Mountain Paths: A Guide on the Journey toward Discovering our Potential

mountain paths A Guide on the Journey toward Discovering our Potential

jack ricchiuto Author of Appreciative Leadership

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M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

M o u n t a i n Pa t h s A Guide on the Journey toward Discovering our Potential

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Mountain Paths A Guide on the Journey toward Discovering our Potential

Published by DesigningLife Books PO Box 15421 Cleveland OH 44115 www.DesigningLife.com Copyright 2006 Jack Ricchiuto All rights reserved.

ISBN 0-9661703-8-5 PDF Format Version

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Ricchiuto, Jack, 1952 1. Business 2. Personal Growth I. Title First Printing, August 2006 Printed in the USA Production: BookMasters

Cover Design: Tia Andrako

Front Cover Art: Katsushita Hokusai, Japanese 1760-1849, Plum Blossom and Sun from the album Haru no Fuji, Martin A. Ryerson Japanese Book Collection, 4-1-55. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago

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M o u n t a i n

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7/ Invitation 8/ Mountain paths as metaphor 9/ Getting the most value from this book

Fire / The nature of passion 11/ 12/ 14/ 17/ 21/ 24/ 25/ 26/ 30/

Being our best Discovering our potential Realizing our potential What matters Getting clear on what matters Vision alignment To dream, to learn Big dreams, small steps Commitment to joy

Earth / The nature of confidence 34/ 36/ 38/ 40/ 41/ 44/ 46/ 48/ 50/ 52/ 54/

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The accessibility of potential Doing well Know how The truth about weaknesses Setting ourselves up for success Rehearsing for success No one else Building self-confidence Our personal scope of influence Success as teacher Gratitude

Wind / The nature of connection 57/ 60/ 63/ 65/ 67/ 70/ 73/ 74/ 77/ 79/ 81/ 82/ 86/

Trust The power & practice of dialogue Inquiry Listening Making an impact Feedback Not taking things personally Blind spots Consensus building Compassion Abundant resources Growing our social networks Companionship on the path

Water / The nature of agility

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89/ Being present 90/ Managing change 92/ Making the difficult easy 94/ Lions, tigers, and bears 96/ Path barriers 98/ Best use of time 100/ Intentional use of time 102/ Saying yes, saying no 104/ Wise decisions 106/ Smart planning 107/ The power of startlines 109/ Follow-through 111/ Creating flow 114/ Strategic serendipity Next steps on the path

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I n v i t a t i o n Mountain Paths is dedicated to people who are committed to making a difference in their life and their world. We believe that making a difference is all about engaging our potential for passion, confidence, connection, and agility. Passion is our clarity about what really matters to us. Passion infuses our life and work with inspiration, energy, and focus. Confidence is consciousness of our potential. Connection is the quality of our relationships that support our ability to do more with others than we can alone. Agility is our capacity for adapting to new challenges and creating new opportunities. This is an invitation to discover the best parts of us. It’s an exploration of cultivating our capacity for success in what we dream. We want to complete each conversation, each day, and each project with confidence that we did our best, we used our potential to act on what matters to us, that we were present and agile, and we acted on our goals that call us to be more today than we were yesterday. Mountain Paths is an invitation to reflect on the possibilities of discovering and realizing this potential.

Jack Ricchiuto August 2006

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M o u n t a i n

P a t h s

a s

M e t a p h o r

Traveling on a mountain path is a journey toward being fully who we are. It’s an adventure of climbing rocks of challenges and fording rivers of change. Wherever our path takes us, we rely on the peaks of our goals to guide us across expected and unpredictable terrains. Problems and obstacles call on us to improvise new paths. With each step moving forward, we learn more about ourselves, the nature of paths, and the power of process. A journey on a mountain path is a simple and powerful metaphor for any journey toward discovering and realizing our potential.

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AGILITY

CONNECTION

PASSION WATER

FIRE

WIND

EARTH CONFIDENCE

Mountain Paths is a compilation and distillation of the most practical pieces of wisdom that have supported and continue to support my coaching work with leaders and teams in organizations and communities over the past 3 decades. The book is organized around four essential ingredients of effective living and working: passion, confidence, connection, and agility, symbolized by the four elements of fire, earth, wind, and water. These are the elements that support success along the way.

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G e t t i n g t h i s B o o k

t h e

M o s t

V a l u e

f r o m

One way to read this book is the way many of us were taught in school – page by page from beginning to end. This approach assumes that knowledge is unveiled with enough growing complexity that makes it impossible to understand later sections before first understanding previous sections. This book is not written in this textbook style. In fact, you can expect to derive the greatest satisfaction and value starting where your heart calls you to start, and using the law of two feet to create your own path and move in the direction of your evolving interest. Some topics will speak to your life today; others may not resonate until some time into the future when you’re ready for them. This is a guide to access anytime. Whichever sections you get into, you’ll find questions for reflection. The highest value you will take away from this book is the gift of reflection and practice you give yourself, inspired by the powerful questions presented. Some books are designed to educate or entertain; others are designed to guide. This book is in the guide category. Simply reading it will give you no meaningful or lasting impact on your potential for personal effectiveness and productivity. Impact is only possible through practicing what you learn here in the very real contexts of your life, career, and work. Expect that with practice, you will experience dependable movement toward your goals. Embrace the journey. Enjoy the view.

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F i r e /The nature of passion

Pa t h s

On the mountain, fire is the life-giving light and warmth of the sun, the guiding light of the moon and stars.

M o u n t a i n

Fire is the nature of passion, what matters most to us revealed and realized as our vision, dreams, and goals.

A passionate life is a life where we are clear on what calls our heart.

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B e i n g

o u r

b e s t

Passion begins with being focused on the best of who we are. Fire, earth, wind and water are always at their best. They have no consciousness otherwise. All they can do is be the best of what they are. When we’re clear on our best, that’s all we can be. Think about any moment of success, achievement, or joy in your life. In every situation, you engaged the best of who you were at the time because you had no consciousness otherwise. You stayed totally focused and clear on your best qualities, capabilities, and intentions. Being our best is always a matter of focus. When we understand our life, we understand that what we focus on, we become. To pay attention to the best in us is to feel clarity of purpose, self-trust, and the willingness to dream dreams that inspire and connect us as never before. Every day, life gives us the freedom to choose a powerful focus on our best or the powerlessness of a deficiency focus. Wherever we are, life offers us as many reasons to forget the power of our potential and instead focus on our deficiencies. With the human condition that transcends geography, gender, genetics, and generation comes the ability and freedom to be miserable, frustrated, and confused. Life always gives us the freedom to either focus on or to forget our best. All that a sense of powerlessness takes is attention to our life’s deficiencies - what we can’t do, don’t want, don’t like, don’t have, what isn’t working, and why. A deficiency focus makes our potential inaccessible, cutting us off from our wisdom, power, and energy to engage our best.

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Or we can feel clear, confident, and creative by focusing instead on our potential - what we can do, do want, do like, do have, what is working, and why. Attention is our freedom, power, and responsibility. No one can pay attention for us. No one can demand what we’ll focus on from one moment and day to the next. No one can take this freedom, power, and responsibility away from us or take it for us.

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When we realize this, we immediately receive all the freedom, power, and responsibility life gives us in infinite abundance every moment of our lives.

D i s c o v e r i n g p o t e n t i a l

o u r

What do you think you’re capable of experiencing and achieving in your life beyond what you already have? What would your life, career, and work be like if you approached each from a belief that you have access to all kinds of capabilities that you have yet to tap into? Take a minute and reflect on a part of your life or work that’s important to you.  What’s your sense of what your potential is there?  When you imagine what you may be capable of in this area of your life, what do you picture?  What words would you use to describe it?

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Discovering our unique potential in any area of our life depends on these questions about our potential. Our questions direct the focus of attention, in subtle and obvious ways, every moment and situation in our lives. When we want access to more of our best, we simply need to change our questions. It’s the simple and powerful transition from “What don’t I want right now?” to “What do I want right now?”, and “What capabilities do I have that I can engage?” Every time we feel like we’re fully alive and engaged in any situation, it’s when we’re paying attention to the capabilities we have access to in that situation. Think about areas of your life where you would like to experience a greater sense of potential, a deeper sense of confidence, optimism, power, and aliveness.  What would you love to be more capable of in your most significant relationships?  What would you love to be more capable of in your ability to be productive in your work and life?  What would you love to be more capable of in making a difference in your world?

What if it became apparent to you that you have more potential than you ever thought you had?

Every time we reflect on these kinds of questions, we increase our clarity, consciousness, and creativity. If we look back at our life and see how our potential increased with time and experience, we can see how our commitment to clarity, consciousness, and creativity played a part in every step along the way.

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Life’s promise is to keep giving us opportunities to discover the power we have in creating our own potential.

R e a l i z i n g

o u r

p o t e n t i a l

Every moment of our success is supported by our best.

Pa t h s

When we understand who we are, we become very clear that each of us is a dynamic and evolving field of potential. We understand that being at our best is always giving ourselves access to all 8 aspects of our potential.

Resources What we do have

M o u n t a i n

Connections Who we do know Successes What we have achieved

OUR POTENTIAL That which enables, inspires, engages us

Qualities How we can be

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Opportunities Where we can be Passions What we do want Skills What we can do

Knowledge What we do know

Think about a time when you’ve been at your best. You made the best use of your time and talents and it paid off. Notice how in every case, you engaged the right potential at the right time. The rich ecology of our potential includes those things that enable, inspire, and engage us. They include our opportunities, passions, skills, knowledge, qualities, successes, connections, and resources.

Our opportunities are the possibility spaces that allow us to act on our passions. They can be opportunities we discover, stumble on, or actively create and co-create with others. Our passions include our dreams, commitments, our vision and metrics for success. They are what matters most to us; what we are willing to commitment to action. Our skills include everything we know how to do – from mundane and physical to cognitive and technical tasks. These are the know-how we’ve accumulated through learning and experience throughout our lifetime. Our knowledge is everything we know from general to specialized knowledge – everything we’ve learned, read, experienced. Our qualities include our personal characteristics like curiosity, courage, patience, creativity, sense of humor, appreciation for organization, persistence, empathy, enthusiasm, and collaborative spirit. Our successes include every instance where we have done something skillfully and when we get the results we’re after. Our connections include old and new, formal and informal, deep and casual relationships within the communities to which we belong.

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Our resources include our financial, technical, personal, shared, and professional resources. Make a list of anything you’ve achieved or survived in the past 3 years. Next to each item, list examples of areas of your potential that supported any success you experienced, however heroic or humble. Which of your best parts supported your success?

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The more complex and challenging our achievements, the more aspects of our best we use in combination. Handling complex people or projects at work may require a combination of a dozen different aspects in a single situation. When we reflect on when we’re at our best, we reflect on the potential that supported whatever desired impact we have been able to achieve. Every ounce of trust we’ve ever gained in our relationships came about from our understanding and using our best in effective ways. Every course we passed, degree we attained, and job we got came about because of our understanding and use of our potential. Every satisfying purchase we have ever made came about through use of our potential. Every creative thing we’ve ever done, every problem we’ve ever solved, and every goal achieved came about because of an improvisational use of our best. Every new thing we have ever learned came about from new ways of using the best parts of us. At no time did our weaknesses, gaps, or deficiencies play a role in what we achieved. No matter what we personally lacked at the time, our inadequacies were irrelevant to how we made success possible for ourselves. So obsessing over our weaknesses is not only a waste of valuable time, it is an effective way for us to obscure the truth of our potential. A deficiency lens is a denial of our best and reduces our access to it. Trying to obsess about or defend our weaknesses is only a sure way to get in the way of our own success.

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This is a radical concept if we’ve been taught to believe that success is always about knowing and overcoming our weaknesses or those of others. But if we reflect accurately on the root causes of our success, never did any weakness help in the process. We only arrived at success because of how we used our potential to achieve what mattered most to us. Success has and will always depend on an engaging and empowering focus on what we do want, do have, and can do. Any deficiency focus on what we don’t want, don’t have, and can’t do is a pure waste of time and barrier to our success. The reason is simple: the deficiency focus only creates a sense of powerlessness and victimhood that gets totally in the way of our seeing clearly exactly which of our potentials will support our success here and now. The more we understand our best, the more we understand and act on our power to create what matters to us.

W h a t

m a t t e r s

Engaging our best starts with knowing what matters to us in the first place. Everything good flows from clarity of purpose. The more clear we are on what matters to us in any situation, endeavor, or relationship, the more we know who we are and what we’re about. The more clear we are on what matters to us, the more quickly and sustainably we align with people who have the same values and goals as we do. One of the clearest indicators that something really matters to us is that we’ve translated a passion and dream into a goal. If we

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have a health, finance, work, relationship, or career goal, it’s because these areas of our life matter enough to take focused action on them. Write a list of your short and long term goals, however you see them today. Describe them in terms of the question, “What would success look like?”, in any parts of your life and work that you want to consider. What if you allowed What do you notice about your yourself to lists? Don’t judge any goals, just explore any notice whatever you notice. Especially notice how you feel as you g o a l y o u r h e a r t desires? look over the list. Which goals make

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you feel most alive and energized? Do any feel more like obligation than passion? Goals are commitments to action. The opposite of a goal is a wish, hope, longing, worry, or complaint. These are opposites because they imply responsibility somewhere outside ourselves. Consider any resistance you feel toward setting goals for your life or your work. Think about what you’d consider good and bad excuses for resisting the setting of goals. Think about the value of setting goals that you may only partially realize, make partial progress on, or that would change. Reality is, even small progress or change on a large goal can give you more value than large progress on a small goal. It’s up to you to decide the kind of partial realization or progress that would be valuable for you. Bottom line: if you’re an “all or nothing” person, you’re going to pass up all kinds of partial value because of an unwillingness to settle for less than “all.”

