Is There a New Normal?

I've been noticing a pattern in the news and commentariat in the last few months: at the very same time headlines shout --"are we getting back to normal?" --while just beside them others scream --"life will never be the same, so get used to it."

Take this past Sunday's New York Times for example: On the one hand was the article on the front page of the real estate section titled "Honk if You Think it is Over," saying it is exciting to be in NY real estate again -- back to the good old days of stratospheric prices and bidding wars.

On the other hand was a piece in the business section about the fall of the "the efficient market hypothesis," . The efficient market hypothesis said that stock markets were rational. The article was about the discrediting of the model, which many believe is itself responsible for the financial crisis -- "an academic model that offered a false sense of security," in a way reminiscent of Soviet style Marxism-Leninism in the early 1990's. This is just one of the many articles telling us that life will never be the same and that we don't yet have the frameworks to replace the old ones, an unsettling thought.

After watching this pattern I've come to a realization. Both are in some sense true. We each need to hold on to these two sides, the normal and the radically new, even as it begins to feel like an increasingly precarious balance. While we don't want to delude ourselves into thinking we can go backwards into a false sense of security, we also must live from day to day with a feeling of calm and connection to ourelves and our pasts -- to how it used to be.

At the same time, we must learn to be acute observers of the new and the upcoming, constantly opening our minds to the possibility that long held assumptions might need some challenging.

What's difficult is that we don't have good examples of what this balance looks or feels like.

I have found one way to get this -- to really get it --is to try the yoga position "tree pose," --standing on one foot like a stork, with arms raised overhead like a tree swaying in the wind.

You are simultaneously rooted on the ground, standing as you always have, while you concentrate on balance, and the discomfort of being precariously close to falling.

Another yoga pose that I've found helpful is Utkatasana, "awkward chair pose," sometimes also called "powerful pose." It requires you while standing, to sit back as if in a chair, while holding your hands up straight above your head. It is simultaneously extremely awkward -- you wish, every moment you are in it that you could straighten your legs -- but you also feel a sense of power as you remain in the pose and try to rise above your discomfort.

You might not be drawn to yoga, and may well have your own ways of learning this new balance.

What keeps you grounded in these crazy times?

What strategies do you have for challenging your assumptions about the future?

The Not Very Good First Draft

Well, I've been away for awhile and I'm hoping this post will get me back on track with this blog. Really. Maybe I should take the tentativeness out of that last statement: it will get me back in the groove of regular writing.

Blogging should be fun, the antidote to perfectionism in writing. It is a wonderful example of a task that can only be "good enough." After all, it is often time bound and responsive to something or other fleeting -- usually news, or a moment of insight that passes.

As I've written here before, I've been learning something about goal setting these last months. It needs to be forgiving, even as it stretches you forward to break through inertia. Getting here to this page is half the struggle. The other half is the first few words and sentences -- taking that small step into the unknown in the not-very-good-first-draft that is the pre-requisite for any pursuit.

Phew...How many times to I have to relearn that one?

What is your mechanism for writing those first lines, for busting through inertia?

How can you remember, day after day, to relentlessly, but compassionately, push yourself to set and accomplish new goals?

small steps into the unknown

I often see parallels between physical challenges, like biking up a big hill, doing a yoga tree pose, and intellectual/emotional challenges -- like embarking on a new marketing campaign, or doing a new piece of writing. My newest insight, which I thought I'd share, was in my first pilates class, which I took last week.

As I got to what I thought was the end of a set of particularly painful abs exercises, the instructor pushed on to one more set, this time with a challenging new twist. The details aren't important, but I plunged forward into a pretty feeble rendition of the new twist. And as I fumbled along and lost my balance, I had the insight -- sweating there on the floor: you need to fumble and flail before you can hope to be on the path to mastery. It isn't as if I hadn't learned and re-learned this countless times in the past, but I suddenly saw the process slowed down into micro steps.

I realized that I could hold on to the image of that moment next time I'm resistant to stepping into an unfamiliar idea, creating a less than wonderful first draft, or picking up the phone to make a difficult call. If I don't allow myself to fail, I wil never begin. I left the class feeling virtuous that I'd made it through, committed to returning. And in the retelling to myself, I remembered the success more than the failure.

What image of flubbing on the way to success can you remember and hold on to?

Envisioning your career

A career is way more than a job. It is a path, even a calling -- and shaping it takes work and vision.

Here is the dictionary definition:
Career
1. an occupation or profession, esp. one requiring special training, followed as one's lifework: He sought a career as a lawyer.
2. a person's progress or general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as in some profession or undertaking: His career as a soldier ended with the armistice.
3. success in a profession, occupation, etc.
4. a course, esp. a swift one.
5. speed, esp. full speed: The horse stumbled in full career.
6. Archaic. a charge at full speed.

