Stop Being Afraid of Getting Fired

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Yes, you could lose your job for being inept, incompetent, missing deadlines and milestones, or simply failing to do the work. But you will not be fired for taking chances, and embracing risk and then accepting the responsibility that goes along with it. And if you are fired for taking an honest chance, with positive intention, and then owning the outcome, your boss is a coward, and your company is on the brink of irrelevance.

So most of us don’t take chances at work. Instead we take crap from management, accept workplace bullying, go along with idiotic ideas, follow unethical orders, hide our opinions, and mask our true identities. We even accept lower salaries. All because we fear losing our job, or because we are trying desperately to fit in.

Fifty years ago only experts worried about cigarettes, drunk driving, and wearing seat belts. The rest of the general public was more alarmed about nuclear attacks, Russian invasions, and asteroid impacts.

Today you are more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 960,000) than you are of being killed in a terrorist attack (1 in 20 million). You are far more likely to be killed by your own furniture, or drown in your bathtub, than from a terrorist attack. And you are 200 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. We fear the wrong things.

Risk equals probability multiplied by consequence. In other words, smoking cigarettes or driving while texting is waaay more risky than worrying that you are going to be kidnapped and held for ransom. But risk is different than fear. Risk is quantifiable, it’s something you can calculate, while fear is perception.

The difference between risk and fear is, of course, control. When you are smoking or driving a car you are in control. When you imagine being attacked by a bear on vacation in Yellowstone Park (1 in 2.1 million), you have no control whatsoever. It’s a terrifying thought. It could stop you from taking a nice walk in the woods.

After September 11, 2001, 1.4 million people changed their travel plans to avoid flying, choosing to drive instead. Driving is far more dangerous. The decision to drive, instead of fly, caused an estimated 1,000 additional auto fatalities.

There’s a number of other criteria that also affect our perception of risk. Timing is a big one. When we believe that the risk is imminent, we perceive it as more dangerous, and longer term risks are viewed as more moderate. This explains why we postpone exercising and order another glass of wine. There’s no immediate risk, right? But habits build, and pretty soon the couch potato routine turns into very real health disabilities.

Familiarity is also one of our biggest barriers to attempting anything challenging and difficult. When we are familiar with the challenge, we view it as less risky. Yet statistically safe activities, which we have never done before, are viewed as terrifying.

Just last night our family watched a show about big, scary waterslides around the world. Waterslides are among the safest, and most controlled recreational environments, complete with professionals who are monitoring the entire experience. But as we saw in the TV show, time after time, people would balk at the last minute and refuse to participate in the waterslide.

Another consideration that halts our ability to accept risk is considering how reversible the consequences are. Losing your job is an irreversible experience, therefore we view the risk as higher.

All of these factors – familiarity, control, reversibility, and timing – contribute to our sense of risk and fear. However, here is one thing we know to be true. Great leadership, remarkable innovations, and outstanding service, begin with initiative, and embracing risk and the accountability that comes with it.

Initiative and conscientious risk-taking are the hallmarks of great team members and great companies. Yet, this learned behavior only happens when people feel psychologically safe at work. If you work in the kind of company that respects the psychological safety of teams, you are more likely to speak up, share ideas, ask for help, and take initiatives.

If you are a leader responsible for a team, you likely have deadlines and objectives for your team to accomplish. The best way to get team members to step up is to make them feel psychologically safe to take chances.

To learn more about adopting a learning mindset and driving innovation see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership is a Washington Post #5 Bestseller. You can order a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

A Small Shift to Ask More Powerful Questions

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Typewriters with ribbons, developed in the 1950s, were excellent at speeding up typists, but not so good at erasing their mistakes. Bette Nesmith Graham was a typist by day, and a painter by night. She wondered, “What if I could cover up my typing mistakes the same way I cover up my painting mistakes?”

She mixed up a batch of quick-drying white paint, and used it to wipe out her typing mistakes. Almost immediately, she was handing it out to everyone in the typist pool. That product later became Liquid Paper, which she sold for almost $50 million.

In 1965, Dwayne Douglas, a football coach at the University of Florida, watched his players run and sweat and drink gallons of water for hours in the hot Florida sunshine. Squinting into the sun, he wondered, “Why aren’t the players peeing more after the games?” He asked a kidney researcher at the university that question, who then developed a drink to replenish electrolytes. The result became Gatorade, named after the Florida Gaters.

