Observable Things

These things are observable among many observable things:

A goose flying solo still thinks of herself as being in formation.

An oak tree leaning far out over the water still sees himself as integral to the forest.

A girl says, “Daddy, try to catch me,” and runs away for the joy and awe of seeing his long legs chew up space between them, his strong arms fill their void with her narrow body in embrace. To be held still. To be kissed, with whiskers.

All the other things which could be observed could also be written but that is enough for today.

Mythos

Place your confidence in many myths:

Floods. Fires. Towers. Brothers.

Weaned by wolves, hunted by kings,

bound by a tribal pact,

lost in the wild on a quest to prove the gods right, or wrong, or simply bloodthirsty.

Lost again, but at sea,

destined for a sweet return, resting on laurels at last.

Science is dead.

Let the oceans rise if they must. Take courage:

Humankind is made for the myth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dandelions

The old growth gives way to young

In a space where there was a burn.

Clearings are no accident.

By natural law, species push ahead, overcome, find new spaces to flourish, travel on wind or beast; take hold again, fall apart, crumble well.

The way is clear and, as quickly as all that, obscured.

So seize your wings, find your trail.

You are never lost completely: only once in a while unsure of your direction.

NOW! TODAY!

Go back again to the place where the burn has left a scar.

Fly with me to the river, swim with me to the shore, climb cliffs, send up a signal, tendrils and vines. There will be room for us all to send our roots out across that meadow.

There is a home for every bloom and blossom;

Every dandelion connected to every other by this web underground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Motivation Myth #1

Let’s bust some myths about motivation.

Here’s the first myth: Motivation is supposed to be like a big secret. It’s something somebody else out there has, and you don’t, something elusive, mystical, a mythical super-quality carried by super-speakers and super-coaches, something people are maybe born with. You have to have charisma, and if you don’t, you can’t do it. We’ve fallen in love with this idea that a lucky few are born with mystical super-qualities, and we think it’s like being an artist, which is code for “that’s not me”. That last part is the myth.

It may seem off topic but bear with me for a minute because we’re coming back to motivation, I promise. To bust the myth, we have to look at what it means to practice an art.

Who knows that General Custer nearly failed West Point? That he was at the bottom of his graduating class?

Was he a bad strategist? Arrogant? Poor grades in tactics? Did he have Badly grammar? No. it’s because Custer refused to learn how to draw. Not his firearm: I’m talking about draftsmanship. Back then there was no such thing as photography. You couldn’t stick a camera on a satellite and fly it overhead to see if the enemy had weapons of mass destruction. An officer on the front line had to be able to see what the situation was and draw, yes, with lines and shading and all that mystical art stuff, draw the battlefield accurately and quickly to dispatch a scout over to their commanding officer to give a report and then get instructions. To be an officer in the United States Army, sketching was a must. Not a mythical thing, it was something they knew you could learn to do and assumed you would learn to do if you wanted to succeed. It didn’t mean majoring in art, but you could get the job done when it was time to represent reality in two dimensions with pencil on paper. What I understand from a little research on Custer is that he thought there were only two places in a class, the head and the foot. He later became known as a great self-promoter, someone who could always find a way to get himself in the news. Being the head of the class is noteworthy, but requires a lot of effort and brown nosing. He was bound and determined not to be the head, so he earned himself 726 demerits in 4 years at West Point, that’s one roughly every other day. I’m fictionalizing his character now to make a point: Why should I learn to draw? I’m a winner, drawing is for planners and organizers and people too scared to just act. Sending reports to the commanding officer is for people who can’t figure it out themselves. Besides, I’m going to be a General. People will report to me, they’ll be serving me, I’ll be in charge. I won’t have to report to others. Drawing is for second-rate, second-tier commanders, middle management… those guys are all losers Good guys finish last. I am not a good guy, I’m the best.  Ok, I don’t know what his deal was, but we can guess. There was something he didn’t value about being able to draw. He was motivated by being well-known, a.k.a. notorious. It was more important. So he didn’t learn to draw!

What do we learn from that? First, that nobody thought the basic elements of drawing were hard to learn. There was no mystery about drawing in those days. Nobody thought art was a mystical thing only a few gifted people could do. But that idea was growing. Before TV and mass media, everyone danced at a party. After mass media, everyone said “I can’t dance like Fred Astaire, so I won’t dance at all”. You’re missing out! Some will do it with more beauty than others. Chef Gordon Ramsay plating food makes it more interesting than me nuking a burrito – but I can cook, okay.

