Follow Your Passions

Note: the work below is a compilation of several items I have written previously on the subject of compassion for others and giving of your self. It has been edited, tweaked, cobbled, massaged, and then submitted to the Spread the Love NOW! Group Writing Project, hosted by Wade of The Middle Way, Kenton of Zen-Inspired Self Development, and Albert of Urban Monk.Net. Enjoy!

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
- Winston Churchill

Giving your time, energy, and resources to others is a rather magical act, in that you personally will reap huge benefits as well. You might think that working for a day on, for example, a Habitat for Humanity house is just going to help those who will someday live in it. I’d like to suggest that there is a myriad of things you’ll get out of the experience of giving.

• You’ll feel good doing it.
• Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.
• You will learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected.
• You’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.
• You’ll make the world better.

I encourage you to spend a little time today thinking about what your strengths are, where your passions lie, and what sort of opportunities might exist in your community to use your strengths and passions in a way that will help others.

Good From Giving

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
- Anne Frank

There was a Friends episode in which Joey was determined to show Phoebe that there was no such thing as a truly selfless deed, because when you do good things for others it makes you feel too good to be counted as totally selfless. As you know if you watched the show, Joey was a wise man.

Giving your time, energy, money, and other resources to someone who could benefit from them just about can’t help but make you feel great inside, even if you don’t actually see the eventual outcome of your generosity. Like the butterfly effect concept, you never know what monumental effect a simple act of kindness can have on an individual, a family, or even a community.

Interestingly, the more you give, the better you’ll get at it. Giving of your time or money forces you to become a better steward of those resources, increasing your time management skills and your awareness of your finances. In fact, most leading financial magazines I read have endorsed giving ten percent of your income to a cause you are passionate about, because the increased awareness of your savings and spending habits usually reaps enough personal benefit to offset the ten percent donation in the long run.

Yep. Giving of yourself, however you choose to do it, can be a downright selfish act. So go treat yourself by sending a check to your favorite charity, or indulge yourself by spending the day serving food to the homeless.

A Source of Strength

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.

Giving can be a very small thing. When you smile at someone who opens the door for you, chances are you put them in a better mood. You’ve used your muscles in your face and arms in the process.

I recently spent a morning opening about a thousand cans of fruit cocktail for individuals and families that need a charitable source of good meals. I don’t know that there were muscles in my body I didn’t use by the time I was through!

Being a part of a charity walk some weekend doesn’t just provide a good opportunity for physical exercise, it also provides an educational event for you to learn more about whatever cause you are walking for, what research is being done towards a cure or solution, and how you can get more involved if you are interested.

There are museums, libraries, theaters, zoos, schools, and other institutions striving to provide positive learning experiences to the public, and are yearning for people to support their efforts through donations of money, resources, or your time. Think about the potential knowledge you could take out of working one day a week or month at a museum. Think of the positive change you could make in a child’s life by talking to them about the animals they’re looking at, or the play they just watched.

My examples focus on helping humans, but there are certainly other causes out there! Giving to a local animal shelter, working to preserve a historic building or landmark, or somehow improving the environment – the opportunies are out there, and plentiful enough that there is surely something that you could get involved with tied to your particular interests, and make a positive contribution to.

Connectedness

If you have a chance some day, I encourage you to take the StrengthsFinder exam from Gallup. It is an exam that enables you to identify your strengths, then work on action items to utilize and keep growing those strengths.

I bring it up, because I took the exam, and my number one strength was “Connectedness”. There is a lot of explanation and discussion about what that means, but I think this quote sums up perfectly how someone with this strengths filters the world.

