Why Successful People Don’t Believe in Comparisons

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“Comparison is the death of joy.”
– Mark Twain

I don’t mean to say successful people don’t believe in comparison, as in they don’t believe it exists. Rather, the most successful people reframe comparison as learning opportunities instead of competition.

Named the “next Pelé” and going pro at the age of 14, Freddy Adu, was hailed by Major League Soccer as the savior of the game. Within a few short years, Adu became the definition of unrealized potential. After being drafted by DC United, and having a lackluster season, Adu knocked about in leagues from Portugal to Monaco to Greece to Turkey, then back again to the MLS. He currently plays for the Las Vegas Lights Football Club, and is still searching for his footing on the field.

“I’m not going to lie, that stuff bothers me. It hurts.” Adu told Goal USA in an exclusive interview. “In the end, I can’t control what people say. It wasn’t my choice or decision to be compared to Pelé when I came into the league.”

“What has happened is I’ve gotten to the point where I’m basically scared of failure right now. That’s the honest truth.”
– Freddy Adu, soccer player

Alissa Quart learned to read at 3 years old. At 7 she had written a novel. By 17 she was winning creative writing competitions. As she writes in her book Hothouse Kids, her father cultivated a strong sense of academic expectation, and as a result she writes that she developed a feeling of failure when she didn’t live up to the demands. She was constantly compared to, and expected to, outperform her peers.

“Designating children as gifted, especially extremely gifted, and cultivating that giftedness may be not only a waste of money, but positively harmful.”
– Alissa Quart, author Hothouse Kids

Believing we are gifted, or special, is comparing ourselves to others. When we tell ourselves that we are somehow endowed with special gifts or skills, we are comparing our skills to our peers, and it only serves to denigrate either ourselves or someone else. It’s the very nature of comparisons.

When we compare ourselves to others, we create a sense of superiority and pride within ourselves, and contempt for another. Even worse, we can develop schadenfreude, a sense of pleasure and joy at the misfortune of others.

These thoughts are the domain of the fixed mindset – the belief that our skills, our intelligence, our capacity for invention or creativity is limited and fixed. When we believe that our skills are fixed we lock ourselves into a comparative hierarchy that only serves to further limit or potential.

Inversely when we adopt a learner mindset, we see those as more talented as opportunities to learn. The “genius effect” is when we see another as having greater skill and are inspired by it. When inspired, with an open mind, we study that talent, we are fascinated by that skill. We become transfixed by the talent we see and work to break it down into chunks we can recreate ourselves.

“If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers. When I say ‘observing,’ I’m not talking about passively watching. I’m talking about staring — the kind of raw, unblinking, intensely absorbed gazes you see in hungry cats or newborn babies.”
– Daniel Coyle, author The Talent Code

When you see an amazing presentation, an incredible athletic performance, an astonishing work of art, don’t compare yourself, instead study it, be inspired by it. Break it down, deconstruct it, figure it out, and then make it your own. That’s the art of the learning mindset.

To learn about how a learning mindset can change your life and your work 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) is a Washington Post bestseller! You can order a copy for yourself.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: shawn@mindscaling.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Believe in Your Goals, but Earn Your Gifts

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You’ve probably heard of the Pygmalion effect. It’s when people start to escalate their performance because of the expectations others have of them. It’s named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion who fell in love with an ivory sculpture he created. He loved his sculpture so much that he wished her alive as his wife, and so it happened.

That, of course, is a myth. But the phenomenon of willing high performance in others is real. In classic experiments over forty years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated that teachers in classrooms can elevate the performance of their students simply by believing that the kids are destined to be high performers. In the study, researchers gave fake IQ tests to elementary students, and then lied to the teachers that 20% of their students were identified as “intellectual bloomers”.

It worked. The teachers began to hold a false belief that specific students in their classroom were intellectually gifted, and destined for high performance. As a result, the teachers started to create a more nurturing environment to help those “intellectual bloomers” excel. The lie created a false belief that 20% of their students had elevated IQs and were poised for intellectual greatness.