You can learn the basic elements of drawing or cooking, if you want to. We’re going to see that motivating people works that way too. It has very little to do with having a big-stage personality. In fact, sometimes that big-stage personality doesn’t work as well with normal people. Are you aware Michael Jordan ended up being a lousy basketball executive, he couldn’t put a team together because all he understood was superstardom? Have you ever met a sales manager who was massively successful as a salesperson but they couldn’t understand why half their team wasn’t breaking records every quarter?

We’re very progressive as humans, which is why we now believe that not only drawing,  dancing and cooking but motivation, as well, are in the realm of the mystical and artistic and require a super-human to do it. I bet you know some names of motivational speakers who are more famous than I am. But it’s a myth that you need a superstar with personal charisma out the roof. My assumption is like West Point’s assumption about learning to draw: The best motivators are pretty normal people and they understand the struggle the average person on their team is dealing with. They might not even be team leaders, but they’re going to be motivating others by the end of the day, and that’s going to motivate them in return. The process for motivating superstars isn’t different. But if you can motivate normal people, your superstars will get inspired by that!

 

Hedgerow Time in Early May

In my book the Art of Motivational Listening (and in earlier blogs in their pre-edited form) I talked about the value of hedgerow time: time spent in creative relaxation, just exploring, not trying to make something you’ll sell. Photography is a great way for me to get expressive without worrying about selling my work because I place myself squarely in the position of amateur. Still, I hope you enjoy these!

 

Are you Gucci?

I have a recent customer who’s hired me several times. This young lady calls me “Gucci.”

Did you know Gucci was back? Did you know that means I’m high class? (I had to ask. Wasn’t sure if I was being insulted or not.)

It’s funny because I associate it with knockoff handbags made in sweatshops sold by people (usually immigrants who can’t get other work) who lay them out on blankets at the beaches in foreign tourist destinations. Malaga, Spain, comes to mind. Not high class at all. Cheap imitations. I spend more time in those kinds of places than on Fifth Avenue.

Be the real deal. Be yourself, not an imitation of somebody else. Otherwise you give everybody a black eye: both yourself and the famous guy. Let other people compare your work to the big names, but only because you have unique class, not because you ripped off their brand.

The Motivated Locomotive

Once upon a time there was a train full of toys, stuffed animals, dolls and balls. “Wouldn’t it be great,” said the Clown, CEO, “if all the boys and girls on the other side of the mountain had our goodies, toys and treats any time they wanted?” Everyone agreed. So they roughed out a Vision statement which said “Develop, deploy, and manage a diverse set of strategic logistics tools to serve our customers, improving overall satisfaction among our diverse customer profiles.” It sounded very business-like. Everyone knew what it meant, right? “Take a variety of toys and sweets over the mountain that all the kids will like.” Also, they decided that a good mission statement would be “seamlessly operationalize market-driven global opportunities,” which pretty much meant “get in the black asap” and they got to work.

The CEO pointed out that the most likely market was over the mountain, and besides, there was a railroad right over the top already, so the company loaded a train with anything they had in stock and set off to make their mission a reality. Which was great, until their engine broke down a mile out of town. Nobody had bothered to see if it was in working condition. So the CEO started doing some quick headhunting by tapping his network.

“hey, I need a loco-motivated guy here who can get us over this mountain,” he said. He tried to lure away people from some major logistics companies, one that specialized in heavy brown and yellow packages, and another that specialized in speedy delivery of red and blue envelopes, but nobody he went to business school with was interested in working for a startup, for half their current pay and dubiously valuable stock options.

Finally he found a kid who was just out of college. Let’s just say she was a little green behind the ears and hadn’t quite stopped watching videos with talking trains who rolled their eyeballs around and bantered with their cabooses and obeyed a clown in a top hat. She was what we’d call an “idealist” and a “go-getter” and she’d never had an opportunity before. She was hyper-motivated; even loco-motivated because she loved the vision. Her motto was “I think I can” and with a lot of effort she made it over that first mountain and delivered the goods.

The end, but not quite. Using some lingo she thought the CEO would understand, the Little Engine Who Did, said “that mountain is a silly hilly hill, homey don’t play that,” and to the board of directors she said “our methodology is unsustainable, has anyone even bothered to think about what our values are?”

Everyone said “What do you mean? We have a vision, a mission, a motivated general manager, and we’re in the black. Keep doing it!”

The Little Engine Who Did, and was happy to keep doing it, too, if only it wasn’t such a damn uphill struggle half the time, said, “We have vision: we know how we want to change the world for the better; we make children happy. We have a mission: to deliver toys to the town on the other side of the mountain. But I’m not motivated to keep making that climb, over and over, when I think there might be better ways to deliver that fit who we are more appropriately. Did anyone think about the tracks?”

