ThriveCurve.com

thriving or diving?

It’s frustrating when good intentions and budding good habits seem to come out second best because of the “reality” of our work, home and play commitments. I think it’s often “own goals” though that turn the opportunity to thrive into living for weeks at a time in an existence of just getting by from one deadline or commitment  to another.

Anyway, here’s a model that helps me figure out what’s going wrong and what I can do about it.

At any time, you have so much energy that can be applied to things you want to do. I call this your “resourcefulness”. By working at the green stuff on the left hand side, you can pump this up, or if you let it slip, down goes your resourcefulness.

Some of this resourcefulness gets siphoned off by your own “self sabotage” – things you do or ways you think that robs you of resourcefulness, leaving less of it for what you want to do.

Thriving

Now the interesting bit  - if your appetite to do things (the blue on the right) is equal or less than the resourcefulness you have, then its all good. You get the deeds done and the sense of achievement and flow in doing it reinforces the your resourcefulness, for whatever is next .

Diving

However if your appetite is greater than the resourcefulness you have available, you have a problem. This causes stress and means even if you do what is done, the satisfaction from it is tarnished. This decreases the green stuff, because you have less time to maintain it and it reinforces the leaks …

The bottom line

So, either you over exert and you dive and it gets worse or you balance things and you can actually, over time, achieve more.

Pumping up the Resourcefulness energy

Many things can rev us up and give us that internal fuel in our tank to thrive.

My “A” list looks like this:

• Getting quality personal time when I have energy
• constructive habits – eating well; exercise; meditation; tai chi …
• sleeping well
• learning – doing interesting and varied stuff
• flow – getting into that creative zone
• family & friends & partner – time and energy with and for them
• experiences – not getting stale – for me the nature connection is particularly important
• values=beliefs=actions – alignment in these so what I’m saying and doing lines up with my values

Those pesky leaks

Unfortunately the resourcefulness we generate doesn’t always get spent on what we want to achieve. What makes this particularly nasty is many of the root causes have merged into the environment we accept as “how things are”. A great book that exposes many of these and points to greater resourcefulness is “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working”. Bit of a mouthful of a title but the authors peel back our self reinforcing environment and show just how archaic and damaging it can be. Like:

Mash-up days – allowing email and other interruptions to destroy any “flow” we may have. Couple this with variable energy levels and how we try caffeine or other booster efforts, as opposed to using smarter food grazing habits. Another pearl is the discipline of breaking the day into 90 minute sprints – 90 minutes is about as long as one can concentrate and stay in “flow” for.

It’s interesting in the line of work we do (high pressure consulting – mixing IT, change management and strategy) that the work outputs are seldom related to how long I spend on them. 90 minutes in flow, first thing in the morning (that’s my cycle) can break through and nail an issue or write the heart of a report that would otherwise take 8+ hours.

Speaking of “own goals”, another beauty of mine is “the over commit”. This works as follows. I get an email or a call about an opportunity and quickly visualise what is possible. If it’s particularly interesting, “the over commit”  is more or less a fait accompli. Before I know it, we have to deliver something that I need to take a major part in, has risk and just doesn’t stack up to business priorities.

And now for the dive…

So this then pushes up the resourcefulness needed, so this exceeds what I can deliver, and now I’m screwed. Because I’m over committed, the flow doesn’t happen and I’m pushed to make room for the habits that keep me resourceful (walks at the beach, exercise, time-out …).

So my available resourcefulness goes down and the “leaks” of resourcefulness are strengthened. This of course then means I’m even less resourceful to do the things I over committed to… Hence, I’m now in a dive.

To get out of this, I then need to “reset” – treat myself in ways that get the green left hand side up, and may be kill or scale back some pet projects

Why the model

The model is useful to me, because it exposes the karma filled behaviour of peaks and troughs. I’m more aware now of the leaks, and how I can pump up my resourcefulness. I’m also working hard, with lapses, on not over commiting and avoiding mash-up days.

Tags: craft, habits, health, life_portfolio

10 traits and stay alive and thrive, and the power of visual thinking

I’ve always been a fan of John Tickell. He is an Aussie doctor with a sense of pragmatism grounded in front-line experience coupled with an easy manner and a knack of presenting ideas convincingly and easily. His most well known book Stress for Success has the byline of “Everything in moderation except laughter, sex, vegetables and fish”.

