“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being more alive.” – Joseph Campbell, American mythologist

Why people paid so much for tickets for the Winter Olympics

Some people paid as much at $750 to $1500 per ticket to see an event at the Olympic Winter Games here in Vancouver this week. When I surveyed these ticket buyers as to why they would spend so much on a two-hour experience I received the same general answer: “It’s so alive and exciting, and those kind of experiences are rare in life.”

An innovative way to bring awareness to your cause

Here’s another example. An innovative organization called Imagine 1 Day was seeking to gain attention for their cause: providing primary education for all children in Ethiopia. They organized a flash mob dance during the Winter Olympics games in downtown Vancouver. The idea was to teach a choreographed routine to a group of people who would then spontaneously break into that dance in a public area — an idea no doubt inspired by the Improv Everywhere events.

They invited people in their network and staged several rehearsals to teach a dance routine to the hit song, Dancing in the Street. They expected about 200-300 people to show up. In the end, over 3000 people learned the dance. The crowd took up an entire city block in Vancouver. Ten times more people than they ever expected to attend were there, and all of those people got to hear about their cause. Not only that but another thousand watched from the sidelines. Add to that all the videographers who posted it on YouTube. Even CNN reported on it. Why would that many people spent so much of their precious time and energy to learn a rather complicated routine and then drag themselves out on a cold and rainy day to dance it? I was one of the participants along with many of my friends. The answer seemed unanimous. Because it was exciting to be part of a huge group of people harmonizing our energies together doing something fun — all for a great cause. In short, it made us all feel more alive.

Here’s a short clip of the event:

Regardless of your opinion about an organization’s goals, Olympics Games or educating children in Ethiopia, creating an atmosphere of aliveness invariably attracts people and opens minds.

Trying to plant your seed of change in unbalanced soil

In the last blog post we talked about one of the main mistakes change leaders make–which is trying to plant the seed of change in unbalanced soil. When there is an over focus on protection at the expense of growth ideas can’t get traction. People have a deep need to feel alive, to grow and thrive. They also have a core need to feel safe and protected. The problem comes when those two needs get out of balance. The tendency in many organizations especially after an economic downturn, is for there to be an over focus on protection which tends to kill off growth and aliveness. Many organizations are not open to change because there is a long standing habit of operating mainly from a fear-based need to simply survive. This survival mindset may have some basis in reality but more often it is simply a bad habit of catastrophic thinking. As a change leader you may need to address this issue before people will be open to your idea for positive change. Organizations and individuals get stuck in protection mode due to perceptions. No change can occur unless you help stakeholders perceive the situation in a more growth-oriented way. This usually cannot be done with logic alone as fear is an instinctual emotion and therefore you will need a more “alive” approach.

Case study – focusing on growth and aliveness to change perception

For example, a privately-owned software company had a culture clash between the sales force and the product development and tech support teams. The owner felt that the majority of resources and decision-making power should lie in the hands of the sales force because they drove revenue. As a result, the sales team decided on timelines and deliverables without consulting the other teams.

Naturally, the stress levels and subsequent resentment within the development team grew. When the development team presented their concerns to the owner he simply asked them to “think more positively” — and you can imagine the response to that. The owner had tunnel vision about the structure and system needed for his company to survive. The previous two years had been a tough. Cash flow suffered due to an economic downturn and they had barely avoided bankruptcy. As a result all he could focus on was cash flow, and the sales force meant cash flow. Now that sales were flowing they were taking every contract without communicating with each other before signing the deal.

Meanwhile the product developers and tech support team suffered. Several of their best people quit. Back room gossip escalated. Interpersonal conflict grew. When the owner heard that clients were leaving because of the bad “vibe” there, he hired an HR person to sort things out. She tried everything from disciplining the gossipers to sending them off for motivational training to help them “get over their resistance to change”. Not surprisingly, the resentment just seemed to grow.

After assessing the situation we helped the HR person come up with a new tactic. She led a team building day with everyone in the company that started with a fun activity. Once they were relaxed and enjoying being together, she illustrated the growth potential of a more collaborative decision-making process. She addressed all concerns such as the fear that consulting with other team leaders would mean losing contracts. She provided facts to prove that an over-focus on sales was ironically costing everyone in terms of morale, productivity, customer service, employee health, and ultimately revenue. Even though it looked like the focus on sales was all about growth, it was coming from a fear-based mindset. She offered success stories of similar firms that were consulting with each other before signing deals and still thriving very well.To make a long story short, they found a way to restructured resources in a way that seemed more equitable to all concerned and decided that all team leaders would be consulted before signing any client contracts. In the end this allowed for much better external (and internal) customer service.

In the last blog post on The Top 7 Mistakes Change Leaders Make I mentioned the importance of looking at common mistakes as an entry point into exploring the success habits of great change leaders.