–verb (used without object) 7. to run or move rapidly along; go at full speed.

–adjective 8. having or following a career; professional: a career diplomat.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origin:
1525–35; < MF carriere < OPr carriera lit., road < LL carrāria (via) vehicular (road), equiv. to L carr(us) wagon (see car 1 ) + -āria, fem. of -ārius -ary

Often we think about career from the outside in: what will make me the most money; what will earn me the most status; what will be a good use of all those years of education; how can I fit the job description I just saw posted.

But thinking from the inside out can get you in touch with your sense of purpose and where you want to have impact -- where you would come alive.

Many of us have several visions for where we might go. And some of those, or even all of them, can be vague, murky or appear preposterous. But having a vision can keep you focused when you have just lost a position, are having trouble finding the right next one, or run your own business and are hustling for clients.

What is your career vision or visions?

I get this exercise from my colleague Michael Melcher:

Try exploring one vision for yourself --five years hence --and avoiding the temptation to begin immediately to tell yourself why it is not possible. Maybe you are doing development work in Afghanistan. Maybe you are teaching first graders. Maybe you have discovered an green tech innovation, and are selling it to investors.

Stick with the idea.

What are you doing?
Whom are you working with?
What industry?
What kind of organization?
What does your workplace look like?
How do you feel in this place?

Try it on and see how it feels.

Now try it again with other visions, if you have them.

See what you learn.

Be proactive in your career

I was pleased to read the piece in today's New York Times about the trend towards pursuing careers in public service, one of the bright sides of this moment of crisis. Hundreds of talented people are being proactive and moving toward growth areas that also allow them to pursue a desire for social contribution.

From the article: "In choosing careers, young people look for signals from society, and Wall Street will no longer pull the talent that it did for so many years,” said Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “We have a great experiment before us.”

What will the new map of talent flow look like? It’s early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on careers in finance and business consulting."

At this moment of flux, where are you in your career?
Have you been pondering a move of this type?
What tools and support do you need to make this leap, or at least to begin to move along this pathway?

I am leading a workshop in New York -- a Career Action Group -- beginning on May 5 and continuing for four Tuesdays. The workshop will be full of tips and strategies, along with a structure for exploring your values and vision, honing your networking and communications skills and managing the uncertainty of the transition. All this in a group with about 10-12 other interesting people.

It includes ten hours of workshop, and a 45 minute one-on-one coaching session. Check out the information at www.careeractiongroups.com
If you sign up by April 15th, you'll get $100 off the price!

Hope to see you there.

A moment to connect with your sense of purpose in your work

Every once in awhile I ask myself why I do what I do for work. What's a political science PhD, a recipient of the top fellowships, who taught at Wellesley and has a book out on leadership and change in post-communist Eastern Europe doing helping talented people make their next career moves, or become more effective or creative in their current roles?

I do love this work. And I feel priveleged to be privy to the inner struggles of really smart and creative people figuring out how to develop their gifts and talents and to take on challenging projects.

But every so often I, like many of the people I work with, have to remind myself of the reasons and reconnect with my passion and purpose.

So here's my thinking.

Back when I was teaching at Wellesley and Berkeley, I offered guidance to my students not just by imparting knowledge or provoking them to think critically, but in helping them live up to their potential and make difficult choices about their paths as emerging leaders. I liked that helping-them-with-life part more in the end than directing them to good resources on peace-keeping or conflict prevention, for example. And I bet it is that guidance about the difficult choices about their careers, between practicality and passion, that they remember years later. For many of us, work is so central to who we are as human beings; how we gain satisfaction and joy; how we express our unique contributions; how we learn. It is about making a living, but it is even more about making a life.

Second, one of the most important trends of this turbulent time is the move of some of our best and brightest away from finance, and away from focusing primarily on economic gain and status and towards work with social purpose, either in government, in greening businesses, in social entrepreneurship or non-profit work. Helping those people find a place to contribute their smarts and creativity (what sometimes is blandly called talent management) is hugely important for our future as a nation. We are in a moment of incredible opportunity, if only we take it -- to throw a lot more firepower and innovative energy towards our most pressing social challenges.

For these reasons alone, I feel my choices, and my difficult career transition, was worth it. I can have real impact on peoples' lives, as a catalyst and thinking partner. And of course, I can make a living in the process.

What would you do if you weren't worried about the challenges of starting in a new field?

What is a step you can take towards aligning your work with you sense of purpose?

What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

Navigating the Great Disruption?

Thomas Friedman wrote the other week that we have entered a period which in retrospect we will name "The Great Disruption." As is often true of Friedman's naming of a social phenomenon, this one struck a chord.

"Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall - when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more.""

What does it mean to live in such a period? How must we change our lives? How do we adjust our expectations? What opportunities can we find? What small steps can we take to build our resilience?