“Sometimes I just look at my bowl of cereal in the morning and think about those hundreds of people who were involved in bringing me my bowl of cereal: the farmers in the field; the biochemists who made the pesticides; the warehouse workers at the food preparation plants; even the marketers who somehow persuaded me to buy this box of cereal and not a different one sitting next to it on a shelf. I know it sounds strange, but I give thanks to these people, and just doing that makes me feel more involved with life, more connected to things, less alone.”
- Rose T., psychologist

Through giving, you can learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected. I come back frequently to the idea that giving can be a very small act, or a very large one (or, ideally, some combination of all sizes of giving, intertwined into your daily life). You’re likely giving throughout your day and not realizing it.

Some examples of how I have given recently – watch for a few you recognize in yourself:

• placed my empty cardboard cereal box into the recycling bin instead of the garbage
• smiled at the clerk at Target, thanking her and telling her what a great job she did
• turned the lights off in the house before leaving to use less energy resources (thus reducing pollution and my electric bill simultaneously!)
• bought a calendar for a friend because she likes cows
• said hi to my neighbor and asked what he had planned that day

All of these actions helped me to connect with my environment and/or community, all of them took minimal effort relative to the potential benefit, and all of them are examples of giving.

Look around in the world around you as you go about your day. Think about your interactions with people you come in contact with, and how you can improve someone’s day with just a few extra words and/or smiles. When you walk into a store, think about everyone that was involved in making your shopping experience there possible – clerks, managers, shippers, suppliers, manufacturers, and far more. When I was returning an item the other day to a store, I watched as the clerk took care of the transaction with ease, and thought about the people who were involved with creating a system of technology, ideas, and policies that enabled the clerk to so quickly and efficiently take care of me. I thanked her, but as I walked away thinking about some different sorts of experiences I’ve had at return desks, I also said a silent thanks to the establishment that made both my experience and the job of the clerk so easy and painless.

We’re all connected, to our environment and everything that exists in it, in ways we’ll never realize. By giving your time, money, and resources to something you believe in that is bigger than yourself, you extend your awareness of what is beyond your self, and increase your opportunities to learn more about the ways in which you are connected to others.

Giving Strengths

“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.”
- Charles Dudley Warner

By actively giving, you’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.

As Mark Sanford puts it, “Giving is an art. That requires practice.” If you don’t feel you have money to give, you can give of your experience, your skills, your time, or other resources you may have. Experiment with getting involved in different kinds of giving, with different kinds of organization involved in your efforts. Maybe you’ll go volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity project and find out you excel at bashing your thumb with a hammer but not much else when it comes to home construction. That’s okay, the next day you can go teach high school kids how to manage their money when they get older. The day after that, you can read to children at your local public library. Eventually, you’ll find something that matches your skills and interests with a place you can do the most good with them.

I don’t like to think of people as “tools” or “resources”, but consider the old adage about chopping down a tree with a sledge hammer. You might get it done, but you’d have a much easier time of it and be able to chop a lot more trees down if you used an axe or a saw. By finding something you’re a great fit for, where you can thrive and be passionate and use your strengths to accomplish big feats, you’re maximizing your giving potential.

Change Your World

“If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love’s reach.”
- Margaret Cho

By giving, you’ll make the world better. Maybe not always “the” world every time, but certainly “your” world. And since we’re all connected (see above), that starts becoming one and the same, see?

Leadership is said to be about serving others, so it stands to reason that by giving to others, you are in fact becoming a leader in your community. The more you give, the more you begin to understand inherently what it means to be a great leader. The world needs leadership, perhaps today more than ever.

In the book Good to Great, one of the absolute keys to a “Great” leader is that he or she possesses, somehow, near limitless amounts of both confidence and humility, simultaneously. By learning to go outside of your self and learn ways in which we are all connected, finding what your strengths and interests are and how they can be applied to charitable acts, and activily going out and giving in the ways you are passionate about, chances are you will encounter situations and people who will encourage and hone your confidence and show you reasons to be humble. Chances are if you are reading this blog post, you’re far better off in life than most of your fellow mankind, and it is hard to truly understand how fortunate you are, how much you have to be thankful for, and not be humbled as a result.