So his “stay alive to thrive” is centred on staying healthy - with or without the help of good genes. He talks about 10 traits of long living people. His descriptions of them add an urgency to “doing the right thing” for your body, spirit and mind. While for some people a simple checklist would have sufficed, I’m not sure how many of the ten traits would be remembered at the moment of having that extra chocolate or glass of wine, choosing lamb over fish or blowing one’s top at poor service again from Jetstar… It made more sense for me to visually package them up in ways that are easier to keep in the mind’s eye that shows the connection between the traits…

The ten traits can be arranged around three interconnecting themes:

• PRESETS - genetic and environmental impacts that we can do the best (or worst with)
• MENTAL - ways we think of things that can wind us up and stress us, or build confidence and energy
• PHYSICAL - how we look after our bodies

These themes interact and impact on each other. To me, the value of the model is showing how the consequences (good and bad) of how I think and behave are interconnected and impact on a reasonably important goal - staying alive, thriving and being happy!

I’ve had two useful wakeup calls in the last five years that give me a sense of urgency on making trait progress. Here is how I think I’ve done…

Visually, it has helped me to see and track progress. Deliberate action and thinking continues to drive progress, with my goals now being to turn the light greens to dark greens, despite my unhelpful genes. So examples…

• getting myself out of business “line of fire” operational stuff that can wind me up
• more attention to meals at supermarket/deli time, to get the right combos of food into the house
• regular raw salmon 
• living the ideas in thrivecurve.com
• replacing tea (with sugar) with juices and water during the day
• bloody minded about minimum levels of exercise and time in nature - daily, weekly and monthly
• starting and sustaining interest in Les Mills “Body Balance” - a combo of tai chi, pilates and yoga inspired stretch and strength exercises. A really good example of “flea” behaviour - all I have to do is turn up…

Tags: health, living longer

Talent and Mastery - developing, recruiting, identifying

In June, two things came together (a book and a drawing class) that re-shaped how I think about how people become and stay “talented”. “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle is an amazing book, that peels away the mystery on how some people get to the top of their craft. They need:

1. the passion, role models and vision that makes the amount of effort required paletable (not much new here, although the book goes into interesting ways of igniting that interest, especially in kids)
2. micro learning cycle repeatedly repeated- hundreds of times a session. This is around breaking down the craft into discrete blocks of technique, and then focusing on each of these. While this is happening, one becomes immersed in “right brain” mode - with the constant try something, get feedback on whether it is right and repeat. During June we attended a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” week long workshop (see next post) in Melbourne. This is based on Betty Edwards excellent book on understanding and developing technique for drawing. During the workshop we did this micro learning technique, and it has had a lasting effect in a number of ways.
3. being able in one’s head to envision coreographing all the pieces together into a seamless whole

A key insight is that from the outside, this doesn’t look like “proper practice” and it often looks like they are making little headway, till suddenly it all comes together and we have “mastery”. What is disturbing about this is that before mastery appears, it is hard to know it will or to want extent. There are clear and present repercussions for recruitment and picking who of your staff will become stars.

The thinking leads you to look less at what they are actually achieving today and more at the observable signs that 1-3 above are happening, or that with the right environment and mentoring you can ignite these. Coyle goes on to describe the characteristics of great coaches, that appear to be the anti-thesis of the “pump them up” loud in your face motivation stereotype conventional wisdom and the media points us towards. Also, through the book, he give clues on how to get this going in kids - starting with igniting the passionthat then will fuel the commitment needed and pacing the practice so it stays fun and tuned to the feedback and feedback style they need. 