As humans we are not good at anticipating futures all that different from the one we are in. Yes, we are worriers -- and can fritter the night away worrying about a worst case scenario that never plays out. But we tend to flit from one extreme to the other -- from our worst fears to wishful thinking.

Think about even the simple situation of planning for a storm you know from the weather forecast is coming your way. You are sitting out having breakfast on your deck under a perfect blue sky and you are told that by 4PM the winds and rain will be so powerful that anything that could move will blow away. Taking in your furniture at that moment seems far fetched.

Similarly, in the middle of the storm, hunkered down as we are, we tend to believe it will continue forever, that sunshine will never reappear.

When it comes to large social disruptions, we never seem to be prepared. It is not just that we are not good at tricking ourselves to anticipate the unexpected. It is also because every ounce of training we've had has been oriented toward extrapolating forward from what we know from the past.

An excessive focus on risk and downsides can be discouraging and certainly it is not terribly fun. Asking "what if?" can open possibilities that you've never before imagined.

We need to build this muscle of flexible foresight. This includes resilience in the face of turbulence, a skill in and of iteslf, and the ability to see the signals that are barely on our radar screen, and form a picture of what might be coming down the pike. We need to learn to be slower to say "that can't happen," and quicker to stop and ask "What if?"

Recognizing change when we see it

Have you ever been at one of those moments when you know what you've been doing will no longer work -- that you are killing yourself by eating too much cholesterol, or that you are ruining your marriage by continuing to have the same debilitating fight -- but you are unable to map the way forward?

Or even if you know what you need to do, and have spoken of it, and resolved to do it many times, you find yourself standing at the edge of the cliff, fearful of stepping off because you are as vulnerable and wobbly as a child just learning to walk?

Or where you have begun your change, taken those few small steps, falling down every other one, but no one around you seems to notice? In fact they seem to be doing all they can to keep you from enacting the changes they say they want and not seeing success when it is right before their eyes?

Whether you are adopting healthier ways of eating, or you are learning to communicate with your staff in a new way, or trying to change your organization's culture, you move through four stages. You can learn more about this and other models of change here.
Stage 1:

In the first stage you are blissfully unaware. You may be in denial that any change is needed at all. You certainly don't have any idea how difficult and painful the required shift will be. You don't see the problem. Nor are you aware of the impact of your old ways. You are unconsciously incompetent.


Stage 2: Once you become of aware of the need to change, perhaps through a crisis, or because you want to learn a new skill, you become accutely aware of your incompetence. You are learning a new dance step. You are trying out a new language, and you realize how far you are from mastery. I think of the time when I was learning French, and I proudly attempted to order an ice cream cone in Montreal only to discover with dismay that the person behind the counter didn't understand me. At this stage you have the realization that you never even knew what it took to be good at this. You are in trial and error mode, taking one step forward and two back. We've all experienced this when trying to make something new happen. You need to spend a great deal of focus and effort on each step you take. At this second stage of change, you are consciously incompetent.



Stage 3: Once you have been trying and fumbling along for awhile, you get closer to a point of mastery -or at least mastery at the first basic level. I remember this happening when I was learning swing dancing. Suddenly one day I was able to let go enough to have fun at it, even though I had to pay attention to each step and keep looking at my feet. To the untrained eye it looked like I was beginning to know what I was doing. Only I knew how hard it still was to make sure all my steps were correct and that I was counting time under my breath. At this third stage of change you are consciously competent: you are practicing the new skill or behavior, but you still need to pay attention to it. You have not yet become fluent.



Stage 4: There is a final stage, when suddenly the new behavior becomes second nature. You are able to speak the new language without translating every word as you go. You are able to drive the stick shift car naturally, and able to carry on a conversation at the same time. It is hard to remember those first awkward steps when each new dance step -- slowed down as it was to lhelp you learn -- seemed so awkward and impossible. You have reached the stage of unconscious competence -- you no longer have to pay attention and you'ver created a new habit.


I have gone through these phases, multiple times and seen clients go through them too. The real work comes in that phase of conscious incompetence, when you cringe at how far you are from being where you want to go, and when others might not recognize your efforts.

I actually think that this framework is illuminating even on a political-social level. Take Obama's attempts to bring post-partisanship to Washington, for example. Altering habits of thinking and communicating that are heavily ensconced in the power arrangements and assumptions of years of bickering will not happen over night. Yet the discussion about whether or not Obama's approach is authentically bi or post partisan, is expecting just that.

We can all recognize these phases of change as individuals. We stay on course because we know that eventually we will get to fluency or fit into the smaller size pair of jeans.

It is all the more important to recognize these phases of change when looking at an enormous and complex shift such as the one Obama is attempting. Without going through that stage of fumbling, when it is barely possible to believe a different outcome is possible, we will remain stuck.

As individuals, as leaders in organizations, and as a culture, we need to be more cognizant of what change processes really look like, and to assess where we are in the process. It would help each of us bring the changes that we want to see.

