Motivation Monday: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The stories we tell ourselves about our lives dictate the type of life we're going to have. This is really important to understand, especially if you're in a place where you don't have a lot of financial resources. The one thing that you really can't afford when you're poor is believing everything people tell you about who you are and what your life is going to be like and most importantly, what you should want.

Oh I was just about to tell you a lie. I was going to say it doesn't cost anything to think for yourself. But oh baby, my sweet darling, it will cost you so much to think for yourself.  You will lose things; I have lost things and sometimes this loss hurts an awful lot. You will lose the comfort of the herd. You will lose sweet oblivion. You will lose the intoxicating fever of experience without context; the blissful heady rush that comes from not thinking things through. You will lose regard and relationships. It is a painful thing at times to see things as they most likely are, rather than how they are presented.

There is a price for the path I'm recommending, and it's not a small price. But I think it well-worth it, all these years on, and perhaps you will too.

The stories we tell ourselves about our lives dictate the type of life we're going to have.

Every day we wake up in relationship with Story. We tell ourselves, continually and subconsciously, a very powerful narrative. We tell ourselves if we're happy or not. We tell ourselves if we're competent. We tell ourselves if we're strong. We tell ourselves if we are healthy. We tell ourselves if we are beautiful. We tell ourselves if we are loved. We tell ourselves if we love others. We tell ourselves if we are masters of our fate or if we are helpless leaves in a hurricane. We tell ourselves if we trust our own selves, our own voice, our own experience, our own perception of the world.

We are not the only ones telling stories to us. Now, more than at any other point in human history, we are awash in a sea of messaging. We are bombarded by Stories. These stories tell us many things. They tell us first and foremost that we're not happy. That we're incomplete. That we're not good enough. We're not beautiful enough. We're certainly not healthy enough. These stories tell us that we are unworthy of regard, that we are managing our lives badly, that we are incompetent - unless, of course, we buy the right things. Given the right makeup, prescription medications, and phenomenally expensive college education we can buy our way into worthiness. That is how the story goes.

All I'm asking you this morning - and every morning - is to consider critically whether these stories we're being told are actually true. Consider how much you're exposing yourself to the narratives. You may think that these stories are  not touching you, but as a marketer of some experience here, let me assure you of this: if I can tell you several times an hour, every single day, that there is something wrong with you and that you need medication to fix it, eventually you will believe you are sick.

If we are going to heal ourselves - if we are going to heal each other, and our communities, and eventually the world - we need to take our stories back. It starts with what you tell yourself about yourself. You are smart, and beautiful, and strong, and capable of making yourself wholly into the person you want to be. You have come this far, and you will go much further yet. Telling yourself this is the first step in making it your own truth.

Onward, upward, forward, y'all. We have toxic prevailing cultural paradigms that need smashing to smithereens. I'm gonna need your help.

Are You Making the Effort to Educate Yourself?

I've recently become enamored of Twitter. I was sharing this with a friend, who said, "Oh, it's such a waste of time. There's nothing but garbage on there."

So I asked her who she followed.  She rattled off a few "celebrities", sports heroes and her personal friends. "Nothing they say makes my day any better."

Great content is not going to just fall into your lap. If you want to use Twitter and other social media tools as part of your campaign of self-education, it helps to be very deliberate and proactive about following people who post content that will enrich your mind and help you think.

This morning, @KofiAnnan was Tweeting. You know Kofi Annan - former Secretary General of the UN, Nobel Peace Prize winner? This is a person who has something to say, and someone who has been around enough that he knows what he is talking about. Why not follow him?

Follow the thinkers, the dreamers, the poets. Follow scientists and sociologists and researchers. People who are doing great work are willing to share what they've been doing. This is a tremendous gift - but you have to be willing to opt in and listen to the conversation.

