 days to jump in and put it to work in my own life, exploring what results I can get out of it. 

Or you might decide that you don't need an experiment. Maybe you have found something that really speaks to you and you want to build a deep expertise. Then you start learning all you can, putting it to use, and building on those results. 

If you want to put a heaping pile of personal development ideas on your plate and dig in, that's fine. I must confess, I can't resist all of the tasty morsels I come across. Think of them as hors d'oeuvres. But if you commit to spending the majority of your focus on one main idea at a time - making it the main course - the likelihood is exponentially greater that that idea will really make the impact it has the potential to make. 

It's worth noting that the same idea applies in any area you want to make changes and see positive results. In fact, this post was actually prompted not by my own personal development work, but by my exploration of ways to grow and build my business. I realized that, because I was feeling so overwhelmed by all the great ideas out there, I wasn't implementing any of them especially well. 

So how about you? What one thing will you focus on?

--

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

Getting Things Done: What's the point?

Here's a question for those of you who are Getting Things Done fans. As you devour GTD books and create systems that allow you to squeeze more productivity per square minute than should be humanly possible, have you ever wondered, "What's the point?"

Don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing taking a GTD approach. I could use an uber-sized chunk of that in my own life. I mean the question more literally. What is the point to it? Where are all your jam-packed days leading you? 

Today over on Half-a-dozen Monkeys, there is a post on the need to incorporate a long-term framework into your GTD efforts. 

The post got me thinking about all the clients I have worked with who have been masterful at getting things done, but ultimately realized that all the energy and effort they were putting into their highly productive days wasn’t actually taking them anyplace they really cared to go. 

If you think about GTD in terms of ROI, the payoff doesn’t just come from being able to tick a higher density of things off your to-do list. It also comes from the cumulative effect of day after day, after month, after year of doing those things. If it’s not taking you anywhere that feels meaningful and fulfilling, you’ll likely come up empty.

That's the case regardless of whether or not you are a GTD afficionado. Take a look back at last week. What did you do? What actions did you take? What items did you tick off your to-do list? Was any of it leading you in a direction you really care about? 

If the answer is no, I encourage you to spend some time exploring that long-term vision so you can tap into the cumulative potential of day after day spent taking action aimed in a direction that matters to you. Until you do, your career is at risk of amounting to little more than a series of well-executed steps taken for their own sake. 

--

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

What are you waiting for?

"Life is short. Don't wait." You've heard it a million times, probably so many times that it goes in one ear and slowly drifts out the other. But it's an important message. 

Sometimes, it takes the raw edge of reality to drive the point home. I heard that voice of reality today in a poetry slam reading by Gabrielle Bouliane, a woman who had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer shortly before the event. 

Her voice is a raw, pissed off, emphatic, passionate, and inspiring. And she has a message for you in the video below that I hope you stop for a moment and really, truly hear. 

[Hat tip to David Zinger Employee Engagement for the heads up on the video.]

--

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

Get unstuck with a 7-day goal

Do you ever find yourself feeling stuck? You know you need to move forward, but somehow you've managed to sink your wheels into the mud and all momentum is lost. It can be a frustrating, draining experience.

In one of the herd of books I'm currently reading, The Power of Focus, I came across a great, simple idea to blast out of that stuckness. The authors described adventurer John Goddard's response when asked about overcoming roadblocks:

"When I get stuck, I restart myself by focusing on one goal I can finish in the next seven days - something simple. I don't think about anything else - that usually starts my momentum again."

I love that idea. For me, part of the challenge with getting bogged down is the inertia it creates. Stuck energy feeds stuck energy, and the cycle goes on ad nauseum.

Part of that bogged down inertia comes when my focus is too diffuse. Having something clearly defined to sink my teeth into helps me start taking action. With a 7-day goal, not only is it clearly defined, but there's a payoff within sight. The energy of both the progress and the payoff combines to break free of the self-perpetuating stuckness.

At the same time, giving it a time frame of seven days gives you enough time to engage in something substantial, something bigger than a box to tick on your to-do list. The sense of accomplishment there also feeds the forward momentum.

Try this: Do a brain dump of possible 7-day goals. What would you be able to accomplish in seven days that would energize you? What could you sink your teeth into that would start to energize you and get you moving? Pick one and start taking action. Let me know how it goes.

--

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