Consider these questions:

If you are in a change process in some aspect of your life, whether personal or professional, what stage do you think you are at?

If you are considering making a change, what can you do to keep yourself moving forward, awkward as it is?

How can you withstand moments of discouragement?

How can you give yourself credit for making a change, and let yourself be where you are in the process, rather than at the end?

Learning from Obama's first days

I found Obama's admission that he made a mistake in the Daschle case refreshing - not so much because of the ethical consistency it showed, but because of his willingness to admit error. As a leader, Obama has time after time, throughout the campaign, and now as president, shown a confidence and a depth of self awareness that is all too rare in public life (and elsewhere).



Many have commented on Obama's ambitious agenda. Taking on any one of the huge challenges he faces would be daunting, (from climate change to fixing our education system) let alone the multiple intersecting challenges (how relations with China intersect with the financial crisis, for example).

He is leading us into the unknown and there are sure to be many mistakes and corrections along the way. If there are no mistakes, there is no experimentation. No failure, means no growth. Check out Mary O'Hara-Devereaux's book "Navigating the Badlands: Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation." I have thought of it many times in the last few months --you'll definitely see what I mean about leading into the unknown. (More in a later post).



We all need to learn how to admit responsibility quickly and make corrections; that way we can take more risks, and be more creative. It is what you do with the mistake that counts.



What is your approach to failure, both large and small? How do you handle mistakes? When have you failed well?

What will this month bring?

Yes, it is already February 1 -- we're solidly into 2009, a few weeks into the Obama administration, looking ahead towards spring. One thing I've been doing both for myself and clients recently is setting monthly goals on the first Monday of the month.

This seems obvious to many, and quite simple. Yet this simple act of intention can be empowering. It focuses the mind by clarifying what you want, and what is doable. It creates priorities.

Many coaches and organizational deelopment consultants use the term SMART goals -- a helpful acronym for powerful goals setting. SMART stands for:
Specific (not vague);
Measurable (you can tell whether or not you've done them--whether it is pounds lost or articles written);
Actionable (they are not just in your head);
Relevant (they move something forward that is meaningful and important to you) and
Time-bound (they have a specific time associated with them -- you will finish them by Feb. 15 for example).
Sometimes another "S" is added, for Stretch -- that is, they are goals that will push you a bit to stretch beyond your comfort zone.

I have to confess that one of mine this month is getting to the gym, or doing yoga at home, at least four times/week. I began last week and have broken through my months long malaise to get to the gym both weekend days the past two weeks plus two days during the week. The trick has been the simple act of going, allowing myself to start small (i.e. not being embarrassed to spend only 15 minutes on the bike, as long as I made it there to begin with) and building as I go along. I am reminded of an essay I wrote a few years ago about my perpetual struggle to get to the gym, called "In Search of the Perfect Health Club."

At the time I wrote this essay, (yes, I've been engaged in this exercise struggle for a long time) I was much more into perfectionism than I am now. During those years I spent my time thinking and speculating, rather than doing. Now, I go for "good enough"...

As you look ahead towards February, what do you want to accomplish? Who in your networks do you want to reconnect with? What do you want to accomplish on your various projects? How do you want to attend to your health, or the relationships with those you love? What kind of time will you allow yourself for reflection? Take a few moments to write down your goals...And then give yourself some slack.

Are you an ostrich or a flamingo?

Some of us look at all the changes and panic; others of us just stick our heads in the sand insisting that nothing much has changed. I've found in working with individuals and organizations that those who can map multiple scenarios for how the future could unfold can keep their calm, access their creativity and stay afloat.

How are you responding to the current crisis?
What do you know about the 1, 2 and 5 year future?
What don't you know?
How are you retooling to thrive amid uncertainty?

Career management is an act of leadership

In our rapidly changing work landscape it's time to promote and reinvent ourselves. Such is the pathway to continuing success and satisfaction. It is also the way we can have the greatest impact as leaders. When you reinvent yourself you are drawing on your passion, reconnecting with your values and using foresight. I have found that many people have trouble doing this on their own since it is so hard to challenge our past identities, or get to our best thinking, even if we want to move in a new direction. And this is especially true in crisis times.

What have you always wanted to do that you haven't yet done?

Are you using your creative talents to their fullest right now?

Creativity is more important than ever!

Leaders who want to make a difference need to be more effective, creative and far-sighted in a time of rapid change and reduced resources. But how do we actually do that? The default position for many of us is to operate from a mindset of scarcity. But crisis-thinking narrows, rather than opens up options. So the psychology of scarcity only serves to make things worse.

Down economies are good times for bolstering innovation and creativity about doing more with less.

What kinds of investments have you made to help maximize your own and your peoples' creativity and resourcefulness?
What additionally might you do in the coming months?