I don’t have unrealistic goals for this blog. I hope it reaches someone else, but even if it does just reach one someone else and cause a shift inside of them, changing something in them that makes them want to do something nice for some fellow human being, the possibility of that snowballing into a community-changing event is… well, it’s big enough that I’ll keep trying, keep giving. To you.

How you perceive reality creates your reality. If you perceive a reality in which you can make positive changes, you’re well on your way to changing the world you live in.

Like a boat moving through the water, each of us creates a wake. In the organizations that form the communities of our lives, our wakes have important consequences. In our businesses, on our teams, with our associates, in our communities and homes, we want a positive wake—one that lifts others but does not capsize them.

A positive wake is critical to our success, to our relationships, to our leadership. But there is only one way to determine the impact our wake has on others. They must tell us. That’s why feedback is a gift.
- Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D. and Marshall Goldsmith, Ph.D.

Two of the greatest skills you can build to enhance your communication skills with others are related to the concept that feedback is one of the most precious gifts another human being can give us.

I worked for a company for five years once, and during that time I received one review from my manager. He never gave more because money was tight and people tended to associate reviews with monetary increases, but I genuinely just wanted to know if I was doing a good job or not, what I could work on to improve the company, etc. Nuthin’. I didn’t leave that job, I escaped. Psychologically, the lack of knowing whether the work I did made a bit of good was surprisingly important to me. At the next company I worked for, my manager was always there with answers to questions, and gave me constant praise and constructive criticism in the time I was there. Receiving the occasional pat on the back, or assistance in steering my work so it provided the most value, was as important to my job satisfaction as getting a paycheck every two weeks.

I’ve since become a feedback junkie. Sometimes the constructive criticism sort of feedback can be difficult (both to give and receive), but I’ve learned that in many cases it is also the most valuable. I’ve learned to identify those rare individuals that I can count on to poke holes in any theory, project, or idea I run by them – and once I identify them I make sure it’s a relationship I hold dearly, because it is unfortunately rare.

I should add one caveat to the concept that feedback is a gift. The type of feedback that is not particularly helpful is the opposite of constructive criticism, destructive criticism. If the intent of the person providing the feedback is to attack and harm rather than to be helpful, their words are generally valueless and can be quite poisonous if taken to heart.

So seek out opportunities to provide praise or assistance to your fellow coworkers or friends, and do so with a helpful heart. Like many things that are of a rare nature, your words can be of significant and lasting value to others. By providing others feedback, you are working to build empathy for others, a skill that will be of often unsung but still significant value to you in your life and career. And by listening to, and truly considering, what constructive advice people have for you without immediately going into defensive mode, you can increase your capacity for patience and humility. I am convinced that a consistent trait of a great leader, in virtually any situation, is the ability to simultaneously exhibit unwaiveringly confidence and unquestionable humility.

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.
- Earl Nightingale

For anyone who might be interested in a sort of off-the-cuff, condensed version of the sorts of things discussed on Follow Your Passions, I also post quite regularly on FYP’s sister-blog, Hacking Your Passions. HYP’s stated mission is “to improve productivity, personal organization, work processes or any other areas that can be enhanced through harnessing an individual’s talents, joy, work ethic, strengths, skills, and above all – passions.” Hope ya like it.

Job satisfaction levels, however, tend to rise as hours worked per week increase, but begin to recede at 60 or more hours.
- The Conference Board, on US Job Satisfaction

I came across an article detailing findings by The Conference Board about U.S. Job Satisfaction declining. It provided a less than inspirational overview of the current situation in the workforce of the United States. But that piece of it above, about job satisfaction increasing as hours per week increased, has me curious to know more. Is it because people are making more money through working more hours? Are the people working more hours closer to retirement? Or, is it the reason that I find myself happier when I work more hours – I enjoy what I’m doing in my job?

