Where is Your Focus ? Destination or Direction ? (Living Vision)

(part of the #MasteringMyself series, #livingVision)
Do you focus on heading toward a specific destination or do you use your goal as a direction, ? The difference is profound. Defining your ‘there’ a specific destination or a as a focused direction affects how you get there and I suspect, the speed, quality of experience and chance of success. What are the differences ?

When your ‘there’ is a specific outcome your focus is on one thing and one thing only - there - to the exclusion of anything else. You are invested in this specific outcome and are not willing to change it or evolve it. This investment creates the need to defend your position and why it is right from all challenges and inevitable requires a high level of control so that you can keep things on track. If you need a team to get your there (and you always do), then you are in for a rough ride because most teams like to be a constructive part of the journey - rather than pure, thoughtless minions. Will you get there ? Maybe. It is after all not an uncommon way of managing, but it is not guaranteed and it always comes at a huge price. And if you do get there, you may end up with egg on your face as your specific destination may no longer be so right after all.

When your ‘there’ is a direction your focus is on ‘always making choices and decisions that take you towards’ there. This inherently means that you are focusing on the present, using what you have and where you are and so optimizing every opportunity (if not creating them). It allows you to be open to new ideas and as importantly, new ways of getting there. When you are focused on a direction you do not waste time investing in a specific place or specific way of doing things or even (and this is the important one for me), in any one way of being, all of which means that you are able to let go of limiting thoughts, ideas and activities. When your destination is a direction you allow others to contribute which creates that all elusive buy in and we all know that groups of passionate people achieve success with less energy, more often. The best part of choosing a direction not a destination ? When you do get ‘there’ you often find it is way more awesome than your original concept.

It sounds counter intuitive to focus on a direction not a destination, after all, everyone always tells you that you have to be very, very clear on what you want and where you want to be if you want to create something. But part of the creation journey is learning and part of that learning is increasing clarity of what you want. It evolves as you move forward.

Focusing on a direction is not about losing that destination, after all where you want to be creates your direction. The difference is subtle :

- It is about letting go of ‘there’ but still holding on to ‘there’ as an anchor.

- It is about being present and making where you are now as important as where you want to be

- It is about allowing other people to be a part of the creative process which allows your dream to get bigger and better

- It is about having clarity but keeping flexibility

When I look around me at the people that build the teams I like to work in, they all use their vision as a direction which allows me to be a constructive part of that vision. Teams like that bring out the best in me. I love seeing how to improve a vision, making it even better. There is power to focused direction, so why not let go of control and allow the rest of the universe in ? Why not make a change from destination to focused direction ?

Stopping Worrying

What would we all do if we just stopped worrying ? Because if you think about it, what we spend most of our time doing is worry about things that may or may not happen. Let me ask another question, how is that working for you ? Does your worry actually make a difference ? Or do things just seem to happen on their own anyway ?


If you have done any reading around the power of thinking (authors like Dr Wayne Dyer or if you are more scientifically minded, Gary Zukov or my favourite Esther Hicks), you will know that what you think about expands. Which means in effect, you create what you are worrying about..

It is not possible to expect a habit that has been entrenched over a lifetime to just disappear, but there is something you can do about it.

1) Find that balance between being in this present and holding your vision in the present.

Conflict arises when you are in conflict with what is and what you would like it to be. The trick (and it really does seem to be a trick) is to accept where you are without struggle and also keep the energy of where you want to be present.

2) Shift your focus, from what is absent to what it would feel like with ‘it’ present

If you are worrying, you are focusing on something not happening. Shift your focus to the future and really see and feel yourself in that future moment. Stop focusing on it not happening and focus on it happening, how will you feel then. What does that moment look like, how does it unfold ?

3) Accept it not happening

Because it may not! Be comfortable with it not happening by having a strategy in place to manage that situation. Then you can let go of worrying and start creating. Accepting that it may not happen does not mean giving up. It means you need to rethink your strategy. If this approach does not work, move on, and find another strategy but the only way to move on is accept that sometimes things don’t happen exactly as we envisage. You need to be flexible.

