Authentic Success for 2013

How was your 2012?  What are you seeking for your personal success indicators in 2013? To gain a viable answer hold an internal conversation between your ideal self (how you would most like to live) and your real self (how you really live) and develop an authentic structure to your goals.  Authentic success integrates these two parts into a happier and more successful you. Our article was so well received in earlier years as a way to frame moving into the New Year, that it’s back by popular demand.

 

Authentic success begets peace of mind because you are living and working in accordance with your values, strengths, and your sense of purpose instead of living in conflict.  Reaching this highly desired state requires personal awareness.  Without it you will be missing the joy from your current wealth by only focusing on what hasn’t happened.  Happiness and optimism, both components of emotional intelligence, are vital to experiencing authentic success.  The following 10 Actions are based on years of research in the fields of emotional intelligence and positive psychology and set forth choices you can make to change the quality of your life in 2013.

 

10 Actions to Make Your

2013 a Year of Authentic Success

 

1.     Define happiness.  Know what you are looking for when you are seeking happiness.  True happiness isn’t the quick food fix; even Belgian chocolates bring a temporary response.  As an article by Carlin Flora, “The Pursuit of Happiness” in Psychology Today states, “The most useful definition – and it’s one agreed upon by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, behavioral economists, positive psychologists, and Buddhist monks – is more like satisfied or content than ‘happy’ in its strict bursting-with-glee sense.  It has depth and deliberation to it.  It encompasses living a meaningful life, utilizing your gifts and your time, living with thought and purpose.  It’s maximized when you also feel part of a community. And when you confront annoyances and crises with grace.  It involves a willingness to learn and stretch and grow, which sometimes involves discomfort.  It requires acting on life, not merely taking it in.  It’s not joy, a temporary exhilaration, or even pleasure, that sensual rush – though a steady supply of those feelings course through those who seize each day.”

Action:  Happiness is closely tied to being aware of what success truly means for you.  Write your own definition of what Authentic Success means to you and intend to live in synch with your truth about Authentic Success in 2013.

2.     Practice mindfulness.  While defined in a variety of ways, mindfulness simply means paying attention.  Notice how you are feeling and why and then make a choice to stick with your current path or take a breath and intentionally shift.

Action:  Set a time each day when you will review your day with intention to notice and expand your mindfulness.  Even a short review will make a difference.

 

3.     Be you.  Embrace yourself.  Know your good points and that which you don’t consider so favorably.  Know your styles and preferences and trust you are a good and resilient person.  We received the following quote awhile ago and we give profound credit to whoever first said it though we don’t know the original source.

Action:  Print this out and tape it around your environment:

There is nothing wrong with me that what is right with me can’t fix!

4.     Practice your 2% Solution. As Marcia describes in Life’s 2% Solution, the 2% Solution requires just half an hour a day (3 ½ hours a week if it works better to cluster your time). Spend that time doing something that’s deeply nurturing, meaningful, fulfilling to you. It may be what you’ve vowed to do later when you are free to explore long-delayed purposeful pursuits. This seemingly small expenditure of time is even more critical in today’s harried world, where work deadlines loom, the carpool to soccer awaits, the dry cleaning is piling up, and a dinner party fills up whatever free time is left. We get it all done, yet feel incomplete. This stress-filled existence leaches away our creativity, passion and sense of fulfillment. We sacrifice the long-view of our lives for short-term results, to check something off a list. No doubt, that scenario leads to burnout.

Action:  Integrate your enhanced awareness from taking some of the above steps with your own 2% project.  Investing 2% of your time in an unusual way on yourself will make a world of difference.  It’s an achievable way of creating more work/life balance without having to turn your life upside down by radical change.  You can learn more and follow the 10 step process found in my book Life’s 2% Solution.

 

5.     Relationships matter.  Take time for friends and choose friends who support the values you wish to live with.

Action:   Notice who your friends are.  Ask yourself if you are giving the time it takes to cultivate valuable relationships.  If not make a change. Keep your expectations of time with friends manageable.

 

6.     Carpe diem!  Seize the day.

Action:  Today is the only version of this day you’ll ever have.  Take advantage of it!