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When we set goals in our life, career, and work, it’s because we understand that if we want an intentional future, we must be an engaged participant in the unique creation of it. Think about the areas of your work and life where you may not have clear goals. These area areas where you are not yet totally clear on what matters to you – or they are areas where nothing really matters to you. The good news is that the more clear you are on what matters to you, the more capable you are of describing, visualizing, and moving forward on your goals. The areas of your life, career, and work that are good candidates for goals include any areas where you feel stressed, overwhelmed, disorganized, uncomfortable, unhappy, conflicted, underutilized, unfulfilled, frustrated, unsupported, stuck, out of balance, or challenged. Goals are also important in any areas that are new for us – new opportunities, responsibilities, commitments, relationships, projects, challenges, and learning. Look again at your list of goals and decide how clear they are as compelling statements of what matters to us. When our goals clearly reflect what matters to you, they meet 3 criteria.  They’re attractive – they’re stated in terms that make you feel excited – not what feels like a burden, sacrifice, or obligation  They’re engaging - they’re stated in terms of what you do want – not what you don’t want or don’t like.  They’re actionable – they’re stated in terms of what you’re going to do – not just in terms of what you’re going to have, feel, or think about doing.

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If our goals aren’t attractive, engaging, and actionable, they may inspire us in the short run, but they are not sustainable through the obstacles and challenges we’ll encounter on the way. It’s realistic to expect that our goals will change and evolve as our sense of what matters and our potential changes with experience.

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When you consider what’s important to you today and your future, you may realize you have fuzzy and conflicting goals. This is OK. You can create multiple versions of any fuzzy goal to get to more clear pictures of what that goal means for you. You can also honor the fact that you can be attracted to opposites. You can be attracted to work and play, time alone and time with people, being spontaneous and planful, taking risks and protecting assets. There is a good chance that you can pursue diverse goals over time. What if you woke up 10 years from now and Two of the biggest realized that your challenges with any goal have world then began to do with time and identity. today? The time challenge is: I don’t know where I’m going to find the time to act on my goal. If the goal really matters to us, we will make or find the time. If we don’t, it’s probably an indication that the goal is not that attractive and we instead need to pursue a goal that is attractive enough to warrant the time. The more clear we become on what matters to us and why, the more we tend to dedicate time and energy to the process. What fills our calendars is the clearest indication of what really matters to us. The identity challenge is the idea: I don’t see myself as the kind of person that naturally does what this goal implies. This is

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logical since when we start out toward a new goal, we haven’t practiced seeing ourselves succeeding in the ways we intend to. The only way to a new sense of our capabilities is through practicing new pictures of ourselves achieving our goals. Every goal implies discovering more of our potential – the best of who we are and can be. In this way, every goal implies letting go of a deficiency picture of ourselves as we move toward clearer pictures of our potential.

G e t t i n g m a t t e r s

c l e a r

o n

w h a t

Getting clear on what matters to us is a matter of the heart. It’s about listening deeply and quietly to what we’re naturally attracted to, what inspires and energizes us. When we have a feel for what matters to us, we feel alive. • What matters most to you in your life, in your relationships, and your work? • What would you love to have, do, and be in the future? • What’s your vision of what you feel called to? • If you allowed yourself to dream, what would be your dream? These are the things that matter most to you right now. One way to get clear on what matters is to picture yourself at some point in the future having a wonderful conversation with a friend or colleague. In this conversation, you’re describing in detail

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what you would love to say you’ve achieved up to that point in time. If you want to explore more deeply what matters to you about your future, try visualizing different versions of the conversation. See how each one feels. Improvise different stories about how you got where you are at that future point in time. Create as many versions as you want. Each one reveals a different dimension of what really matters to you today. If pictures are difficult to create, simply use words to describe your experience in this future conversation.

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When we start on the path toward clarity of values, it’s natural to notice how we’re attracted to multiple and opposite directions. The more diverse experiences we have in life, the more capable we become of being attracted to a diverse palette of possibilities. The more experiences we have in life, the more things we can be attracted to than we could ever give adequate time to. When we understand this, regret becomes less realistic. The most important aspect to being clear on what matters to us is honesty with ourselves. We can say something matters to us, but if we don’t give much time to it, it obviously matters less than what we do give more time to. This happens with things we think we “should” be attracted to – by obligation or pressure – but we aren’t. This self-inflicted confusion is based on a misunderstanding of attraction. Attraction is a feeling and like any feeling, it cannot be commanded or decided. We can’t decide we are or aren’t attracted to something. Attraction is a natural phenomenon and as such can’t be dictated, forced, or controlled. All we can do with what matters to us is notice it, tell ourselves the truth about it, and act in harmony with it.

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If I want to understand more deeply what actually matters to me, the listening can start with inquiry into why. • What attracts me? • Why does this matter? • What do I value about this? • What do I believe that supports my attraction to it? • How does this fit into my story?

What if you could build your calendar around what matters most to you?

Each of these questions help me get more clear, more honest, and more truthful with myself about what matters to me and to what degree it matters. What’s interesting to observe is when we experience a shift and transition in what matters to us. As we become more effective in our life, career, and work, we become more attracted to even greater healthiness, wholeness, and aliveness. Our joy and the joy of others begin to matter more than ever, creating an upward, selfreinforcing spiral. We begin to find it easier to let go of old beliefs that prevent us from being clear on what we want. This creates the space for courage to emerge and inspire dreams we once thought to be outside the reach of our potential. The more we understand the best that we are, the more courage we have to understand what most deeply matters to us. In order to be fully who we are and fully present to life’s opportunities, we believe that we have access to more potential than ever seems available to us. We believe that what we do with our time and talent is totally up to us. We believe that being clear on what matters to us determines the quality of every path we take.

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V i s i o n

a l i g n m e n t

One of the most profound self-fulfilling expectations we experience in our life is the belief about how our future comes about. If we believe that we can’t influence our future 5, 10, or 20 years from now, we probably won’t. If we think we can influence our future, we probably will.

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Taking this one step further, we have the most energy for our present goals if we can see a direct line of vision between these immediate goals and our goals further out into the future. A clear and compelling present begins with a clear and compelling future. Think about how you would love to be able to describe your life 20 years out from now. Try to use the word love as often as possible to evoke what most deeply matters to you. If you haven’t done this before, start with a few images, words, or pictures. If it’s still a difficult task, start with what you would love to not say about your life at that point. Then simply start to construct what the opposites might look and feel like. Of course there are so many unknowns between here and there, there is no way of predicting the possibilities 20 years from now than we could have predicted 20 years ago where we are now. Visioning is not about prediction, it’s about clarifying what really matters to us and why. Allow yourself to create multiple attractive future scenarios. See how each one feels. See which you are more attracted to. Then think about what you would need to be doing 10 and then 5 years from now in order to have the kind of life you want to have 20 years out. Finally, decide what goals you would need to have today that would align with the goals that attract you into the future.

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Seeing the future opens our eyes to seeing new opportunities and possibilities in the present. And when we can see that our goals this week, month, and year directly align with our goals out into the future, our present goals have strong positive energy that gives us courage to overcome and outgrow obstacles. Creating a compelling vision for the future energizes and inspires everything we do in the present.

T o

d r e a m ,

t o

l e a r n

It’s very reasonable to expect that the larger our dream, the more it will involve new learning. Changing careers, living in a new culture, managing larger scopes of responsibility all require new levels of learning. What if you decided to be willing to learn new things, expanding the scope of your potential in infinite directions.

If we don’t think we’re capable of new learning, we naturally put limits on the kinds of dreams we allow ourselves to dream.

What helps is remembering all the new things we’ve learned in our lifetime so far. Start even a short list of things you’ve learned - perhaps many of which were things you once didn’t think you were capable of learning. • New languages • New job or technical skills • New specialized kinds of knowledge • New artistic or creative abilities • New understanding of different cultures

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• New insights into current events and trends The easy way to add to the list is to think of things you can do today that you didn’t do 5 or 10 years ago. For many of us, email and internet navigation was new learning. If you’ve parented children through any phases of their life, this was new learning. If you effectively managed changes in your life or work, these were new learnings. When you realize your capacity for learning, you are naturally more inclined to allow yourself to dream beyond what you’ve already accomplished.

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Fact is, there is an endless list of new skills and knowledge you can learn. You have the ability to learn anything anyone else does as long as you have the physical capacity to perform the task. Go back to your list of dreams and goals and identify what kind of new learning will support your success in each. Acknowledging your capacity for learning, even the most stretch goals and dreams come into reach as actionable.

B i g s t e p s

d r e a m s ,

s m a l l

In our life, career, and work, our path is the way toward what matters to us. Our path is the journey in the direction of our dreams. Our dreams are our pictures of what we would most love to see in our world. The larger our dream, the longer our path. An engaging view of success on any path is a view of our progress along the path. Progress is moving in steps toward our

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dream. To the extent that we are happy with the ability to move in steps, we are happy with the path of our choosing. Take a minute right now and think about a goal you’ve made any kind of progress on in the past few months. Steps are small actions. Include on your list of small action steps things like:           

Having a conversation Doing some research, new learning Making a decision, promise or commitment Getting prepared for something Making a plan Securing a resource Enlisting someone’s help or support Acting on a plan Changing, altering, or improving something Starting something Completing something

Don’t worry about how small or humble your steps have been. Each step of progress counts toward the growing greater realization of your goals and dreams. The achievement of dramatic dreams always implies the achievement of thousands of small nondramatic steps. Every step in the right direction – whatever its scale – represents success on your path. If you want to experience the most success possible in your life, career, and work, define success as the focused momentum of progress in stages and steps. Realizing your success is vital on any journey because understanding each success gives you understanding of the potential you need for the rest of the journey. On the proactive side, experiencing progress starts with identifying the indicators of progress on any path we choose. Identifying the indicators of progress means describing or picturing

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what you and your world would look like as you make progress each step of the way, always starting with where you are. Indicators of progress represent phases or stages toward a larger goal whether the goal is a specific outcome or skill mastery. Take one of your goals and look out a month or two from now. Call where you are now point A; call where you want to be point E.

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Now describe as clearly as possible what points B, C, and D would look like. What are you doing at points B, C, and D? The more impatient and anxious we are about getting to any goal we have, the more difficult it seems to define the steps along the way because we feel like we don’t have the time or attentional bandwidth for steps. We want there to be one step between A and E. If impatience or anxiety are patterns in our lives, we may be tempted to resist setting goals with more than 1 or 2 steps. We maintain small dreams that lack the passion and energy of larger dreams that require progress more than perfection. Without a clear sense of progress markers, we can’t have a clear sense of our progress. We just feel lost. Eventually, we’re tempted to give up the path. We create our own sense of being lost and not making progress simply by not creating the markers that tell us we’re still

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successfully moving along the path in the direction of what matters to us. So take a goal you’d love to make progress on at this point in your work or life.

What if you knew you were always prepared to take the next steps in the direction of your dream?

• Where are you now with that goal? • What have you felt like you’ve been able to do so far on this goal? • What is your ultimate dream with it? • Where do you want to be in a month or two from now on this? • What specific actions on your part or outcomes from your efforts would indicate steps toward progress? • What would be some logical and realistic next steps you can do well? What are your points B, C and D? If you want to take this to the next level, do this with goals you have beyond this year or several years out. What are the milestones along the way? The radical and liberating truth we get to discover is that, wherever we’ve been and wherever we are on the journey, we are always prepared to take the next steps in the direction of our dream. If we’re willing to move in steps, we can move toward dreams of any size and scope with courage and confidence.

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C o m m i t m e n t

t o

j o y

If you looked at all of your goals and reflected on why you’re attracted to them, you’d quickly discover that they all point to one thing: happiness. The important question is: How committed are you to happiness? Really! If happiness is an ultimate objective behind any goal we have, our ability to make progress on any goal depends on our commitment to the happiness implied in that goal. As reasonable as this sounds, it becomes more challenging in practice. Here is a short list of barriers to a commitment to happiness in our life, career, and work:

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 We don’t think we’re worthy of more happiness than we’ve experienced in the past  We can’t see ourselves being happy in situations where we think unhappiness is inevitable  We think that “too much” happiness is the root of apathy; if we get too happy, we won’t be motivated for anything more than we have today; that unhappiness is necessary for motivation These are self-fulfilling and self-defeating beliefs – supporting unhappiness and ultimately keeping us from making progress on goals whose objective is happiness.  Do you still think that growth and gain always requires suffering?  Is it possible you tolerate suffering unnecessarily because of this belief?  What is your commitment to creating and discovering joy in your life, career, and work?

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 What could you do on a daily basis that reflects this commitment? Some of us have become accustomed to using suffering as a valuable way of opening our minds and hearts to learning and growth. This is a good use of suffering. It is also good to not turn the pattern into a belief that suffering is essential to learning and growth.

What if your commitment to joy was far stronger than your commitment to suffering?

An authentic and durable commitment to joy starts with being curious about the likelihood that happiness is a larger space of possibility than suffering. If you believe that suffering is a larger space for you, you’re going to keep creating the conditions for it.

What’s important to understand is that giving up our commitment to unhappiness and committing instead to joy is not a decision – it’s a discovery. It’s discovering the futility of a strategy of deficiency and the effectiveness of a strategy of appreciation. Until we make this discovery for ourselves, we continue in frustrating and unproductive ambivalence between happiness and unhappiness. So what does it mean to be committed to joy? It means focusing on what matters to us – visualizing what attracts us more than anything else. It’s taking responsibility for our successes. It’s focusing on our potential and power, in any situation. It’s taking the next action steps in the direction of what attracts us. It’s reflecting on any level of success we achieve and understand how we support our own success. And it means helping others do the same.

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It’s realizing how a commitment to the necessity of unhappiness perpetuates unhappiness. It’s observing the seductive nature of our belief that suffering is essential to our happiness. It isn’t. All that is essential is our discovery of the power of happiness in bringing clarity and purpose into our lives. Commitment to joy is not easy while we live and work in a deficiency culture that continuously tempts us to practice and maintain a deficiency lens. It means diverging from the deficiency lens practiced by the many people in our life who raised us, grew up with us, taught us, cared for us, and became our friends. It means giving up our connection to their perspective, no matter how much we valued it in the past.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

The good news is that by simply being aware of this mythology and its seductive futility, we become free of it. And free of a deficiency lens, we naturally realize a more engaging lens and life. This work starts with asking ourselves the questions: How much does joy for myself and others matter to me … and why does it matter more than our suffering? To the extent that we can answer these questions, we open ourselves to the possibility of an abundant, engaging life. The realization that joy matters more is the first step on the path toward authentic and sustainable joy. No one else can decide or discover this for us. Our commitment to joy begins with our attraction to its power. And it is the realization of this attraction that strengthens and sustains our commitment to joy. In the beginning it feels like new territory and unless we travel this path with others, the solitude can tempt us back to the heavily traveled paths of suffering. Connecting with others in our communities who are equally committed to joy supports our movement and momentum forward on the path.