4) Be flexible and use what you have

By letting go of HOW something should happen you allow it to happen. Stop worrying about the how and instead, pay attention to what is happening now. Ask yourself how this helps you and start to use the opportunities that are there yet you never see because you are so focused on the how you have in your head.

5) Step into your fear by taking the time to put down ALL the consequences of your choice.

Worry is the fear that something you desperately want won’t happen and the fastest way I know to move past fear is to consciously acknowledge understand every consequence. We are never trained to see consequences because we are told that thinking about what could go wrong makes it happen. Poppycock. Things go wrong and the people who manage those events best are the ones who took the time to think about what would happen if. In deep diving this is often the difference between surviving or dying.

6) If you can’t trust the people around, trust yourself

We control because we don’t trust others. We worry because we think that if we don’t, it won’t happen. But, if you trust yourself (which means you have taken the time to be prepared, have a plan in place for any consequence and have given yourself permission to learn), then you can let go and focus on what is happening. In diving, the moment you submerge is the moment you stop worrying about it, because now it is too late. That is the moment you start living it. When was the last time you stopped obsessively worrying and thinking about your vision and instead lived it!

Letting go of worrying feels uncomfortable. It feels like you are deluding yourselves, but here is how I made peace with it. Would I rather be happy in this moment and not get what I was hoping for, or would I rather be miserable in this moment and still not get what I was hoping for. If you are still not convinced how about this, your thoughts create your reaction to events and by now you should know how you react to something is often the difference between a successful or disastrous outcome. If you are focused on what you want to happen you will not jump to the wrong conclusions, instead you will be firmly linked to the present, working on using what you have to create what you want. It is the most empowering place to be and one that every leader I have met instinctively knows.

PRACTICE ! Take an hour, a day, or even a week and find out what happens when you let go of worrying! You have nothing to lose, after all, you can always go!

Mastering Work – Creating High Performing Teams and Individuals (Why Context creates Performance, not Training)

As an individual striving to succeed in the world of ‘big corporate’ I have become obsessed with finding that ‘x’ factor that differentiates high performing teams and individuals. My natural tendency is to want to perform and perform well (if not better than my peers), which has been very difficult to accomplish in the world large corporate. I could have given up and just blended into the corporate background but that is not in my nature either. It has to be possible to succeed, after all, I have a world record, how hard can success in a corporate really be compared to that ? At this point you would have thought I had learnt my lesson. When I started my world record journey the question that drove me was, yes, you guessed it, how hard could it be ? Then again, I had no experience in creating exceptional success, so this time should be a whole lot easier.

In diving I took a lot of time to understand the environment I was in and then to correlate what people did to service that environment and understand what they were doing and why. In diving it was easy because the environment was almost exclusively physical, at work, well the environment is not that simple. In diving I also never had to worry about other people’s performance or impact on my success, not so in the work place. So what causes a lack of performance in the work place ? As if often the case, a book gave me an answer that really connected for me and that book was ‘How Nasa Builds Teams (Pellerin).

Pellerin refers to another book (that is not on Kindle, I hate it when that happens) by Stolovich and Keeps (2004) - Training ain’t Performance, where the cause of performance in the workplace is linked to environmental rather than individual factors. The context then in which individuals find themselves is therefore the key aspect that defines performance. Their research indicates that 80 % of team performance is associated to environment (context) with individuals’ abilities only contributing about 20% of the time. Which basically means that training ain’t going to fix your problem, managing the context will.