 

7.     Know your values.  It’s easy to get caught up in the multitude of options that expand daily from numbers of cereals to forms of entertainment to interesting books.  We all have twenty-four hours in a day.  Take advantage of your day by knowing what is truly important so you don’t get distracted with the job of making too many unimportant choices.

Action:  Make a list of your top values – somewhere between five and ten items at the most.  Then practice connecting your values with your choices.

 

8.     Create.  It feels good!  Humans are amazingly creative beings.  You probably create much more than you realize and miss giving yourself credit for your gifts.

Action:  Intentionally make a soup, draw a picture, write a letter.  Whatever feels simply good to you and then stop and acknowledge the act of creating and give yourself time to enjoy.

 

9.     Express gratitude.  This is a big one.  Anytime you want to build happiness, be grateful for what you do have and go find a way to give.  So much of authentic happiness is based in giving your gifts and in being a good and compassionate human being.  Don’t make it hard; find easy and natural ways to give with no strings attached.  Pay it forward is a great strategy.

Action:  Take time to stop and say thank you.  Notice how you feel and how the recipient feels.  Keep a gratitude journal.  Notice five to ten events that occur each day for which you are grateful.  Be specific.  Feel the gratitude in your heart as you write your list and as you read it over.

 

10.  Smile.   It’s impossible to be grumpy and smile at the same time.

Action:  If you are willing to change your emotional state, you will.  Breathe, notice what is going on, notice any tension you are holding in your body, and be willing to let it go.  Be quiet and smile for a full minute.

 

Authentic success combines your inner and outer strengths, though integrating these two is not always so easy.  Good luck on your journey.  We’re always interested in learning from you about how this works.  Comment on our blog.

What Qualities Do You Associate With Emotional Sustainability?

At Collaborative Growth’s recent Symposium on Emotional Sustainability participants identified the key qualities they feel are associated with this hopeful term.  Their answers follow and were the heart of how the Emotional Sustainability Word Cloud you see here.  After some soul searching these answers were highlighted at the Symposium:

• Gratitude – being without regret or anxiety
• Self/other awareness
• Work/ life integration – eliminating my own internal silos
• Modeling
• Accountability – how to get EQ in at the bottom of the organization
• Language – feeling words, able to speak on emotions in a structured way
• Joy – living to one’s full potential
• Kindness – leading people to be comfortable to learn in the classroom
• Love, the verb! – Stress disconnects us from our higher purpose and we need to recognize that fear harms learning.  Be transparent around emotions.
• Present to moments of Grace – align talent with organizational goals
• Intimacy – transform leaders as people by deeply and respectfully connecting
• Act with the recognition:  In love I am one with you
• In Lak’ech – from the Mayan tradition this is understood to mean I am another yourself (A modern day interpretation) and also means I am you, and You are me (A traditional Mayan interpretation)

Crafting an Emotionally Sustainable Lifestyle

Life is precious and is best lived when we pay attention to creating an emotionally sustainable lifestyle.  We are passionately committed to providing our services in order to support individuals and teams in living emotionally sustainable lifestyles.  This is also known as living resiliently.  Marcia’s book Life’s 2% Solution provides a well tested strategy for living with Passionate Equilibrium – being thoroughly engaged and doing so with a sense of balance. Additionally the EQi and EQ 360 for individuals and the TESI® (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey) are developed to promote emotional sustainability.

The Collaborative Growth team model highlights the path for developing the seven skills measured by the TESI in the outer ring.  Emotional and social well-being for teams is the result of following this path to sustainability for teams.

Emotional sustainability, also referred to as well being, can be measured with assessments such as the EQi ® and the EQ 360 ®.  Dr. BarOn, the original creator of the EQi has pinpointed self actualization as the apex of all the EQ skills.

So just which EQ skills should you focus on to develop this life nurturing state? BarOn names eight, which he listed in the order of their importance:

• Happiness

• Optimism

• Self-Regard

• Independence

• Problem Solving

• Social Responsibility

• Assertiveness

• Emotional Self-Awareness

Bar-On, 2001, p. 92. “EI and Self-Actualization.” In Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life, edited by J. Ciarrochi, J. Forgas, and J. Mayer. New York: Psychology Press.

