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May 29, 2015 by Christine

Love The Work You Do

Nothing stays the same forever.

That was one of the lessons I didn’t want to learn when I created my own company.

Back then, I had a clear vision that I’d be offering shit-hot HR services: HR strategy reviews; organization designs; performance management systems. Things I loved doing. It had taken a lot of time and effort while I was still an employed consultant to get clear on all of that, allow myself to channel my work that way, and indeed tell people in my networks that that’s what I was going to do.

It didn’t occur to me to consider that I’d get bored and fall out of love with any of it.

Falling out of love with your work

Sure enough, the first five or ten or how many ever projects that involved these kind of things were magical. I felt exhilarated to be out there on my own, selling top-end advice and working with such clever, fun, inspiring people. But there came a point where something that had once been nirvana, started to feel stale.

It was like getting to the end of eating a very large slice of red velvet cake. Before I’d carved myself a wedge, I’d craved it. When I started eating it, I melted in the tongue zinging hit of cacao, buttermilk, vanilla and beetroot flavors. But by the last few mouthfuls I was sated.

I stopped enjoying my work. Which was as worrying as it was confusing.

If you’re in a paid job, it’s easy enough to take this kind of experience as meaning that it’s time to find your next big challenge.

But if it’s your own business, or you’re somehow tenured to the company you’re part of, it’s not quite that straight forward. Often, aside from anything, there’s the challenge of defining what else it is you want to do, let alone thinking about how you’re going to morph what you’re doing in a way that sustains your revenues.

Morphing

That’s how it was for me. At some point, I saw my next horizon appear: I wanted to be to offer executive coaching. And indeed I wanted to sharpen my ability to work with business teams. I could facilitate an arbitrary, externally designed agenda. But I wanted to be able to channel and harness inherent group process far more elegantly.

I figured I had a ton of learning to do before I could legitimately offer these things. So I set out to do both coach and psychotherapy training.

But in the meantime, I was still a business owner not feeling the love.

I remember being very conflicted about that. Never mind my ambivalence; offering services to clients when my passion was in absentia felt like it lacked integrity. I decided to take the counsel of one of my mentors at the time, a full-time, highly successful practicing coach and psychotherapist called David.

He shared with me his own story.

“For years before I began my own training,” he said, “I had a kitchen design and fitting business. When I knew I wanted to become a therapist, and I began my training, I faced a similar dilemma to you. For a long time, far from just being equivocal, I hated my work. Sure, I kept selling people kitchens and arranging for them to be installed. But all I could see was how done I was with it. Especially when confronted with challenges, all I could focus on was a time in the future when I’d be doing something else.

“It was killing me.”

I asked him he’d got past that, and he explained that, one day, he’d had the realization that, for however long he chose to run his kitchen business, he could either keep resenting it, or choose instead to enjoy it.

That was his insight: that he had choice.

Loving The Work You Do

“So, I decided, for so long as I do this, I am going to love it. I am going to stop seeing it as a necessary evil. In fact, I’m going to start loving the shit out of it.”

We laughed.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “we creative and entrepreneurial sorts tend to get bored easily. We live in tomorrow. We’re brilliant at that. But it comes at the expense of our today. And that bears a price in the very heavy feelings associated with waiting and longing. It also has an impact on people around us.

“I asked myself, what message am I conveying to my customers, to my staff, and indeed to the universe, through my dislike of my old business? And it was as simple as that. I thought, until I’m a coach/psychotherapist, and have created my practice in the way I want, I have a kitchen design business and I’m going to bloody love it.

“How did that change things?” I asked him.

“Well, nothing and everything changed,” he said. “The products and services didn’t change, nor did my staff. But I started to see them through different eyes. I became more caring and respectful. I listened more. I tried to be more present. I asked people what they needed of me. I saw opportunities I’d previously missed to do things like deepen staff relationships or to encourage customers to be more imaginative and daring in their designs. I was sad in the end to let it go. But I began to see that presence, loving and serving were fundamental building blocks of being good in my forthcoming incarnation, and had to laugh at myself when I realized that, instead of holding me back from something, my current business could in fact be a conduit to what I now do.”