If your Twitter feed is garbage, you have no one to blame but yourself. Fix it up! When you read an article you enjoy, take note of who the author is. 9 times out of 10 you'll be able to follow them on Twitter. If not them, at least the website or magazine that published their work. 

Make Twitter work for you. Set it up to harvest the information that will make you smarter. If you read one article from one smart person each day, by the end of the week, you're going to know more than you did at the beginning.

Be A Better Marketer: Do You Have Someone to Tell You No?

I just finished watching a train wreck of a commercial. I'm not going to name names, but let me fill you in on the concept. The owner of a local car dealership is at the wheel of his truck. As he's driving along, he continually looks up at the camera - clearly mounted on the passenger side visor - and in a demanding tone, tells the viewing public that if they're not buying their car from him, he wants to know why. He gives his personal cell number, assures people he'll answer the phone himself, and then we go to the dealership logo. The entire time, his attention is clearly divided between the camera and the highway he's driving on.

Yeah, that's real safe!

Conceptually, there's nothing particularly wrong with this ad - chances are you've seen variations of it thousands of times. But execution really is everything. A noticeably distracted driver is not the best choice to sell cars! This man's tone of voice was aggressive, not inviting. He didn't look good, sound good, or reflect well on his business.

Be A Better Marketer: Looking Bad is Entirely Avoidable!
Advertising is never free. Even in this small market, a television commercial is a significant investment for the small business owner. Before you spend that money, you want to make sure that you're making a wise decision. This requires an essential step: having someone who can tell you "No!"

What this car dealership owner clearly needed was someone on his side to take a look at the commercial - BEFORE IT AIRED - who would say "Dude. You're a great guy, but this commercial's just not working. Why don't we try it again? You'll be just as effective - and a whole lot safer and more focused! - if you're standing in front of one of your trucks instead of driving. If we change a few sentences around, you'll sound friendlier and less scary, too!"

It's important to understand that the TV ad rep is not going to do this for you. Their job is to sell ad time. They don't care if your ads are good, bad, or indifferent: they just want you to buy a bunch of them. The same dynamic is at play when you're buying print advertising, radio advertising, or doing online advertising. Some reps are better than others, but it's always, always, always a bad business decision to leave the responsibility for your company's image in their hands. That's yours, and you need to own it.

Everyone needs a second set of eyes to look at their work. In this instance, it was very clear that this dealership owner was handling production duties on his own, probably to keep costs down. The skills you need to be a great car dealer are not necessarily the same as the ones you need to be a great commercial producer.

Have a trusted employee, colleague, or friend review your all of your advertising before it goes live. This should be someone who is both sensible and confident enough to tell you "No way!" when an ad will make you look bad. It can be hard to hear that the ad you worked so hard on is a stinker, but it's much better to hear that before your market has seen the ad! Money spent on crappy ads is money wasted, and in this economy, who can afford to do that?

Reading Between the Lines

There's a PSA running on Quebec radio that goes something like this:

"911"

"Yes, my air conditioner is broken."

"Lady, this is 911. For emergencies."

"Yes, my air conditioner is broken and it's getting hotter in here by the minute. My address is 6595 Any Street."

"I understand, Ma'am. We'll send someone over right away."

Then it cuts to a message about you can call for help with domestic violence.

A not-unrelated story: a friend, detailing the physical and emotional abuse that led up to the dissolution of her relationship, shared a story where her partner broke her cat's leg by throwing the cat across the room. She said, "The vet knew. And probably also knew that I was in a DV situation before I did. "She fell" sounds a lot like "I walked into a door" or "I fell down the stairs".

How much of our ability to save each other, to care for each other, to break the cycle of abuse, is dependent on our ability to read between the lines. It's not enough to hear what is said. You have to hear what is meant. Sometimes that means listening for the words that aren't there, the things that aren't said.