The teachers believed in the potential of their students and intentionally created circumstances to enhance their success.

The teachers did this by deliberately “creating a warm and friendly environment for students, providing students with opportunities to practice their skills, and providing students with performance-based feedback.”

More recent studies find the same is true when it comes to building high-performance cultures in the workplace. When leaders hold high expectations of those around them, they tend to offer more learning opportunities, provide more consistent feedback, and hold people to a high level of accountability.

There’s one critical factor in all of this high-expectations business: Never tell them they are great. Don’t tell the kids they are brilliant, and don’t tell your colleagues they are inherently gifted and destined to thrive.

When we tell someone they are brilliant, gifted, and remarkable, we create an illusion that they have some inherent, hard-wired advantage over others. So they start to self-evaluate and compare themselves to others and try to identify their edge. That comparison and self-scrutiny can be crippling.

The world is littered with stories of those who choke in the face of high expectations. Remember Michelle Kwan, the American skating prodigy? Having won four world titles heading into the 2002 Winter Olympics, critics universally picked Kwan to wear the gold medal before the competition even began. Any threat would certainly only come from rival talents Irina Slutskaya and Kwan’s own teammate Sasha Cohen.

But they all skated tight, self-consciously. They skated as if they were obligated to win. Instead it was no-name Sarah Hughes, who barreled on to the ice and delivered a vibrant, unrestrained, and confident four minutes of joyous choreography to the deafening roar of approval in the stadium. Sarah never believed that she deserved to win, or was expected to win – only that with pluck, dedication and work, a win was an achievable goal. Her coach, Robin Wagner said in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, “Our feeling is, you go for the gold,” Wagner said. “It’s a feasible expectation.”

It turned out to be Hughes’ one, and only, big time win. Only a year later Hughes retired from skating on her own terms, satisfied and elated with her short career.

Believe in your goals, earn your gifts.

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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

Being Available Is Not the Same as Being Engaged

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Many things we chase after in our lives are elastic. The amount of twitter followers we chase, the number of likes on an instagram post, the amount of money we make, and the number of fitbit steps we take each day. We think these numbers can just keep going up and up if we work hard enough, chase it hard enough.

But our time is finite. By age 50 we have had just over 18,000 days to share. That may sound like a lot or it may sound like a little depending on your point of view, but one thing is true: that’s all the days there are. No more. Which is why, in a very real sense, our time is the most precious gift in the world. And time spent focused and engaged pays dividends. It’s true in almost all aspects of life.

Make no mistake. Time measured merely in quantity, not quality, can be ineffectual, and sometimes detrimental. Offering lots of your time to your colleagues, your friends, your partner, or your kids, when you are distracted, nervous or stressed-out, has a negative effect.

According to a 2015 study on parental involvement, over the past forty years, the time invested in our kids has been going up. In general that’s a good thing. And for it to be a great thing, the time spent needs to have quality and meaning. It turns out that when the researchers measure impact based on the sheer volume of time spent with kids, there is almost no relationship to how our kids turn out – not in reading and math scores, not in emotional well-being, and not in behavior.

“I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents’ time and children’s outcomes. . . . Nada. Zippo,” – Melissa Milkie, Sociologist, University of Toronto

That comprehensive report got a lot of parents upset and angry at Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte because they had quit their jobs, compromised their own sleep, and distanced themselves from their own well-being to spend time with their kids. But time spent with others when we are exhausted, stressed and feeling alienated from our professional lives isn’t time well-spent.

The key variable in the study when making a difference in the lives of our kids is the amount of time spent being simply “available” versus being “engaged”. Being available isn’t the same as being engaged. In the study there was, however, one exception to the “time spent” finding. Researchers did find that time spent being simply accessible and available did have a positive impact on the behavioral outcomes during the teenage years.

Being present with others is an act of compassion. And compassion and kindness is the most sought-after trait in the human experience. Researcher David Buss studied 10,000 people in 37 countries to figure out the most powerful attractor in a lifelong mate. It wasn’t money, and it wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t even intelligence.