His story really made me think, and I decided to make the same choice as he had. I decided to love what I was doing for as long as I was doing it. To try to come from a place of serving as much as I could. The whole thing felt way lighter, and I do believe my results improved. For sure I enjoyed it more again.

As an unexpected by-product, I found my heart opening to the warmest sense of gratitude that, however things conspired, I was being able to continue to do important work, making a valuable difference to people and their businesses, at the same time as I was sharpening my saw to move in a different direction again.

I do believe that loving what I did ultimately made it easier to transition. There was no need to feel bad about what I was letting go of, because I’d served it and it me.

Any amount of smart coaches can collude with your desire to do work you love. And, sure, why not head yourself in the direction of doing it? But consider that what you love can, over time, change. And that meantime, there’s strength to be gained from developing your muscle in loving what you do today. No matter what that is.

Image Copyright: siraphol / 123RF Stock Photo

May 22, 2015 by Christine

On The Business Benefits of Being Grateful

Love heals.

Two words that form part of our Keeping It Real creed. They have immense reach in the world beyond business. But could they be relevant within business too?

I’m sure Terry* was skeptical when we started talking about it during a coaching conversation.

Story

Terry, a Partner in a consulting company, was young, and keen to do even better than he already had within his firm. He had a team of Managers and Directors working for him. He found the younger, more ambitious ones quite easy to work with. But he struggled a little with people who were a little older than him; who were maybe good enough at what they did, but were topped out in their careers.

On an earlier call, we’d discussed this whole thing in general: how was it for him to manage people that he didn’t quite gel with? This challenge had clearly been around for him for a while as he shared with me conversations he’d had with this or that fellow Partner of colleague who’d coached him on this or that tactic he could use to try to get these people to change in some way.

I didn’t have any fresh tactics to offer Terry, but I did reflect to him the judgment that I heard in him. And wondered aloud how much of Terry’s issue was the people themselves, and how much was the way he was thinking about them? How much was about Terry changing, versus them?

And I wondered what might be possible if Terry could replace his judgmental thinking with compassion. I didn’t use the word “love” overtly, but that was what I was pointing to.

We didn’t then talk for a few weeks, but on the next call, Terry shared with me a huge breakthrough he’d had with John*, one of the people he’d found himself most struggling to manage.

Terry was honest and said that he’d seen John as a huge pain in the neck, always needing Terry’s time and attention, and instead of taking responsibility for making things happen, often seeking Terry’s prior approval.

Terry told me, that after quite a punishing week, he was driving home one Friday evening and John’s number came up on his phone.

“I just thought, ‘Oh God, here we go…'” he said, “but I answered anyway.”

He told me how John had wanted to update him on a client review meeting he’d done earlier, during which he’d discovered there was a prospective piece of add-on consultancy work. He wanted to run it past Terry because he was planning to do work on it at the weekend before going back to the client early the following week.

“At first it sounded like a really small piece, worth about £25K,” Terry said. “I had other proposals in the melting pot that week, all worth significantly more than that, and I just thought, why is this guy wasting my time on a Friday night? But all of a sudden I remembered the conversation you and I had had about judgment. And I stopped myself in my tracks.”

I just listened as he spoke.

“Something shifted in me. I just started to have the most enormous compassion, not just for John, but myself too. And I found myself saying to him, ‘Look, John, it’s Friday evening and we’ve both had long weeks. I’m sure neither of us is at our best right now. And actually, you don’t need to be working on it this at the weekend. Why not give yourself a break and let’s talk again on Monday?'”

“Huh,” I said. “And…?”

“It just diffused the tension I felt between him and me,” he said. “We even ended up having a joke about something.”

“And did you end up talking again on the Monday?” I said.

“We did,” he said. “I decided instead of another rushed phonecall, to actually invest face-to-face time with John. We ended up having a much different conversation than I think we’d have had if we’d just continued talking that Friday night. It was like, by Monday, two different people turned up.”

It seemed to me that the story would have been pretty cool already had that been where it ended. But he went on.

