Tag: Change Authentically

Resolutions Need Accountability

Posted on by WorkAuthentically

About this time, the crowds on the resolution bandwagon have started to thin. We’ve been looking at how to make resolutions stick. You don’t stand a chance without belief or support. But the odds are against you without the third component: accountability.

I know! Accountability isn’t sexy or cool or even interesting to most people.

Accountability is often the very thing we try to avoid at all costs! But I’m here to tell you friends, that accountability works. It’s the rocket fuel that will take your resolutions to outer space (or wherever it is you want to go)!

Of course, anyone who’s been around the blog for more than a minute knows that I talk a lot about the importance of using your strengths at work. New here? Check out all these strengths posts.

I go blathering on about strengths on the regular because they are a critical component of doing your best work, finding your place in a community, and getting more joy out of work and life. And who doesn’t want those things? Yup. It’s pretty much what everyone is looking for after funny cat videos.

Some people get stuck wondering what their strengths are, so here’s a really simple way to find some of them: think about what people compliment you on.

I told you it was simple!

Those things that people compliment us on tend to be strengths that we don’t notice because it came so easily to us. Those compliments can be about the way we approach our work, our work style, why people like working with us, or how we make life easier/better for someone else.

Sidebar: If you can’t come up with anything, start a list today of compliments you get and track them until you see a pattern.

One of the compliments that I regularly get is that I’m a good accountability partner. I never set out to weave accountability into the fabric of the lives of my family, friends, and co-workers. It just happened. I can’t even fully explain how I do it (another sign of a strength!) other than to say my brain seems to remember when other people tell me something important to them and I follow up to hear about the progress they’re making toward said important thing.

Sometimes when I ask people how their important thing is going they tell me how awesome it is! But more often, they get embarrassed and mumble about how busy they’ve been. And let me be the first to tell you that just because I’m a good accountability partner doesn’t mean that I never get stuck. Excuses are often a lot easier to come by than the simple action we know we need to take. We all need accountability to keep us on track.

#PositiveAction Find someone who will regularly check in with you on your progress toward your important thing.

Resolutions are hard, so I’ve got 2 things to help make yours easier.

  1. My e-book, Change Authentically is on sale this week. It’s exactly the boost of positive action you need to get your resolutions back on track.
  2. This is the final week I’m going to be offering FREE calls so you can make sure you’ve got the belief, support, and accountability to manifest your dreams! Even if you’ve been struggling with taking action on your resolutions, a call with me is painless, easy, and fun. And of course, free!

 

Image by kropekk_pl from Pixabay

Successful Year

Posted on by WorkAuthentically

Well here we are, at the most anticipated year-end that I’ve ever known. It’s been so – what’s the word I’m thinking of? No, not unprecedented. Different. It’s been so different in so many ways.

I know most people are going to call it a dumpster fire of a year and it definitely had its moments. But it was also a successful year.

I know it was a mess! It still is, really. But there’s also success hiding within it. Here’s what I mean.

For my work, I had to re-think how I delivered education and coaching services. The pandemic changed the way I interact with people and organizations. But I was still able to help over 200 people this year. That’s a whole lot of people that have learned to surface their authentic career story, grow their confidence, communicate their value and find their best work!

I couldn’t do that work the way I’d done it before. It was dramatically different than how I thought the year would go. And yet. I know how our workplaces, families, and communities are transformed when people are doing work they love, so helping even one person do that would be successful in my book.

And speaking of books, did you know I published 4 this year? Crazy, right? I actually spent a lot of time in 2019 writing the first book, but Change Authentically wasn’t ready until February of this year. It almost feels like January and February 2020 were their own distinct year since those months were so dramatically different than the rest of the year!

I published two short e-books during the pandemic, but the majority of my writing time this year was spent on (you guessed it!) Success Authentically. It was an idea that kept nagging at me until I had no choice but to sit down and start. It was not convenient timing, since I had recently been promoted to teacher for my two school-age children who were thrust into the ever-challenging world of virtual learning. Given the constraints on my time and the unknowns at the start of the pandemic, I shouldn’t have even tried. And yet, I wrote a little bit every day until one day, it was magically complete. When I launched Success Authentically in December, it became a best seller on Amazon!

It’s funny. Becoming a best-selling author was not on my list of things to do in 2020, but that sure feels like success, even if it is different than the goals (which now seem hilarious!) that I set at the start of the year.

