Celebrating Your Decision

Most people make decisions and then sit back and wait to see what happens. It is far better to joyfully and fully embrace your decision. By putting positive, rather than neutral (or worse negative), energy around a decision you generate momentum. Think about decisions that generate this kind of energy- saying yes to a new job, getting engaged, planning a family. All these carry a lot of positive energy that help you stay focused on the goal. They also tend to involve lots of people who help to carry that energy forward. So how can you create this kind of energy for decisions that you are making

Creating positive energy around a decision

Pick at least two things from this list to help you celebrate a decision you have made.

• Go out to dinner with friends to talk about your plans
• Post an announcement on a social media site you use- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Journal about how you are feeling and what you hope to accomplish
• Post a statement or a quote reminding you of the decision somewhere where you will see it every day. Screensavers, fridges, electronic calendars can all be great places to post.
• Form a group of likeminded people who are implementing their decisions so you can build off their energy.
• Create a blog to share your progress
• Buy or find a bracelet or rubber band that will represent the decision you have made. Wear it at least three times a week to remind yourself of the positive change you are making.

Weighted decision making

Weighted Decision Making Matrix

Weighted decision making in designed to take some of the emotion out of deciding about a new job or career options.  In this model you determine what criteria are important to you in a job. It is important to think about all the factors that would affect your decision like amount of time it takes to get to work, reporting relationships, business travel etc. Once you have determined those factors you then choose weights for those factors.

Case study- Sue

In the following example we find Sue who is trying to decide whether to leave her job. She has a young daughter who has some health problems that require a number of doctors and specialists appointments. Sue wants to not only spend time with her daughter but also be able to schedule appointments in a consistent manner. For her hours of work and work life balance are the most important factors. She gives those factors a 9. Pay and benefits are the next most important factors so she ranks those as 7s. What is not very important to Sue is vacation time, since she only wants to work four days or less a week. She gives this factor a 4.

The weights are the same when evaluating both the current and future position.

The potential new job pays a little bit less than she makes right now and has the same hours of work as she presently has. Since it is a new job she will have the opportunity to learn new things.  In her current job she is an administrative assistant, but she was trained as a graphic artist. The new job allows her to use these talents. Her present job has a company benefits the new job has no benefits at all. She has discussed her family needs with the potential employer and they have agreed that she can make up time that she misses when she has appointments that can’t be rescheduled on her day off.  She would be going from three weeks vacation to 4% vacation pay and a predetermined vacation schedule. Sue is not sure which job is the best job for her. She uses the weighted decision model.

	Sue’s Current Job			Job Option A
	weight	raw score	Total	weight	raw score	Total
Criteria
Pay @ least $25/hr	7	10	70	7	8	56
Less than 30 hours/wk	9	10	90	9	10	90
Learning opportunities	5	5	25	5	6	30
Recognize & use talents	5	2	10	5	8	40
Company paid benefits	7	10	70	7	0	0
Vacation	4	7	28	4	3	12
Work life balance	9	7	63	9	10	90
Less						318
Fear (how afraid are you to change?)					5	5
Change (how much will it upset your life)					5	5
			356			308

Sue subtracts how afraid she is of changing on a scale of 1 to 10 as well as how much the change will disrupt her life from the new job. (There is no change if she stays in her current job).

Based on how she assessed each job, she is better to stay at her current job. With Company paid benefits weighted heavily she will most likely always need to find a job with benefits in order for it to be the right job.

This model can be difficult because you need to assess what you really want and how valuable it is to you in relation to other factors. It allows you to see the trade offs you are making in tangible numbers.

	Current Job			New Job
	weight	raw score	Total	weight	raw score	Total
Criteria
Less
Fear (how afraid are you to change?)
Change (how much will it upset your life)
			0			0

Lost Arts- Being Gracious

Being Gracious

The Oxford dictionary defines being gracious as kind, indulgent,
courteous and beneficent to inferiors -the irony of that statement
will not be lost on most.

 

It seems to be en vogue these days to treat others as though they were
inferior whether it is at work, in the grocery store or driving home.
If ever you needed to see where people aren’t gracious just watch cars
trying to merge into traffic during rush hour in any of our major
cities. Being gracious used to be a no brainer, if someone was in
need you helped out. Today however pitching or tuning in requires
putting yourself aside and picking up a lost art.