In 1943, while on vacation in New Mexico, Edwin Land took a family portrait with his camera. His daughter asked immediately, “You took the picture. Can I see it now?” Which led Land to ask himself the question, “What if you could somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?” The answer to that question became the Polaroid Camera.

When you think about it, everything starts with a question. I have been collaborating for the past year with Marilee Adams, Ph.D., author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. She has poignant stories of how simple questions, when reframed, can change the course of history.

Consider the subtle question shift, from “How do we get ourselves to water?” to “How do we get water to us?” That question shift is the difference between nomadic cultures moving themselves to reach water, to civilizations using technology to bring water to the people. Roman aqueducts, irrigation and indoor plumbing are the cornerstones of modern infrastructure, and all an answer to the question, “How do we bring the water to us?”.

“A paradigm shift occurs when a question is asked inside the current paradigm that can only be answered outside it.” – Marliee Adams, Ph.D.

Here is an idea from the work of Eric Vogt and this colleagues, start by reframing questions from Either/Or to What If.

questions

A powerful question will generate curiosity, stimulate reflection, invite possibility, and focus attention. A more powerful question will also stay with you much longer, and touch something deeper inside. Powerful questions such as, “What would you do if you were not afraid?” and “If you were dying, would you worry about this?” make us rethink our priorities, and give us courage and purpose.

In Germany there is often a professional called Director Grundsatzfragen, which translates to Director of Fundamental Questions. It’s their job to be asking questions that have the power to drive systemic innovation and change. To the most experienced, shaping better questions becomes a true art.

Einstein said much of his breakthrough thinking in Relativity came from wondering, “What would the universe look like if I were riding on the end of a light beam at the speed of light?” That might sound like a crazy question, but it’s also the kind of crazy question that brought about breakthrough thinking.

Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, our son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

What You *Have* to Do or What You *Get* to Do

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What are you thinking about when you are thinking about the things you have to do? What are you thinking about when you are thinking about obligation?

Now, what are you thinking about when you are thinking about the things you get to do? What are you thinking about when you are thinking about opportunity?

The difference between these two things is the difference between indifference on the one hand, and energy, power, creativity and excellence on the other. And it’s all in our mind, in how we see the world.

Obligation can creep into our work. If you are in sales, your boss wants to know how many meetings you booked, how many proposals you sent out, how many phone calls you made. If you are a developer, your boss wants to know how many bugs you fixed, how many lines of code you wrote. Whatever role you might be in, the nagging question is about how many deliverables did you ship, how many points did you put on the board, what you have to do.

That constant demand of obligation affects our outlook and our behavior. In your workplace, do you feel like people are judging and evaluating your behavior and actions? Or do you feel like they are honestly curious about your work, giving useful ideas, lifting you up?

Are your ideas encouraged or dismissed? And most of all, do people in the organization talk about who is the smartest, with the most power and budget, or do they talk about who is passionate, and doing really exciting work?

The difference between these two conflicting attitudes is our mindset. People have mindsets, and ways they see circumstances and opportunities. So do entire teams, and whole organizations. The habits of individuals will eventually make up the culture of the whole.

Turning a culture from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset can be done by changing the language we use and the habits we encourage.

We can learn everywhere, nearly all of the time, if we are open to it, and prepared. Books, movies, conversations, situations, schools, and focused research on the internet can all be valuable learning sources, but only if we are open and prepared for the unexpected, the surprising. Because when we recognize surprising events, or changes in circumstances, we develop new mental connections which incite active learning.

The way to build a company and culture that is alive with innovation, collaboration and energy, is by first creating a culture that encourages constant growth and learning.

Cultures of learning have three driving principles:

  1. We can reach high learning standards when the culture provides rich and readily available experiences and resources
  2. We are most successful when we are held responsible for our own learning and have autonomy to pursue our interests
  3. Social interactions, and active practice, are fundamental to learning

While cultures of learning can transform the speed and agility of your business, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes deliberate practice.

Most managers and leaders talk about deliverables and milestones and outputs. If you are a manager or leader in your organization, consider using language which creates an expectation that people take time and mental space for learning on a regular basis. That’s right, create an expectation that everyone learn a little something every day and then share what they learned.