The #1 characteristic desired around the world when looking for a long-term relationship is kindness and compassion to others. Give your time, your focus and your energy to those around you. It’s a small act of leadership we can all do.

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    Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

    Last summer, my 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. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Do You Know When to Disobey?

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What if your boss asks you to do something you think is wrong? What if there are practices your company engages in that are just ridiculous, or redundant? Or worse, what if there is an institutionalized process in your company that you think is flat-out unethical?

Maybe you work in a look-the-other-way culture, or a get-it-done-at-all-costs culture. What do you do?

According to a survey of 1600 managers in the UK, unethical behavior at work is common and widespread. In the survey, these managers reported the top ten questionable behaviors include:

  1. Taking shortcuts / accepting or encouraging shoddy work: 72%
  2. Lying to hide mistakes: 72%
  3. Badmouthing colleagues: 68%
  4. Blaming colleagues (when you don’t get your work done): 67%
  5. Slacking off when no one is watching: 64%
  6. Lying to hide colleagues’ mistakes: 63%
  7. Taking credit for colleagues’ work: 57%
  8. Calling in sick (when you’re not): 56%
  9. Lying about skills and experience: 54%
  10. Stealing low value items from the company: 52%

So, what do you do when your boss asks, or simply suggests, you do something inappropriate? Here’s is what people at some of the highest performing companies do: they disobey – intelligently, politely, and firmly.

Intelligent disobedience is a term that originated in the dog training world, and has migrated over to business culture. In Ira Chaloff’s new book Intelligent Disobedience, he describes what can go horribly wrong when people blindly follow orders, and inversely, how high-performing organizations create cultures in which individuals think for themselves.

Training guide dogs can take up to three years, and the really hard stuff comes at about 18 months when trainers introduce concept of intelligent disobedience. To teach a guide dog to cross the street safely with a handler is pretty straightforward.

First you teach the dog to stop at the down curb, which indicates to the handler that you are at the edge of the street. Then you teach the dog to respond to a “forward” command to lead the handler to the other side of the street. No problem.

But training guide dogs to “intelligently disobey” is tricky work. What if you want to teach the dog to willfully contradict the command, and not lead when a car is approaching? Trainers will ride in an approaching vehicle and use nerf bats or squirt guns to gently correct them. It takes time and patience, but eventually guide dogs learn to assess the situation, and decide for themselves if the path is clear and safe to cross the street.

Many guide dogs start the training process, and most don’t make it through to final graduation. One of the biggest reasons guide dogs washout during the training process is they follow every single command without question.

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.
– Jim Hightower

In business settings, it can be tough to contradict your boss. Often, managers reflexively don’t like dissent. They may view it as insubordination. As Chaloff points out in his book, “…if obeying is likely to produce more harm than good, disobeying is the right move, at least until we have further clarified the situation and the order.”

Kirk O. Hansen, professor of social ethics at Santa Clara University suggests starting with a non-confrontational approach that might point out the questionable ethics of the order, such as “Do we have a policy on that?” or “Under what circumstances would we normally destroy documents?”

According to Chaloff, if ultimately you can’t stop your boss from his intentions and actions, at least you can choose not to participate yourself. Chaloff suggests you don’t step off that curb with him into oncoming danger, accept any short-term consequences, and focus on long-term integrity and character.

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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

Do You Have a Job or a Calling?

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There’s nothing quite so inspiring as seeing someone embrace their work in the pursuit of excellence, or in service of a greater mission. And there’s nothing quite so moving as witnessing small acts of excellence, generosity, and kindness. Often the most moving and inspiring stories are about competitors who become comrades, or everyday people taking deep pride in their work.