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E a r t h / The nature of confidence Earth is the nature of confidence, the solid ground that supports our moving forward in the direction of our passion. Earth supports all life by just being its self, fully, without hesitation or self-doubt. Everything we do well is done with confidence. Confidence is self-trust, the same trust we have in the earth manifesting as mountain on our life’s journey.

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T h e a c c e s s i b i l i t y p o t e n t i a l

o f

In any situation we encounter, we succeed to the degree that we are able to access and engage our best - our opportunities, passions, skills, knowledge, qualities, successes, connections, and resources. Realizing our potential to ever-greater degrees in our life and work is all about accessing and engaging these 8 core elements that make up the scope of our potential. Access and engagement is a matter of the questions we ask ourselves in whatever situation we’re seeking success. Engaging questions are questions like:

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

What is this an opportunity for? What matters most to me here? Which of my skills could support making this happen? What knowledge do I have that can support me? Which of my personal qualities would be well-timed here? How have I succeeded in this kind of situation in the past? Who could best help me here? Which of my resources could support me here? These questions give me immediate access to my best. They engage me and connect me with my power to be response-able to the opportunities before me. Cutting myself off from my potential in any situation is conversely a matter of working from deficiency questions, like: What’s wrong with this picture? What bothers me most about this? What don’t I want and don’t like? Why me, why now? What can’t I do right now?

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How have I failed to achieve my goals in the past? What are the obstacles blocking me? Who could empathize with my victimhood? What am I lacking?

What if we believed that we direct the access we have to our potential?

Every moment of our success happens thanks to the accessibility of our potential. And the good news is that unless we hand over this power to people and situations out of our control, we shape accessibility.

Everything you do happens because of the accessibility of your potential. Even in the most challenging situations, we make each aspect of our potential accessible through the questions we use to guide ourselves each step along the way. When life’s undertow sweeps us from our comfort zone, we rediscover our self-trust and selfconfidence by re-asking ourselves questions about what we do want right now, what we do have, and what we in fact can do. We only become ineffective by working from the deficiency questions. Truth is, we always have the potential we need to do well in whatever situation life presents to us. When we don’t engage our best, it’s because they’re not accessible enough. They’re not accessible because we’re not working from the right questions. We have access to our full potential all the time; we only have to remember how. Any shift to more engaging questions immediately gives us more access to our potential. It is only more complicated if we make it so.

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D o i n g

w e l l

In our most lucid moments, it’s clear that we have a lot more direct influence over the quality of our efforts than the quality of our outcomes. Beyond our attention and action, there is little else we can direct with intention. Doing well means acting with situational intention where our moment to moment flow is organized and energized by two simple questions: What do I want? and Which of my potentials are most likely to bring this about? No matter how challenging or routine the situation, being intentional about purpose and potential keeps us focused, confident, connected, and agile.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

Think about your ability and potential for doing well. Where do you feel like you’re doing well now? Where else in your life would you like to be doing well? What would support your doing well there? How could knowing what you want help in doing well? We have the highest satisfaction in anything we do when we’re doing it with situational purpose and potentialconsciousness. Our prime response-ability is to act as fully from our best as we can. This means maintaining continuous consciousness of who we are from the perspective of our potential. It is so easy to get distracted by what’s situationally unknowable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Simply being distracted in this way is enough to make us feel less than fully satisfied with a sense of doing things well.

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The key here is that doing well is about us, not the conditions and variables outside the scope of our attention and action. We lose our sense of power and potential to the extent that we allow our attention to be absorbed in the energy of deficiency what we can’t do, don’t have, don’t like, hate, what upsets and annoys us, what we can’t control, what’s not working, what’s wrong, who’s to blame, what we should have done in the past, and what could happen in the future. We maintain the buttons that life pushes. We regain our sense of power and potential the moment we focus again on what we want here and now and what potential we have to support our doing well. Every time we regain a sense of what is possible, we move forward with passion, confidence, connectedness, and agility. Knowing this, anything we do becomes an immediate opportunity for doing it well. It’s in the intersection between clear intention and present attention that we do things with the care we associate with doing things well. So take a few minutes to create a list of outcomes in your life and work that you can’t directly control. Then for each uncontrollable outcome, describe and visualize what it might mean to act effectively on your purpose in each situation. Absorb the wow ... Breathe it in ... Take it into what’s next.

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K n o w

h o w

Making steps toward any goal, dream, or vision takes selfconfidence and self-trust. Without self-confidence and self-trust, we avoid the difficult and in doing so resist the rewards of the difficult that often exceed the rewards of the easy. Without selfconfidence and self-trust, we dream dreams too small to inspire us on the path toward what really matters to us. Without selfconfidence and self-trust, we make it less possible for others to have confidence and trust in us.

What if you realized that you actually know how to do whatever you need to do next?

Pa t h s

One of the easiest ways to build self-trust and self-confidence is to remind ourselves of what we know how to do. These reminders look and sound like this:

M o u n t a i n

             

I know how to be clear on what matters to me I know how to act on what matters I know how to take initiative I know how to learn new things & try new things I know how to connect with new people I know how to be creative I know how to build trust with people I know how to ask for and offer help I know how to get unstuck I know how to act with courage I know how to manage change and uncertainty I know how to be fair and compassionate I know how to do research I know how to make and keep promises

Take a few minutes to make up your own list. I can say I know how to do and be these things because I’ve had moments of doing and being them in the past.

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Thinking we lack know-how is a classic excuse for not improvising with our best to meet new goals or challenges. In many cases, we have the know-how. We just need to realize it and use it in new ways. The fact that we feel challenged in any situation is not evidence that we lack know-how. The fact that we don’t have a confident approach to these opportunities is not proof we lack the know-how required for success. Remembering our know-how in any situation starts with 3 questions:  What know-how does this situation seem to require?  How have I experienced this know-how in past situations?  What might it mean to use this know-how in new ways in this situation? The next step is to deconstruct each instance of know-how.  What supported this know-how in the past?  If I were to teach someone else this know-how, what instructions would I give them in order to gain new knowhow?  What contributed to my success?  What obstacles did I overcome to achieve this success? The big ah-ha here is that most of the core strengths that support even our more complex experiences of everyday success are strengths we actually had by age 10.

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T h e t r u t h w e a k n e s s e s

a b o u t

When we approach our life, work, and world from a deficiency perspective, we logically believe that success comes to those who can wage the war against their weaknesses. Think about what you call your weaknesses.  Which of your weaknesses do you most easily blame for what you fail to achieve?  Which of your weaknesses do you spend the most time criticizing yourself for?  Which of your strengths in one context could possibly also become weaknesses in another?

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

They usually come in the form of character flaws, personality gaps, and general inabilities to ward off evil temptations. From an engaging perspective, success comes from focusing on our potential, not our weaknesses. And in an engaging world, what we call our weaknesses are actually poorly timed strengths. Hence, the saying that “sometimes our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses.” I start a list of things I consider weaknesses that I think I need to get rid of in order to be more effective in some way. On the list are things like: impatience, conflict-avoidance, love of chocolate, and chatting with people when I “should” be doing something more productive. But if I’m taking an engaging approach and considering a strength anything I do well, these are all actually things I do very well. If people wanted to learn impatience or self-indulgence, I would be their teacher, mentor, and role model with books, tapes, and clinics.

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If any of these get in the way of my effectiveness, it’s actually a matter of timing. Impatience is ineffective at the wrong times; and effective at the right times. Self-indulgence is not the best use of my time in certain situations, while being very effective use of my time in others. The key is to be clear that I don’t need to get rid of anything I call weakness in order to develop a new strength or higher level of existing strength. I discover that every time I succeed at anything, it is because I’ve engaged the right best part of me at the right time! This way, the whole issue of overcoming weaknesses becomes an unnecessary distraction from the business of using my best in new and effective ways. Moving toward success becomes a matter of using the right strength at the right time.

S e t t i n g o u r s e l v e s f o r s u c c e s s

u p

When it comes to making progress on our personal goals, there are a number of things we can do to make the process easier and more success-prone. First, we need to make sure our goals are stated in ways that are engaging, actionable, and attractive. How exactly do we want to be more effective in some area of our life or our work? Then, we need to be clear on what new kinds of performance our goals require. Achieving any new goal is always about achieving some new kind of action. Setting ourselves up for successful action prepares us for our own success.

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The best preparation for effective action is doing visualization and script-writing. This means picturing or describing ourselves doing exactly what our goals require for our effectiveness. Think of a goal you want to make progress on. Get clear on what you need to do in order to make progress toward this goal. Think about the potential you’re going to engage to make this kind of progress possible. Now, describe or visualize situations that represent the low end of the challenge continuum.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

These are situations where I think it would be easiest to effectively do what I need to do. If I want to visualize presenting new ideas to people who eagerly receive and support them, I can rehearse presenting these ideas to people I picture as receptive and supportive. When we first present our ideas in real time, we may want to start in situations where we are most likely to succeed. Anytime we want to act into new ways of being and doing, we want to make success as likely as possible. Confidence building is everything. It helps to practice in a situation where we may have the least distractions and emotionally charged temptations to act in selfdefeating ways relative to our goals. If our goal is to be more direct or tactful, we start with people we think will be most receptive to our directness and tactfulness. If we’re working on expressing what we want, we start in situations where we can take small steps in that direction. It may be practicing expressing wants when shopping, in a restaurant, or other emotionally-uncharged and low-risk environments.

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The key is to move one step at a time. The more our confidence grows, the more we can take practice into increasingly more challenging situations. Think of making progress in a scale of -5 to +5. If we tend to perform at a level of +1, we want to aim for better performance at +2, which is still going to be far from perfect but progress nevertheless. As we move forward, it’s important to decide what exactly indicates behavioral progress on our goal. If I’m working on “better use of my time”, I need to translate that into what would indicate the next steps in progress along the continuum from self-defeating to effective. It might mean that I complete tasks before starting new ones, and that I do this for 15 minutes at a crack because all I’ve achieved so far is 5 or 10 minutes. Notice that we don’t decide we’re going to make “better use of our time” with everything all the time. We may get there eventually, but we set ourselves up for failure if we try to jump steps from where we are today. Finally, we support our own success when we reflect on any similar successes we’ve experienced in the past. If there was a time when we did complete tasks, we look at exactly what we did to support our ability to do that. This is focusing on our potential – the ingredient abilities we can use today to support new levels of performance success and effectiveness tomorrow.

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What if you discovered you could use the power of visualization to do well in every situation you encounter?

R e h e a r s i n g

f o r

s u c c e s s

Every time we succeed in some aspect of personal effectiveness, it’s because we’re supported by the way we visualize our success. Everything we experience begins in mind. These pictures come from past success experiences and reflections on these experiences. We can also invent pictures of performing in ways we’ve never experienced before. As long as we have the physical equipment to do something, whatever we can picture, we can do. When we’re moving beyond past experience to new levels of performance and confidence, our success will depend on creating new pictures of our success. Two powerful tools in this effort is visualization and scripting. Here’s how visualization works.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

• Find a place where you can focus quietly • Either close your eyes or keep them half-open and focused on a visually neutral surface • Take in and let go of a couple of deep cleansing breaths • Visualize in your mind’s eye the details of the situation where you’ll be practicing whatever you’re working on – if it’s not easy creating pictures, simply use words to describe the situation • Visualize yourself performing well in that situation • Practice with different versions of the situation and different successful approaches to it • If in the process, other thoughts or feelings emerge, notice them and bring your attention back to your visualization • Always finish with a picture/description of successful completion – for example, you telling someone about your success • Notice how success feels inside your body

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•

Take a couple of deep breaths and finish.

If this is new, try it only for about a minute, then increase your time gradually. The longer and more frequently you practice, the more powerful the process will be in supporting your success. Scripting is rehearsal in situations where we’re verbally interacting with others. It starts with deciding the details of what success will look like. Once we know what kind of outcomes we want, we can experiment with different statements and questions we can use to move toward these outcomes. This is the creative process of playing with different languaging possibilities, and when we have ones that work, rehearsing them so they’re natural for us in real-time performance. Because we can never perfectly predict how things will go, it helps to have multiple “right ways” of going about what we’re after. And because we can never fully predict things in real-time, it’s useful to create different approaches, given the possible scenarios of how others might act and interact. We want to prepare ourselves for the continuum from low to high challenge. We can then take our scripts into visualization in order to give more power to our rehearsals. Another way of reinforcing scripts is to practice them out loud so we get a fuller sense of our delivery – especially the tone and inflection of our voice. If something doesn’t feel effective, we can go back to deciding what other kinds of statements and questions we can use to create the outcomes that matter most to us. In the beginning stages of practice with visualization and scripting, it’s natural to experience low self-confidence and doubts. What’s key is that we spend more time practicing. No matter how much we may want to feel confident, confidence only comes with practice – not wishing, hoping, or worrying.

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That’s why it’s important to practice before we feel confidence; confidence comes from practice. In the end, it’s important that we measure our success more on the basis of our doing well with what we’ve scripted and rehearsed. All we can do to invite the effectiveness of others is by being effective ourselves.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

When it comes to real-time performance, all we need to do is do what naturally comes to us at that point. What we do will always reflect what we’ve prepared ourselves to do. No amount of micro-managing our performance real-time will make us any more effective than we’re prepared to be.

What if you did everything with confidence?

Skillful spontaneity is always the result of improvisation supported by practice and preparation. Whatever we can learn from our successes, we can use to support future rehearsals and performance.

N o

o n e

e l s e

One of the ways we get and stay stuck is by not taking responsibility for our actions. Not taking responsibility shows up in a variety of ways. We blame others for our experience. We believe our happiness or effectiveness depends more on what they do than what we do. We hold them up as the one who’s going to save us, help us, teach us, love us, support us. We give away our power.

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We do this with other people, our leaders, our organizations and communities – anyone who we believe has the power we need and lack. We start to realize our power as soon as we realize that no one else can do what we need to do. No one else can create the experience we want. Take a few minutes to start a list of things people can’t do for me. Here are some examples:  Other people can’t decide for me what really matters to me  Other people can’t take action only I can take  Other people can’t do the learning only I can do  Other people can’t be effective for me where I need to be effective  Other people can’t communicate what I need to communicate  Other people can’t make and keep promises I need to make and keep  Other people can’t say yes or no for me  Other people can’t push buttons I don’t maintain as buttons  Other people can’t manufacture beliefs or values I don’t have  Other people can’t resolve my conflicts for me  Other people can’t clear up my confusion for me  Other people can’t decide what’s best for me  Other people can’t decide on the best use of my time, talents & resources  Other people can’t decide what kind of future I am attracted to This can be a very empowering list. It’s a list of everything that’s up to me. Of course, other people may be helpful to what only I can do, but at the end of the day, these are only things I can do.