If you encourage constant learning, you will have a much higher performing team in the long run, not just a stream of undifferentiated deliverables. Here’s a framework that will help guide people develop more intentional learning habits.

Schedule the time
For the most consistently creative and diligent people in the world, learning is a sacred time of day. Maybe it’s first thing in the morning. Maybe after exercise, maybe before breakfast, maybe after. People argue it lots of ways. The time of day isn’t necessarily that important when starting out. What’s important is the starting. Later, when the habit gets more ingrained, you can find out which particular times of day work best for you.

Make it easy
Minimize the amount of energy it takes to get started, remove all the hurdles to taking action that we can. If we want to start jogging more, we should lay our gear and our shoes by the bed before we go to sleep. That way, it will be right there staring at us in the morning. If we want to be better guitar players, start by taking the guitar out of the closet and tuning it up, and having it nearby. That way, it’s easier to put up and start playing when the mood strikes.

Prime your mind
Most of the writers, creators and constant learners I know keep a scratch pad handy. I use Evernote, but you can use anything to capture ideas throughout the day. Usually I write short fragments or expressions that mean only something to me. I’ll be in the grocery store, have a little insight, and then write a few words to recollect that moment later. Otherwise it’ll be gone.

Make teaching the goal
Aristotle once said, “Teaching is the highest form of learning.” In order to teach something thoughtfully, deliberately, and effectively, you have to understand it yourself. To have a deeper understanding of something, there is no substitute for research, writing, immersion, and practice of that idea. The very act of trying to write about something you don’t understand is itself an act of learning. Dan Pink is a celebrated public speaker, but I heard him once say that first and foremost, he considers himself a writer, because before he can speak coherently about anything he has to first understand it.

Become a fan
If you want to become better at anything, start as a fan. Follow, study, and friend anyone in that domain that you want to get better at. The first step to getting better is to be a fan of those who are better. And when you find someone who does what you want to do, what you aspire to? Stare at them, study their every move, their every brush stroke, their every breathe, because that’s how to break it down. Once you break down what you love, you can rebuild using those tools, but in your own voice.

Don’t try to make it perfect

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
– Anne Lamott, writer

Building a culture with a growth mindset is building success for the long term. After all, our work should be a journey to love and enjoy, not an obligation.

To learn about how a learning mindset can change your life and your work see:

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab your own copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Your New Idea Is Not Where You Think It Is

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In the 1950s, in rural Oklahoma, at a place called Robbers Cave, several researchers performed an experiment we would find unethical today. They invited twenty-two eleven-year-old boys to participate in a three week camp. The researchers advertised a wholesome summer camp experience. The experience they delivered was very different.

What the researchers actually did was to privately divide the boys into two groups of eleven each, and separate them for the first week so they had no contact, or knowledge, of the other group at all. Isolated, each group developed their own habits, expressions, favorite songs, and even their own group names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, which they painted on flags and T-shirts.

Then, after one week, the counselors informed each group of the existence of the other group. Their immediate reaction was to challenge the other group to sporting contests. The counselors arranged for Tug-of-War, baseball, a treasure hunt, and other sporting contests, and arranged for prizes to be rewarded to the winners.

The Rattlers spent the days leading up the baseball game joyous and confident that they would win. They carefully raked and managed the baseball field in preparation for the game, ultimately placing a “Keep Off” sign next to the field and placing a Rattlers sign near home base.

At the end of the first day, the Eagles had lost the Tug-of-War contest. On their way back to the cabins they noticed the Rattlers sign on the baseball field. They tore it down, stomped on it, and then burned it.

Well, the flag-burning incident started a whole ‘nuther level of battle as the camps took turns raiding the other groups’ cabins at night, stealing and vandalizing. They had food fights, and actual fights. Their animosity toward each other was real and vicious.

At breakfast on the last day of the tournament, the Rattlers sang “The enemy’s coming….” They described the Eagles as a “bunch of cussers,” “poor losers” and “bums.”

The boys who took part in this study back in the 1950s are in their 70s now, but in interviews they all have vivid recollections of the strong group cohesion of their own tribe, and the fierce animosity they held for the other group.