Even more thought provoking was the finding that context/ environment drives behaviour and in fact modifies it, which can turn a high performing individual into a non-performing individual just through consistent exposure to the behaviour norms within an environment. We all know unconsciously that context drives behaviour because we do it all the time. How you behave at a dinner when your in-laws are there, or your boss or your best friend or it is your bachelor/ ette party are all different with the different contexts clearly defining your behaviour. This control of an individual’s behaviour is managed by the participants in the environment, with people who do not ‘conform’ sanctioned until they do.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a compelling argument that our character has more to do with environment/ context than who we are innately. He states that the reason most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment”. Corporates are even better at controlling behavior through a mechanism Pellerin calls normalization of deviance.  This is what happens where bizarre behavior that even the individuals exhibiting it would consider inappropriate outside the workplace, is completely appropriate and propagated within.

Now take all that and apply it to your workplace.  You are either in an environment that supports high performance or you are not! No amount of training will change that as it is the environment and not the skills that are creating the non-performance, and as training is what companies do to create change, you are now stuck in ground hog day… with the people around you exerting enormous pressure for you to behavior just like them, no matter how destructive that may be.

So what do you do ? I fundamentally believe that individuals have the power to create change (even when stuck in a world of instituitionalised disempowerment), which means that I do not believe in sitting back and letting some-one else fix the environment I am in. As an individual I am empowered and I can make a difference through who I am and how I behave. If the problem is create by environment and context, I can start to actively change the environment toward something that would support my vision (in this case, high performance). Focusing on environment is something that is  outside my nexus of control, which leaves me with one last tactic - consciously managing my behavior by choosing a ‘self’ that does not change based on context. By becoming more authentic I become part of an environment that supports high performance instead of becoming part of an environment that creates non-performance. I also am operating within my nexus of control, which means that I am fundamentally more at peace and more confident with who I am and whilst that may not matter to my company, it certainly matters to me.

There is a warning that I must attach to the concept of choosing who you are and so how you will act and behave - especially when you find yourself in an environment where conforming is required – it can create huge conflict if managed incorrectly. Then again, think back to those rare managers who have walked into a team and fundamentally turned it around through a combination of who they are, how they behave and how they manage the context. Sometimes, all it takes is one person with a strong vision of how it could be. Sometimes, that person is you!

The Lonely Road - Turning a ‘No!‘ into a YES!

I stumbled on a new TV program last night called, ‘Peter Jones – How we made our millions’. Peter Jones is well known to Dragons’ Den fans and as a permanent fan of people who ‘stand out’, I watched the show with mild interest, only to be stunned at the level of honesty and exposure that was hardly normal in a documentary of that nature. Two quotes popped for me, the first by one of last nights, entrepreneurs, Richard Reed  really encapsulate what explorers do, they turn a world of No’s, into a  ‘Yes’ and the second was observation about what it feels like to walk that road – very lonely which is definitely a feeling I could relate to.

It is indeed lonely being an explorer. You are outside the known limits, outside of the comfort zones of all but a few people which means there is very little external approval or support, both  of which are things that most of us are born to seek. I often found myself ‘seeing’ my journey as a road that stretched out into oblivion with me, the only pilgrim anywhere in sight. Some days I  would wonder if I was even sane ? Was it really worth it ? Maybe I should go back to that well beaten path where I at least would have company ? I would return for a while and surround myself with the constant barrage  of No, No, No until it irritated me so much I would head back out and look for another way to turn that No into a Yes.

Because that is really all that a world record holder or successful entrepreneur does, challenge the reasons why something is not possible and look for a way to turn that resounding  No into a Yes! How do they do that ? With their persistence, their creativity and their ability to let go of who they are and become who they need to be to get to that Yes! Think about it. When you are in a negotiation/ discussion how often do you find yourself letting go of what you want just to be right ? But, if you were really serious about getting what you wanted, would you not let go of being right or start to listen to the person opposite you so that you could understand his position and how you could both  move closer to yours ?

Next time you find yourself stopping dreaming because the prevailing opinion is, “No! That is not possible! “ and you can not find a single person who believes in your dream, relax and remember, lonely is normal. Then start to focus on exactly how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Let go of everything else! Let go of your ego! Challenge your beliefs! Get creative but don’t stop until you have turned that No into a Yes!   