“Incredible thing is,” he said, “that because by Monday we were seeing one another in a different light, the conversation we ended up having about the client piece was different too. We got a whole lot more creative in looking at the problem John’s client was trying to solve, meaning that the intervention we ended up offering was worth about £200k.”

“Wow,” I said. We were silent for a while as we just held the whole magnitude of that.

“So, what did you take from all of that?” I said.

“It’s about what becomes possible,” he said, “when you bring gratitude and humility into the mix. I just found myself having huge compassion for John. It can’t be easy to know in your heart of hearts that no matter how hard you try, your career is going nowhere. And I appreciated him making the effort, irrespective. I also think that that had been the first time I’d honestly created real time and space for him; gave him my full attention and respect. The quality of our connection was therefor so much better. And so, it’s no wonder, we got a totally different result.”

Love heals

And that’s my point.

What Terry did there was, in a moment of feeling challenged, choose a loving, instead of a judging mindset, and the whole landscape of his relationship with John shifted, as did their collective business results.

Awesome!

And, I wonder, where and could you shift things on your business landscape? What results might that bring you?

*Names changed to protect confidentiality.

May 15, 2015 by Christine

Question: Dare You Use the “L” Word In Business?

Love.

In the business context it’s a word and indeed a concept that’s a little taboo.

Makes me think of these awful team-building exercises I went on in my corporate years, where we were encouraged to say nice things about one another, and to have team hugs at the end. Even if we couldn’t stand each other and there was no way we’d be talking, never mind hugging, when we got back to the office.

Sad. But I think that talks to how many of us think of love if we think about it at all. We imagine it’s a warm and fuzzy feeling that emerges in relation to people who affect us in a particular way. Something indefinable, and around which we’re out of control. Hence something that sits a little awkwardly with the often more rational side of business.

But is that really how it is? And is there really any way you could use it as a force for good in your own set-up?

What is love?

Before we go on, let’s step back and ask that question: what IS love?

I get that we can all talk about loving what we do, or saying glibly how we love this or that person we work with. That all has its place. But that’s not the context I want to set for this conversation.

What I want to offer you is the possibility that love is not after all a gooey thing that just happens. Instead it’s an energy; an attitude; a force that we can choose ourselves to use and to direct at any time. A decision we can make. A force that enables some of the most profound healing and change. You may think that love has no role in business. But I just want through this post to have you pause and consider whether or not that’s true.

What might it look like?

Well, let’s break it down.

Love for ourselves

The first person we can choose to love in business is ourselves. As entrepreneurs, self-employed folk, or business leaders, we can often be incredibly tough on ourselves. We can set ourselves big goals – bigger than other mortals would think to set – and then when we don’t achieve them 100%, or in a particular way, we can beat up on ourselves, worse than our worst critic. Sometimes our negative thinking acts like a whip that keeps us chasing the results we seek. But often it just gets in our own way.

Taking an attitude of love towards ourselves turns this around. It allows us to keep setting our sights high if that’s congruent with who we are. But it also allows us to be more curious; more able to be with what is; less judging about when things don’t go so well. Which in turn allows us more headroom, creativity, thinking space.

In fact, if we want to be forces for good in our worlds, we need to start here, and with ourselves. We need to fill ourselves up first. Without it, we can’t convey love to others. Not real love.

Love for others

Loving others in business is really all about extending ourselves to them in a way that serves them well. That enables them to be their very best. Because we trust that the more they can happily be who they are, the better everything works.

If we choose to come from love to clients, for example, it might mean that we embolden ourselves such that we offer them exceptional services, or value-adding products.

If we come from love with colleagues we may choose to share with them our gratitude for who they are are as people and how they touch our lives.

It might also mean that we choose at times to say something or to give feedback on something that feels awkward or uncomfortable.

Conversations that name the elephant in the room can in some instances cause profound upset. But for the most part it gives the experience, at least in the long term, of being seen and understood and offers the opportunity for profound personal growth.

Which is a core aspect of the whole love energy thing.

Health warnings

The kind of love I’m talking about has no strings attached. When you choose to love yourself, or another you don’t put conditions on it. You don’t *need* the woman to whom you deliver delightful service to tell you how wonderful you are. You don’t *need* the man with whom you share emotive feedback to think your his savior.