And it was all contrived by researchers. The dynamic of creating in-groups and out-groups was artificially constructed as a demonstration of intergroup conflict and in-group cooperation.

The interesting thing about in-group cohesion is that we almost always see our own in-group as more creative, intelligent, and diverse. And we see out-groups as more homogeneous, and less varied. This perception is amplified when opposing teams are in competitive situations.

When two opposing athletic teams, or product development teams, or sales teams, or companies in similar industries face off, we almost always think of our own in-group as more diverse, varied, flexible, and creative, and we think of the opposing team as all the same.

In one study, 90 sorority members all described their own sorority as having more dissimilar and unique members in their own group, than the other sororities. Basically, they believed that each of their own members were more special than members of other groups. It’s why we love our people. Our group is special.

So when your son does something stupid, and then rationalizes it by saying Joey did it first, you should not say, “So if Joey jumped off a cliff I suppose you would to?” Because he probably would.

Understand that other people in the world are not so different. We all have the same aspirations for health, safety, engaging and interesting work, a sense of purpose, and a sense of community. We may just have our own opinions on how to get there, and then align ourselves with others who think the same way.

Your best source for new ideas, inspiration and innovation is not going to come from asking the same people, from your same in-group, the same questions. Take a chance. Have lunch with someone new. Ask them about their work, their life. Just listen.

To learn more about building new relationships, and adopting a growth mindset see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

How to Recognize the Mindset of Your Company

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Think of a time in your life when you were doing something new, and exciting, and fun. Maybe you were learning a musical instrument, trying a new sport, learning to paint, or even solving a sodoku puzzle. And then, after the thrill was gone, it got hard. It got difficult, and not easy, and not fun. What did you do? Did you quit? Did you press on?

Individuals adopt different types of mindset – sometimes a fixed mindset, and sometimes a growth mindset, which you can identify by their language and behavior. Those with a fixed mindset believe their skills and talents are locked in, immutable and unchanging. Those with a growth mindset believe that, with work and effort, they can grow and learn and develop.

I say sometimes, because both of these mindsets exist within us, at odds with one another all the time. The fixed mindset inside us whispers, “There’s still time to get out of here before someone notices I’m a failure,” or “I can always blame that guy if things go wrong,” or “See, I knew I couldn’t do it.”

The growth mindset within us replies, “True, but I think I can figure this out, or find someone who can help me.”

Here’s an extreme example of a growth mindset. On April 5, 2010, Dan McLaughlin quit his day job as a commercial photographer, and started a journey to become a professional golfer. He had never played golf in his life. Intrigued by the suggestion that 10,000 hours of deliberate and intentional practice could transform him into an elite player, he has set off on a quest to go pro. He’s at 4,000 hours now, has a trainer, a swing doctor, a chiropractor, and his handicap is down to 4. In his photo on twitter, he has “Persistence” written on his forearm.

Growth mindset people tend to work harder on identifying, and correcting, their mistakes. Fixed mindset people often cover, and hide, their mistakes. After all, if they can’t learn and get any better, why not hide their weaknesses?

“I think it’s really important for people to know that almost all of the great people that they admire, fabulously successful people, have had major, even monumental, setbacks that they’ve had to overcome. And that that is part of the human condition, it’s not part of being incompetent.”
– Carol Dweck, Ph.D., author of Mindset

Companies have mindsets too, and you can identify the mindset of an organization, or team, if you know what to look for.

People talk about how smart they are
When team members inside an organization start to talk about how smart someone is, or how talented someone is, look out. That language builds up heroic personalities – people who need to be called in to save the day. Have you ever been in a meeting, and the meeting can’t start because a certain someone hasn’t shown up yet? It’s that palpable feeling that nothing can happen until the hero arrives.

People get defensive about feedback
When you start to see people get defensive about hearing feedback, hiding their mistakes, or assigning blame, you may be in the midst of a bozo explosion. When you hear people object immediately with, “But that’s not true…” or “That’s going to be too much work”, you’re in a place where people believe in protecting their reputation, not growing their capabilities.

People dwell on failures instead of celebrating experiments
A sign of a growth mindset culture is a constant, urgent discussion about conducting, and studying, efforts like small experiments. Up until recently Facebook had a mantra of “move fast and break things,” which was an invitation to their engineers to rapidly prototype, ship, and then study the results. When you see a culture reciting folklore about taboo activities because of some past experience, you know you’re walking in an innovation wasteland.