There’s this beautiful story of high school runner Meghan Vogel, who helps her fallen competitor, Arden McMath, cross the finish line of the 2012 Ohio State Track meet. And then there’s this story of quiet dedication and inspiration Martin Seligman recounts in his book Authentic Happiness…

Years ago Seligman was visiting a dear friend in the hospital. His friend Bob Miller was a vibrant, joyful man, and at the age of eighty-one still an avid runner, tennis player, and gregarious person. Miller had been hit by a truck while running, and now lay in a coma for the third day in a hospital bed.

The neurologist gently asked Seligman to consider Miller’s “advance directive” order, and consider removing the life support system. Seligman was distraught considering the possibility that his friend would never rise again. He asked for a moment of quiet, the doctor left the room, and Seligman sat down in a chair to watch the orderly working in the room.

The orderly was quietly rearranging art on the walls. He took down a calendar, pinned up a Monet print, and then took two Winslow Homer prints from his bag and placed them with consideration on the walls. Next to Miller’s bedside he taped a photograph of a Peace rose.

Seligman gently asked the orderly what he was doing, and the man replied, “My job? I’m an orderly on this floor. But I bring in new prints and photos every week. You see, I’m responsible for the health of all these patients. Take Mr. Miller here. He hasn’t woken up since they brought him in here. But when he does, I want to make sure he sees beautiful things right away.”

In Martin Luther King Jr’s “Street Sweeper” speech he said,

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry… if you can’t be the sun, be a star. It isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best at whatever you are.”

Some people have jobs, some have careers, and some have callings. A calling is a pursuit of something greater than oneself, and often the path which creates the greatest inspiration for others.

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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

Only You Can Own Your Own Engagement

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“Seek small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens. And when it happens, it lasts.”
– John Wooden

I recently spent a half-day working with executives from a global technology company. Our goal was to develop ways to heighten the engagement and drive of their team members. The executives in the room were responsible for immense teams. The twenty or so executives assembled that day were responsible for the work and livelihood of thousands of people around the world.

To kick things off, we reviewed results from a recent company-wide engagement survey. The results were so-so. While the ratings were fairly high in response to the question about being proud to work for a famous and well-known brand, the results were poor regarding levels of personal engagement, and also low regarding a sense that the company leadership was open, accessible and communicative.

Many respondents claimed there was a lack of communication between the higher levels and the lower levels in the company. The survey revealed that many people in the company felt like they were left in the dark, out of the loop.

One of the participants in the survey commented anonymously, “Now what are the executives going to do about the lack of engagement around here?”

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”

It Starts with Choice
There is a simple truth about people who become great leaders. They step up. It doesn’t start at the top. You can’t sit around and wait for the culture to change, or the engagement to start magically happening. You have to make it happen. It starts with you and your own personal attitudes and behaviors.

Yes, it is true that your manager often defines the personality of the company for you. You experience the company through the quality of your relationship with your boss. And it’s also true that the greatest attractor of outside talent is great managers.

But this doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to be accountable, and to be as present as you can in your work. Each of us must accept responsibility for our own “engagement.” A manager only creates the circumstances and the opportunity for you to do your best work.

Make it Easy on Yourself
The expression “activation energy” was coined 150 years ago by a chemist. The terms refers to the minimal amount of energy required to stimulate an interaction between available reactants. Make things easy on yourself. If you want to start jogging more, lay our your gear and your shoes by the bedside before you go to sleep. That way, it will be right there staring at your in the morning. And if you’ve been wanting to become a better public speaker, block off time on your calendar that will alert you to focus on that activity for just thirty minutes.

When you make things easier to begin, you lower the amount of energy it takes to get started. And if it takes less energy to get started, you are more likely to do it.

“Turns out it’s not where, but what you think, that really matters.”
– Dave Matthews

Not Where, But What You Think
Hip workplaces and free cafeterias are cool, but ultimately it’s not where – but what – we think, and how we behave, that matters. I recently had an interview with Paul Hiltz, CEO of Springfield Medical Center. The staff of two different hospital systems came together and moved into a brand new five hundred million dollar state-of-the-art facility in Springfield, Ohio.