To recap, the top 7 mistakes I’ve noticed after 20 years of surveying and working with change leaders are:

1) An over focus on protection and safety at the expense of growth
2) Having vague outcomes
3) No map
4) A poor container for getting from here to there
5) Little or no buy in from stakeholders
6) Keeping too narrow a perspective
7) Lack of appropriate implementation and persistence through the bugs

In my upcoming book, The Change Artist Principles, I will explore each of these mistakes via case studies and how the mistakes made became the grounding agents that led to the successful adoption of new habits.

The first is an over focus on protection and safety at the expense of growth. According to cellular biologist and PhD, Bruce Lipton, most organisms operate in either protection mode or growth mode but cannot be operating in both modes at the same time. An organism (or an organization) that continually focuses on safety and protection cannot grow. Many change leaders won’t or cannot launch a change because the individuals (and thus the organization as a whole) get stuck in fight or flight mode far too often. This leaves no resources left over for growth. Here is a short 2 minute video in which Bruce Lipton explains the concept of protection vs growth:

How big is your organizational defense budget?

Good judgment comes from experience which comes from bad judgment. – Anon

Looking at the common mistakes of change leaders is a great entry into this topic because people often only achieve success through its opposite: failure. My upcoming book, The Change Artist Principles, focuses on the problems of leading people through change and how those problems are perpetuated sometimes and resolved at other times. Before we dive into the problems or the mistakes, it helps to have some context for using this approach.

You cannot have success without failure or persistence without resistance

Consider the concepts of success and failure. They are opposites yet related—you cannot know one without the other. Similarly, persistence and resistance are opposites and also cannot be understood without the other. Both sets of opposites appear over and over again throughout the change process. Our perception of any situation is relative, and we can only understand its nature by studying it through contrast. For example, in a universe in which everything is blue, you cannot discuss the concept of blueness because you lack contrasting colors

Failure and resistance got you where you are today

Let’s take another, more personal, example. Right now think of an area of life in which you have plenty of experience. Something you could honestly say you are “good” at. It could be in golf, or parenting, or graphic design, or interpersonal communication. You probably achieved that level of expertise through having some success, making some mistakes, resisting moving forward, then persisting through the challenging parts and then learning from them, then back around again through all those phases. You became good because you embraced these opposites. For whatever reason you kept practicing, working through your resistance, being persistent despite making mistakes and feeling a sense of failure sometimes, getting feedback, learning from the feedback and trying something new the next time. Chances are, for every step into your feelings of resistance you found renewed strength to persist. For every moment you sensed failure, you found a silver lining which renewed your belief in success.

New leaders too often get chastised for making mistakes

This may seem like obvious information, but in my role as a consultant I am continually amazed at how often people enter leadership roles with no training and then get chastised for making mistakes and then rebuffed for feeling resistant to trying new things. Good leadership thrives in an environment where you are allowed to make mistakes and then are encouraged to deconstruct them and create a new plan of action continually.

Mistakes are like grounding agents in an electrical current

The concept behind the word “Mistake” is simply an entry point into what I like to call “The Grounding Agents”. These are the pitfalls along the way that ground you into the actual realities of leading people through change, much like an electrical grounding cord. The positive charge is your vision of success and the grounding agent is that which keeps it grounded in the here and now. Both are necessary to make the machine of change work.  A Transformational Leader is one who creates a positive vision of change, expects to be met with grounding agents so that the interplay of the two (positive vision + negative grounding agent) can create a third entity. The third entity is the change that truly transforms those concerned. Using these skills, a 21^st Century Leader emerges.

The Top 7 Mistakes

This list of mistakes is based on 20 years of surveying and working with change leaders and those affected by their decisions. Through my research and experience it became clear that the same human mistakes were happening over and over again and that those who made them enough times persisted through the failure and resistance were the ones who achieved success, or what I like to call the Habits of Successful Change Leaders. In a nutshell here are the top 7 mistakes:

1)    An over focus on protection and safety  at the expense of growth

2)   Having vague outcomes

3)   No map to get from here to there

4)    A poor container for getting from here to there

5)   Little or no buy in from stakeholders

6)   Keeping too narrow a perspective

7)   Lack of appropriate implementation and persistence through the bugs

We will explore each of these mistakes and failures in the next post using a couple of helpful metaphors.

How do you know when you’ve crossed the line from “taking care of” your priorities and unnecessary worry? Ask yourself this question “Is this something I can take action on right now? If not, let it go for now.

For example, I gave a presentation at a conference and after driving for 30 minutes, realized I left my purse in a public washroom at the conference. At first my thoughts were constructive. “I better turn around and go back. I better call the conference organizer”. These were actions I could take at that moment. However, when I discovered the organizer had gone home, and when I found myself locked in rush hour traffic, my thoughts began to darken. I watched my mind create increasingly worse scenarios. “I won’t find my purse, I’ll have to get new ID, I won’t be able to go on my trip tomorrow, someone will buy a Winnabago with my VISA card”. I became very bad tempered and anxious.