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The converse is also important to understand. That the same list applies in reverse to others. No matter how much people drive us crazy, no matter how committed we are to their success and happiness, no matter how much commitment we have to them or love of them – we can’t do any of these things for them. Being clear on these boundaries empowers them and us to do what we can without disempowering dependencies.

B u i l d i n g c o n f i d e n c e

s e l f -

Pa t h s

When you’re working on any new behavior, the most important thing is building confidence and self-trust. Here are 8 guidelines to consider.

M o u n t a i n

1. Work on a few things at a time No matter how ambitious or anxious you feel about your goals, work on a few things at a time. Once you’ve gained enough mastery with these, work on the next things. Working on too many things at the same time results in working on nothing completely. Focused energy facilitates success. 2. Follow the 30/6 principle Expect that for any new strength to be natural, it will take about 30 days of practice. For any to be automatic, it takes about 6 months of daily practice. When you commit to something, plan on committing to these timeframes.

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3. Give yourself continuous feedback Whenever you practice a new strength, grade your performance on a scale of -5 to +5 (self-defeating to successful performance). Also grade the challenge of the situation (-5 to +5; very frustrating to very satisfying). Decide what kind of feedback will tell where you’re at on the scale. 4. Move in steps Expect to move up the scale one step at a time. If you’re at 3, aim for 4. Don’t even think about aiming for 5 until you’ve gotten to 4. Higher levels are only possible from the previous levels. 5. Rehearse Before any real-time practice, visualize different success scenarios – at different levels of challenge. Make each visualization as detailed as possible. Practice extending the time of each visualization with each practice. 6. Be natural in the situation In any practice situations, do what comes naturally. What you do will be a reflection of your rehearsals and reflections. If you want to improve your real-time performance, spend more time with your rehearsals and reflections. 7. Take responsibility for attention and action Expect feelings to follow behavior. Rather than trying to take responsibility for feelings you don’t directly influence, instead take responsibility for your attention and actions that you do directly influence. 8. Reflect on your successes & their causes Don’t spend more time on failures and disappointments than your progress and successes. Reflect on any instances of successes and progress along the scale. Especially reflect on anything you did to help bring about these successes – no matter how humble or heroic your effort.

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Our personal scope of influence There is a boatload of things in life we do not and cannot directly control by intention. Until we understand this, we expend all kinds of energy trying to control other people, their feelings, and our own feelings. It’s a futile pursuit because none of these are within our personal scope of direct influence. If we have any influence over them, it’s all indirect influence.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 What do you try to control even though you’re fairly sure you can’t control it?  What can you influence but not control?  What do you influence well now and what do you do to achieve this influence? There are two things we actually have direct influence over: our personal scope of attention and action – what we notice and do from one moment to the next. There are two pieces of good news in this: Our attention influences our feelings and our actions influences other people. To the extent that we notice what we have, we feel grateful, supported, and abundant. To the extent that we notice our successes, we feel confident. To the extent that we notice what we can do right now, we feel productive. To the extent that we notice what matters to us, we feel focused.

What if we became clear that we have direct influence over two things in this universe: attention and action?

When we act with transparency and dependability, our actions invite trust from others. When we act productively, we create the conditions required for what matters most to us. When we take the next steps toward our goals, we realize our goals one step at a

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time. When we act on what matters, we feel motivated, focused, and passionate. When we look back on things we’ve achieved in our lives, it’s interesting to realize what we were noticing and doing at the time that contributed to our success. We’ve made successful moves and transitions. We’ve overcome losses and tragedies. We’ve earned new jobs and praise from people whose opinions mattered to us. We’ve helped other beings grow, learn, and heal. We’ve taken care of our assets in responsible ways. We’ve lived according to standards we have been proud of. We’ve made and kept friends. We’ve turned strangers into friends. We’ve solved problems we once thought were unscalable barriers. And in each case, our success came about through attention and action. Knowing this supports our confidence and creativity with whatever challenges we’re engaged in today. It’s all about understanding the nature of our success as it relates to the scope of influence through attention and action. In any situation, it totally matters what we pay attention to and and do because these influence everything else. When attention is engaging and action is productive, we have the greatest chance of creating what matters most to us. When we are at our best in influencing change in our world, it’s because we’re totally focused on our personal effectiveness. We’re intentional about our role in moving things one step at a time in the direction of our passions realized in our dreams and goals.

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S u c c e s s

a s

t e a c h e r

When we’re working on any personal goal, we’re going to have some degree of success along the way. It helps to think of success as usually progressive, sometimes dramatic movement in steps toward a goal. If we want to experience as little success as possible, we only need to define success as the ultimate arrival at a goal instead of the achievement of single steps on the mountain’s path. Movement in steps can be brief moments or instances of success, partial success, or more success than we’ve had in the past. In any case, success is success no matter how small a step toward the outcomes that matter most to us.

The key is to learn from any moments of success we experience – matter how brief or humble. Here is a set of useful questions to guide the process.  How would you rate the level of your performance – on a scale of -5 (self-defeating) to +5 (effective)?  What was the level of challenge in the situation – on a scale of -5 (low) to +5 (high)?  What were the challenges that you experienced and acted on your goal in spite of them?  What did you do well – what worked?  How did you use your potential in new ways?  Did any preparation you did before the situation – like rehearsals - support your success?

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

If we visualize the success continuum as a scale from -5 to +5, any steps in the direction of +5, no matter how small, is success – even if we’re starting in negative numbers.

This is a process of taking responsibility for whatever measure of success we achieve, even if it’s only at low levels of

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performance. It’s an exercise in accurate reflection on the causes and contributions to our own success. To deepen the results and allow them to support our confidence and self-trust, it helps to replay our success in our mind – just as we have done in the past with our failures. We can add more power by remembering past similar successes and replaying them as well Remember: how we perform in any given situation is directed by our pictures of ourselves. The more we replay success pictures, the more these pictures will show up and direct us in future situations. These pictures actually become more powerful than any situational intentions we may have. In other words, if I intend success in a fairly frustrating situation, but all I’ve done is practice failure pictures, only failure will show up in spite of whatever good intentions and goals I have. That’s why it’s so important that we don’t give time to replaying failure pictures. The more time we spend replaying pictures of our failure, the more power we give them to show up when we actually need to be guided by success pictures. This includes subtle approaches like trying to review failures in order to “hold ourselves responsible for our failure” or to “learn from our mistakes.” These do nothing but reinforce failure pictures, which only further directs future failures. The only way to future success is through past success. Reflecting on success gives us the understanding, confidence, and self-trust that supports our taking more steps in the direction of our goals. To the extent that we understand any success we achieve, we get to repeat and transfer it in new situations.

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G r a t i t u d e Practicing an engaging approach in our life, career, and work leads to an ongoing sense of gratitude. Gratitude is the clearest indicator that we’re paying attention to what we do have, can do, what’s working, and why.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 What do you feel most grateful for in your life, work, and world right now?  How grateful would you like to feel in your life, career, and work?  What would you be like if you tapped more deeply into your potential for gratitude? Gratitude flows from engaging attention and expresses itself in two ways. Gratitude manifests as a sense of satisfaction with ourselves and our world. The only effective way to become or stay miserable is to focus on what we don’t have, can’t do, what’s not working, and why. Gratitude also manifests in words and acts of thanks to people and things that provide value for us. When we’re grateful in service situations, we’re gracious givers of positive feedback, forgiveness, and generous tips. When we’re grateful with friends and the people we live and work with, we extend to them courtesies that help them feel valued for who they are. We even show gratitude for the things in our world that serve us well by taking care of them. The practice of gratitude is an ongoing practice of attention and action. Make a practice of taking care of people and things. Make a practice of expressing thanks no matter how small or expected the acts.

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Feeling deficient and deprived comes from the opposite practice of attention and action. Complaining and demanding entitlement diminish our capacity for gratitude and the joy that naturally accompanies it.

What if you could experience the joy of gratitude any time you wanted to?

I am grateful for my friends I am grateful for people who drive safely around me I am grateful for good service I am grateful for people who support me in my work I am grateful for those who value what I do I am grateful for the health I experience I am grateful for all the technologies that support me I am grateful for everything new I learn I am grateful for every new opportunity life gives me.

Especially when we practice gratitude for the best parts of us, and for those who contributed to our learning involved in these, we tap into an inspiration more powerful than any challenge, obstacle, or setback. Being grateful for how people help us, in intentional and unintentional ways, allows us to better see their potential and engage their best in service of our respective dreams. Every moment spent in gratitude supports our ability to take an engaging approach to our life, our work, and our world. Gratitude gives us energy and nourishment for the journey.

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/

W i n d The nature of connection

Wind is the nature of connection, our potential for moving together.

Pa t h s

On the mountain, we never see wind, only the results of its actions Clouds, trees, birds, moving together. Wind is the unseen power that makes moving together possible.

M o u n t a i n

In our life, careers, and work the quality of our relationships and connections is the unseen power that makes moving together possible.

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T r u s t The number one requirement for success in any relationship is trust. We can be smart, charming, and powerful. We can be a genius, visionary, and leader. We can have the power to force, manipulate, and coerce. Without trust, we have no one’s authentic or sustainable alignment or support. With trust, collaboration is easier. Think about people who depend on you – people whose trust you’ve earned over time.    

What can they depend on you for? What did you do to build the trust they have in you? How have you been dependable? What are your opportunities for more trust building?

One of the core requirements for trust is the process of making and keeping promises. All trust relationships and communities are based on the fundamental capacity of promise making and keeping. Here is a brief outline of a process that can work with any two or more people or groups of people. We start off by taking turns giving each other examples of expectations we have of each other, in 3 areas: Information, Outcomes, and Help. • Information - The kind of updates, heads-up, knowledge I depend on you for • Outcomes - The kind of outcomes I want/need from you • Help - The kind of help, support, guidance, assistance I want/need from you

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Information

Outcomes

Help

EXPECTATIONS

PROMISES I will ...

I will if ...

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

The key is that we state our expectations as accurately and completely as possible - without second-guessing the other person’s ability or willingness to deliver on them. We then detail accurately what we can and will promise relative to each expectation defined. We can make unconditional promises (I will ...) or conditional promises (I will if ...). For gaps between expectations and promises, we need to do 1 or more of 3 things: • Re-frame our expectations to meet promises • Re-frame promises to meet expectations • Come up with mutually satisfying plans for getting these expectations met in part or in other ways. Then, on a regular, mutually agreed on regular schedule, we have a conversation about 3 things; • How well we thought we and the other person did on promise keeping • How we would modify our expectations and/or promises based on our experience • How we might action plan on promises that proved to be challenging to keep

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This helps us learn from our successes, continuously improve, and keep our expectations and promises up to date. Disappointment is a given in all of this. As we communicate what matters to us, people may not be willing or able to deliver on exactly what we want and need. When disappointment happens, the most intelligent thing we can do is express it as non-judgmentally as we can, forget about it, and move on. If we’re frustrated, angry, or hurt, we need to be transparent about it without dragging everyone down about it. Suffering from not getting what we want or need is not caused by having expectations that are somehow “too high.” We should have expectations worthy of our passions – no matter how outrageous, unrealistic, or unreasonable. Name 2 or 3 expectations you have today that may seem “too high” Why do they matter to you? How do they serve others? It helps to make no one wrong for not aligning with what matters to us, or to make ourselves wrong for wanting and needing what we do. Important in all of this is understanding that ongoing suffering doesn’t come from less than fully realized needs, wants, and dreams. It comes from our squandering valuable time thinking about what we don’t have and can’t do rather than making best use of our time thinking and doing something about what we do have and can do. Moving on from real and logical disappointment involves revisiting how much what matters to us really matters and if we’re still committed to it. Moving on means finding new ways of going about our goals. It means looking at what we can do with what we do have.

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T h e p o w e r o f d i a l o g u e

a n d

p r a c t i c e

One of the things that supports our working together is the quality of our conversations. Think about the best conversations you have with people in your life and work. What makes them feel most creative and productive? What makes them feel most alive and engaging? What makes them feel most honest and focused?

Because dialogue is a natural process, it draws from the power of the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. SMOKE complaints

non-transparency

FIRE

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

In an engaging world, dialogue is a collaboration toward mutual discovery and action. The opposite is debate - a deficiency focused contest of defensiveness and control. There is a world of difference between the look, feel, and outcomes of dialogue and debate. Dialogue connects us; debate divides us.

Wants

postponement ICE excuses

Contexts

Plans

Knowns

WATER

EARTH

Promises

Unknowns

WIND Support

Possibilities

criticisms

defensiveness FOG

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misinterpretations MUD arguments

Dialogue is inspired by the fire of our wants and contexts what matters most to us and why it is important for us. Common perspective grows out of the rich earth of our knowns and unknowns - what we know for sure and is fact for us, and what is unknown and a question for us. Our making a difference together is inspired by the winds of our possibilities and support - our sense of what’s possible and supportable. Finally, we flow forward together into action through making and keeping promises and plans. The language of dialogue is simple and direct, on both sides of the statements and questions we use to engage each other in the process. Wants Contexts Knowns Unknowns Possibilities Support Promises Plans

What matters to me is .... What matters most to you ... ? This matters to me because ... Why is that important ... ? What I know for sure is ... What's clear to you? ... What's an unknown for me is ... What's an unknown for you ...? What if ... What else can we consider ... ? What I like about this idea is ... What do you like about this ...? I will ... What can I expect ...? My plan is .... What's your plan?

If we instead allow conversations to become debates, we get discouraged in the smoke of complaints and non-transparency, stuck in the mud of misinterpretations and arguments, lost in the fog of criticisms and defensiveness, and derailed by the ice of postponement and excuses. In debate, we complain about what we don’t like, don’t have, and can’t do in our world. We have hidden agendas. We spar over interpretations and generalizations based on our assumptions rather than facts. We argue over the opinions, positions, and assumptions of others. We defend a “one-right-way” against any completing possibilities and offer more criticism than support for each other’s ideas. We excuse ourselves from action and hope some else takes care of things for us.