You put your love out and you let it go. Either way it will teach you something.

Is love the future?

So much of business is, in my experience, impersonal and devoid of feeling. We can sit in meetings and have bland conversations using management buzzwords and ideas that mean little at all.

Leverage. Logic. Learning. These “L” words trip off the tongue.

Love?

Not so much.

And yet it’s where our humanity is. It’s what life’s about.

I’m not suggesting any need to become in any way alternative. I’m not even inferring that you have to like everyone you work with. Or that you have to use the word out loud or to adopt any weird behaviors. But you can take an attitude of love, an attitude of service, into everything you do.

Try it out. Let me know how it goes!

May 1, 2015 by Christine

How To Speak Your Truth in Leadership Without The Sky Falling in.

Authenticity in leadership gets talked about a lot.

Just Google the term: you’ll get over 20 million hits. Stand in the corner of any leadership development intervention (hate that term, but you know what I mean) and you’ll most likely hear it espoused. In fact the word “authenticity” itself appears on the list of values of quite a number of big organizations.

I get why it’s important: the more how you are in business and at work aligns to who you are and what you believe, the more resourceful and productive you can be. In leadership honest conversation can enable clear – if not always easy – progress. And results unhampered by hidden agendas and emotional baggage.

How easy is it to speak your truth?

But being yourself and speaking your truth is not always that easy.

I know you know that feeling. Something comes along that rankles with you. You have a strong point of view on it. You know you ought to put your opinion ought there. But the risk of doing so seems immense.

Maybe there’s an unspoken complicity in your business or team dynamic that things be done a certain way. And that how you want to do things breaks the taboo. You know that in breaking the taboo you stand to help things change and change for the better. But you fear that you run the risk at best of being judged as being disloyal. At worst of losing your job, your reputation, your career…

I know because I’ve been there too.

Personal story

Some years ago I was the HRD of a business within a much larger business. My boss was the UK HR board director, reporting to the MD. Let’s call them Dan and Phil. They were both powerful, charismatic men, with immense, strategic business brains and a phenomenal view of where the company was going. I loved working with and for them because of the level of access they gave me to big, sexy stuff. This was, in fact, a double-edged sword because often they’d drag me into work that was well over and above the already heavy work load me and my team had in serving our own client business.

But part of the thrill for me was that both of them *got* the importance of the whole people dynamic in business. They valued talent and performance.

And yet, paradoxically, there was an implicit value in the business that success meant working all the hours God sent. To my cost, I did the hours most of the time, as did my boss. In fact, at the time of this story, both he and I were going through our own painful marriage break-ups. But I was careful on behalf of my own team not to expect that because I was choosing that lifestyle, they had to too.

At one point, we’d bought another company and my team were dealing with the sea of changes you have to manage from a people perspective in that scenario. And we were doing it to some major deadlines, which meant that I asked my team, for a period of a few weeks, to put in the extra time. They were happily doing this and doing a phenomenal job of pulling things together, but as time went by, I could see them start to look weary.

One evening at around 7pm as we were all engaged in figuring something out around a desk in the open-plan office, Dan walked up to us and began a conversation with me that everyone else could hear.

He was buzzing because he’d just had a great conversation with the Phil. He’d persuaded Phil to consider something and Phil had asked for data to follow the idea up. Problem was, in his enthusiasm, Dan had promised to have the information with Phil the following morning.

I could see my people’s shoulders drop as Dan warbled on, because they knew what that meant: the 8pm finish we’d promised ourselves wasn’t going to happen, because we were going to be the ones to pull the information together.

And inside, I knew that on this occasion I had a choice. I could cave in and just get on with the unasked request to do the extra work because that was what the culture required of me.

Or I could speak my truth and push back.

For a few moments I did nothing other than just sit with the maelstrom of conflicted feeling going on inside me. I may well have gone and sat in the ladies to give myself space to breathe. I knew the right thing to do was to push back, but I feared that in doing so these two powerful characters would think less of me. Which was a concern because, at the time, I was seen as a kind of rock star HR person and I wanted to continue to be seen in that light.