More from the article – “Consumers rated bonus plans and promotion policies as the least satisfactory benefits of employment, with less than 23 percent claiming they are satisfied with their company’s policies. Satisfaction is also low for performance review processes, workload, work/life balance, communication channels and potential for future growth. Says Franco: ‘Perhaps, this is why two out of every ten employees does not see himself in his current job a year from now.’”

There are more obstacles than this between you and being happy in your work. If you let them become insurmountable, they absolutely will take you up on the offer. But all of these things are difficult if not impossible to control. There is, however, one particularly effective way at avoiding dissatisfaction in your work because of this mountain of reasons to be disgruntled.

Do what you are passionate about.

You can do this by finding a job you can be passionate about, or by taking the job you have today and unlocking how to be happy in it, but if you don’t figure out how to do one or the other, you run the risk of ending up a statistic.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Meade

Life’s creative solutions require alonetime. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.
- Ester Buchholz

The message today is a simple one, but important. In many common environments we find ourselves in – families, school, work, etc – there are times when the situation calls for you to be a dedicated team player, and others where strong independent contributions are needed. Leaders, for example, rely on their teams to realize success in whatever they are trying to accomplish. However, it is the decisive actions of that leader, the choices made when that leader is called upon, which are looked upon to provide direction and guidance. As much as that leader may take in advice and feedback from team members into consideration when making those tough calls, the gut instinct of that leader plays a factor important enough that they “own” the decision more than any other individual in the team.

When Michael Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls, winning the NBA Finals many times over, he was a phenomenal individual contributor. Without him, his team would have been hard pressed to be as successful. However, visualize a basketball game in which the opposing team had to only play Michael Jordan. Five against one, a very different story would likely be told.

The fact is, successful teams are filled with strong individual contributors. The more you enhance yourself as an individual, the more the team can benefit from having you as a part of it.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.
- Henry David Thoreau

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
- John Lennon

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein

How you perceive each and every encounter, situation, event, and relationship dictates in no small part the outcome, which in turn becomes the reality you live in. This is the summation of many things I have written about in this blog, and since it is a concept I think is so important (and it has been a while since I posted on this blog), I thought a recap of sorts pulling the concept together would be helpful.

“There are many hurdles on the way to living our dreams, but the sad part is that most of them have been placed into existence by our minds, and thus we as individuals are the only ones ultimately capable of removing them (or at least getting around them).” – from What Have You Got To Win

“If you desire something more than everyone else combined desires the opposite, then your desire is significantly more likely to come to pass.” – from There Is Only One Now

“Your mind has the potential to be incredibly powerful, regardless of how you choose to use it. Wielded wisely, it can be an incredibly potent tool for good.” – from A Brief Lesson in Mind Management

There are a lot of ways to build on the basic idea, but everything essentially can be boiled down to five simple words.

Your perception becomes your reality.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
- Alfred North Whitehead

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin

It was about one year ago that I heard of a philosophy about change held by one of the leaders of the organization I work for. I can’t recall the precise quote, but at its essense was the idea that without change you cannot have growth. Literally! So if you want to grow personally, in any way, you must accept that change will be a part of it.

This was the beginning of a major shift for me in terms of how I viewed and emotionally responded to major change events when they occured. Something I have spoken of previously in this blog is the value of being able to look at any given situation or event and see the opportunity that exists within it. It is so easy to give in to things like fear or concern about the unknown when some drastic shift occurs in your life. But that cloud of chaos floating above everyone’s head during turbulent times often will rain gems of untold value to those who, instead of covering their heads and crouching down to avoid being hit, will stand up instead and reach out to catch them. The fear and concern about the unknown is ultimately about feeling out of control, and I have found that the best way to get that sense of control back is to seize upon the amazing amount of opportunities that are present in times of signficant change. It is, in fact, often these times that most allow you to shape your own destiny.