At one point, I realized that it made no sense to ruminate about “what if’s” because there was no action I could take yet. I started listening to Stuart MacLean’s Vinyl Café. After laughing through a story or two, the adrenaline eased off. I arrived at the conference center 30 minutes later to find the janitor had picked up my bag and was holding it for me, everything intact.

Worry is a mental parasite

Worry thoughts are like parasites that want you as their host. A worry thought convinces you it is your friend, that without it you would die or be a bag person with no legs, one eye, and a stock portfolio worth 2% of its original value. Worry thoughts fly through the stratosphere at millions of bytes per second. You can download them any time, anywhere, at no cost.

Beware of the Law of Attraction

This Law states that our negative thoughts attract negativity, and our positive thoughts attract positives to us. Therefore, if you spend time worrying about not having enough money, over time you are training your mind to not have enough money. In other words, what you resist persists. It makes more sense to spend your thought time in joyful, positive ways. After all, life is short.

How do you actually change your focus?

If you have ever spent a sleepless night worrying, you know that actually changing your focus can be difficult. You can download joy thoughts just like worry thoughts, but they tend to be more elusive. They are like flower seeds that must push up through all the dark matter in order to thrive. The proportion of worry thoughts to joy thoughts floating around at our present time in history is probably about ten to one. That is why it is so easy to get caught like a freeway commuter at quarter past five. Ridding yourself of the worry parasite requires a commitment to a habit. Here are some tried and true habits for daily Mental Flossing.

1. Refuse to download

Have you ever been assaulted by a pop up window asking you to download something? Worry thoughts are like pop-ups. You can simply click NO.

2. Observe and label

Okay. You got sucked in. You downloaded and the worry parasite has taken hold. Notice that you let it happen. This “observer” state can often help you detach and eventually delete the thought.

3. Do a reversal

What is the opposite of the worry thought? “What if my work isn’t good enough?” becomes “What if my work is excellent?” Or, “I might be late” becomes “I might be on time.” Just like trying on clothes in a store, decide to take off the worry thought, and try on a positive one instead. See how it feels.

4. Laugh about it

Laughter is THE cerebral laxative. It can purge you of unwanted thought matter. I remember racing through Vancouver Airport barely holding onto my wardrobe bag, computer bag and boarding pass. I came whizzing around the corner and saw a bronze statue of a man racing through the airport barely holding onto a wardrobe bag, computer bag and boarding pass. I suddenly saw myself from the outside and had to laugh. I walked the rest of the way to my gate resigned to whatever fate awaited me. Once there I discovered my flight was delayed 20 minutes. Look at yourself from an outside perspective and remember that “Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused.”

If you let worry decay your day—read on. I am an expert on worry. I come from a long line of professional worriers. My father was known as The Beacon of Doom. Worrying was his favorite retirement activity. He was so engrossed by all the fear inducing stories in the media, that he gave new meaning to words “Disaster Relief.” If there was a disaster, he was relieved.

Worried about thieves, he put bars up on every window of his house–even on the third floor. Worried he might get sick, he took seventy-five different vitamin supplements a day. Worried that he might fall, he stapled 2-inch thick underlay to every floor of his house. The house looked like the MacDonald’s playroom. I was over having coffee, I dropped my cup and it bounced right back up into my hand.

Worrying helps you stay safe – or does it?

My father convinced me that I needed to worry or bad things would happen. I came to believe that worry was a sign of intellectualism, realism and “being sensible”. It only makes sense then, that being positive meant you were naive or in denial. Sally Armstrong, an award-winning journalist once noted, “If you write negative news, nobody asks you to prove it. If you write positive news, people want a jury.”

Great thinkers say worrying is–a waste of time

However, the more I studied the great thinkers in history, the more I questioned those beliefs. Recently author Roger Delano Hinkins wrote “Worry is paying interest on a debt you may not owe”. Sixty years ago Mark Twain said, “I’ve lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened.” Four hundred years ago Moliére said, “People spend most of their lives worrying about things that never happen”. And finally over two thousand years ago Plato said, “Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.”

The Worry Jar experiment (10 minutes per week)

One day I decided to do an experiment. I got an old cookie jar and cut up strips of paper. At the beginning of the week I wrote down one worry thought per strip of paper. I put the strips in the jar as a symbolic way of “letting them go”. At the end of the week I pulled the strips out, and put them in three piles.

1. “Never happened”
2. “Happened and the consequences were manageable”
3. “Happened and the consequences were just as bad as I imagined”

Guess which was the biggest pile? The first pile contained 85-90% of the strips, the second pile 10-14%, and the third 0-1%. I did this for seven more weeks and the percentages remained similar. I proved Moliére’s theory. Now I do this exercise with participants in my longer programs and people prove it for themselves.