Most of all, listen for language that describes people as passionate and enthusiastic, instead of brilliant, or gifted and talented.

To learn about how a learning mindset can change your life and your work see:

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Why the Best Leaders Reward Defiance

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In 1959 the Revolutionaries finally forced the Cuban president, and United States ally, Fulgencio Batista into exile. Fidel Castro and his insurgency had taken over. Two years later, John F. Kennedy, the golden boy in the White House, initiated the Bay of Pigs invasion. Surrounded by advisors and cabinet members who believed Kennedy could not possibly make a mistake, Kennedy heard not one objection before launching the failed invasion.

The ill-conceived, poorly-executed, and completely bungled operation to invade Cuba and take over lasted only 6 days, and was an international embarrassment to the United States.

From 1996 through 2001 Enron had been named by Fortune Magazine as “The Most Innovative Company in the World.” Innovative indeed. In 2001, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, former CEO Ken Lay, along with top executives, cooked the books by underreporting debt, and inflating profits. They are in prison now.

Enron had been consistently ranked near the top in quality of management, talent, and innovative products and services. According to one top executive, “We got to the point where we thought we were bullet proof.”

As Carol Dweck describes in her book Mindset, when advisors to the former CEO of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, were in unanimous agreement over a decision, he would say to them, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement…”

Irving Janis, of Yale University, coined the term “Groupthink” and published a book under the same name in 1972. In his research groupthink most easily occurs when three circumstances are present:

  • A strong, persuasive group leader
  • A high level of group cohesion
  • Strong external pressure to make a good decision

Here is a small, yet simple, practice to avoid groupthink, and to spur ingenuity and innovation.

Reward Creative Defiance
David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, had a favorite story of a junior engineer who was asked to abandon work on a new type of monitor he was working on. Instead of dropping the project, the young engineer instead took the monitor to show to customers, and developed an enthusiastic support base for his innovative idea, which convinced the company to proceed developing the product. The company made over thirty-five million dollars on sales of that monitor, and the engineer was awarded a medal “for extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”

One more example…
In the early 1990s, Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks, was then acting as vice president of sales and operations to help expand Starbuck’s store locations. Dini, one of his store managers in Santa Monica, showed Howard a new drink their store invented. Howard agreed the drink was excellent, but the management team back in Seattle was hesitant to adopt it, and asked Dana to stop making it.

Howard called her up, and privately told her to keep making it and monitor sales. That was the birth of Starbucks’ Frappuchino®, which turned out to be one of their most popular—and profitable—drinks.

Creativity, and innovation often occur more rapidly when people are encouraged – rewarded even – by their acts of constructive defiance.

Go. Try something new. Take a risk. What would you do if you were not afraid?

To learn about how questions can drive Innovation and Transform Mindsets see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Better Decisions Begin with More Beautiful Questions

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Recently our family traveled to the Virgin Islands for a vacation. Our daily choices were pretty much reading, swimming, hiking, and sunsets. And snorkeling in beautiful warm water with beautiful, strange creatures.

Almost every day we would pick a beach, pack a lunch, towels and swimming gear, and head off on a small adventure. And each time our daughter Annie (10) went in the water, her eyes got wide, and she got excited about the fish, and coral, and turtles. She would come up gasping for breath, and ask questions. So many questions. Mostly questions I couldn’t answer.

Four year olds will ask roughly 300 questions a day. Yet we know from research that constant questioning likely drops off as kids gets older. Parents can get exasperated by the questions, and then kids grow up and take a job, and then their bosses get annoyed by the questions. Instead of listening, the boss will say “That’s not how we do things around here.”

It turns out that the creativity of American kids has been slowly declining over the past few decades. Researchers have been tracking it since the late 1950s.

Back in the 1950s Ellis Paul Torrance developed something he called a “Torrance Test” which is a series of creativity tests in which participants are asked to think of different ways to use objects (“How many ways can you use this paper clip?”), or compose different solutions to situations (“If your school closed, how would you complete your education?”) or hypothesize circumstances (“What happened when the cow jumped over the moon?”)

Questions are the basis of innovation, the basis of personal change. More beautiful questions drive quality, and excellence, and demand more beautiful answers.