Thinking perhaps the new building was somehow inspirational to the staff, I asked him what role the new facility played in helping to bring about high levels of engagement and patient focus. He explained that the new hospital, equipment, and facilities were all very nice, and definitely increased their ability to effectively treat patients, but it was not a big player in the developing the collaboration and camaraderie of the staff.

In his opinion, the facilities are a nice-to-have advantage in their work, but the deep and meaningful team collaboration and heightened patient care came from conscientious work of the staff and leadership, it didn’t come from simply working in a fancy building.

When we point fingers at the management, or the CEO, or this crappy workplace, we are placing blame on people and circumstances. To begin a path to engagement, fulfillment and effectiveness, we have to own our own engagement.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, and the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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

Four Actions That Will Truly Motivate You

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What drives you at work? Is it the quarterly bonus? Is it simple praise and recognition from your colleagues and boss?

Maybe it’s a sense that your colleagues have your back, that you’ll get the support and resources you need in your work. Wait, maybe it’s a clear sense of direction and goals, that your team knows where the heck it’s going. Or maybe it’s a sense that day by day, you are making measurable progress in work that is meaningful to you.

I asked that multiple choice question last week to a room full of executives at a leadership retreat. No one budged. They knew it was a trick question. It’s a trick question because organizations have to get all of these factors right. Without fair pay, there is a deep sense of inequity and loyalty erosion. Without clear goals, people feel adrift and without purposeful direction. Without praise, people feel neglected.

But one factor outweighs the rest. Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile and her colleague Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in 7 companies to come to the qualified conclusion that the most valuable work motivator is a sense that we are making progress in work that is meaningful to us. When you signed up to run that marathon, you definitely had a clear goal in mind, but it was the daily grind of making incremental progress that kept you going. That quarterly bonus is nice, but it’s not going to make you stay.

When Amabile and her colleagues conducted that research about five years ago, only 5% of leaders surveyed understood that meaningful progress is our most powerful motivator. I interviewed Ms. Amabile when her book came out, and she said her goal is to tip that figure over 50%.

It’s important to point out that while praise, incentives, equitable pay, interpersonal support, and clear goals are all important, they are also all extrinsic motivators. These motivators come from the outside, from someone else. A sense of satisfaction in making progress in meaningful work is an intrinsic motivator, it’s a sense of joy and satisfaction that comes from within.

“Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”
– Jim Collins

Creating a sense of meaningful progress is something that’s within our control. It doesn’t require external validation or reward. Here are a few ways to stoke your sense of meaningful progress:

Express creativity: Go ahead, add a flourish. Put your signature on it. Make it your own. When you dig a little deeper and put your own creative accent on a project or situation, you will take personal pride and ownership of it. It becomes meaningful to you personally.

Revitalize dormant relationships: Nothing is so marvelous as gaining new insights from old friends to fuel your efforts. When you take time to proactively reach out to those people in your work and life whom you haven’t connected with in a while, it revitalizes both of you. Because while you probably have a rich history you can catch up on, you can also share your ideas and projects over the past year and accelerate each other’s work.

Assume leadership: Take responsibility. Step up. Assuming leadership can be terrifying. You may feel scrutinized, uncertain, and out of your element. And that’s a good thing. Pushing yourself to the edges of your capacity in leading meetings, projects, and interactions will help you grow as a leader. Just remember that people are cheering for you. It may feel like you are being evaluated and dissected, but the truth is most people in the world assume best intentions, are grateful you stepped in to lead, and are cheering for the success of you and the whole project.

Be of service: Remember, the other motivators must come from the outside, from someone else. Your most powerful motivator comes from within, so the real question to constantly be asking is not what can I gain, but what can I contribute. Not what can I get, but what can I give. Not how is this person hurting or even helping my goals, but rather how can I help this person achieve their goals.

Above all, avoid comparisons. If you wish to be smarter than anyone else, then you never will be, because someone will always have more degrees, accolades and a higher Mensa score than you. And if the goal is to be rich, you will forever feel poor. And if the goal is fame you need only look to the Kardashians to agree there is no amount of personal disclosure to keep up with them.