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Dialogue is characterized by mutual exploration and action for mutual gain. Our shared intention is for our individual and collective success. The good news is that we all have the abilities and skills to engage each of the 8 core elements of dialogue, whatever the conversation. We know how to engage each other with statements and questions about what we want, know, imagine, and do.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

Of course, dialogue is a mutual process and is only possible when each of us participates. One person cannot have a dialogue. What any one person can do is model and invite dialogue. The more we balance statements and questions in each of the 8 elements, the more possible it becomes for people to have the trust in us to support their engagement in dialogue. In dialogue, we are supported by knowing that each of us has each of the skills required for the process. We don’t have to learn how to dialogue; we simply need to practice it in whatever contexts we have the opportunity. Dialogue both requires and creates trust. The more we gain people’s trust in the process of dialogue, the more able and willing people feel to engage in dialogue with us. Every time we gain people’s trust through modeling and inviting dialogue, we make it easier for them to share the process with us. Some people find dialogue natural; others need practice and invitation in order to make it their natural style on interaction. Dialogue outperforms debate every time because it is at core respectful, realistic, creative, and committed to making a difference. The benefits are clear. With dialogue, we’re working together from each other’s best, for each other’s best.

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I n q u i r y Effectiveness comes from understanding. At the core of dialogue is purposeful, mutual understanding of each other’s worlds. Understanding comes from inquiry - our ability to use simple questions to create mutual understanding that supports alignment. From a quantum perspective, the world we share is the world we understand together. Inquiry gives us new insights into:  What each of us believes & values that drives our actions and choices  What each of us thinks of our ideas, proposals, suggestions  What each of us sees as concerns, problems, issues, challenges  What each of us sees as opportunities and possibilities  What it would take for each of us to come to agreement on something  Where each of us is on any given question or issue  Our available potential and resources  How each of us sees things, how we define things in our common world  What each of us is willing to do or commit to Without good questions, we are left to possibly inaccurate guesses, hunches, interpretations, beliefs, or assumptions. Without understanding we reduce our chances of being effective with the people in our world. Without accurate understanding of their experience, we allow ourselves to be confused, bewildered, frustrated, victimized, or perplexed.  What kind of people in your world seem most challenging to understand?

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 How would a better understanding of them give you an opportunity to deepen the dialogue between you? The excuses we give ourselves for not asking enough good questions are many.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 We don’t want to appear intrusive or pushy  We don’t want to appear uninformed or unknowledgeable  We think we could always be up to speed on everything and we can have all the answers  We don’t want to find out what we’d rather not know in the first place  We don’t think they’ll be honest with us  We think we already know and don’t need to find out  We don’t care what they think because what we think is all that matters to us anyway But as good as these excuses sound, they lock us in our comfort zones and prevent us from understanding people effectively. I can only work with people I understand, and I only understand people I feel free to inquire with. Inquiry gives me the possibility of understanding people I need to work with instead of apart from or against.

What if you discovered that your greatest power in connecting with people is in giving yourself freedom to ask new questions?

This is easy to understand in the reverse. People who don’t understand us have little or no chance in working with us. All they can be is confused and frustrated. If they have inaccurate assumptions or expectations about us, they cannot work with us and we won’t be able to deliver on what matters to them.

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Inquiry tells us where we and others are aligned and different in our perceptions and expectations, our beliefs and values. When we know where we’re aligned, we can move together. When we know where we’re different, we can explore the possibilities of alignment, or accept and allow the differences. The only waste of time and talent is trying to coerce each other into wanting or believing things we naturally don’t. Inquiry can also give us powerful and engaging insights into the potentials of other people beyond what our stereotypes about them might imply.

L i s t e n i n g Listening starts with showing up. Showing up means being present to people when they have something to say.  What kinds of people are easiest for you to listen to?  What kinds of people are difficult for you to listen to?  What might it mean to increase your listening potential?  What would be the benefits of making it easy to listen to anyone in your life, career, and work? There are two ways we get in the way of our own listening. One is interrupting. Think about when someone interrupts you mid-sentence or mid-thought. When we interrupt people, it’s usually because something they say sparks a reaction or response that we feel a sense of urgency to share. Interrupting prevents us from getting someone’s whole story.

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If you want to discover if someone has delivered their complete thought, pause a couple of seconds after they seem complete with their thought. It sometimes creates a space where they feel invited to go on to give us a more complete picture of their experience. See if more emerges. Another way we get in the way of listening is making assumptions about what we are or aren’t hearing, and then not checking them out. At these times, the sign we’re doing our best listening is the quality of our questions. Questions give us more of the picture people have. To be fair, there are also two ways that people make listening difficult for us.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

They keep going onto new thoughts before giving us their complete picture of the thoughts they started but haven’t finished. The ultimate test for knowing we have someone’s complete thought is when we can have only a single picture of what people are saying. If we can picture more than one possible version of what they’re talking about, we don’t yet have a complete picture. The most direct way to get a more complete picture is to ask for it. The other way people make listening difficult is by giving us puzzle fragments of their picture. People who do this usually don’t realize we’ve got more dots than connections. It becomes tempting for us to substitute our assumptions for the missing pieces of the picture. Again, questions bring out the pieces on the table and we gain a complete picture. One other factor, as in any interactions, is the trust factor. When people trust us, they are more likely to give us the picture

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they have. Without trust, they won’t feel comfortable enough revealing everything they have to reveal. In an upcoming conversation, practice asking people to clarify anything you can’t clearly picture in your mind. When they speak without details, ask for examples. When they give you the end of the story, ask for the beginning of the story. When they tell you what they know, ask for what they feel. When they tell you what they feel, ask for what they know and don’t know. Listen as well with your heart and all of your senses. Are they saying one thing but communicating another? Are they saying that something matters to them but they aren’t acting accordingly? Skillful questions can mean the difference between confusion and clarity for us and them.

M a k i n g

a n

i m p a c t

We want to make a positive and lasting impact on our world. We want to make a difference. We want to influence outcomes in the areas of our life, career, and work that matter to us. Defining our vision for personal impact starts with simple and powerful questions:  How would you most like people to describe you?  Why is it important to you that they can describe you in these ways?  What potential do you have today that could support the way you want to be experienced by others? One of the more important venues where we make a difference is in conversations. Informally and formally, whether on

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the phone, in person, or through email, we want to have the impact we intend. Making the impact we want in any situation starts with clarification from 4 questions. As the result of this interaction: • • • •

What do I want them to know they don’t know now? What do I want them to believe they may not now? What do I want them to feel they don’t yet feel now? What do I want them to do they’re not doing now?

One of the easiest and most effective ways to plan our impact goals is through mindmapping. This is a visual tool for brainstorming our approach to any situation we’re preparing for. We start with our goal and keep branching the details required to feel prepared and confident for our expected scenarios.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

Here’s an example.

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Knowing our intentions gets us clear on what we need to do in order to create the conditions for realizing these intentions. Depending on the impact we want, we may need to:           

Give people new data, information, examples Ask people new questions Suggest new ideas Point out the benefits and costs of potential options Volunteer help Make new promises Clarify unknowns Tell stories Quote credible sources Ask them for help or a promise Explore their capabilities, resources, or opportunities

What if you realized that you can and do shape the impact you have on people in your world?

The key here is to understand that our wanting to have greater impact often invites people to travel outside their comfort zones. What stirs our passions may only stir their fears.

Think about where you want to make more of an impact in your world and how that might take people outside their comfort and confidence zones. It’s important to have realistic expectations. People only move to new territories one step at a time. If we try to push people to jump steps, they will shut down, disappear, or push back. It may take more than a single conversation to help people to new levels of impact or agreement. Part of the issue is how far outside their familiarity and comfort zones we’re trying to take them. Again, people will venture beyond these zones one step at a time. No matter how eager,

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greedy, or anxious we may be, this rule of 1-step at a time is important to honor. Another core issue is trust. People’s capacity to venture to new comfort and confidence zones with us will never exceed their trust of us. And the good news is that we know how to build trust. Trust builds with giving people freedom to be who they are. If people feel pushed as if we have no respect for where they are, no trust will occur. People trust people who respect who and where they are.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

Along with trust in us, equally required is self-trust on their part. No one ventures to new zones they don’t think they’re capable of successfully navigating. Self-trust is believing we have what it takes to succeed in new zones. If we can help people realize they have what success takes, they become naturally more open to venture forward. And each step forward successfully creates momentum for next steps until they arrive in new places.

F e e d b a c k To be committed to the growth and development of others is to be committed to giving them the feedback they need for the journey. Think about the feedback you give and receive.  When do you feel most free to give people feedback?  What kind of feedback is easiest and most challenging to deliver to people?  What do you think you do to help people feel most receptive to feedback you have to deliver?

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 If you could give them more or different feedback, what could you give them more or different feedback about?  When do you most appreciate feedback from people?  What kind of feedback is most helpful to you? An engaging approach to giving feedback means: Noticing when the other is doing something I value Bringing it to their attention Letting them know why it matters to me, if it isn’t already obvious • When they disappoint me, letting them know what does matter to me, and asking what I can expect from them going forward • • •

I don’t spend more time noticing what’s wrong on their side, asking them to defend or justify it, making demands in a way that gets in the way of freely communicating their promises. I don’t waste time on deficiencies, knowing this both gets in the way of my ability to trust others and their ability to trust me. Trust thrives when we have confidence in each other and confidence comes from reflection on success. When either of us is disappointed, we need to talk about what matters to each of us. We need to talk about what we can expect from each other going forward. Any power we have will be in the future – not in the past. To talk about going forward is to empower each other in the relationship. Even when I’m disappointed today with you, I can also invite you to look back on times when I was pleased with what you did instead of launching into a frontal attack on your pride and selfesteem. Fact is, you can’t do anything with past failure now – you can only learn from past successes and take those into future situations.

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Acknowledging when people do what matters to us builds our confidence in them and their confidence in us. It also strengthens their appreciation for what we need for our well-being and success. When they notice and acknowledge what matters to them, it strengthens our appreciation for what they need for their well-being and success. Many of our relationships are not of our choosing, and so we don’t have choice over the styles people have in giving and receiving feedback. Some are more engaging and others are more deficiency-based.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

We appreciate the engaging people. The challenge can be the deficiency folks who are used to focusing on what’s wrong and why, what they don’t like, don’t want and can’t do. They are capable of engaging feedback but it’s not what they’re accustomed to. If they’re conflict-phobic, they’ll withhold any feedback with the excuse that “if you don’t have something nice to say, then best not to say anything at all.” We need to ask for feedback especially when we don’t get it. When we get deficiency-based feedback, we can use questions to get the kind of feedback that is most useful for us. We need to ask about what we’re doing well and what matters to them in relation to what we do, and why. When we get push-back from feedback we give to deficiencybased people, we can ask if they want our feedback in the first place – or would they prefer we kept it to ourselves. They usually opt for disclosure, if reluctantly. This makes them more receptive and if we’re engaging, they are rewarded for their choice. Feedback is critical to any improvement. Giving and receiving feedback supports our continued success in delivering far more satisfaction than disappointment.

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N o t t a k i n g p e r s o n a l l y

t h i n g s

It’s tempting to take other people’s feelings personally. They love what we do and we feel like heroes; they dislike what we do and we feel like goats.  When are you most likely to take personally how other people react to you?  How could taking things personally get in the way of seeing your potential and passions?  What would you be better able to do if you didn’t take things so personally? Taking things too personally causes me to forget that I am always more capable than people see me at any single moment in time. One of the most common ways we take things personally is when we get feedback from others as we please or disappoint their expectations of us. It’s easy to think of ourselves as “good” or “bad” people on the basis of meeting or disappointing their expectations.

What if you stopped taking personally things that don’t belong to you in the first place?

Not taking things so personally means realizing their feedback to me about me can be as much about them and their expectations as it is about my ability or willingness to deliver on them. It’s realizing that:  I can’t decide what matters to them  I can’t decide what they define as the conditions for their happiness  I can’t determine their capacity for being engaging relative to my behavior

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That’s all up to them. Feedback from others, however fair, engaging, and helpful, is always as much about them as it is about us. All I can do with any feedback – whether critical or engaging – is learn from any successes I have, get clear on what matters to them and me, and use my best and learning to create more of what matters.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

The art of not taking things personally is realizing that people always do things for their own reasons - not mine. They don’t necessarily have my tolerances or preferences. What people do always aligns with their beliefs, not mine, and therefore always make sense in the logic of their world. Realizing this, we become infinitely more free to move toward creating what we may want instead.

B l i n d

s p o t s

One of the more curious factors in life is our blind spots – the parts of ourselves and our world that we don’t see and that have potential significance for us and others as opportunities or risks. Whatever road we’re on, blind spots obscure our view of obstacles and options. They’re based on the reality that we can see only so much at a time.  How might you impact people in ways that you might not notice or know about until you ask or they tell you?  What kind of impact on other people would you definitely not want to have?  How could they misinterpret your actions or decisions?

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Blind spots obscure our view of our actual impact on others as well as the new opportunities that hold promise for us. This is true for positive and negative impacts we have on others. On the short list of what contributes to our blind spots:      

Over-confidence Self-justification and defensiveness Resistance to doubts & surprises Considering new questions as unimportant Self-criticism Deficiency perspectives

In each case, we stay within the comfort zone of what we know, what we refuse, or what we neglect to explore beyond what we know about ourselves and our world. The double-bind of blind spots is that by definition we cannot know we have them. I could have a dozen right now but would never know it. The only way I could possibly notice more than I’m aware of now in myself or my world is to get a different look at myself and my world. Like in driving, I keep checking different views, windows, mirrors, or asking my fellow passengers if they see anything I don’t. The ultimate antidote to blind spots is asking for feedback.   

Where would you like more/better feedback? How would it help you? From whom and about what?

We all play a role in eliminating each other’s blind spots. If I don’t give you feedback on what you do that helps and hurts me, I’m assuming or hoping your behavior and impact will somehow be obvious to you without my pointing it out.