“Without a good question, a good answer has no place to go.”
– Clayton Christensen

Try this three-part process, developed by Warren Berger, to move from stuck to unstuck, from stagnant to inventive.

First ask Why?
Second only to Thomas Edison for naming patents, Edwin Land was the Steve Jobs of the 1940s. Brilliant, inventive, and constantly curious, the two-time Harvard dropout was on vacation with his family in New Mexico when he decided to gather his family for a photograph using a contemporary film camera. Land took the picture, and then his daughter asked to see it. He explained about dark rooms, and processing film, and so forth.

His daughter asked, “Why do we have to wait? You already took the picture.”

Next ask What If?
Land once described to Steve Jobs how he envisioned the Polaroid completely, before he ever embarked on the process, “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.” The exercise here is to see the potential, the possibility, in your mind. Don’t ask How, that comes next. In this phase, ask only “If it were possible, what would it look like?”

The question Land asked was, “What if you could somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?”

Now ask How?
To answer “What if you could have a darkroom inside a camera?” Land had to draw upon everything he knew in chemistry, engineering, optics, and mechanics. He sought out his colleagues, friends and researchers to mine their knowledge. He reached deep into his network, described his vision, and enlisted anyone with expertise willing to contribute.

The How part has many many questions, such as “How do we do this in color?” and “How do we make it lighter?” and “How do we keep the chemicals from evaporating?”

Why is about seeking to understand. What if is about envisioning possibilities. How is about doing, executing, and creating. Too often we start with How or What. Don’t start with How, start with Why.

And if you can take a few F-bombs, and colorful language, here is Louis CK on kids and questions. Amusing. Here is the Louis CK video. Enjoy.

To learn about how questions can drive Innovation and Transform Mindsets see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

No, Time is Not Money

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How would you answer these questions?

  • Would you prefer a less expensive apartment with a longer commute, or a more expensive apartment closer to work?
  • Would you buy a more expensive direct flight, or a less expensive flight with a layover?
  • Would you choose a job with a higher starting salary, which required more hours of your time?
  • Do you pay to park in the garage convenient to your destination, or park for free farther away?

These are a few of the questions Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues at The University of British Columbia asked of participants to help understand how our priorities affect how happy we feel. In the study the authors found that those who prioritize time over money expressed a greater willingness to use their money to have more time, and often spend that time in more enjoyable activities.

The researchers enlisted a large sample of people (2303 students) to try to understand the how prioritizing time versus money affects our level of subjective well-being.

“Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who prioritized time reported higher subjective well-being compared to participants who prioritized money.”

Once the authors found that a large sample of university students who prioritize time over money were happier, they worried that sampling only college kids wasn’t a reasonable representation of the greater population. After all, college students don’t have to worry about money too much, right? It would make sense that they would care more about their time.

So next they enlisted over 1200 working American adults with wide social, ethnic, political, and financial diversity to replicate the study. Once again, they found a consistent correlation between valuing time over money, and an increased sense of well-being. Interestingly, those who valued time over money tended to also maximize their free time engaged in highly enjoyable activities such as socializing with friends, and exercising.

Toward the end of the research paper, the authors concede that these priorities likely change over time, as our life circumstances change, and more research needs to be done to understand whether time priorities become easier after financial obligations are met.

Here is one life hack Elizabeth Dunn offers that does work. Instead of our common behavior of “enjoy now, pay later” enabled by our credit banking system, Dunn suggests trying “pay now, consume later”. When you pre-pay for the lunch, the latte, or even the vacation, by the time you actually consume and experience it, it feels free and is more enjoyable.

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

You. Put It in Your Work.

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Are you funny? Sarcastic? Witty? A dog lover? Maybe your passion is coaching youth sports. Or maybe it’s a cup of tea and a sci-fi novel on the couch. Maybe it’s Downton Abbey or maybe it’s The Walking Dead. Maybe it’s snowboarding with your kids. Whatever it is. Whatever gets your groove on, put it in your work.

People have passions and joys in their life, yet do stale, tired work. We get stuck trying to do the work we think someone else wants, instead of the work that inspires us. We get trapped thinking that if we hide who we are, we will fit in better, and be more likable. The opposite is true. When we conceal valuable parts of our identity we begin to feel alienated from those around us, and alienated from our work.