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Shawn Hunter is the Founder of Mindscaling and author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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

You Almost Choked. Don’t Choke, Learn.

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A few years ago I was the invited keynote for a private conference in Toronto. It was one of my first big events. I knew the event director and was deeply grateful for the invitation. I prepared diligently. The ballroom was packed to the walls. I had published my first book and was just starting my work seriously to share ideas on stage. I was knowledgable, rehearsed, confident, and relaxed. On stage just before me was a professional comedian. She was disarming and fun. She even sang. She was killing it. The crowd was totally enjoying her opening.

I was sitting near the stage next to the technician who was handling the audio-visual stuff. The comedian started to introduce me. She was warm, vibrant. She made a few jokes about me being American. Everyone laughed. She was just finishing my introduction, when the techie guy next to me said, “Uhh, hang on, your remote and the slides aren’t working. Mmm, just go. Go and I’ll fix it in a minute.”

Good lord. The room was clapping for me. I gulped. My opening set piece was an in-depth story choreographed with a cascade of photographs and rich imagery. I designed the first few minutes to immerse the audience in a tale that would be a metaphor for my key points. But now I had no visuals.

I smiled. I walked the length of the stage to burn a few seconds, and said some ridiculous nothing comment about the wonderful comedian. I had no idea what I just said. My head was clamoring. I could feel my field of vision start to close. I glanced at the technician, who clearly did not have his shit together yet. Or maybe that was me.

I took a deep breath, smiled, found some friendly eyes in the audience, and launched into my story anyway. It was probably only a few seconds of dead air but it felt like an eternity. It worked. As I built the story, I warmed into it. I opened up, revisiting and punctuating each step of the journey. I started to own it. People leaned in. I had just jumped off a cliff and somehow found the rip cord.

I once had an interview with the magnificent speaker, writer, and marketing guru Seth Godin, who said if he ever gets that rising panic feeling, he takes it as a reminder that he’s in exactly the right place. He knows he is in a high-opportunity moment for learning and growth. What he means is that when your palms get sweaty, when your heart rate jumps, when your hair stands on end and you get nauseous, these are all symptoms of panic. And also the conditions for challenge, opportunity, and growth if you choose to see it that way.

Breathe
It’s true. The first thing to do to lower your heart rate, calm your nerves, and open your mind again, is to breathe. Breathing is the body’s built-in stress reliever. It’s ground zero to rebuild your calm. Simply breathing deeply can do everything from resetting your heart rate to changing the chemical composition of your blood. In the practice of yoga, focused breathing is called pranayama, which literally means “control of the life force.”

Rehearse Excellence
greatestcatchDid you see this last year? Odell Beckham, Jr. made, what many argue, the greatest wide receiver catch of all time. It looks like a magic trick out of Cirque du Soleil. But here’s the thing: he worked on that exact type of catch over and over and over in practice. He didn’t just summon that move on the spot, unrehearsed. He spent many, many hours preparing for that exact moment.

Competence Creates Confidence
Want to summon confidence? Power posing certainly helps. Amy Cuddy, the TED goddess of Wonder Woman posing has dedicated the last few years of her life to spreading the gospel of striking a power pose. And it does work. When you stand like Superman, you get a shot of dopamine and oxytocin, which spreads a warm cocktail of confidence throughout your brain. But it’s a stop-gap. It’s the duck-tape of confidence. Go ahead and use it, but real, sustainable confidence is found through developing competence. Tough love, but nothing substitutes for hard work, perseverance and dedicated practice.

And when in doubt, get pronoid. Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is the belief that the world, and everyone around you, is conspiring for your success.

[Originally published here for Huffington Post.]

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Shawn Hunter is the Founder of Mindscaling and author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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

We See the Company Through the Lens of Who We Work For

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Whatever industry you are in, you have competition. The only thing that differentiates you from anyone else in the long term is the people inside the company.

I recently started a new business building beautiful eLearning courses specifically so thought-leaders, authors and speakers could scale their minds. I thought it was unique, one-of-a-kind. I thought no one had ever thought of this idea. Of course I was wrong.