Change is not only inevitable, it is in many ways perpetual. Not all change happens in broad, sweeping events you can clearly identify and react to. More subtle forms of change may be easier to handle emotionally, but if you aren’t reacting and adapting well to it, you may realize the shift has occured one day and scratch your head as to how you missed it. A colleague and mentor of sorts recently shared with me the following Peter F. Drucker quote – “Do not continue to do in your new assignment what made you successful in the old one. When you enter a new assignment, ask ‘What new things should I be doing in my new assignment to be effective?’” You have many talents that you use, consciously or not, to get through the tasks of the day. I have come to think of talents as energy, which can power a vast number of tools and skills depending on what a situation calls for. By constantly assessing and reassessing your environment and the tasks at hand, you’ll not only become a natural at rolling with change as it happens, you’ll build those talents you have and become that much stronger for it.

Hello blog. I’ve missed you.

It has been six months since I have posted anything here, and they have been six amazing, inspirational months.

On a personal level, here’s a few things I’d love to share -

My wife and I bought a house we love. We did it. More impressively, we sold our condo in this less than stellar Phoenix housing market, and though we did drop our price a bit, we still did remarkably well from an equity stance. Why is the new house so great? Somewhat difficult to express, though it has something to do with having to put so much care into it that the HOA took care of back at the condo. Exterior painting, landscaping, mowing the lawn, caring for the pool, and so on. Also, the condo was new when we got it as opposed to our twenty year old “new” house, so we scraped the popcorn stuff on the ceilings, painted the interior, did a lot of electrical and plumbing work, put new tile and carpet in, hung new ceiling fans, and… I am sure other things I am forgetting. Putting so much effort and care into almost anything will endear you to it after a while, and that has certainly been the case with the new house.

Okay, now that we have the personal stuff out of the way, what will we be talking about here in the coming weeks and months? Well, plenty, but here’s a few topics we’ll tackle first –

• The power of change (and why it’s a good thing)
• The power of perception (and how your thoughts are your reality)
• The power of individuality vs being a team player (and why they aren’t exclusive concepts)
• The power of feedback (and what kind to pay the most attention to)
• The power of you (and how talented I believe you to be)

Stay tuned.

In high school I had an AP English instructor who challenged us on a regular basis to develop a deeper understanding of the things we are exposed to in life. He’d play songs by Simon and Garfunkel or Bob Dylan, hand out the lyrics, and we’d spend days sometimes discussing what the meaning of it all was.

I am not sure how it was brought up, but one day he started talking about people being honest. He suggested that when our acquaintances pass us in the hall or on the sidewalk and ask how we are doing, they are often just doing it as a courtesy and would rather not actually hear the story about how you are feeling inside. And we know this, so we often respond with “Fine” even though fine may be far from the most accurate word do describe our current state.

My instructor challenged us to spend one entire day being completely honest in every conversation. If someone asks you how you are, tell them the truth, and if you don’t genuinely care how they are doing, don’t ask! I started living my life this way, convinced that the point I should take away from the challenge was that I should be brutally honest and just not ask people how they are if I don’t care to hear the answer.

But over time, I have developed something much more important than that as a result of this little experiment. I am not at all convinced this was the original intent of the challenge, but it dawned on me that maybe instead of not asking how people I don’t care about were doing, I ought to focus on caring about ALL of my fellow man, at least enough to care to know their general well being.

Now, when I ask how people are doing, I want them to respond honestly rather than just saying “fine” or “I’m good, how are you?” Unless of course that’s how they truly feel.

So tomorrow when you go about your daily business, take time to ask the people around you how they are doing, and when they tell you the truth, embrace it. Further, when someone asks you how you are doing, tell them the truth. Even if you are feeling “fine”, try to use a more descriptive word. Some of my personal favorites are “awesome”, “groovy”, “inspired”, and “excellent”.

No worries, I am still alive and well. I have been presented with some incredible opportunities and challenges over the past two weeks or so that have been consuming my “blogging time”. But I keep jotting ideas for future posts down, and the content will return soon. I’ll be travelling soon for work and have a lot of free time with a hotel room, my laptop, and free wireless internet.

We’ll talk soon.