Mastering Emotions with Meditation

I don’t know about you, but the ability to stay calm, cool and collected at work (amongst other places) is quite high on my list of things to perfect. It is even more frustrating to be stuck on this and know that who I am is something that can change – my diving taught that irrevocably. Who I was when I started diving and who I am now are so different I can hardly recognise myself in the girl who was soo scared of the world she took three years to even join the underwater club to learn diving.
If you have tried to change your reactions you will know how hard it is. I guess 30 or so years of unconscious practice can be blamed for that, which begs the question, how do you change your wiring ? Because if you take a stroll down the EQ shelves you will quickly discover that your emotions are chemical reactions and that these are patterned into our brains -the pattern being reinforced every time we experience the trigger and reaction. This in effect means that you can re-pattern you brain and so your reactions, the question is how ?

 

Meditation seems to be a valid answer and one that even the guru of EQ, Daniel Goleman has explored. Here are some interesting facts and conclusions that I took from his book, The Meditative Mind.

 

The Basic Premise

•  One’s thoughts create one’s emotions. To change the way you react you need to be able to manage the unconscious thoughts that then create the emotional hijack that then ruins your day.
• Meditation works directly with your thoughts and the pattern of your thoughts by retraining your attention, which in turn gives you the mental space to make another choice and practice something else.
• Meditation fosters concentration. This means instead of the normal random and scattered thought stream you actively work on focusing your thoughts by fixing your mind on a single object (the meditation topic) or by practicing detachment from thoughts (mindfulness meditation).
• Meditation is different from other ways of relaxing because it trains and improves you capacity to pay attention (as opposed to letting the mind wander as it will).
• The effects of meditation last beyond the meditation session, making it a highly efficacious method for improving your mental health

 

Medical Reasons Why you Should Meditate

 

1) Reduce anxiety and stress

Meditation has been shown to reduce the effects of anxiety and stress (and who doesn’t need that). When you suffer from high anxiety your body fails to stop reacting when the problem is over. This means that you react to ‘normal’ events as if they were crisis.

   Each minor happening increases your tension which in turn magnifies the next ordinary event (a deadline, an interview, a doctor’s appointment), into a threat. Because the anxious person’s body stays permanently mobilized it has a lower threat threshold for the next event.

 

2) Change the Bodies Physiology

Meditation is also beneficial for heart disease and diabetes, lower cholesterol as well as having a positive effect on asthma sufferers.

 

3) Improve EQ & Communication

Meditation improves empathy, communication skills, listening and social awareness. This improvement is based in the improvement in attention which means that you are better ability to pick up on subtle perceptual cues in the environment and to pay attention to what is going.

 

A supporting experiment

Two groups of volunteers came into Goleman’s physiology lab. One group comprised meditation teachers who had been meditating for at least 2 years. The other group who were interested in meditation, but how had never practiced it.

   The volunteers were then split into two groups, one of which was told to relax for 20 minutes, the other to meditate for 20 min. When a non- meditator was in the ‘meditate’ group, they were given instruction on how.

   Ater twenty minutes both groups were shown a short film depicting a series of bloody accidents among workers in a woodworking shop - a standard way of inducing stress for lab studies.

   The study found that the meditators (whether or not they were new or experienced) had a unique pattern of reaction to the film. As they watched the film, their systems prepared for the accidents they were about to witness and then, as soon as the accident was over, they recovered more quickly than those of non-meditators. After the film, they were also more relaxed than the non-meditators who still showed signs of tension.

   From this (and other experiments) it can be concluded that meditators handle stress in a way that breaks the threat-arousal-threat spiral.

 

How to Meditate

There are numerous ways to meditate, but they can be broken into two primary themes – you are either focusing on something or you are being mindful.