I only had to start talking about our new company and service to someone in the industry, and sure enough they would say to me, “Oh, that sounds a little like so and so. Have you heard of them?” And it’s true, we do have competition, but our secret sauce is our people.

And the bigger and more successful your business is, the more likely you are to have competition. You probably have a slightly different product, slightly different pricing, and maybe slightly different service. But ultimately what makes your brand X different from brand Y is the people in the company.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Generation Y is expected to keep their jobs for just two years, only about half the amount of time spent in professional jobs by the current American worker. According to Experience.com, seventy per cent of recent college graduates reported leaving their first job within two years. “For millennials, it is more a matter of career exploration than climbing the traditional ladder,” said Emily He, CMO of the talent management company SABA.

But why do they quit? According to a new survey by Ernst & Young of 9,700 full-time employees in the world’s big eight economies – the United States, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, China and Japan – the top three reasons are:

  1. Stagnant wage growth
  2. Lack of career development opportunities
  3. Excessive overtime and inability to escape work

But the data suggests that retaining top talent is more complicated than simply giving aggressive pay raises, installing ping pong tables, or offering to pay for night classes. The entire system is creating stressful environments around the clock. From the time we wake up to check email at our bedside smartphone, to marathon meetings, lack of sleep, and “finding time for me,” professionals today are under more duress than ever before.

Consider, almost half (46%) of managers globally are working more than 40 hours a week. Millennials (64%) and Gen X (68%) have the highest levels of spouses working full time as well – doubling the stress of balancing home and child obligations.

Almost 70% of Millennials and Gen X claimed that “getting enough sleep,” “finding time for me.” and “balancing work and home life” were becoming problematic. And it’s not just the American white collar worker. According to the study, things are even worse in Brazil, India, UK, Japan, and Germany.

I had an interview with Tom DiDonato, Chief Human Resources Officer at Lear Corporation. He says it takes constant tweaking, and adjusting. He says there is no magic formula for balancing pay, flexibility, special benefits, supporting educational opportunities, or early-release Fridays.

He says there is only one secret weapon to attracting and retaining top talent.

“Ultimately people view the company through the lens of the person they work for. They don’t say ‘I work for Company XYZ, and even though my boss, and their boss aren’t role models for me, I really love the company.’ I doubt you will ever hear that…

If you view your boss as a role model, you probably think really well of the company. I believe that to my core. That’s the one thing you don’t have to tweak… keep getting great leaders. Keep developing great leaders. Keep having those people in your company that others view as role models, and you’ll have that sustainable culture that attracts the kind of talent that everybody is vying for.”

Grow the greatest leaders from the inside, and the strongest talent will come knocking to work for them.

____________________________________________________

Shawn Hunter is the Founder of Mindscaling and author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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

Do You Panic or Thrive?

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On January 29, 1981, Steve Callahan woke abruptly from a dead sleep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on his little 21-foot self-made sloop. There had been a mighty crash. In the seconds before he could stand into action, the boat was already starting to list and fill with water.

Quickly, within a minute or two he was able to deploy his self-inflating life raft and gather a few items as the boat sank. He leapt to his inflatable to discover a couple small airtight compartments within the sailboat were keeping it afloat for a few moments longer.

He made a small joke to himself about how lucky he was, and calmly used the opportunity to swim inside the sinking boat to retrieve some valuable items – a flotation cushion, a sleeping bag, an emergency kit, food, a spear gun, a solar still, and a few other things.

Over the next 76 days, as he drifted 1800 miles west, and as his body became covered in saltwater sores and sunburns, and as his raft was set upon by sharks, and as his radio failed to signal rescue, and as his body deteriorated, each evening he took time to admire the beauty of the night sky.

According to Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, when disaster strikes, the difference between those who succumb to panic and those who don’t is this:

“They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation… They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.”