Tags: craft, Daniel Coyle, learning, raising kids, right brain, talent, The Talent Code

Philip Glass in 12 Parts Doco

Saw this amazing doco last night. Its an incisive two hour window into how one of the most iconic composers does his thriving. Some key insights:

• If you are not upsetting a lot of people then you’re not doing your craft -  Craft is about letting your uniqueness come through
• Its not about contribution (though, of course, you really do)
• The craft speaks to something that really enrichs his life
• If you only use trued and true tools and techniques then thats all you will produce
• “Big things” emerge - its like being underground and hearing an underground river somewhere. Instead of directly looking for it, you do your routines and you sink in the time - the river finds you and takes you where it is going - you are the vehicle and it (for Philip the new music) was always there
• It is your life - get up early, work till late in your portfolio of activities
• It is your life - have a portfolio of activities that craddle your uniqueness - for him this is various moving meditations and exercises with different masters, family life, being a New Yorker - doing the evryday stuff and routines -
• With the portfolio of mediations/exercise/spiritual proactices, you look for new practices that fill in gaps or open new possibilities
• It is your life - surround yourself with a network of gifted very different individuals, and have regular quality time with them
• It is your life - shape the quality of it by the environments you inhabit and move between - for him its the buzz and life of NYC, coupled to the farm wilderness type enviornment he and Holly have on the Nova Scotia coast
• Learn and evolve from lots of very different teachers - from the harsh formal piano mistress in Paris to the loving approach used by Ravi Shankar
• When you do your craft you just make the quality time, be there, support yourself with the habits and it comes. Have lots of projects on the go at any one time
• The craft is “communicating” - for him its through music, painters its their art - the key is how to ingest this - for music being great at “listening”, visual arts through “seeing”. Passive - active going on here 
• It is your life - Moving between the Nova Scotia coast and NYC environments
• Live “young” - His much younger wife Holly, and family life with kids under 5 - he turned seventy in 2005 but appears to live with the energy and drive of someone half his age

It is striking to me how much of the above relates to my journey and the thinking in this blog - in particular:

• Try lots and keep what works
• Live and think young
• Get the right portfolio of habits
• Use different environments (eg Boyle River and the beach) to pump creativity, inner peace and wellness

Tags: buddhism, craft, creativity, environment, life_portfolio, living_young, music

The Dip and Blip: becoming “best in the world”

Imagine if you could take lessons from the studies of genius, business and influence and apply these to your own life?  How could this radically change what you do in 2009? Through some Christmas reading, coupled with one of my top books of 2007, I’ve made a major shift in my thinking.

 So far, it seems like the books are quite different.  However in terms of people achieving excellence, the two books intersect over the need to practice your craft. Outliers talks about the 10,000 hours of practice needed and Influencers discusses the quality and form of this “deliberate practice”. Deliberate practice is all about identifying the key behaviours needed and then, by getting targeted and quick feedback at conscious and subconscious levels, the body and mind determines what needs to change.

Expertise arises as you do this more often and better than the other guy…

Now add to the mix Seth Godin’s “The Dip”.  Godin talks about how to be “best in the world” to your audience. Going through an improvement cycle can be hard going - causing you to feel like you are going backwards until you master the skill or new process. Godin argues that the harder this is (ie the deeper the dip you need to climb out of) the better, as it makes it hard to catch you, your team, organisation or country if you can achieve it.

So that led me to think about:

What am I good and successful at? and What combination of “Outliers”, “Influencers” and “Dip” thinking and action has been in play in creating this sustainable success? As I think about new possibilities for 2009/10 and beyond, what deliberate action should I be taking to move towards “best in the world”?  I’ve picked out some themes, described these and added examples:

Theme	What this is	Example for me
Talent x Passion	Experience, honed skills and interest I have	Creating compelling narratives, visual synthesis of ideas, startup to very successful small consulting business, knowledge and information sharing, being an agent of change, reading situations and people
Trends	What is valued and needed now and in the next decade - locally, nationally and globally	“More for less”, sustainability, bringing fresh ideas grounded in inconvenient fact to reality, medical advances and retarding aging, what New Zealanders need to do to retain their quality of life and have unique and valued contributions on a world stage…
Predisposition	Cultural background and base behaviour style and therefore predisposition	kiwi “can do” attitude, a healthy diregard for conventional wisdom and power structures, self starter, high levels of self responsibility and “shaper”
Relationships	Network of friends, colleagues and customers	a wide range of talented individuals - you know who you are
Opportunities	Stepping up when opportunities arise to use or stretch your craft	attending TED, assignments in knowledge and information sharing, who you meet on planes…

One way of thinking about this is having a helping hand “Blip” that helps me get through the “Dip” – ie what are the natural advantages I should play on? This is important as the combination of advantages is so unique to me, that if I can line them up then I can achieve and be more (ie “thrive”) than others. This isn’t just about competing and ego (though for some it could be). It’s about being able to go further in a field of endeavour just as some of the masters of craft we look up to have done in their time – be it Albert Einstein, Claude Monet, Edmond Hillary, Barak Obama plus the writers of the three books above.

