The Art of Hartful Living
What Workers Adore and Abhor: Mentors and Tormentors
November 19, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Mentors affect teams positively and tormentors infect teams. We can look at traits employees adore and abhor in their mentors and tormentors and what they can relate to themselves as they look into their leadership mirror to see how they come across to others. How do you rate on the Mentor/Tormentor scale? Are you adored or abhorred? What changes can you make today to move towards adored mentor status?
Leadership traits that people adore
- Has a clear vision of how people’s work meets the leader’s expectations.
- Provides timely, clear, constructive feedback.
- Expresses appreciation and gives credit where credit is due.
- Actively listens and answers questions.
- Treats others with respect and kindness.
- Consistently fair in their treatment of others.
- Trains, develops, and grows their people.
- Willing to jump in and help out when things become difficult.
- Has an open door policy and is available.
- Supportive and protective of their people when things go wrong.
Leadership traits that people abhor:
- Indecisive
- Foul-mouthed
- Plays favorites
- Doesn’t take time to learn about employees personally, treats them as cogs in the production wheel
- My way or highway thinking
- Takes credit for your work
- Doesn’t take action when needed, particularly for discipline problems
- Has clunky communication skills and low emotional intelligence
- Does not respect younger workers and their contribution
- Kisses up and kicks down
Obviously, this list is not comprehensive. There are many great and not-so-great leadership traits we could add. One of the primary skills of strong leaders is excellent communication. Every item on the list above is affected by communication style and emotional intelligence.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to improve your leadership skills and help you get the results you want:
How do you treat your people? To help answer this question, you might ask yourself, “How do my people treat me?” For example, if you are warm and friendly, your people will probably be warm and friendly in return. On the other hand, if you are cold and blunt or if your demeanor is unpredictable, your team will likely go to great lengths to avoid you. Be approachable and consistent in dealing with others and they will reciprocate. We are mirrors for how people treat us. If you notice that others are not treating you well, not saying hello and good-bye, then look inward to see if they are mirroring your demeanor.
Does your team understand how what they do contributes to the success of the organization? Don’t assume they know, even if the answer may be obvious to you. Recent research indicates that somewhere between 70% and 95% of people do not know how what they do contributes to their organization’s success. If most individuals lack this understanding and you haven’t conveyed it to them, then you are missing the opportunity to increase their motivation, and the likelihood that they will be as productive as they could be. Ask them if they know their impact on the organization’s success, listen to their response, and be prepared to fill in the gaps. According to Dan Pink in his book Drive; he states that motivation today relies on purpose, autonomy and mastery. If they don’t know their purpose, are not given the space to do it and to learn it, then you can be sure you’re a tormentor they abhor and they won’t be there for long. Do you express appreciation for a job well done to each person on your team at least once a week? Particularly with the new workforce, they expend on-demand feedback and may not wait around for it. The younger generations in and entering the workforce today are serial freelancers with the skills to get jobs at other places and won’t hesitate to jump ship and go out on their own. Make sure you are doing what you can to retain them and be their mentor they adore.
Forward: Constant Forward Motion Keeps us Moving in a Positive Direction
November 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
When we coast for too long, it means we are going downhill. So like a shark, if we quit moving forward, we cease to live effectively. Keeping our sights on the possibilities and discoveries ahead of us while enjoying our present helps keep us moving in the direction of our dreams. When we are hopeful about what lies ahead of us, we look forward to a new day.
When we are in charge of creating our future, we get excited about moving forward to greet our goals. Sometimes we may choose to move sideways as a form of moving forward – as in a lateral move in our workplace. At times the answer is not always moving up, but out that makes the most sense, but it is always moving you forward towards where you want to be.
Popular psychology suggests that we are either moving forward towards pleasure or away from pain – either way, we are making a positive move that instills energy in our actions and gives us the power and the confidence to keep moving forward. Go where your heart leads you, go for it, go take a hike, or go explore a new destination.
If you don’t go, you won’t know. Taking the attitude of taking off towards where your dreams and desires lead you helps build your confidence, build your resilience to stress, and build on your life experiences. Be bold and go to where you think you need to go in order to get what you think you need. Taking brave steps toward your goals gives you energy and courage to pursue your dreams with guts, grace, and gusto.
Interesting people, activities, places, books, ideas, information, and association with other interesting things gets you stepping a little higher. Energy and inspiration by association seem to kick-start your battery. The key to attract interesting people is to create an interesting life, become an interesting person, and seek diversity to get your engine humming. When your mind stops exploring new interests and discovering new ideas, then your soul withers and your brain stops expanding to take in new information.
So what’s new and interesting on your To Do list today? Get interested in becoming interesting and see what kinds of energy sources you tap into. If your life seems like Bill Murray’s in the movie Ground Hog Day, then it’s time to make some changes and include more interesting things to add some spice to your days so they won’t all seem like re-runs that run you down.
Stretch Your Creative Muscle
October 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Creativity is one of those things many people thing they don’t possess. They may have had it as a kid and it was “conformed out of them” in the academia and workplaces unless you chose a creative field. If you ask a room full of children if they can draw, all hands go up. If you ask a room of adults the same question, only a few hands raise. What’s the deal with that? When did we lose it? I think it’s still there, but hasn’t been exercised in a while and has become flabby.