Some people come alive Friday night on the dance floor when the lights go down and the beats go up. And yet give boring, sad, sales presentations on Monday morning. They’re not boring, sad people, they just switched off their true self when the time came to work.

Here’s a challenge. Take what you love and put it in your work. Yes, you might alienate a few people. You might turn some people off with your basketball analogies, or comparisons to cooking, or your stories about hiking in the Swiss alps. (Please no more cat videos.) But you will be understood. People will get you. They’ll understand where you’re coming from, what you value, and what you hold dear in your life. And because of that, they will respect and appreciate your work more.

What if writing good clean code is similar to your passion for gardening. What if building a marketing plan is a lot like a carefully planned hike with friends. And maybe killer graphic design is a lot like a great conversation with an old friend. Put it in your work.

Emerging generations are increasingly more assertive in expressing their identities, proudly, openly. And that’s a good thing. According to a recent study from Deloitte, when people within a diverse and multigenerational workforce begin to express their whole self at work, they begin to look past differences and start to focus on business results.

Millennials are refusing to check their identities at the doors of organizations today, and they strongly believe these characteristics bring value to the business outcomes and impact.
– Christie Smith and Stephanie Turner, Deloitte Leadership Center for Inclusion

When people within the organization become less concerned with concealing who they are, they start to become more interested, and active, in developing deeper and more meaningful collaborations with those across the organization to drive innovation and business results.

The result is an environment of psychological safety. In psychologically safe teams, members feel accepted and respected, and as a result feel safer to take risks, to be more audacious in their work.

Bring more of you to your work, and encourage those around you to also.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October but you can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

The Words You Use Can Change Your Life

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Our words matter. We can lose more weight, save more money, smile more, and make a greater impact on the world around us simply by changing the words we use.

The language we use counts. The words, phrases, and verb tenses we use affect the way we see the world and the decisions we make every day. The language we use interacting with other people doesn’t just impact them, it impacts our own thinking and behavior.

As Keith Chen illustrates in his research, languages around the world which are “tenseless” have societies in which people save more money for retirement, are less obese, smoke less, and use more condoms. In general they have healthier, and more stable, economies and cultures than those countries which use “tense-based” languages. As Chen points out, Chinese is a “future-less” language in that one can say, “Yesterday it rain,” “Now it rain,” “Tomorrow it rain,” which all sound very strange to an English speaker. Similarly in Finnish, the speaker would say, “Today it snows.” and “Tomorrow it snows.”

As a result of our English “futured” language, we interpret the future as more distant, more remote, and less immediate. So we make decisions which give less merit to our future self. Whereas in “future-less” languages, our current and future self are the same, and because they are the same we make more conscientious and thoughtful decisions to take care of our future self.

Here’s another example of how our language shapes how we think. In the Australian aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre language, they don’t use directional expressions such as “left”, “right”, or “forward”. Instead they use sixteen unique compass directional expressions equivalent to our “North”, or “Southwest” and even “North-northeast”. As a result they have a heightened sense of spatial awareness and an ability to navigate accurately even when in foreign and unknown territories.

Directional expressions such as left, right, or forward are all egocentric. That is, these directional expressions are relative to you, the individual, whereas North or Southwest are absolute directions, which force the individual to consider themselves in the context of where they are at the moment.

Using directional language which is not relative to which direction you are facing is an ego-less understanding of geography. As a result, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers have a much more refined sense of spatial orientation and direction.

And there are language shifts we can make in our everyday interactions that will make measurable differences. We can shift from the language of complaint to the language of commitment, shift from blame to responsibility, and shift from the language of helplessness to using words that focus on what we can control.

In their book Words Can Change Your Brain, authors Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman demonstrate that the words we use can, quite literally, change our brains:

“As our research has shown, the longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain. …which changes your perception of yourself and the people you interact with.
A positive view of yourself will bias you toward seeing the good in others, whereas a negative self-image will include you toward suspicion and doubt. Over time the structure of your thalamus will also change in response to your conscious words, thoughts, and feelings, and we believe that the thalamic changes affect the way in which you perceive reality.”

If we are all making our own realities, let’s make it a good one.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes and his new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion, October 4, 2016).

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com