 

1) Using Focus to meditate

By focusing on a specific object and practicing holding your attention there, returning to that object when focus is lost the meditator makes the habit of repetition stronger than the his other mental habits. This enables him to then use this ability to focus on a specific thing to focus and practice behavior that he chooses and that will support his goals in an interaction.

  

The focus can be :

• The breath
• A chant which can be the repetition of a name. mantra or phrase, spoken. It can be silent verbalisation or mental or out-loud.
• An object, picture or specific point in space

2) Mindfulness meditation.

 

In this meditation practice the meditator is not focusing on something, instead he practices adopting a neutral stance toward whatever comes and goes in his stream of awareness, placing an equal value on whatever arises. He is in effect practicing being an observer rather than being ‘in the action’. The meditator’s reaction is simply to register whatever he observes. If any further comment, judgment or reflection arises in the meditators mind, these are themselves made the focus of ‘bare attention. They are neither repudiated nor pursued, but simply dismissed after being noted.

 

Practically Applying Meditation

There are two parts to a meditation practice, the first is to introduce it regularly into your day (even if it is for only 15 minutes). The second is to practice using meditation to detach yourself you’re your normal reactions in difficult situations. I have found that a simple mantra (I am calm) works really well at work. When I feel myself starting to react I immediately repeat that to myself, remembering what calm feels like and returning to that state. If that does not work I revert to the traditional meditation of noticing the breath. Does it work, yes, if I remember! So I often start my mantra as I walk in, rather than hoping I remember in the heat of the moment.

   Suprisingly, I actually used meditation to overcome my intense fear when diving! Not that I called it meditation. I found that by repeating over and over the Buddhist mantra Ohm Mane Padme Hung, before and during my dive I was able to distract my brain and stay outside of the panic and fear it was experiencing and so get on with the job of diving.

 

Meditation is not a quick fix, but it is a scientifically proven mechanism that changes the way your brain fires and that affects your emotional response habits. All it takes is 15 minutes a day!

Life Lessons from a Record - Turning Hope into Reality

We fall in love with hope, hope that promises us that there is a way out of our lives. There is! But it is not easy or something that can be given to you. It takes courage - the courage to start asking yourself hard questions.

• Who am I being ?
• What am I creating ?
• What am I afraid of ?
• How would I like it to be ?
• What do I need to start thinking, saying and doing to start creating THAT INSTEAD!

How many of you are prepared to start finding those answer ?
Yes it is easier to sit and wait for someone else to notice you and create it for you...but having done that for years diving I know from some very bitter experience that the only way to make your life happen is to be your own master!
ONLY YOU CAN MAKE YOUR LIFE HAPPEN! And if you are not taking ownership of it, you are relying on blind luck and the good will of others to create it for you.
That is the lesson behind any accomplishment!
That is the lesson behind my world record!
When will you start ?

When is Enough, Enough ?

We all have a sentence that drives us, for some it is, ‘I am not enough!’ I know it is one of mine, a fear that sits there, eating away inside me. What if everyone finds out ? I could not bear the humiliation, the laughter and of course, the rejection. For a while I spent hours trying to find out where and how I started to believe this. Focusing on why, trying to find someone to blame let me off the hook. I didn’t have to dive into that blackhole and see if it was true. Then one day I just stopped and instead asked myself a different question. I replaced why with when, when will I be enough ? After four decades of trying and improving and giving and sacrificing, when would I be enough ? When would it let go of me ? When could I finally stop, breathe and rest ?

When I got a world record, then I would be enough ? Wait, I have one of those!

When I got married, the I would be enough ? Yes, have that checkboxed checked as well.

When I finally made it in the business world, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe if I climbed Everest, deepest and highest, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe…. Maybe  if I went deeper, maybe the problem was that I had not gone deep enough, I was only the deepest woman, not the deepest ever, the men were 100 meters below me, then I would be enough ?

What will it take for you to stop and rethink how you are living your life and what is driving you ? When will you be enough ?