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It’s important to understand that the only shared reality is the one we share through communication. You and I can be looking at the same sunrise, rainbow, or mountain, but the only one we see together is the one we talk about together. So I don’t get to walk around thinking anyone sees what I see, or that I see what they see. I don’t get to assume no news is good news – especially in contexts where people are too uncomfortable to be upfront about their feedback and needs. I don’t get to assume what’s inside and outside people’s blind spots until I check that out.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

   

How is this for you? What do you hear me asking/saying? Does this help? What do you feel when that happens?

These are simple, direct, effective ways to widen our lens and shrink blind spots. Of course, these need to be asked in a context of genuine interest in and commitment to meaningfulness. For people to give us accurate, actionable feedback, they need to trust in our receptivity and response-ability. Of course at the end of the day, we may not be interested, able, or willing to accommodate their needs and wishes, but we do well to be conscious of our impact nonetheless. People in our life, career, and work are certainly capable of needing and wanting more than we can or will deliver. Every instance of disappointment and satisfaction occurs at the intersection of their ability to imagine more and our ability to deliver on more. Our ability to shrink and prevent blind spots supports our acting with our greatest potential.

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C o n s e n s u s

b u i l d i n g

Building consensus is important in any relationship and situation where we either lack the ability or willingness to coerce people into what we want and need. Think about your past successes and future opportunities for building consensus.  Who in the past have you worked with well?  What contributed to your working well together?  What kind of consensus did you have with them – where were you aligned on beliefs and values?  Who would you like to have more consensus with today?  What could you do to contribute to this consensus? Alignment is the basis for productivity, depth, and speed in our relationships, networks, and communities. Whatever kind of consensus we want to create, there are two required conditions: 1. Authentic trust 2. Situational alignment of values and beliefs Authentic trust is the willingness to depend on others for what matters to us. Alignment of values and beliefs means we have in common what matters to us in this situation and what we believe about our shared capabilities and possibilities.

What if you could make it easier for people to say yes to what matters to you?

If we lack these, the only consensus possible is agreement on peaceful (non-harmful) co-existence. Consensus building begins with transparency about our givens. These are conditions that are non-negotiable – our musthaves. The process is authentic when we each honor the other’s givens. Without this respect, nothing else is possible.

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When trust and alignment exist to a sufficient degree, there are many ways to build consensus. It helps to start by getting clear on our common and unique needs and wants as well as capabilities and constraints. Here are three approaches for building consensus.  Collaborative research We work together to research existing options that could serve our common needs. Our hope is to find an approach that we can plug into our situation in a mutually satisfying way.  Collaborative creativity We work together to invent approaches to what could serve our common and unique wants, given our common and unique capabilities and constraints. The richer we develop and combine each model, the closer we get to consensus on the best model to pilot test or commit to.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 Collaborative cost-sharing We share the burden of costs, for example, where we each get an equal or fair share of the gains and costs from options we’re considering. You get some of what you want and I get some of what I want. The most important aspect of consensus building is the attitude and intention of helping each other succeed. It is vital that the whole conversation is in the spirit of dialogue, not debate. If we aren’t explicitly committed to each other’s success, there is no trust, and without trust, there won’t even be agreement to logical and functional alternatives. With trust, more is possible. With trust, even our collaborative creativity thrives and serves winwin and both-and strategies.

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C o m p a s s i o n Compassion is understanding. It’s seeing the truth of each other’s perspectives and trust in each other’s best. Compassion expresses itself as empathy, support, respect, and commitment to another’s success, well-being, and joy. Perhaps the best way to think about compassion is from the inside out.  When do you most appreciate other people feeling and acting in a compassionate way toward you?  What does it mean for you to have noncompassionate people in your life, career, and work? Compassion is a challenge. Many of us grew up, live, and work today in worlds that were low in compassion. These were worlds of normative criticisms and condemnations. The most important thing to understand about compassion is that it doesn’t necessarily change or alter our belief and value system. I can more fully understand another’s irrational choices and at the same time be solidly intolerant of their choices. I can see why people act in ways I might call call stupid, ignorant, irresponsible, and harmful – and I can feel clear intolerance of each because these are at odds with my belief and value systems. No matter how much compassion I may have for someone, it doesn’t obligate me in any way to them. The practice of compassion allows us to be less reactive and deficiency oriented; it actually benefits the givers of compassion more than the recipients. Most importantly, it gives us greater access to their potential and ours.

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From an engaging perspective, when we truly see people as they are, we’re seeing their potential - the best parts of them. We do this by giving them opportunities to reveal and express their best. We do this through looking for their best as we interact and observe them. And we do this through asking them about their success stories. Think about people today you feel most critical and judgmental toward. What could you learn about them that would deepen your understanding of how they might see the world. Here’s one way to practice compassion.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 Think about someone you feel little compassion for and look at the world through their eyes  Think about how it might feel to be them for a day – what kinds of feelings would dominate your consciousness?  If you were them, what might be your fears and hopes?  What might be your goals and how would you be actively and passively sabotaging your own goals?  What beliefs might play a role in this?  How might you feel if people in your world expressed more compassion toward you?  What might that compassion look and sound like?  What would open up for you if you then showed more compassion toward yourself? This is a difficult practice the first time you try it, but with practice you will get better at it and feel positive results. The bottom line is that compassion plays a very practical role in our life and work. Compassion is the basis for every successful moment of respect, courtesy, tactfulness, and diplomacy we experience with others.

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While compassion may impact others in a positive way, it always has the possibility of softening our negative energy, and without the negative energy, we have more positive energy for dialogue, alignment, and collaboration.

A b u n d a n t

r e s o u r c e s

Most of us have no problem committing to goals and tasks that exceed our resources. On a normal day, what needs to be done eclipses the resources we have to do it. We bite off more than we can chew; the eyes of our passions are bigger than the stomachs of action we have to digest them. Working with resource constraints is a reality. The biggest resource constraint is the belief that we personally need to have all the resources we need.  Where in your life, career, and work do you feel most able and comfortable asking for ideas, advice, or help?  What might you be able to accomplish if you became more comfortable asking for help, advice, and ideas? Reality is that to achieve most tasks and goals, we need to rely on the time, talent, and resources of other people. We create our own self-constraint by thinking it’s all up to us. Most dreams worth dreaming require many eyes and hands. One excuse we give ourselves for self-defeating self-reliance is that we “hate to bother other people.” Beyond this are other excuses having to do with the possibility of their disappointing us with saying no or not giving us the help we need. We may also not ask for help because we don’t want to appear unprepared or unqualified to get the job done.

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The reality is, we need to bother other people – and if we want to be fair about it, they need to bother us. We need to be reciprocally interdependent which means mutually inconveniencing each other for the kind of help when we need it. If it’s a fairness issue, we need to “put social capital in our bank” by offering help to others, so we can draw from that bank when we need to. If it’s the fear of getting rejected, we need to realize that not asking for help in the first place makes it impossible for them to help even if they wanted to. It’s taking away from them the opportunity to create or borrow on social capital with us.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

If it’s a dependability issue, we may need to help them learn what is actually most helpful to us. If their learning curve builds their capacity in the process, we all win in terms of being prepared for future needs. The bottom line is that we all need to rely on others at times that are unpredictable and possibly inconvenient. To try to do everything ourselves is not an option in a busy world. Sharing the load, more gets done.

G r o w i n g n e t w o r k s

o u r

s o c i a l

We all live in a world of connections. Our relationships shape both who we are what we are capable of.  Where in your life, career, and work has it become true that who you know is as important as what you know?

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 What kind of people do feel are important to your future possibilities and growth?  If you could meet or talk to anyone alive today, who would that be and what would you talk to them about? Part of realizing our best is realizing we live in a nested ecology of communities rich in resources, possibilities, and opportunities. Each of us lives in 5 kinds of communities.  Communities of past – people with whom we share common family or ethnic roots, cultures, and traditions  Communities of place – people with whom we share common geographies, for example, people in our neighborhoods  Communities of purpose – people with whom we share common goals, for example, people in our organizations  Communities of perspective – people with whom we share common beliefs and values, for example, people in our faith and political communities  Communities of practice – people with whom we share common work or roles, for example, people who do what we do for a living We can think of our connections in any of these communities as existing within 3 circles.  Our first circle is the set of people we know well. We typically share similar beliefs and values with these people. They can be people in any of our communities. The frequency and quality of our interactions with first circle people can vary.  Our second circle is the set of people we know of, but not well. They are often our first circle people’s first circle – people they know well.

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M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 In our third circle are people we don’t know, but who we are connected to in one or two steps through our first and second circle people. They’re people we’re introduced to at a meeting, party, or gathering, by our first and second circle people.

Think about people in your 3 circles.  Who’s in your 1st and 2nd circles?  What kind of people you would most and least guess are in your 3rd circle? The more diverse our circles are, the more resources we have to rely on when we’re getting something done. The larger our circles, the more supported we are in our successes. Abundance in life is equal to abundance in our networks and communities. What’s key is to realize that we have the ability to grow our connections. The three most basic strategies for growing our connections in our communities are:

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1. Strengthening the quality of existing connections within our first two circles 2. Making new connections between people inside our first and second circles 3. Making new connections to people in our third circles Making new connections within our first two circles implies increasing the frequency and/or quality of our transactions, collaborations, and personal impacts. Making new connections between people inside our first and second circles means introducing people who we think may be able to share new kinds of transactions, collaborations, or opportunities. From a social capital perspective, every new connection we make between and among people is a new relationship What if you that enriches the scope of our own realized that in potential. a fast-moving, complex world, Making new connections to people in what you know our third circles means getting depends on who introductions to these people through you know? our first and second circle people. The value of making and strengthening new connections is unlimited. In a dynamic world, who we know becomes as, if not more important, than what we know – because what’s knowable changes continuously. In a connected world where who we are connected to shapes what we have access to. This is especially true in a world where every person on the planet is connected to every other person at a distance of no more than 5 or 6 steps. This reality means the learning and success we will enjoy in the next 5 years will come about completely through the connections we’ve cultivated and sustained in our networks and communities today.

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C o m p a n i o n s h i p p a t h

o n

t h e

One of the highest levels of relationship on the path toward realizing our potential is companionship. A companion is someone we share learning with. We are inspired by the same questions, we’re partners on the same quest for truth, discovery, and new possibilities. These are often accidental relationships that emerge from a rich field of intentions and intersections. Here, we share discoveries and learning. We’re partners together in exploring and realizing new learning fro a common problem, opportunity, or project. Companionship can be a transient or sustained experience, sparked by a common challenge, collaboration, or opportunity.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 Have you had companions in your life, career, and work?  What did you share with them and gain from them?  What do you think they gained from their companionship with you?  What kind of questions are keeping you alert and alive in your world these days - and who else seems to have these questions?  How could you more intentionally share the learning process together with them? As companions, learning together is a choice that gives value to us. Neither of us is responsible for the other’s learning or growth, so the traditional roles of learner and teacher do not apply. We are learners together, and at times from each other. Three things support our common purpose of learning and discovery: our questions, reflections, and connections.

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Questions Every new question we bring to the table creates the possibility for new learning and discovery. New questions push the envelope of our knowing into new areas of exploration through action, reflection, or research. The most powerful questions are the ones that are compelling and without immediate or simple answers. Good questions can also challenge our values and beliefs in ways that deepen our understanding of them and ourselves. Reflections Reflecting on our personal and common experiences opens a space for deriving new lessons from these experiences. The power of shared reflection is that some patterns can only be seen by multiple eyes and through different lenses. The unique lens of our complementary and common experiences yields richer meaning from our reflected experience. Connections We also extend our common learning by connecting beyond ourselves to new sources of knowledge and practice. Connecting each other to diverse networks of discovery enriches the possibilities of our learning and deepens the value of our companionship. Of course, if our learning edges and interests are diverse, so will the diversity of companions on our path. No one of us can or ever will be an ultimate partner in learning. This is especially true because new learning leads to new questions that invite a broader and richer network of companions.

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W a t e r /The nature of agility

Pa t h s

Water is the nature of agility, the kind of fluid adaptability that allows us to easily move around obstacles and over the rocks of challenges. On the mountain, the water of springs and rivers flows freely to new places.

M o u n t a i n

Agility supports our wise responses to change, chaos and complexity in ways that support success in our goals.

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B e i n g

p r e s e n t

Everything we achieve in life is achieved through attention in the present. To be fully engaged in any moment is to do things with full attention. When we’re present, we’re aware of what’s going on in our world. We’re up to date, working from current information about what’s up in our world. At the root of response-ability is paying attention. Think about the times in your life when you were most productive and responsive to opportunities. How much were you paying attention? Think about the kind of presence that your goals today require of you. The hallmark quality of presence is curiosity. We’re curious about what’s happening in our world and inside ourselves. From one moment, day, and week to the next, we’re paying attention to changes, trends, and patterns. Because we’re more present, we notice opportunities we would never see otherwise. We notice issues and challenges in their larval stage before they really start to bug us. We find ourselves being more proactive than reactive. What if you We take few generalizations seriously and we take few interpretations of reality as seriously as we take an accurate view of things as they are.

took on every task in your life with total presence?

Curiosity means acting with the humility to know what we know and what we don’t know. In most situations, we discover and achieve new things because we know what we don’t know and pursue the questions implied.

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 Where in your life today do you feel most present?  Where do you think it’s most important to be present?  What more do you think you could achieve if you were as present as you’d love to be?  If you lived each hour as your first, how present would you be? The clearest indication we’re living in the present is confident action. When we do fully what matters to us, we’re fully engaged in the present. In a world that seems committed to change and uncertainty, presence is wisdom and grace.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

M a n a g i n g

c h a n g e

With the best of intentions, we work overtime trying to keep some things in life as they are. We like them as they are and are willing to invest in maintaining them. There is always a certain seductive attraction to predictability and certainty. We can operate from a belief that trust is only earned by that which we can count on, predict, and be certain about - that which resists change. We’re attracted to things that are new. We like new opportunities, new market options, new ideas, new friends, new entertainment alternatives, new investment choices, new menu items, new fashion styles, new sports heroes, new political leaders. Everything new represents change.  What seems to be changing in your world?  What kinds of change in your world would you most likely accept, embrace, and adapt to?  What kinds of changes would you more likely resist, fight, and avoid?