When faced with unique conditions, I would like to think we could get creative and figure out a way just like the astronauts did when they were in trouble, or like Cheryl Strayed in her book Wild about hiking the Pacific Crest trail solo. I can relate to that after spending 30 days in the wilderness on an Outward Bound backpacking experience. Necessity is the not only the mother of invention, but I think the other child is creativity. I try to exercise my creativity daily through art, photographs, cooking, sewing, designing décor, designing training and activities, and problem solving. If I don’t get a chance to exercise my creative muscle, I get antsy and itchy to do something, anything creative.
The following are six conditions which allow creativity — and ultimately, innovation — to flourish.
Solitude. Not withdrawal or being totally alone, but in the sense of spending time apart from the clichés and conventions of society to focus on one’s own thoughts and ideas.
Inactivity. Not loafing or goofing off, but planned inactivity as a break in one’s busy routine. I’ve known people to regularly set aside part of their daily schedule so as not to be interrupted in their thoughts.
Daydreaming. Daydreaming can be focused on out of box thinking and is often connected to inactivity. In daydreams, we make mental excursions into fantasy that breed creative activity. Several organizations have quiet rooms set aside for the purpose of stimulating out-of-box thinking. Reading magazine outside your normal arena to get ideas from other industries is a fascinating way to daydream. I also find watching the house hunter home shows from around the world helps me get ideas.
Gullibility. This is the willingness to suspend one’s personal beliefs and accept what comes from inside without insisting on rationality or logic.
Alertness and discipline. Although these qualities are necessary for productivity in any endeavor, they also have a special meaning in creativity.
Mental replay. Allowing oneself to revisit past creative efforts and resolution of past traumatic conflicts leads to analogies.
While most of the conditions require loosening of control and openness to the inner self, the last and most important quality is the willingness to put whatever you discover into action. What are you going to put into action to exercise your creative muscle?
? Question Your Actions – Are They Merely Obligations?
October 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
To avoid having to say no to obligations, schedule both your personal and professional time on your calendar. When somebody requests your time, your calendar can say no for you. This helps ease the guilt in some of us who have a hard time saying no to requests on our time.
If what you are doing is not moving you forward toward one of your written goals, life’s mission, or ideal vision, then it may not be something you should be doing. How does your future look based on your current actions? Are you reacting to somebody else’s goals and expectations, or are you working towards your own?
You may be surprised at how much time is freed up when you renounce obligatory actions and only take on actions which come from your heart. Question the requests made on your time. Remember that our time is our life energy? Is that request worth a part of your life? Question how you want to spend your time and your life and guard your time as ferociously as you guard an “important” appointment. If we don’t guard our time, nobody else will either. Is your activity a “have to”, a “should do”, a “want to” or an “I’d love to.”? Your answer will tell you if it’s an obligation or not.
Four Core Needs of Every Employee
September 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
The Harvard Business Review interviewed more than 19,000 people, at all levels in companies, across a broad range of industries asking the question of what stands in the way of our being more satisfied and productive at work.
The results were that people feel better and perform better and more sustainably when four basic needs are met:
- renewal (physical);
- value (emotional);
- focus (mental);
- and purpose (spiritual).
No big surprises in the answers as this is what I’ve been teaching for decades that when we feel more energized, appreciated, focused and purposeful, then we perform better. I recently read several articles in Training journals about the importance of play at work and gamification in the learning arena helping workers learn better and having more fun at work improves productivity. Really? They are JUST NOW printing these articles?? Those of us in the Recreation and Training industries have known for many decades that work made fun gets gone and good times lead to good business. Also that laughter and learning go together to improve retention. When we are more fully engaged, present, comfortable, centered and on purpose, we do better all the way around in life.
When we get to rest and renew our energy during the day, we are better able to focus, handle workloads and be creative. One reason to get out of your office over your lunch break. Your brain and your body need a rest so you come back refreshed and renewed.
Feeling valued creates a deeper level of trust and security at work, which frees us to spend less energy seeking and defending our value, and more energy creating it. Having a sense that what we do matters and serves something larger than our immediate self-interest toward our personal purpose which hopefully is aligned with the organizational purpose is a grand source of motivation.
What’s surprising about our survey’s results is how dramatically and positively getting these needs met is correlated with every variable that influences performance. What they found that meeting even one of the four core needs had a dramatic impact on every performance variable in the study. When all four needs are met, the effect on engagement rises from 50 percent for one need, to 125 percent. Engagement, in turn, has been positively correlated with profitability.
You can start with just one core need and add the others as the previous one becomes habit and ingrained in your organizational culture. Only 20 percent of respondents said they were encouraged by their supervisors to take renewal breaks during the day. By contrast, those who were encouraged to take intermittent breaks reported they were 50 percent more engaged, more than twice as likely to stay with the company, and twice as healthy overall. Leaders need to question their outdated assumptions that that performance is best measured by the number of hours employees puts in — and the more continuous the better — rather than by the value they generate.