There are reasons his is difficult. The first is that we're collectively not in the habit of paying attention at all. Never mind listening to what isn't said, we don't hear what is said. We're not present in our conversations. Sometimes we don't even know who we're talking to at all:



There are reasons we don't pay attention. We're busy. We're overwhelmed. We have places to go, people to see, important things that require our attention more than what or who we're currently engaged with. We live our lives on autopilot: how many times have you driven a familiar route - let's say from home to the office - only to realize you didn't see anything along the way? Our minds are continually occupied and this keeps us from living the lives we're supposed to have.

The 911 dispatcher gets thousands of calls a day - some of them from people who are calling because their air conditioners *are* broken, which is generally outside of 911's scope of service. It takes a cultivated awareness to pause long enough to think "Maybe something else is going on here!" and discern the meaning behind the words.

Vets, like other health care providers, are forced to see more and more patients in less and less time to make their revenue model work. It takes experience, compassion and a cultivated awareness to stop long enough in the normal course of events and say "Cats don't just fall like that. What's really going on here?"

There's very little education in our lives about how to develop our awareness, to discern the meaning behind the worlds, to look a little deeper. But that's exactly what we must do if we're going to change the lives we live, the lives other people live. If we're going to build a better world, we need to start paying attention.

On the Latest IRS Scandal: Do Good Management Practices Apply Only To People We Like?

Right now, on my desk, I've got a notice saying I need to pay the IRS nearly $2,000. The tax man is not my favorite guy right now - I don't think anyone ever likes to pay taxes.

That being said, I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the coverage surrounding the IRS conference expenditures. The agency has reportedly spent $50 million dollars for 220 conferences, over 2 years. That works out to roughly $227,000 per conference, although some conferences cost far more (one is reportedly $4 million!) and some obviously less. The IRS has 106,000 employees, according to Wikipedia.

One piece of information I haven't seen so far is how much is spent on conferences by other government agencies of comparable size over a similar time period. Numbers without context aren't tremendously helpful. I would like to see an agency-by-agency breakout of this information, and I bet other people would too. Just saying "Oh, they spent $50 million!" is good for whipping up the emotion - $50 million being spent by people you don't like just sounds terrible - but we can't forget that ALL of the money the gov't spends is taxpayer money; not just that spent by the IRS.

But that's not even the biggest part of the problem. The troublesome bit is the outrage leveled at the fact that the IRS employees were participating in team building exercises. Some of these exercises were fun! They involved dancing! People were visibly smiling and having a good time!

It would be interesting to have performance assessments of the IRS employees before and after these conferences, both self-assessments and objective third party assessments. Because here's the thing: team building exercises, morale boosting drills and the like are all designed to improve performance. They're a tacit acknowledgement that all work is performed by people, and people have complex emotional and psychological needs. When you take steps to meet those emotional and psychological needs, your employees perform better. This is not rocket science. This is Management 101.

For example, let's look at police officers. Due to the nature of their work, police officers are regularly exposed to traumatic events. That's why good police departments make sure there's counseling & support services available for their teams. Healthy, strong bonds between police officers not only provide for better law enforcement, they keep every one safer.

IRS employees are probably among the most hated professionals in the country. They have a thankless task that is complicated and ever changing. The tax code is more that 73,000 pages long. And budget crunches (believe it or not in the context of this story)mean that there are fewer employees doing more and more work. This is not a recipe designed to deliver top performance. In fact it is the opposite: put people in a difficult, high-stress job that everyone hates them for having.

Every single IRS employee is a person. Is it such a stretch to see that these people might need some emotional support? That their morale might be impacted by having everyone hate them?

If we agree that the IRS employee teams are performing a needed function, aren't these employees entitled to the same management tools and techniques people in other industries use to get top performance from their teams? Or is good management something we reserve only for the people we like?

We can argue about the amount of money spent all day, and somewhere, someone probably is. But let's stop the discussion about whether or not it's appropriate that the IRS employees have access to the type of team building, morale building exercises that are common practice to provide employee support and boost performance in many industries. People who are treated well do better work. Retaining skilled IRS employees is always going to be more cost-effective than attracting and training new employees. If that takes a little dancing and some cupcakes, so be it.