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 If you could create change in any part of your world, what kind of change would that be?  If you were more able and willing to make change happen, how might you spend your time and talent differently? Whether we like or resist change, change is a constant in our lives. Not only is it ultimately inevitable, it is the reason why we have any new breath, new thought, new next moment, new opportunity, or new resource. Authentic trust is only possible in the context of this realization. At the root of all kinds of suffering is resistance to change as one of life’s givens. There are two sides to managing change: managing change that happens to us and managing change we create. In the first case, effectively managing change means doing whatever research it takes to anticipate change and to be prepared for it. When it comes to change, there are 3 types: Change we can predict in terms of when, where, and how it will happen • Change we can predict will happen, but no details beyond that • Change we can’t predict, no matter how much information we have. •

Managing change is all about managing our unknowns. Every change we can imagine represents a set of unknowns. Whether it’s change we’re creating or change we’re responding to, the first step is to identify all of the unknowns in the context.    

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What is unclear, ambiguous, puzzling? What are our hunches, guesses, and assumptions? What do we need to discover, learn, explore? What are our unanswered questions?

The next step is to decide which of our unknowns are knowable.   

Which can we research? Which can we ask experts about? Which can we check out with research and data?

The more we close out our unknowns, the closer we get to managing the change effectively. When our situation requires being prepared for change, there are 4 questions that lead us to effectively preparing ourselves for change:

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 What could change?  What’s the potential for that to happen?  What would be any costs or benefits of the change?  What could we do today to be prepared for changes we know are inevitable? Being productive in our work and life always implies being prepared in order to be agile. When it comes to change, as it’s been true for millions of years: only the agile survive and thrive.

M a k i n g e a s y

t h e

d i f f i c u l t

There are many reasons why we might consider anything on our to-do list as “difficult.” It’s something we’ve struggled with in the past. It could be something that we lack confidence in doing easily or well. It may

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be something we believe we have imperfect time or resources for. Or something we don’t feel prepared for or new at.  What in your life, career, and work are you committed to achieving and doing that seems easy?  What seems more difficult?  If you played with the idea that you sometimes make things more difficult than they need to be, what might be examples of that?  When some things come easy, what do you think you do to make them easy to do? Making anything we consider difficult easy is all about just doing it, whatever our level of confidence, plan, conditions, certainties, or resources. It’s being clear on purpose and using our potential to do what we can, as simply as we can. We make things difficult by focusing on the deficiencies of what we don’t have, don’t like, and can’t do. These are always realities and paying attention to them has no value. It only makes things more difficult than they need to be. Notice the areas of your work and life you consider to be relatively “easy.” These are the things you feel you do well, naturally, without a lot of drama or struggling against obstacles. Notice how in these situations, all you’re doing is paying attention to what you do want, do have, and can do. Taking responsibility for our success means understanding clearly that we create every single experience of “things being easy” when we find them easy to do. No one else does this for us. We do that. The difference between easy and hard is the difference in our moment to moment focus of attention. Knowing this, we can then

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transfer this ability to situations where we’ve made things more difficult than they need to be.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

What if you discovered you have the power to make anything easy difficult ... and anything difficult easy?

When it’s difficult to say yes to something, making it easy to say yes means just saying yes – realizing that it’s what we want and what we can do. When it’s difficult saying no someone or something, we can make saying no easy by just saying no. If we’re concerned that any yes or no will create costs we don’t like, we just need to be honest with ourselves about our willingness to make handling these costs as easy as saying the no.

When it’s difficult to do something we don’t feel fully prepared for or skilled in, it’s the same approach. We decide on our goal, notice what we can do and do have, and then just do what we can do with what we have. If we want to make it even easier, we can practice picturing ourselves getting everything done as easily as possible.

L i o n s ,

t i g e r s

&

b e a r s

Any intention to achieve a new level of performance is a venture beyond our zone of competence, comfort, and confidence. If we’re at 50% mastery on anything, we move in stages toward our ultimate goal. We don’t jump stages.

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So in our next phase of learning and practice, we know we will succeed 60% of the time. The math guarantees setbacks, failures, and disappointments the other 40% of the time. The most engaging approach here is to notice, learn from, and move on from what we don’t achieve. It’s important to rate ourselves continuously against our goals for one reason: to pay attention to our successes, so we can learn from and build on our successes. The wrong reason to rate our performance is to have new reasons to judge, criticize, punish, and lecture ourselves, resulting in lower self-confidence, self-trust, and courage to succeed. The mythology of failure is that it is essential to success. It isn’t. If we never fail again in any of our goals, how is that a problem? The less we fail, the more we succeed. The only thing essential to big success is a series of small successes. Success is our most powerful and dependable teacher on the path toward any worthy goal. We usually value failure because we believe it can be a good teacher. Let’s say we’re in a difficult conversation and we’re trying to be tactful and we don’t pull it off. Our failure teaches us that being tactless doesn’t work. But we knew that before, and somehow in the moment, forgot. Essentially, failure can teach us two things: things we already knew that don’t work and new things we discover don’t work. In either case, failure is a great teacher that shows us exactly what not to do. Knowing what to do isn’t part of failure’s capability as teacher. Failure is clueless about what will work. Its job is to simply reveal to us what won’t work, what we can’t do to meet our goal.

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What if you were no longer dragged down by disappointments or failures?

Discovering what works comes from two things: 1.Repeating our own or someone else’s past success 2.Improvising a new approach that ends up succeeding.

When we say we “learned from failure”, we mean that we used the experience as an opportunity to do our homework and research better practices or to improvise a different and more successful way of approaching things. To be fair, our new level of success comes about thanks to this learning and improvising.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

What builds the kind of confidence and self-trust that leads to our next levels of success is reflecting on any instances of partial or total success we have relative to our goals. Finally, it is important that we don’t take too personally setbacks, failures, and disappointments. They are not a reflection on our capabilities. They are the logical by-products of having goals that call for new levels of learning and performance on our part.

P a t h

b a r r i e r s

As it turns out, the most significant barriers to our success have to do with the very beliefs we hold about ourselves, our world, and the nature of success. Our beliefs are our interpretations of and generalizations about reality, aimed at filling in information and knowledge gaps that life gives us. Beliefs can even be more powerful than our values and intentions.

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Here is a short list of these barrier beliefs - beliefs that prevent our agility. 1. Believing that attachment to any “single right way” is a wise strategy - especially in a dynamic universe 2. Believing that we can be perfectly consistent in anything 3. Believing that promises - our own or others’ - can guarantee anything 4. Believing that we could or should stick to unchanging plans in a changing landscape 5. Believing that lowering our standards or downsizing our dreams can reduce unhappiness or bring about greater happiness and effectiveness 6. Believing that discovering our best has to do with understanding or analyzing our failures, disappointments or mistakes 7. Believing that personal effectiveness can happen “naturally” for people who don’t continuously practice the required strength 8. Believing that we need certainty and guarantees to make commitments to create the future we most want. What would you put on your list of beliefs that can keep you stuck and unproductive in your life, career, and work? The way to release ourselves from self-defeating beliefs is to keep paying attention to things as they are without trying to impose our interpretations on them. This is the simple yet challenging practice of seeing things as they are rather than seeing things through the lens of how we want them to be. Dreaming of what attracts us continues to be an absolutely vital practice for being fully who we are and tapping into our full potential, but we never let these pictures blind us from seeing things simply as they are. Being reality-oriented is at the root of agility.

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B e s t

u s e

o f

t i m e

Being organized is its own reward. We find things when we need them; we show up when we say we will; we start and complete things when we decide to. Just as importantly, we feel organized. The good news is that being organized doesn’t prevent or negate chaos and change. Change and chaos are constants however expert we get at planning and organizing what we can in our world. Wise organization creates agility.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

Think about where you would like to be more organized in your life, career, and work.  What would your world look like if you took more time to be organized in it?  If you were even somewhat more organized, what advantages would that have for you?  What could you do to create a little more organization here than you have today? These questions imply that you already have organizational know-how. You’ve already learned how to achieve best use with your time and spaces. Remembering the core potential you already have is supported by engaging assessment of your successes through questions like:  How did your own organization support one of your recent achievements?  Where in your life, career, and work do you feel most organized, and why?  What are examples of best use of time you already experience? Many of us have different areas of our work and life where we are more or less organized than others. On a scale of -5 to +5 from very disorganized to very organized, some areas are in negative

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numbers and others are in positive numbers. The key is to move up to the highest optimal levels possible, one step at a time. So if we’re at a -2 in one area, we want to aim for -1 before aiming higher. What would that look like? The idea of optimum organization is an important. The goal is best use of time and space. Being over-organized means spending more time being and staying organized than it’s worth the time. This happens in over-planning, where we spend time trying to attain the perfect plan in situations where change continues to be a constant. The alternative to over-planning is organization through flexibility and adaptability. One way to look at best use of time is to inventory our weekly use of time to see what activities use the largest quantities of time. The next question is to explore the possibility of reducing the quantity of time in any activity and increase the quality or productivity of time. Another side to organization is the continuous experimentation with new systems. Interestingly enough, research shows that filers (people who keep things in files) tend to feel and be as productive as pilers (people who keep things in piles). One person’s ideal system is another’s barrier to organization and productivity. Some people thrive on technology while others thrive on paper. The key is to experiment and use what works for us. When it comes to new systems, it’s important to give them at least a month of regular use to test for their usefulness, especially if they require new habits of us. If we use a new system that we decide doesn’t work, we need to decide if it’s the system or our lack of practice to make it natural for our use. One of the simplest ways to stay organized is to give ourselves enough time to be prepared for whatever’s on our calendar. We’re productive shoppers because we construct good lists beforehand. We’re productive in meetings and conversations because we

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prepare for them. We’re productive travelers because we take care of the details ahead of time. One of the more pathetic excuses we give ourselves for not being organized is that we don’t have the time it takes. The truth is that time is not a given: the only time we ever have is the time we create. Organization is always within our power, as long as we realize this fact.

I n t e n t i o n a l

u s e

o f

t i m e

Pa t h s

Our first resistance to being intentional is thinking about all of the people whose requests and demands on our time are not very negotiable. We’ve agreed to certain roles and responsibilities that imply time commitments we can only say yes to.

M o u n t a i n

Being intentional about our use of time means making and keeping promises to ourselves about how we use our time.

Nonetheless, we can still be intentional about how we manage the very finite spaces of time on our calendars. All this said, wisdom has it that it is far better to plan tasks and time whether or not things change and preempt our intentions. Every intention about our time is an act of faith. Life gives us no guarantees. As it turns out, life seems to be at least as committed to surprise as continuity.

What if it was actually up to you to be as productive as you want to be?

Thinking ahead, we can be prepared even for those things that are surprises. There are two kinds of surprises: those we can

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anticipate and those we can’t. In the second category are events we know can happen but we don’t know when. Many of these we can prepare for. Managing surprises is an art and science. It starts with anticipation. What can happen that we don’t and can’t plan? There are things we can anticipate and those we can’t. Planning at its best means being prepared. What can I do right now that could make me more prepared for possible change? This is what intentional use of time means: preparing yourself for what you know will or may be possible. What kinds of obstacles, twists, turns, and changes in your work and life are and aren’t you prepared for? How prepared are you for unexpected or unplanned success? What would kind of new opportunities would you love to be prepared for? What kind of good change in your life would you love to be prepared for? What could you do to create this kind of preparation? In a world where change is a constant, agility is a function of preparation, and preparation is within our scope of influence. It’s all about the intentional use of our time. The beauty of practice in intentional use of time is that there are no boundaries to the possibilities - except those we impose on ourselves. We can practice being intentional in our use of time when everything is going on, and when nothing is going on - when we are over scheduled and when we have nothing planned. From this perspective, an intentional nap will be as productive as an intentional meeting, errand, or multi-task feast.

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S a y i n g

y e s ,

s a y i n g

n o

There are two ways we fail to make best use of our time and talent: saying yes to things we should say no to, and saying no to things we should say yes to. Make a list of some things that you typically say yes and no to.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 Where would you like to be more productive and what would you need to say yes and no to in order to create this kind of productivity?  When do you feel least able to say yes in your life?  When do you feel least able to say no in your life?  How would you better use your time and talent if you gave yourself permission to say yes or no more? The yes/no dilemma is a practical matter: we only have so many hours in a day and some good options are mutually exclusive. We all have the ability to say yes to more things than we can achieve. All it takes is imagination, passion, and opportunity. We also all have the ability to say no even to things that tempt us beyond our capabilities. The first obstacle to overcome here is the unrealistic belief that we can please everyone with enough yeses.  The more people in our world, the more likely it is that we will get more requests or demands than we have the capacity to say yes to  The more lazy, victimhood-oriented, highmaintenance, self-centered, or controlling people are, the more capable they are of inventing unfulfillable expectations for us

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 The more passionate people are, the more opportunities they will invite us into than we could ever say yes to  The more other people take on that they can’t handle, the more yeses they’ll ask of us  The more people discover how dependable we are, the more they will feel confident to ask even more of us Given this reality, we can count on delivering as many no’s as yeses on any given day. In a world where we say yes when we should say no, we will always have deadline and follow-through issues because we’re making it impossible to get anything done on time, done well, or done at all. When diplomacy is the order of the day, we can deliver a “soft no” - a no that’s qualified in terms of conditional yeses.  A yes to doing it at a later time  A yes to doing part of what’s requested or required  A yes to asking someone else’s help with it  A yes to doing it as long as certain conditions are met  A yes to achieving the ultimate goal in a different way  A yes to this as long as others reciprocally help us with something that our yes would depend on Honesty is important for the trust of the relationship. Saying no when we need to say no, empathically but unapologetically is key to trust building and sustaining. The other side of the yes/no coin is key as well. This is where we say no to things we should say yes to. It’s as unproductive to close off new opportunities as it is to take on more than we can achieve. It’s important to understand that in a world of finite time and resources, every yes implies a no, and every no implies a yes. When a no implies moving on from a current job, project, or relationship, we do well to follow the Open Space Law of Two

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Feet: When we find ourselves no longer contributing or learning, we need to move to a place where we can.

W i s e

d e c i s i o n s

When life is good, decisions are easy. The right choice stands out, easy to spot from the line-up of options, all shamelessly begging for consideration and attention. This applies to any kind of decision we can imagine decisions impacting our careers, health, investments, relationships, commitments, and changes we take on.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

 Looking back over your life so far, what would you say were examples of wise decisions?  What do you think made them wise?  Did they seem wise at the time, or only later when you saw the impact that followed?  If you could be as wise as you wanted to be, what do you think your life would be like?  How have the problems you've solved, successes you've achieved, and experiences you've gained made you wiser? Making wise decisions is a matter of listening to the situation we’re engaged in, so the situation can tell us how best to proceed. When we’re at our best, we let reality tell us what’s wise. Decision wisdom also isn’t a special talent confined to certain genders, social classes, personality types, or astrological signs. Nor is wise decision making necessarily related to power, position, education, or wealth.