In a recent interview with Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post empire regarding nap pods she has installed in her organization; she stated that she does not pay her staff for their stamina, she pays them to for their creative brain power and if they are too tired to think, they are not bringing creative ideas to the table. So a renewal nap of 20 minute is certainly worth it in the long run. You can’t argue with that.
% What Percentage of Your Life is Spent in a State of Freedom?
September 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Freedom is enlightening and is there to be savored for all it is worth. It truly is energizing when you have the freedom to be yourself. Proclaim your independence and vow to live your life freely starting today. Think about how heavy and draining our lives would be if we didn’t have freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to choose where we live, shop, work, play, and freedom to choose our life partner. How fabulous to have such freedoms!
After living overseas for 10 years without all these freedoms, I came to realize their profound significance and impact on my energy and my ability to choose the life I wanted to live without the constraints of not having all the freedom I was used to having.
Take a look at the personal constraints you put on yourself by your beliefs or outdated rules. What other restraints can you break free of that you place on yourself or that others place on you. Did you once need such guidelines and rules and now they are pinning your down? Some of my associates have found their freedom by sending their shirts out to be laundered and ironed, or by hiring others to do their yard work or house chores. Others have found their freedom by going back to college in their 40’s to learn a new skill or earn a degree in a new field.
Still others have found their freedom after the kids finished college or when they decided they didn’t have to make their bed every day. There are some who have found the freedom of their right livelihood and shed the shackles of a job that they never really wanted to do in the first place. Or those people who have been living a lie or keeping a secret for many years who finally come to grips with their past and now exalt in the freedom of living the truth and speaking their truth.
As the statement goes, the truth will set you free. What would it take for you to feel your full freedom and to feel your full energy without constraints? What is holding you back from the freedom of fear and the freedom to be yourself? Is it you or somebody or something else that is your biggest barrier to freedom? What tools do you need to tear down the wall or scale over it? Take a look at your freedom pie chart and figure out what percentage of your life is lived in freedom.
Listening on Demand in a Demanding Generation of Workers
August 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Living up to our capacity at all levels includes our communication styles and ensuring they are up to snuff. Especially with the new brand of employees now in the workforce and those entering in the coming years, Generation Z. The research shows that Millennials now have an attention span of 12 seconds living in a constant state of partial distraction. Once the workers of Generations Z enter the workforce, they bring with them an 8-second attention span living in a state of partial attention.
What that means for us as team players and leaders is that we need to hone our communication styles, our leadership styles, the way we interact with the new breed of workers in much faster paced, on-demand type of environment. These workers are used to finding answers to problems on demand in the palms of their hands on mobile devices. They may not have the answers in their heads, but they have it in their hands. Our way of giving direction must be quick and agile, our listening also needs to be honed to their brief sound-bite type of 140-character Twitter-type of quips. No long conversations expected.
Solid relationships help us gain the respect and trust of others, our clients and our colleagues. It is important to be easy to work with, to have productive working relationships. People must sense that we genuinely care about them; this is how they feel inspired to work with and even follow us and to endear that trust and inspiration, we need to behave and communicate how others needs us to in order to feel heard. After all, sharing experiences with the world and having the world hear their stories is what Millennials and Gen Z are all about – just check out Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and the flavor-of-the-month site to upload stories and pictures.
Here are a few helpful practices to becoming an accomplished listener:
- First, our attitude: We must commit to listen to understand and learn.
- Put the other person at ease, maybe by sitting side by side rather than across a desk.
- Lean forward, comfortable eye contact, a slight smile.
- Quiet our mind — and stay fully present!
- Give affirmations: “OK,” “I see,” “Makes sense.”
- Ask clarifying questions.
- Maybe ask if we may repeat what we’ve heard to assure we have it right.
- Use silence, don’t rush to fill the space, likely the person will then continue, and we’ll deepen our learning. It is said, “Let silence do the heavy lifting.”
- Take notes, it will help us remember, and even more important, it is a sign of respect to the other person and will be appreciated.
It all begins with our willingness to understand and learn, and our effort to be patient and fully present. Conscious listening is difficult, especially in our crazy busy world today with so many urgencies and distractions. Keep in mind that we all want our stories to be heard and try to keep your distractions at bay while you lend an ear.
ALT – Alternatives, You Have Them
August 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
You have a choice to either panic and stress out, or hit Any Key to open your windows to better options. Choose positive options that make you happy and add joy to your life. Are you truly doing what you want or are there alternatives? Realize you have a choice of alternatives in any situation to help you become unstuck. It’s your decision how to react to situations. Choose the alternative that will move you closer to what is truly important.
It’s our decisions that shape our destiny and our character. Are you choosing short-term gratification or long term satisfaction alternatives? Where are your decisions taking you? Even not choosing an alternative is making a decision to act in one way or another. Waiting to take no action forces the decision or alternative upon us. Be pro-active and research your alternatives to make the best decision for you at that time. Sometimes none of our alternatives seem like a good choice, but at least we do have alternatives, choices, and options. Take charge of yours and be in the driver’s seat of your emotional energy.