I was quaking when I walked into my boss’s office and said:

“Look, Dan, you had no right to promise Phil that we’d pull that stuff together, without asking me if that was okay. The team is already working well above and beyond their normal workloads. If I just expect them to do this stuff tonight, they will do it, and the results will be good. But I don’t think it’s fair to expect. You and I may not have a life right now, and that’s a choice we’re making. But they do. And I want us to honor it.”

He went crazy at me. I don’t actually recall now what he said. Just that he ended up escorting me out of his office and slamming the door.

I was mortified. Cursing myself for being so stupid as having opened my mouth. I was sure that I’d be fired. But I was also sure that I was going to stand by my word.

One of the women said, “So, do you want me to start working on that thing for Phil?”

“No,” I said. “I want us all to stick with what we were already doing and call it a night when we get through.”

I could feel their relief.

Next morning I was in before Dan. As in fact was my whole team. He’d normally come by my office and say hi, but this day he walked past me, still clearly angry, and with his head down. I spent the entire morning feeling somewhat distracted. I was getting on with all my stuff, but I was sure I was going to be let go for insubordination. Or worse, that I’d become one of the people that weren’t on Dan’s Christmas card list, and be subjected to one of his drip-drip crusades of organizational bullying that would mean I’d end up leaving anyway.

As it turned out, later in the day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived at reception for me, with a note. “Forgive me.”

I walked along to his office to say thank you.

“Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t like that you said what you said, or did what you did. I felt stupid having to tell John that we’d have to rethink when he’d get his data. But I reluctantly came to see that you were right. I was not respecting you or your people. I’m sorry. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Now, not all the times that I’ve spoken my truth have gone this way. There’s another story I’ll save for another day that happened more recently where, on the face of it at least, the sky did fall in. Or so it seemed in the beginning. I have no sense now of how speaking my truth on that occasion affected the other person involved. But I know that it was transformational in helping me shape the direction of my life and work to this point now.

Ask yourself these questions:

If you’re in a situation where you’re feeling challenged to either speak up or shut up – be yourself or be some version of you that business requires – there are three core questions you can ask yourself.

1. What is your truth?

Be really clear. What’s your position on this thing that sits uncomfortably for you? If you can’t immediately be clear, just sit with the morass of feelings for a while. Center yourself with some meditation, or at least some deep breathing. Let your clarity emerge.

2. How comfortable are you with your truth?

Hopefully, with clarity, comes certainty. If you are okay that your position is okay, then you can speak it with gravitas and be heard, no matter the outcome. The worst place to speak your truth from is one where you yourself feel on shaky ground. That lack of conviction and confidence translates energetically and people pick it up.

3. How safe is it to speak your truth?

I didn’t consciously logic this out when I was in the grip of my own story, but clearly some part of me felt that Dan – and indeed Phil – would be able to hear what I was saying. But I know that, bottom line, there can been situations where your truth may fall on stony ground.

Sometimes self-protection is completely appropriate. And then you need to make a conscious choice on what best to say or do in order to be true to yourself regardless.

What do you think? How do you put your truth out there when you need to? Have you ever spoken your truth and lived to regret it?

April 17, 2015 by Christine

This Is What Happens When Your Idea of Yourself Starts To Look Important

Let me be honest.

This post is nothing like the one I began to write for you. Nothing at all.

In fact, I’m not sure that I’m going to be writing the same kind of posts again that I’ve been writing over the last few months. I say “not sure” because I don’t ever like to be definitive about these things. All I can tell you right now is that something has changed and that you’re going to notice it.

See, this year, and indeed since I revamped this website and started writing here instead of over on A Different Kind of Work, I’ve been writing articles in quite a logical way. I got the Livingston Consulting creed down and then I thought – great idea – let’s take the creed’s themes and drill into them. One theme a month. I’ve been doing that. And, when I’m not on holiday, writing an article a week which I send out to my list.

As it turns out, I have been on holiday the last few weeks and so there have been no new articles but today was “writing this week’s article day”, and so I dutifully went back to my schedule to see what I’d planned out to write about.