Being gracious is really about being present with someone, regardless
of who they are or what they are saying. This seems hard to do when
you have a telemarketer on the end of the phone after a long day at
the office. However in most cases that person is trying to pay their
rent or pay their college tuition. They did not choose the job because
of all the perks that come with minimum wage jobs, they are doing
because it is all they have. So being gracious requires you to spend 3
minutes to let them have their say. Then you can politely decline them
without having made them feel inferior.

Being gracious doesn’t mean you have to listen to everything. Think
about the office gossip. You aren’t being gracious when you indulge
them. But the next time a child tries to tell you something that is
REALLY important, and no one could possibly hope to follow the logic-
smile and listen. Be gracious, allow them that moment. You will have
lots of moments for yourself, every once in a while let other people
have theirs.

Who's to blame?

Too often we let other people catch our mistakes instead of recognizing them and learning from them. When this happens we enter into the blame game. In the blame game nobody wins and everybody loses.   

How do you avoid the blame game?

Admitting when you have made a mistake and growing and learning from it allows you to be humble. Admitting a mistake and learning nothing from it is just plain stupid.

How to learn from your mistakes

First assess what really happened without any emotion. Write out the problem and remove any judging, blaming or emphatic words. Here are two examples of the same story.

Judging words

I was running really late for work because the elevator in my building has been slow for the past three weeks. When I finally got out of the lobby an idiot was parked in the loading zone and I had to go all the way around him. By the time I got to the bus stop I had missed the bus. The city has such a poor schedule that I had to wait another 15 minutes for the next bus. My boss is a real stickler for timeliness so even though I was only 15 minutes late, he made me work the extra time- even though I would have done it anyway.

Descriptive words

At 8:30 I left my apartment for work. The elevator took 5 minutes to arrive on my floor. When I left the building I walked around a parked car. The time was 8:40, I know this because my bus was leaving and it arrives at 8:40. I boarded the next bus at 8:55. I arrived at work at 9:15. I worked until 5:15 at my manager’s request.

When you remove all the judging, blaming and emphatic words it becomes easier to see what the real problem was and learn from it. Unfortunately many of us have grown up on a healthy diet of blaming others (I blame reality tv J ) and it becomes hard to see where our responsibility lies. Once you can see your responsibility in the problem you can often find the solution and the learning opportunity.

In this case the employees should have gone to his boss and admitted that he had not left enough time to get to the bus stop. Accepting his responsibility the employee would have learned the lesson and probably offered up the remedy instead of the supervisor having to mention it.

 

Sara Rylott

Ready2fly

Feelings are not facts

I hate downhill skiing mainly because I feel absolutely terrified when I get on a chair lift. Last year I tried again. My skis feel like anchors pulling me down toward the earth. I clung to the safety bar, would not let anyone touch me or talk to me and the tears started to flowing. Being an incredibly logical person, I was telling myself that I am safe, people do this all the time, accidents are incredibly rare…Yet my feelings were totally in charge and they bore no relation to the facts at hand.

It is easy to see that in an example about a phobia of heights how our feelings do not represent the facts. It is harder to see that same concept in our everyday life, but the same thing happens almost daily.

Imagine you are in a meeting with 10 other people. While you are presenting a colleague interrupts you, makes his point, one that calls into dispute what you are saying and then tells the room he has to dash out, but he’ll be right back. You are going to immediately have some feelings about what just happened. You feelings may be hurt, embarrassment, disbelief, anger. These feelings can take over from your logical mind, which will try to tell you, your colleague has always been helpful and supportive, is not normally rude, and is just getting over the flu.

This principle works whether it is a big thing like being embarrassed or a little thing like wanting someone to do something. How many times have parents become angry/ frustrated because their child does not want to eat the dinner presented? The fact is the child does not want to eat, but the emotional reaction of the parent bears no relation to the facts. If a co-worker didn’t want to eat her lunch you would not make a big deal about it, it would not anger you. Yet the child does. This is not to say that we should not encourage children to try new things (thus creating new facts for them). However we should check our thermometer to see if the facts and feelings are matching up.