Frequently revisiting these eight critical factors will help you engage your EQ in a manner designed to support an emotionally sustainable lifestyle.  At the team level the critical sustainability is developed by using the seven skills in the outer ring of the Collaborative Growth Team Model.  These are powerful skills that can be developed at the individual and team level.  The resulting quality of life will assure you and those you influence that it is worth the effort!

Emotional Sustainability Practices

To develop the truly effective solutions that today’s complex world demands, our emotional strength and resourcefulness has to be sustainable! Because right now as we are just about to resolve the current crisis, new problems are germinating, others are sprouting up and some tricky challenge has matured to the point it is just about to tap us on the shoulder and insist, “What about me??”

Emotional sustainability is achieved through developing (or redeveloping) both our individual and our social skills. It requires personal practices to hone our own adaptability, centeredness, and growth, and it also requires maintaining physical and social support systems that keep us sensitive to our environment and integrated with our community. Ecologically speaking we know that sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, that concept also fits well for leaders and teams.

We can understand and develop emotional sustainability to produce powerful demonstrations of leadership and team strength that result in continuous growth and development. Sustainability is similar to resilience, another term used frequently to describe leadership goals.  Both indicate the capacity for long lasting endurance and responsive engagement.

With the underpinning of emotional sustainability, leaders and teams experience many benefits including:

• They are more able to benefit from conflict
• Leaders and team members are more likely to stay consistently engaged and positive
• They know how to ride the waves of change
• Leaders and team members have courage to regularly listen internally to themselves and externally to others, reflect on what they hear and be responsive because they value relationships and communications skills
• They demonstrate the benefits of reduced stress because they confront unrealistic expectations and maximize their strengths.

Emotional sustainability is exhibited by leaders and teams when they demonstrate the following practices:

• Awareness:  They are aware of their feelings and actions and attuned to those of others.
• Responsiveness:  Having recognized emotional and other forms of communication, they respond in a timely and sensitive manner.
• Ability and Willingness to Change Perception:  While often holding well developed views, leaders and team members are able to open their minds, listen and fully consider the perceptions of others.  This skill includes the ability to change their minds and perceptions when appropriate.
• Stress Management:  Leaders and team members act with emotional sustainability when they adjust their stress dials to the right tempo.  They need enough stress to be creatively engaged while not overdoing it to the point they lose physical or emotional stamina.
• Positive Attitude:  They look at events with curiosity and a sense of possibility and begin with the presupposition that positive results will unfold even in challenging situations.

Practices for Building Emotional Sustainability with Individuals and Teams include the following five active forms of engagement.

• Active reflection – Take time regularly to stop and breathe and do what Marcia refers to in Life’s 2% Solution, do the triple T – Think Things Through.  It’s taking time to notice what you are doing, why and to change as you believe is best.  Reflective self awareness is a powerful strength.
• Give feedback individually and to teams – Leadership assessments reflect a large reluctance to give feedback.  This creates loss of power that could result from the creative flow of ideas and has a secondary impact of frequently resulting in a buildup of resentment because people don’t respond to the unexpressed thoughts or concerns (big surprise!).
• Yoga or other forms of movement – Keep a physical flow moving in your body whether it is with yoga, walking, running, or qigong.
• Be actively aware of something bigger than yourself – Why do you do what you do? Connecting with something bigger than you and following that path provides meaning and purpose to your life.  A life of intentional service in accord with your values provides perspective and zest.
• Intend to live a meaningful life – Self-actualization is one of the key skills measured by the EQi 2.0 and one of the key questions is based on the belief that you intend to live a meaningful life. When leaders and teams incorporate the first four skills we’ve just discussed with this intention, they have the opportunity to deliberately manage their commitments and activities in order to live purposeful lives that are robust without leading to burnout.  That’s not an easy achievement; it requires conscious and deliberate living.

Building Emotional Sustainability

The crisis conditions we see in the planetary environment today are a direct reflection of the crisis conditions we find in the workplace. No oil is spilled, no dangerous levels of carbon dioxide are generated, no toxic chemicals are manufactured, no resources are extracted, no investment vehicles are designed except as the result of people working together to get as much value from their efforts as possible. Here’s the problem: our determination of what is valuable has been distorted by our perception of lack and the fear that this occasions in us at the deepest unconscious levels.  The answer is embedded in using all our forms of intelligence.  One of the most powerful is emotional and social intelligence.