This is sort of weird in that if you take it to its natural conclusion, there will always be an Einstein, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – there are more than enough humans with very different experiences to go around and fill in all the corners of possibility. It’s like Darwinism for memes – i.e. ideas and craft find ways of flourishing through human diversity.

Being a visual beast, I came up with the model below to represent the memes and their interconnection…

This is now a useful model (for me anyway) to start to explore what changes will play to my strengths and passion, and do good for others for 2009 and beyond…

The model centers on three crucial questions to ask yourself:

1. What do I bring to the table?
2. What journey do I choose?
3. What do I do on my journey?

For each of these questions, the model gives key themes to consider that can help build a robust way forward…

Tags: craft, goals, life_portfolio

Life Footprint and how you spend the only time you have - “Now”

In the last post on “Encounters” the footprint on life of those interviewed seemed larger, or at least very different to what most of us live within. Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” springs to mind in thinking about this “footprint” concept. It is a wordy emotionally tough but very rewarding read. To get more value from it for myself, I visually decoded some of the key elements and mashed it with other thinking as follows: 

Yes, there is a lot going on here! If you start in the middle - that you (the flea) have a choice at every waking moment - does your mind wander into the “Red” zone of ruminating on the past or the future, or stay focused on the “now”

In the “red zone”, it is about:

• reliving past decisions, events on what might have happened or why one feels so screwed or unhappy today. This could be about getting old and the future not looking as rosy as the past, or
• ruminating as a substitute for action … where you have read one email to far on a Friday afternoon and can’t do anything about it till Monday. Of course, Monday comes and its no longer a big deal … apart from all the worry/anger etc airspace it got all weekend!
• worrying about what the future will bring based on basic needs not being met … maybe fears of losing what appears to be hard won security

However, in the “green zone” it is possible to get a life portfolio that weaves the various aspirations, resilence and habits that allows one to thrive. For me that looks like:

• Achievement … of our Information Leadership business, in growing, satisfying customers and giving all of us working in it an opportunity to thrive in what we are good at and like doing. Also, personnal achievement in putting together and delivering keynote presentations and workshops, as well as one off non-work related projects
• Connectiveness … being in a thriving and loving relationship with Sarah and my daughter Hannah and surrounding ourselves with close friends and family that as Tony Robbins would say “magnify the human experience”
• Connectiveness… to nature and the universe through getting out amongst it regularly - in New Zealand mountains and beaches, as well as regular journeys around the world
• Suffering Resilience … yes, I could “do better” at this … attitudes, going with the flow, staying in the “now”
• Habits … eating right, exerciseing regularly, relaxation, reading and watching new thinking, time into relationships

Eckhart Tolle has written and created audio programmes, like this one, that are powerful in nudging one from red to green thinking, building resilience and then taking constructive action. The Power of Now is a good starting point.

Tags: goals, life_portfolio, now

“Thriving” Encounters at the End of the World

Recently saw this mesmerising movie by Herzog on Antarctica.

While the visuals are powerful, what really got me was the interviews and snapshots of the lives of some of the inhabitants (and I don’t mean the penguins!). They came across as bright, eccentric, and well, not quite fitting the “real world” that most of us are in. There stories on why they were there, what came before showed incredible variation.

You got the sense that for whatever reasons, Antarctica was , for now, just right and they thrive within it - being a combination of their science and discovery focus, just being there, not being elsewhere , the “now” sense of danger, cadre of others who are also thriving in this quirky sort of way…

Tags: life_portfolio, worldview

Creating your own thriving environment - Cezanne style

Earlier this year we visited Aix-de-Provence and went to Atelier Cezanne.
This is his studio that he had purpose built.

http://www.atelier-cezanne.com/france/visites.htm

One of the things that gets your attention is the scale and set up of the primary room itself. Its north facing side is a wall of glass with a rambling garden and large trees outside. The effect is that you feel as though you are outside in nature, the lighting is constantly changing. This feeling of being outside in “nature” is reinforced by the bird and wind noises. This must have been a powerful stimulation for creativity and getting in the “zone” of his craft.