Truth Clarifies

The theme I’d planned was Truth Clarifies. What, I thought, could I tell you about the truth? Spent a couple of hours surfing the internet for some inspiration, but all I could come up with felt somehow hollow.

Unable to come up with any meaningful, pithy content, I was really sweating it.

What would you think of me if I didn’t keep my commitment to post weekly? And post in accordance with how I said at some prior point I would?

Why is that important? Well, so much of it goes to the thing about integrity I keep going on about. It’s important to me that if I’ve said I’ll do something, I honor my commitment to it. I want to be a Servant Leader to the people who read and work with me. I want to serve.

But today, and after a conversation with John El-Mokadem, I’m seeing it a little differently. What’s changing is some greater insight into the nature of what’s going on for me here.

It was kind of funny. Today I turned up for my session with him with a list of things to talk about. It had to be the first, maybe the second time, that I’ve actually had an agenda. Normally I just turn up and we allow the conversation to take its own shape. Those conversations have been immense. Without fail, something important turns up and bites me on the bum in a way I hadn’t expected.

Consistency vs meaningfulness

But today was right down in the dirt of stuff. On the list: consistency versus meaningfulness. I told him of my thing about doing a post a week, and that, when I’d sat down to keep to my schedule today, I couldn’t get the words to flow.

As John said, “In the moment, the feeling was off.”

I think “off” was the polite way to put it!

Anyway, the way John helped me see it, at some point in time Thought took form – and if you don’t know what I mean by this, go check out this post here – and what that looked like was the idea that I should write weekly; that that was somehow “good”. I’d imagined that I was doing that from a clear, insightful place. And maybe I was. But come earlier today, I was caught up in figuring that getting that post written would somehow make me “okay”.

“If I can get this post out – oh, and let’s make sure it’s a wow post – it’ll mean something amazing about me. And then I can be happy.”

We had some conversation too today about structure generally. What it means if you have to turn up and operate within a structure. I had been holding onto some thinking that structure somehow suffocates me. And sometimes it does. But then it would if I have that belief since life only ever works inside-out.

What happens if I choose not to buy into the “structure suffocates” belief – what happens if I can see that’s just an “off” piece of thought form? Can I write here weekly? Not in some preconceived way, but in a more creative, in the moment way?

If I don’t need my turning up – or not – to mean anything, can I turn up and flow?

I don’t know.

Whatever, what’s clear is that my idea of myself has been looking important. I’d been looking at things in quite an egotistical way and putting shape around some concept of “Christine” believing that I am Christine and that I could self-invent. In fact, I’m not Christine.

Sure, you may think I’m Christine (actually, if you don’t quite get what I’m saying on this, you may also think I’m smoking!), and we may talk of one another as if personality is fixed and our lives very self-determining.

But it’s really not fixed. And we’re really not self-determining. Oh, sure, we can set ourselves what appear to be very me-centred goals – and maybe we’ll achieve them too if we push hard enough. But if we’re not allowing of something bigger of ourselves in the process, we’re going to feel exhausted. And produce little of any enduring value.

What has this got to do with you, your life, your business?

Well, everything.

I’ve been out of it for a couple of weeks and coming back in I see it more clearly. So, so much of our lives – whether work or play, and even if we run our own businesses or have quite autonomous leadership roles – is about fitting into some pre-agreed plan. It may or may not look that way. But so much of the time we’re trying to squeeze ourselves into some mold of our own or someone else’s making.

Sometimes that can feel suffocating. We can believe that we have to turn up in a certain way. That only one way of turning up will be acceptable.

We kick against the context but it’s not the context that truly constrains us. It’s our own thinking about our context.

Honestly, when I couldn’t find the words earlier to write, I thought I was going to have to mail my readers and tell them I was having an off day. Or share something I’d written before. Or make some excuse. But when I popped the Thought-bubble that had me in its grip I saw the best place to act from was truth.

Which reminds me of some other words I found recently care of Michael Neill:

“Before learning the truth, the mountains appear as mountain. When one begins to study truth, the mountains seem to disappear. After accepting the truth, the mountains again appear as mountains.”
– Zen proverb