Love

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!