The studio also allowed large canvases to be placed on the east wall and with the help of a large ladder, he could paint all over the canvas. In the north east corner was a long thin slot for getting the canvases in and out of the studio in one piece (though this still looked like a tricky proposition).

We have recently purchased a hideway “bach” in the New Zealand beech forest. The multitude of bush, river and mountain walks at our fingertips coupled with good access to the tools of our trade (whiteboards; large computer screens; good internet access; private quite offices; access to each other) have made this a thriving environment for us.

Tags: cezanne, creativity, environment

Creating and re-creating

In my last post I introduced the idea of the flea, the rider and the elephant…

One of the ways that helps me ensure that I get good quality recreation and creation time is by building an environment and habits that support and bring these two together.  The components of this environment will be different for different people.  Some of the things that work for me are:

• having one environment where typically do ‘normal’ work versus another environment where I engage in my craft.
• creating and maintaining habits that I know help me have feelings of ‘well being’.  For example, I don’t need to take a particularly long time over breakfast but I do know that I need it to be uninterrupted.  I have trained my family members to allow me that time almost no matter what and as a result my day gets off to a better start and I am much easier to be around.
• ensuring that I spend time in non-urban environments as well as urban environments.  For example, while I live in a suburb I’m close to the beach and make sure I get 15 minutes at the wild beach near my home every day.

It is not always possible, or desirable, to be involved in high-end activities non stop.  Rather by recognising that there are a range of activities that are needed and that each has a role it helps get a perspective on how I want to spend my time and how I need to restructure things to meet that.

Tags: habits, innovation

Focusing on craft - the flea, the elephant and the rider

No matter our individual circumstances in any given day there will be a range of things that we want to achieve.  These range from completing mundane tasks such as picking up groceries or calling a plumber, to tasks that require more attention, and then to the top end high quality thinking and action.

This high quality thinking and action is usually the greatest source of satisfaction and enables us to further our craft – what we are good at and have a passion for doing.

Most of us battle to find the time and inclination to focus at this top end.  After all, most of the activities located here take more energy and engagement than simply lining up the ducks on a range of ‘to do’ tasks.  In fact, it’s easy to allow our agenda, email inbox or phone calls to determine what we do when. This is a form of self sabotage, as it takes little interruption to scuttle the high end stuff.

Focusing on the ‘important but not urgent’ is a common theme of time management and self-help tomes whether this takes the form of quadrants and targets.

The most elegant analogy I have come across is by Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Happiness Hypothesis”. Here he suggests that humans comprise of an unconscious elephant being ridden by a rider (the conscious mind) that tries to alter the elephant’s behaviour. To make things more complicated, the elephant doesn’t understand language, so communication tends to be via forming helpful habits and feedback loops that have quick response times on what the rider thinks are desireable (making the elephant feel good) and undesireable things to do and ways to behave (elephant feels bad).

In grappling with how to get the quality time and quality head space, it seems that an extension to this analogy is a flea that sits in the rider’s ear - giving advice, suggesting action and at times being quite incovenient. A classic case is in the mornings I go for a run down at our local beach. This is easy when the weather is fine and it’s not winter. However on those cold mornings it’s easy for my rider to make another choice.

Fortunately, the flea says ‘just do this habit because it’s who you are, and I promise you’ll feel good afterward’ - and of course the flea is right!

So how can I make sure that the flea gets heard?

One of the things we did recently was to get a low key holiday home in New Zealand beech forest covered mountains. The habit I now have is that when I’m there I severely compartmentalise any lower order activities and instead have formed habits about high quality re-creation (through the environment) and high quality creation. This really works. It’s as though I’ve got the rider and elephant to a stage where all the flea has to do is get me here (I’m here right now) and then my nature and nature itself take their course and I do my best stuff.

Tags: craft, habits