This requires self discipline and a willingness to examine why you are feeling the way you are. Is it your co-worker, is it the child, is it you. What is really going on?

After my disastrous first attempt on the chair lift, my sons who were eight and ten at the time, gave me lots of hugs and kisses at the top of the hill. They told me how proud they were of me as I stood shaking at the top. At the bottom they expected me to go in and be done with skiing yet again. Instead I kept trying. Each time I was a little less panic stricken. I never did enjoy it, but I kept at it. Robin Sharma says “The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” For me I was not going up the chairlift to prove anything but to regain control of my mind from my emotions.

 

Think about in your your life where you need to do the same.

Sara Rylott
Ready2fly

Start Today- Five Actions for Greater Happiness

1. Be grateful- Stop what you are doing and think of all the things you are grateful for. Being grateful is simply to be appreciative of what you have. Too often we spend our time wanting things in the future, a better job, a newer car, a life partner etc. wanting things does not make us happy. In fact desire and wanting usually lead to a flood of negative emotions. Being present brings us back to happiness and focusing on what we have right now. Start by writing a list of all the things that you have. Here are some categories to consider: career, personal growth, finance, house/home, health, well being, close family, wider family, leisure, community, partner and spirituality. You may notice that as you right you begin to smile and feel happy about all that you already have.

2. Smile- smiling is an incredibly powerful tool in increasing your sense of happiness. Even better smiling is a two-way street, if you smile at someone they are likely to smile back and the mood in the room/bus/mall goes up just a fraction. Ron Gutman does it best in his TED Talk on smiling which you  watch here.

3. Reflect- Spend five minutes everyday reflecting on what went well. You found a parking spot, the meeting ended on time, your spouse had dinner ready, and bedtime went smoothly. Instead of discussing all the disappointments of the day re-frame to look for the good- and when you do you’ll find there was lots of little things that made you smile.

4. Eliminate perfection- It is really hard to be happy with anything or anyone when you are striving for perfection. Perfection does not exist except in your mind. There is no perfect piece of art, no perfectly executed plan, no “perfect” game (although baseball likes to think so). So long as our mindset is at 100% or for some people 110% we will never be happy with ourselves, we can always do/be better. Ease up a little, try to see yourself as dogs do- perfect already, no need to do/be anything more.

5. Take a risk- just a little one. The more you take small chances and succeed the more confident and happier you will become.

 

Life Lessons- Learning

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Gandhi

Everyday is a process of learning, just ask a parent of an infant- both  of them are constantly learning! Yet we often ignore the life lessons in our quest for making a living. What we have learned along the way would help us tremendously but too often we compartmentalize our lives, telling ourselves that real learning happens in the classroom or that we can't learn from an experience. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of us just don't have a system or a structure to apply the lessons to.

A new organizational trend is to have a "Lessons Learned" section or cell within a company to track what went well and should be repeated; and what went poorly and should be avoided. Some people already have a system like this, usually called parents, siblings or in-laws who remind you of how things went horribly wrong or encourage you to remember your successes. However trusting external people to count your successes and failings is not particularly reliable.

You should be keeping track of the lessons you have learned in your life. Some may be humorous "If it smells bad it probably is not good to eat." but others may be lessons that come out of pain, rejection or misunderstandings. In many cases it is the lessons that come from loss that we learn too well and usually incorporate that change our behaviour.

One of the best ways to learn the lesson is to keep a learning journal where you make notes about items that you have learned or wish to learn. Write it rather than keeping it in an electronic form. There is something very soothing about seeing your own wise counsel in your own hand.  I have a hot pink leather journal that only contains things that I have learned. It is one of my favourite books to flip through as I see the learning journeys but also quotes from books and speeches that I found inspirational.

The next time you have a job interview you don't get, read a fabulous article, connect with a character in a novel or have a run in with a co-worker write down what you learned from the experience. Life is all about learning; sadly many of us miss the lessons.

No one lacks life lessons; wisdom comes from having the courage to learn from them.

 

Sara Rylott

Ready2Fly

What is life about?