I volunteer my time for an organization that is dedicated to catalyzing a global solution to the climate crisis. One of the key components of that work, up until this year had been in-person education and conversations to help people understand how they can be part of the solution. You would expect that this work would have been on hold after we couldn’t gather in groups this year, but we were able to pivot, imagining a different way to achieve the same goal. I volunteered more than 60 hours with the Climate Reality Project, mostly from the comfort of my own home this year. The Milwaukee chapter of the group (where I’m a co-chair) grew our membership by 3x and launched a new monthly education program. So yeah. Success was definitely hiding in our challenges there too.

Of course, there’s also been lots of challenges at home. Having 4 people trying to work and learn and live in the same place isn’t easy, but we’re finding ways to make it fun, even if it’s different than before. Like everyone else, we’ve changed how we interact with our family and friends (excited for the day when hugging those far away folks becomes a reality again!). We’ve changed holiday traditions and created some awesome memories. We’ve been frustrated, angry, and disappointed. But we’ve found success in being together in different ways (virtual spring break, family book reading, picnics in the yard, and more). This year helped us all build resilience and it helped us get more intentional with our time together. And that’s the most important measure of success I can think of.

2020 wasn’t all bad and it wasn’t all good. It was different. Just like every other year.

#PositiveAction Look at your year to see the success hiding within it. If your list isn’t what you hoped, you’ve still got 2 weeks to change that!

 

Programming Note: There won’t be a blog post next week as I prepare for some time off with my family. Yup, it’s with those folks I see all day every day, but I’m still looking forward to our very different holiday!

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Book Lessons Part 3

Posted on by WorkAuthentically

I’m sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned from writing and publishing my first book. Check out Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 for more details.

Lesson 3 – Focus on the process, not the results. Because even when you follow the process, the results aren’t guaranteed.

The world is filled with stories of stuff that didn’t work. Failed inventions. Business ideas that a person poured their heart and soul into, only to see that the market didn’t support it. Sometimes, we even use those stories as a reason not to try.

I loved Seth Godin’s book, What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn). It very eloquently describes the exact phenomenon I experienced as part of the process. There is no guaranteed, tried-and-true method to create a #1 song, a bestseller, or a viral sensation. But wanting these results often changes our approach. We try what worked for someone or something else and hope it will apply to us. And it’s disappointing when that doesn’t work.

But the value is in the process itself. To quote David Whyte, “Good work, done well for the right reasons and with an end in mind” is the reward. Not the positive or negative reviews from others.

It’s about putting your best into the end product authentically, regardless of how it’s received by anyone else.

An awesome friend and fellow writer helped me keep my eye on the process every single time I got distracted by fear of possible results. Sidebar: if you love football (and who doesn’t really?!?!), check out his books on the NFL draft and free agency.

So what sorts of fears were distracting me? Fears like: What if everyone hates it? They might. What if no one buys a copy? Definitely a possibility. What if I spell a word wrong and get a bunch of negative reviews and angry emails? Some people do get upset with poor grammar.

All of those things I listed are possibilities. There are lots of others too, like selling a million copies or becoming a New York Times bestseller (funny how we don’t worry about those positive results like we do the negative!). Either way, I don’t control the results. So I can’t let it change what I’m doing or how I’m doing it or why I’m doing it!

Easy to say… much harder to let go of the results when we’re in the thick of things at work. Sometimes we need the results in order to earn a bonus or reward. Sometimes we need the results to keep our jobs. It can become high stakes, high stress really quickly.

The interesting thing is that when we keep our focus on doing good work for the right reasons, the results often follow.

#PositiveAction What results or fears do you need to let go of so you can focus your attention on the process of doing good work?

 

 

 

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Book Lessons Part 2

Posted on by WorkAuthentically
The boring, unglamorous steps help bring the dream to life!

In case you missed it last week, I wrote a book! And now I’m sharing a few of the lessons I learned through that process. You can see Lesson 1 here. 

Lesson 2 – The vision never included these steps, but they’re integral to the process.

Our biggest dreams are often very detailed. We dream with our 5 senses, experiencing the achievement long before it ever comes to fruition. When someone imagines themselves holding the academy award and giving their acceptance speech, they can hear the applause and cheers. They can feel the joy in that moment! 