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Wise decisions depend on five core factors. Clarifying what matters to us The more clear we are on what matters to us, the easier it is to differentiate options on what best matches our values and goals. The best choice is the choice that meets most of our success indicators. If we’re encountering any decision that seems burdensome or paralyzing, the first place to look is the degree to which we are really clear on what matters to us. Working from the right questions at the right time Information is data, knowledge is understanding and wisdom is knowing the right questions in the first place. Every new decision is a dynamic field of unknowns that raises new questions. Smart decision making means realizing that some questions are better addressed before others and making progress on a decision is often a matter of addressing other questions before we ultimately address the “burning question.” Knowing and creating good options It’s important that we know all relevant and available options before we choose. This is a matter of research, and when research gives us options with issues, it becomes a matter of creativity. Creativity is developing multiple options for consideration. Being inventive allows us to create hybrid options that can fuse the “best of” contentious and flawed options on the table. Understanding the cost-benefit potentials When it comes to options, no two options are equal. Each offers a different mix of potential costs and benefits. The key is to research every unknown and resist operating on untested assumptions. In assessing potential costs and benefits, it’s always wise to look at long and short term as well as tangible and intangible costs and benefits.

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Including valued minds There are three kinds of people who can be helpful in a decision making process: people with rich experience, people with engaging feedback, and people with good questions we haven’t yet considered.

M o u n t a i n

Pa t h s

What’s interesting in decision making is that, looking back after many decisions, there were actually multiple right paths possible. We chose what we chose based on our best understanding at the time. What’s key is that we learn from whatever success that decision brought us. If there are new decisions to make, wisdom is moving forward with full attention and engagement of our best.

S m a r t

p l a n n i n g

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself to support your productivity in anything is: What’s my plan? What are my next steps here? Think about how planning has supported you in the past and how it could support you in the present.  When does planning support your ability to be productive?  How important in your world is flexible and adaptable planning?  How has preparation and adaptability supported any of your past achievements and successes? The purpose of planning is to discover and decide what needs to be done, when, and by whom. It’s task, timing, and talent coordination.

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Timing is a matter of logistical convenience or task dependency. According to the principle of logistical convenience, I cluster email tasks together because they all live in my email program. I cluster errands together because they all live in a geographic proximity. The principle of task dependency is the notion that certain tasks must precede and follow others because of their functional relationships. I can’t edit something until it’s created; I can’t publish something until it’s edited. We can’t decide on something together until we’ve built enough consensus. Smart planning is viewing planning as preparation rather than prediction. We cannot have perfect knowledge of the future, no matter how many plans and contingencies we’ve invested in. When change is a constant, planning = preparation. This is realistic because every inch of our success happens thanks to our being prepared to take successful action. We always do exactly what we’re prepared to do. One of the more powerful questions we ask ourselves in planning is: What are the most likely scenarios and what would it mean to be prepared for them? If scenarios change, plans change. Sometimes our wisest strategy is to prepare for multiple scenarios. There is a special kind of peace of mind when we feel prepared for change and the possible unexpected.

T h e

p o w e r

o f

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We all know the reality and feeling of deadlines. The problem is the classic mistake of “working to deadlines.” If we know we have something due on day 1 and we have 3 days

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to do it, and put it off until the last hours, we create the risk of not having the kind of time or readiness to get things done on time. Think about deadlines in your life and work.

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 Can you think of a time you started early on a deadline and then met the deadline?  What did you do to get off to an early start?  If you could start on certain kinds of deadlines earlier than usual, what kind of deadlines would those be?  How productive do you think you’d be if you got started earlier on all of your deadlines? The wise alternative is to work to startlines instead. This is the practice of starting and completing things as soon as we get them. The wisdom here is that the earlier we can handle possible delays or glitches, the greater likelihood we’ll end up on time. So instead of working to deadlines, we work from startlines.

What if you shortened every start-completion cycle you have?

This is of course a challenge when a task lands on our list that requires more time and readiness than even the startline allows. That’s where we ask for help from someone who either “owes us one” or who we are willing to “owe one” to. Trying to do everything ourselves is not worth the stress and risk of missing deadlines we cannot change. If we have people in our world who are crisis-oriented, either from bad luck or bad planning, this is going to impact our ability to meet deadlines they are associated with. They are notorious for telling us about what needs to be done long after they knew it needed to be done.

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We can ask them to be more proactive and give them ample appreciative feedback when they do. We can also make conditional promises to them when we make promises to them. In a conditional promise, I say I will be able to get x done in timeframe y, as long as …, and I fill in the conditions required for being on time. My goal here is to be fair to myself and honest in accommodating them. I stay committed to their success and my happiness. Delivering unconditional promises prepares them for the worst but probable scenarios given the impossible timeframes. A proactive strategy is frequent check-ins with these folks. These are informal inquiries into what’s new in their universe. Did any next steps or assignments come out of the conversation/ meeting you just had? What do you have due coming up? These and questions like these help them give us actionable notices of tasks and their timelines that I need to pay attention to.

F o l l o w - t h r o u g h It’s one thing to get things started early, and it’s another thing to follow-through on tasks to completion.  What would be an example of a recent achievement where follow-up and follow-through played a key role in your success?  What kinds of tasks and projects in your life, career, and work seem to require the most follow-up and followthrough?  If you got really good at follow-up and follow-through, what could you achieve in your life, career, and work?

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Follow-through is challenging and important these days for several reasons: • Multi-tasking means that at any point in time, we have more unfinished tasks than if we’re simply starting and completing one task at a time • The rush to speed tempts us to start new things before we’ve completed others already in progress Tasks that have pieces that depend on other people can become idle in various stages of incompletion until people get their pieces completed •

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• With attention spans becoming shorter because of the impact of modern life pacing, media, and technology, we have less attention for follow-through The first step to follow-through is to give regular attention to all incomplete tasks on our lists. With whatever system works, the key is to keep daily consciousness of unfinished business. Another success strategy is to keep momentum on any task, no matter how small the progress. It’s a mistake to “wait until we have the time we need” to complete a task. If all we can eke out of our schedule is 10 or 15 minutes for a task that needs another hour or two, we can get the task done in an improvised sequence of short work segments. Waiting for the time we need could mean the risk of never getting the task done. Finding and creating short work segments of time is often possible. It’s a matter of noticing and using those fragments of time available during morning, afternoon, or evening transitions. We can create these small but important chunks of time as breaks between larger blocks of work, between meetings, or in natural lulls when we’re waiting for something else to start.

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In every case, working in small chunks helps us move on a steady path toward completing any size tasks. Another dimension of following-through is following up. A task is fully completed when we know the impact of our efforts. It may take personal conversations or emails to check in with people and assess the quality of our impact. This is especially important when we are fairly or very sure we succeeded. Knowing when we succeed is a requirement for understanding how we succeed. Our future success depends on our lessons learned from past successes. If we disappointed people, we also need to use this as an opportunity to get clear on what matters most to them so we can move forward making future realistic promises and improvements where we can.

C r e a t i n g

f l o w

One of the most profound discoveries we can make as human beings is that we’re seamlessly connected to a universe of infinite energy. One of the other insights is that there are countless ways to create an experience of disconnectedness from this universe of energy.  What in your work and life saps your energy the most?  What gives you energy?  When you really take care of yourself, what does that look like?  What do you think your life would be like if you took great care of yourself?

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The indicators that we are connecting to this field of energy are simple and obvious. We feel healthy, agile, alive, relaxed, attentive, peaceful, and joyful. It’s easy to enjoy sensual experiences, easy to eat and sleep when we want to, easy to work with endurance when we want to, easy to recuperate from imbalance when we want to. We flow.

What could you achieve today if you knew you had all the energy you needed?

Being connected takes intentional practice – where healthy being follows healthy doing: healthy eating, healthy activity, healthy friends, healthy work/life environments, healthy daily routines, healthy napping and sleeping, healthy entertainment, healthy traveling.

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Knowing what’s healthy for us starts with listening to our body and mind – noticing impacts and influences. What makes us feel healthy and connected to our energy sources? Another dimension of healthiness is the balance of energy flow – energy coming in and energy going out. Being out of balance can mean more energy going out than allowing energy in, or taking far more in than what we give out. Again the key here is inner listening. Right now, do I feel overwhelmed, drained, or in balance? Feeling overwhelmed or drained means that we feel disconnected from our energy. Anything we do on a physical or mental level to regain balance frees the flow of energy and we feel whole and healthy again. Meditation and yoga are two common and accessible practices for getting us connected again to our energy. Any kind of breathing practices reconnect us and open us to balanced energy. Most of us have access to books, tapes, and classes to learn any

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number of approaches. The key is daily practice, whether proactive and preventive or recuperative and restorative. Another practice is creating feelings through actions. Although we don’t directly control how we feel in any situation, our actions influence our feelings. If we rush around, we create rushed feelings; if we take our time with someone or some task, we feel more relaxed. This practice begins with looking at a situation where we want specific feelings and deciding what kind of actions would most likely create the conditions for these feelings. In the beginning of any new practice, the feelings we create will be at weaker levels, but will strengthen with practice. Paying attention to our environment is another way to sustain healthy energy. When we have a choice of where we spend our time and with whom we spend our time, we can be conscious of what gives us the kind of energy that allows us to feel healthy and balanced. Some environments and people are more healthy, and others are more toxic and draining. If we have to spend time with any that are unhealthy, we need to decide if we can restrict our exposure and do something restorative afterward to regain balance. The good news is, the healthier we become, the more we attract healthy people and environments in our life.

What if you discovered that you have access to all the energy you need to make progress on your goals?

One practice is building in healthy elements into our life/work spaces and routines. It may be live flowers in our home or office, inspirational and energizing music or books on our iPods, taking stretch breaks outside, spending time weekly in nature or along a beach.

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If we listen to our body and mind on a regular basis, taking care of ourselves becomes natural and easy.

S t r a t e g i c

s e r e n d i p i t y

When we look at how the best things in our life came about, we discover that many of them happened unplanned. They were serendipitous, happening at the intersection of opportunity, attentiveness, and readiness. Knowing this means we can count on serendipity and can in fact create the conditions for serendipity.

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 What have been great things in your life that happened “unplanned”?  What in your life today do you attribute to grace, luck, or serendipity?  If you could give yourself credit for creating the conditions for these things coming into your life, what kind of credit could you give yourself? How is this possible? Here is a short list of intentional ways we create the conditions for our own luck.  Pay attention to new trends - spend time often reading about what’s new inside and outside your field and world  Spend time in spaces where you are more likely to interact in accidental conversations with new people and new ideas, perspectives, talents, and opportunities - like public events and spaces, gatherings, hallways, coffee shops

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 Volunteer for new tasks, projects, and opportunities that would get you exposed to and interacting with new possibilities and people  When talking to people you know or meet, ask new questions, ask about what’s new for them  Visit new places, travel, join online discussions and research the web for new approaches to whatever today’s puzzles are Each of these strategies make serendipity more possible. Of course, planning increases the chances of our luck. Allowing ourselves to connect with new people in new ways has always been the path toward our discovering opportunities and possibilities we could never have planned. In a world that is intrinsically surprising, allowing ourselves to be surprised is one of the most profound ways to discover our best.

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N e x t P a t h

S t e p s

O n

T h e

Every journey is an invitation to discover who we are. To experience our potential and power is to engage who we are in creating what matters to us.

Pa t h s

One step at a time, life keeps giving us fresh moments of opportunity to discover the wisdom and beauty within us.

M o u n t a i n

And to the degree that we discover the wisdom and beauty within us, we become more able to see Infinite forms of beauty and wisdom in our world. May your path reveal the engaging discovery of your potential. May your journey inspire dreams you never imagined you could dream.

Travel well.

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Acknowledgments There is a cast of people who I would like to acknowledge (in no particular order) as contributors to the thinking and learning that went into the emergence of “Mountain Paths.” Teachers and colleagues John Allen, Peter Block, Patti Choby, David Cooperrider, Tom Cutolo, Bill Warner, Julia Allen, Bill Lawrence, Pema Chodron, Sensei Ogui, Tom Carlson, Vida Svarcas, George Nemeth, Steve Pattie, Lois Annich, Rob Searson, David Reynolds, David Bohm, Tulku Thondup, Lynn Grabhorn, John Mizenko, June Holly, Valdis Krebs, Ed Morrison, Ellen Shafer, Stephen Batchelor, Ed Brown, Allison Conte, Jim Kulma, and Meg Wheatley. Thanks to Cathy Purdy at Bookmasters who continues to midwife my books with great care and tenderness, to cover diva Tia Andrako whose design eye makes every package better than the last, and for all of the friends and the people I am most graced to coach for the endless and priceless support and opportunities for the practice of my coaching craft, from which this book seamlessly emerged.

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About the Author Over the past 3 decades, Jack Ricchiuto continues to provide coaching and facilitation to leaders and members of organizations and communities striving for meaningful and sustainable change. Jack is a respected conference speaker on the groundbreaking topics introduced in his books and work with organizations across 20 + industries, from Fortune 500 to start-ups, non-profits to communities. His client list includes MCI, American Greetings, Parker Hannifin, Viacom, American Institute Of Banking, University Hospitals, Progressive Insurance, and the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks.

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The scope of Jack's services includes: Executive, leadership and team coaching, Large and small group facilitation, Qualitative research, Organization and community development, and Professional development workshops and seminars. Jack is author of Collaborative Creativity, Accidental Conversations, Project Zen, Appreciative Leadership and Dream Space: The Power & Path of Dreaming in Community (due 2007). He has written for national publications including Projects@Work and local publications like Smart Business Magazine. With an undergraduate degree from John Carroll University and master's degree from Goddard College, Vermont, Jack continues to teach Executive MBA and post-graduate level classes. Jack is also a principal with Smart Meeting Design, a collaboration facilitation and web technology firm working with non-profits and communities. He serves other outstanding national consulting firms including the Cobalt Group, the Capacity Institute, and the Rallus Group. Visit Jack at his website: www.DesigningLife.com and his blog: www.jackzen.com.

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