One thing Steve Callahan remembers vividly from the episode is that he was very calm, hyper-aware, and focused throughout the sinking event from first impact to minutes later as he watched his boat slide under the waves. He can recount his every action. He can play the tape in his mind of every nuance of the event.

Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, continues this thought:

“The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly….”

When things go badly, those who survive move away from emotion and toward a state of resolve.

*****

From Paralysis to Resolve

Stress is a response to a trigger. That trigger can be a challenge, a circumstance, a rapidly changing environment, or even a negative thought. But the extent to which the trigger induces distress or positive challenge is largely up to us. How we react to these triggers can be the difference between negative stress and positive challenge.

As Shawn Achor, researcher on positive psychology, puts it “stress is the extent to which an individual believes that the effects of stress are either enhancing or debilitating.”

In Kelly McGonigal’s research over an eight-year period, those people who experience high levels of persistent stress had a 43% higher mortality rate. BUT that was only true for those people who also believed that stress has negative health consequences. For those who embrace stress and use it as fuel to convert into positive pressure, stress has little or no negative health consequences.

Pressure can yield excellence. The difference between those who become paralyzed and succumb to stress, and those who interpret obstacles as something to overcome, is Resolve. Resolve is a mindset.

*****

In 1985 Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates decide to climb the massive Siula Grande, located in the Peruvian Andes.

They didn’t climb the conventional route, but instead chose to ascend the never-before-attempted West face of the mountain, which is nearly vertical and covered in nothing but “a sheer layer of ice, loose dirt, flat rock, motorcycle grease, melted butter and used cooking oil.” (thank you Ben Thompson)

They triumph in the climb, but on the decent Simpson suffers a broken leg. Yates belays him down the mountain for hours, and then in a rising blizzard mistakenly lowers him over a cliff into a fathomless crevasse. After an hour, Yates cannot hold the rope any longer and believes his partner is irretrievable. It is impossible for Yates to physically pull Simpson back up to safety. In a moment of personal torment, Yates chooses to save his own life, cuts the rope, and allows Simpson to fall to his death.

But Simpson doesn’t die. He awakens to find himself on his back having survived the 50-foot fall with a crushed knee and destroyed leg. He crawls, limps, and drags himself for three days back to camp.

While hanging on the rope for an hour, in the void, as night was turning to dawn, Simpson recounts:

“A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying bright reflections off the far wall of the crevasse. I was mesmerized by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside… I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty.”

The opposite response to stress is confusion and panic. M. Ephimia Morphew, a psychologist and founder of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments, spent some time with her colleagues puzzling over why some novice scuba divers drown while still having plenty of oxygen in their tanks.

The reason, it turns out, is that in a stressful and unfamiliar environment, people often start to hyperventilate because they feel like they can’t breathe. The instinctive response is to remove any obstruction from their mouth. So in a moment of panic, they rip the regulator off their face and suck in a deep breath of the ocean. It’s similar to why those suffering from extreme hypothermia often take off all their clothes in a snowstorm.

The analogy is extreme, but today’s workplace can be stressful and overwhelming. We can often feel as if we are drowning.

*****

A March 2015 survey of 160,000 employees around the world found that 75% of today’s workers experience “moderate” to “extreme” stress. An April 2014 Monster.com survey of more than 7,000 employees found that 42 percent even left their jobs because the workplace was too stressful.

In that electrifying August, 2015 New York Times article, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace – which was later rebutted, and is still today deeply argued for it’s validity – Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld write:

“Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

In a typical stress response, heart rates and breathing increase, and blood vessels constrict. But those people who rise to challenges with the belief that stress is a positive opportunity have an opposite physiological response: the blood vessels open and relax as if they were in a state of elation or preparation for physical test.

Or to put it in Kelly McGonigal’s language, to embrace adversity and challenge with a positive mindset is another way of saying that you trust yourself. It’s another gesture of confidence. And that confidence and resolve will make you much more resilient for whatever arises.

Keep your knees bent my friends.

____________________________________________________

Shawn Hunter is Founder and President of Mindscaling, and the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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