Curiousity: How The Heck Does That Work

Yesterday, I was reading one of Chris Brogan's newsletters. He was talking about our flags - basically what defines us, personally and professionally. This is something I've been thinking about, and so on a whim, I wrote to him, and said, "I'm curious, and I want other people to be curious too. No idea how this integrates with my career, actually - encouraging curiosity doesn't seem to be a paying sort of endeavor - but it's what I wind up doing most of the time :-)"

Wouldn't the world be a much better place if it was populated by intensely curious people? Curiosity is an engine of understanding, and understanding is an agent of change.

Much to my delight, Chris wrote back, saying,"Curiosity doesn't pay. Helping people satisfy theirs does. :)"

So now I'm thinking about what tangible, offline tools do people use to satisfy their curiosity? I'm focusing on offline tools because I believe hands on engagement is essential to creating passionate curiosity. It's definitely essential to understanding.

A magnifying glass is a great example, and one I appreciate more and more as I get older. It's a simple, easy way to see the small details of things. Binoculars and spy-glasses let you see what's far away; telescopes are great for what's really, really far away. I don't have a microscope (yet!) but it is definitely the tool to examine what lies way, way, way beneath.

I think if we want to encourage curiosity in children, we need to provide them with the age-appropriate versions of these tools and send them out into the world to see what they can see. More importantly, we need to keep using these tools as we grow. We must not get so busy that we stop looking at the world around us! 

Connecting Our Attention Spans and Success: The Seth Godin Question

Yesterday, I was talking with a colleague about Seth Godin. Seth's blog is pretty much required reading in some circles, and we were talking about why he's so popular. There are times when Seth is brilliant, and there's times when he's not so brilliant - I'm pretty sure that's a function of numbers as much as anything; he's an extremely prolific author and blogger and no one hits it out of the park all of the time.

My colleague suggested one simple reason I hadn't considered. "Seth's stuff is usually really short. I can read it in a minute. Other stuff, I look at it and I know it's got value and I should look at it, but it'll take me a while to read, so I put it in a folder for later."

"Does later ever come?" I asked her.

She laughed. "Sometimes."

Wise Geek reports that an adult should have an attention span of 15-20 minutes - more than long enough for most of us to read a few thousand word article. Yet the internet has reduced our attention span substantially. Typically, we'll spend a minute online paying attention to a single item before we're distracted by something else. Some people don't even spend that much time: they're on to the next thing in less than 10 seconds.

What impact does this have on our success? Well, I think answering that question depends where you're standing. Seth Godin has done well formatting his messaging in a way in such a way to appeal to an abbreviated attention span. When you're populating a website with content, you'll get better results if all of the essential information is instantly identifiable. Non-fiction book design is steadily evolving to incorporate lots of white space, bullet points in quantity, and infographic style design to make them more appealing to the reader.

But does the rapid delivery of information give us everything we need to succeed and thrive? I'm not entirely convinced. If we're only consuming what we can consume quickly, we're limiting ourselves. A diet that consists of only food that's easy to chew and effortless to digest will make us sick in the long run. We need fiber to keep things on track. To extend the metaphor, perhaps we need the intellectual fiber. Perhaps we need to spend time with ideas, taking them in slowly, mulling them over, thinking about them, integrating them into our worldview, and only then taking action.

Doing this can mean taking action that goes against prevailing cultural norms and our own personal daily routines. Suggest to someone that they spend a quarter of an hour with a single article is to provoke an almost guaranteed response of "I don't have time to do that!"

What would happen if we found the time? If we slowed down just enough to be present in our lives, professionally and personally. Would we learn more? Would we understand more? Equipped with more knowledge and understanding, what could we accomplish? It might be worth spending 15 minutes a day finding out.