Are you wondering what is life about? Gail Sheehy (1976), her book Passages, describes seven stages of adult development. She sees transitional stages in adulthood where we question and re-evaluate the choices that we have made earlier in our lives. Life becomes more complex and you start to question what is life about? Maybe this is where you find yourself, wondering about your life purpose and what is life for?

One of the most powerful tools I have encountered for creating meaning in life and answering the question of “who am I?” is writing out a chronological life history.

Life gives us very little time to reflect on what is actually happening. We rush through each day, then week, until we find ourselves surprised at how much time has passed. It is months and sometimes years before we stop to look around at what is going on in our lives. Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to actually stop. But even in the stopping we often don’t look too far back, just far enough to understand what just happened. However what just happened, almost always has happened before. We develop both healthy and unhealthy patterns in our lives, but rarely go back to the beginning of our adulthood to see what choices we have been making. Looking at this with fresh eyes allows us to examine the meaning and patterns that we have created.

By writing out a life history, what we have done, it becomes more tangible.

A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
-Steve Jobs

Like Steve Jobs says you can start to connect the dots. However unlike Steve Jobs employees you will see that you have lots of dots to connect and when you start to do that work, the patterns of your life history become clear. This then starts to help you find the meaning of your life.

Most of us live our lives by simply moving through a routine. Get up, go to work, come home, walk the dog, make dinner, watch tv, and go to bed. Repeat. As Robert Heinlein states “In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it”.  Our lives are much richer than daily trivia when we examine all the events that make up a year. While you may have forgotten what you had for dinner last week you will be amazed at how much you can remember about your life history when you set out to do so.

At first it seems like a simple task. Start in the year that you left home and using short sentences list everything that happened that year. It might look something like this at the start:

1997- Graduated high school. Moved to Peterborough to start University. My best friend Pat moved to Kingston to go to college. Met my friend Payton in Biology 101.

That would be an excellent start. What you will find however is that as you start to turn events over in your mind you will remember richer details of those years. This does not usually come on the first draft. The memories of events come at unusual times and you will find yourself wanting to grab a pen so you can capture that memory. As an example I somehow managed to forget that I had travelled to Greece for two weeks in my twenties. One of my friends forgot she had her Level 5 piano. These reclaimed memories are where you start to find the meaning in life and what life is about.

Eventually your entries will look more like this:

1997- Graduated high school with a B+ average. Moved to Peterborough to start University, hated my dorm roommate. My best friend Pat moved to Kingston to go to college, we drifted apart. Pat wanted to come down and party all the time and I needed to study. Met my friend Payton in Biology 101, we spent every Thursday in the library going over our notes and then heading off to the pub for a pint. My sister was hospitalized for her appendix. My mom sent care packages every month always with enough homemade cookies to share.  Saw Jurassic Park with my dad when he came down to visit.

You can see the difference between the two life history entries. At first you only remember high level events. But as you start to reflect back on experiences you will see how life is also about things like going to concerts, hockey games, events that were happening in your family, you move out of the major changes mode of thinking and into the experience of life.

When you engage in this activity you will see how rich and full a life you have already lived. It also helps you to see how many challenges and hardships you have already overcome. It will also help you to reconnect with what you life purpose is. When you dig into your life history your life purpose seems to unfold effortlessly for you.

Answering what is life about? How to start:

Most people start when they leave home because this often is the start of adulthood. However in some cases adulthood is thrust upon people by traumatic events. Pick the point in time where you feel you moved from being dependent to having to take independent action. Some people don’t leave home until later in their twenties. In this case start when you finished high school.

Areas to consider:

There are many elements that make up our lives. When reflecting on each year think about the following areas:

Family

Health

Transitions

Employment

Where you lived

Friends

Travel

Recreation

Volunteer

Languages

Caution- Emotions ahead

This activity can dredge up emotions and hurt that you thought had put behind you. Many people I know have tackled this task with a glass of wine in hand as they sift through the memories that make up their life history. While everyone says it is rewarding, no one says it is easy. However no one should really believe that answering what is life about would be easy.

While it might not seem that a life history would lead to uncovering your life purpose, it often provides the inspiration and insight that is needed to re-chart your course as you discover the meaning of your life.