No one imagines filming 50 takes in the pouring rain after putting on makeup for 6 hours, just to get the exact right emotion into the exact right sentence only to have it cut out of the film in final editing. But the 50 takes and the award go together; you need both.

Here’s a huge discovery I made that I’ll share in case there are any aspiring writers out there. The best way to write a book? It’s to actually start writing a book! Can you believe it? But for 20 years, I’d imagined seeing the book on a shelf (or in later years in an online bookstore). I didn’t necessarily dream about writing every day. And yet, that’s a key step in the process. 

Unfortunately, the process is often not glamorous or even fun. There are days when you don’t have time or you don’t feel like doing it or you have nothing to say or there’s no inspiration to be found anywhere. But without putting in the work, the dream doesn’t happen.

There are lots of people that have a dream job that is different than their current role. They can see the awesome job, company, and co-workers as part of it. They can feel the joy. But guess what’s needed to get there? Lots of unglamorous steps in the process. Updating their resume, gaining new skills, applying to jobs, and facing the rejection that applying to jobs inevitably brings. 

So what should we do? First, we need to recognize that the path to where we want to go is filled with distractions and unglamorous, though necessary steps. 

Then, we need to commit to making progress in the face of that knowledge. For me, it was committing to write regularly. In the case of the dream job, it’s committing to do the steps to take you there. Like any interesting journey, it’s not always fun, but it’s definitely worth it!

#PositiveAction What do you need to commit to doing to allow you to achieve a goal or dream? Take one small step today!

 

Image by fvoellmer from Pixabay

 

Book Lessons Part 1

Posted on by WorkAuthentically

I’ve been sharing my becoming-a-published-author journey over the past few months and today it’s officially official! Change Authentically: A guide to transform your job and life through positive action is published! And confetti rains down Super Bowl style!! 

At least, it did in my head! And if you know me, you know I’d hate to have to sweep and vacuum up all that confetti, so it’s probably better it was imaginary. Let’s keep the celebration clean and orderly, shall we?

I’ve had a little time to reflect on the process of writing and self-publishing. It was a surprising, exciting, sometimes terrifying journey, a lot like anything new. There are things I would do differently next time (yes, there WILL be a next time!) now that I’ve been through the process. And there are some interesting lessons I wanted to share, since they apply to work.

Lesson 1 – A bunch of details that don’t really matter in the big scheme of things stand between you and the ONE THING that does matter

I’ve wanted to write a book for at least 20 years (you can read an excerpt here). There are lots of reasons and excuses as to why I didn’t up to this point. But I knew someday, I eventually would do it. The writing part was fun for me – it’s always been something I’ve enjoyed. The many details of the self-publishing process on the other hand, were not.

Did you know that you can pick between three different paper colors for your printed book? AND that each paper choice is a slightly different thickness? AND that slightly different thickness when stacked on top of each other in book format changes the width of the spine of the book? And by the way, the width of the spine then has implications for a whole bunch of other choices to be made!

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when faced with so many interconnected decisions. But the funny thing is, as much as they all impact the final product, they don’t really matter all that much. I’ve never chosen to read or not read a book based on the spine size. Or the color of paper. Or a whole bunch of other inconsequential details.

All those choices can become distractions if we let them. It’s easy to spend hours on the internet reading about which paper is the absolute best paper for a specific usage. To endlessly debate and agonize over each decision to be made. And it also could prevent me from moving toward the end goal of publishing a book, which was my big aspiration all along.

I needed to instead focus my attention on the minimums. Fill out the required fields and move on. Trust me, even this approach took WAY longer than I expected, and was not without its fair share of debating before deciding!

I sure wish life came with a required fields indicator! It’s easy to get caught up in the details of the everyday, the things that seem so important in the moment. It’s much harder to sift through those things objectively to figure out what matters. Sometimes it’s only through the benefit of hindsight that we can see more clearly what did and didn’t help us in the process. 

Whether we figure it out in the moment or through the benefit of time, hopefully we’re taking those lessons forward with us so that the next time we’re faced with an endless sea of distractions, we can more easily move forward toward that one thing that matters most.

#PositiveAction What tiny distractions are keeping you from making real progress on your big goal? Set a deadline to figure them out and then commit to moving forward!

Book cover image by Erin Zastrow