Throughout the history of human cooperation there have been a long series of innovative attempts to find new ways to help people work together in a consistently productive manner. Too often these efforts have been less than fully successful because they lacked one critical component – they were not emotionally sustainable. In other words they do not consistently meet and transform the emotional needs of the people whose effort and cooperation was critical to the success of the mission.

Meeting the emotional needs of a project team for instance, means that the members feel safe and supported, and, when tensions arise, there is a user-friendly and effective means of resolving them. Achieving this dynamic is no small accomplishment, and those organizations that do so reap a handsome reward for their efforts. But there’s more. Transforming the emotional needs of a group of coworkers may be even more important, because this process incorporates developing and integrating the skills of emotional communication in such a way that the costs of conflict distrust and disengagement are continually reduced as team members grow more effective individually and the team grows more integrated as a unit.

The sources of the energy we need to work are primarily biological in nature – nutrition, sleep, and exercise, but the management system that we use to engage and direct the energy is emotional. Our emotional evaluation of the environment tells us what direction to move and how rapidly. People who feel deceived, manipulated, intimidated, taken for granted or worried about their future cannot sustain the attention, communication, and cognitive effort it takes to be fully engaged. More and more of their energy is reallocated to defensive strategic behavior as they seek to stay safe and protect themselves. When you’re feeling threatened you cannot innovate and you don’t want to!

Whether or not it is convenient to the 24/7/365 world of business, the fact is our human needs will always get met in Maslow’s order. We cannot override the unconscious, hardwired, instinctual patterns that organize our behavior, but when we understand how these internal processes work and learn how to cooperate with them consciously they can become assets for balancing production and consumption in a sustainable cycle. Our instincts program us to achieve success at two levels, initially on behalf of our individual survival and then in support of the collective survival of the species. As each of us seeks to outgrow our initial conditions of dependency we learn the very best ways we can to satisfy our personal needs and desires, however eventually, if we have the right models and experiences, we realize that just getting our own needs met is insufficient.

We cannot begin to provide ourselves with everything we need to function in the world today, so over time both cognitive and emotional intelligence has taught us that the quality of our life depends on the quality of the lives of those around us. If others are safe and satisfied and creatively challenged, they are better able to cooperate with us in the interdependent processes of family, community, and commerce that make up human civilization. To our detriment our technological success has created a false vision of independence that makes it seem as if each of us can make it more or less “on our own” because our life support system seems to be accessed through a mechanical interface with “society” or “the economy” rather than cultivated as an intimate relationship with our community. Consequently we are not forced to do the reality testing necessary to determine what level of true empathy and care we need to contribute to the real social network that supports us. Our recent technical “success” has allowed us to withdraw, isolate, and exclude others in ways that are eroding the very foundations of our economic security.

The values that underlie the long-term thinking, visioning, planning, and execution that have built civilization thus far have given way to shorter and shorter profit cycles designed to enrich individuals and companies regardless of what effects they may have on the larger system and those who serve in its other functions. Greed, no matter how cocky and well-heeled it may appear, is always the direct expression of one unsustainable emotion: fear – the fear of not having or being enough. Sometimes it is seen in the external environment, but much more often the lack is perceived as an internal, personal inadequacy that must be compensated for by getting more and more with the King of the Mountain mindset that destroys all hope of social, economic, and environmental balance and jeopardizes survival of the species.

This is a call to action. Achieving emotional sustainability in business requires the courage to value team members’ personal feelings about their work and their organization as critical data that must inform all decision-making. Learning how to contribute and incorporate these feelings in the workflow effectively is a skill as new as iPods. Both teams and leaders need education, training, and practice. The pioneers at Collaborative Growth can facilitate your process. The Team Emotional Social Intelligence Survey (TESI) and the EQi 2.0 can measure your progress.  Stay tuned for more examples of the innovative potential for building sustainable organizations when the core skills of the TESI and EQI 2.0 are used together.  These highly effective strategies for developing an emotionally sustainable workplace are available and critical to our success as a civilization.