“The tracks were just there,” said the giraffe, who spoke up because he always had an easy time getting a bird’s eye view, “and based on a cursory inspection they do not appear to be broken.”

“It’s not a matter of being broken or not. It works, but I’m wearing out quickly. I don’t get to see my children much, and when I do, I’m so exhausted I fall asleep before we’re done eating our KFC. I really want to do what we do, but I don’t have a high value for our traditional methodology.”

“How else could we do it?” said the CEO.

“The first two options I see are blasting a tunnel through the mountain or building a track that goes around it. Then we could consider getting a ship and sailing around to the east, or flying some of the goods in by air. Some of those methods will cost more, some will take longer, but just getting it done isn’t going to work. We need to look at other values besides just doing it this way. In this case, there isn’t a right way to do it, just different ones.”
So they wrote it out:

Vision, or how the world will change if we succeed: Kids will play and grow!

Mission: What we are doing now: Getting toys and fruit to children.

 Values: How we do it and why we do it the way we do it. Where the train tracks go and why they go there.

“We have not thought about these very carefully before,” said the CEO, who felt his suspenders had broken and his pants were falling down, because they were. Hee, hee.

And that is when they called a coach to help them talk it over. The Beginning.

Coach training, Congo update

Monday I spoke with Jacques Luwaku, one of the trainees from a class I led in Kinshasa last September with Charles Buller and Jeannette Buller Slater. Jacques (pictured, in the middle of three men seated behind the table) works with Leonard Kiswangi (pictured, seated to my immediate left) at the Kinshasa office of African Enterprise, an international organization based in South Africa, and also pastors a congregation in Kinshasa.

Jacques said, “I’m going to give you a coaching testimony. Recently, I got a call from a young husband in my church (and he filled me in on their positions, the wife is in the women’s council, I missed what the husband’s position is, but these things are culturally important in Congo, everyone has some position or title) and the man said ‘No, pastor, my wife and I, it’s not working out, we are just going to get a divorce.’ (Jacques did not say what their dispute was about.) So I called the husband back, and I called the wife, too, and I said, ‘No, I don’t have any counsel to give you. But I have a question for you. If I asked you to give counsel to another young couple who was thinking about getting a divorce, what would it be? What should they do? Get divorced? Or stay together? Please reflect on that together, then you tell me.’ and they called me back later and said, ‘No, pastor, really, we’ve thought about what advice we would give; we’re going to stay together.’ They solved their own problem, they have walked away from the door of divorce. When I am coaching, I am second, and they are in charge.” Jacques went on to say that he hadn’t had to stress out about it and was glad to see the couple find their own solution.

I felt excited for him. I told him, “But Jacques, you didn’t even use the Panic Technique.”

“What? The Panic Technique? Oh, no,” he laughed, “I did not use the Panic Technique.”

It’s gratifying, and that’s an understatement, to see that the training we did in Congo last fall is bearing fruit in very real ways. Coaching saves marriages.

This story is shared with Pastor Jacques’s permission.

I continue to coach Jacques occasionally, pro bono, with your support. It seems like a good time to remind my readers that if you’d like to support our work in developing nations, training leaders like Jacques Luwaku to use coaching techniques, you can do so at Evergreen Leaders. All contributions are tax-deductible.

 

Five Options Coaching Technique

My client has been trying to get a meeting with his own boss to discuss the business’ mission so he can better understand it and his work can build into it. His tactic has been to just try to catch the boss in person, since they have offices next door to each other. But the boss is never there.

“Give me five more options for how you can get this message to your boss,” I say. “It’s okay if they are crazy, we’re not judging whether or not they’re good ideas yet.”

“Ok,” he says, and proceeds to rattle this off, “One, call his cell phone; two, text him; three, email; four, leave a note on his desk; five, carrier pigeon.”

[Ideal client!]

“Great,” I say, “that was quick. Can you give me five more?”

“Sure. Send him a letter in the mail. Put a poster on his door. Hook up a sensor so that when he walks in a recording plays ‘call M.B. for a meeting’, put a whoopee cushion on his chair with a note, put a decal on his car.”

I get the idea he could do this all day long. I ask if he minds if I write a blog about it.

People ask all the time if I give great advice. No, I don’t. I get them generating their own ideas. It’s far more effective. Last night someone asked if I just tell people to follow their hearts. I said, no, I don’t tell them anything. So the same girl asked, what is your best advice? “Follow your heart,” I said, using her words. That’s what coaching is about.

Also, if you vote for Pedro, all your wildest dreams will come true.