Daily Creative with Todd Henry

In American football, the red zone is the area on each end of the field inside the twenty yard line. What happens in this area is a key determining factor in a team’s success or failure. Teams that easily advance the ball down the field but can’t score in the red zone will lose games. Teams that play great open-field defense but can’t prevent scores in the red zone will lose. Performance in this very small sliver of the field often determines the overall success or failure of the team.

As you examine your life, and especially your creative work, it’s important to be able to identify the re-zone activities that will really make a difference and generate forward momentum during the particular season you’re in. Some qualities that mark re-zone activities are the following:

Activities that you can uniquely do or add value to because of your position or expertise.While there are a lot of ways you could be spending your time, there are a certain number of activities that you are probably the best person for. Which of these activities should you engage in every day?

Activities that increase your personal capacity to generate ideas, such as study, purposeful ideation, or intelligence gathering. These are typically the first to go during a busy or stressful season. Are you taking the time to sharpen your mind and your creative intuition?

Activities that provide cohesion or creative traction for your team and increase future capacity. For leaders, these include activities such as clarifying objectives and encouraging your team members. Are you taking time every single day to do the small things that make a big difference?

Activities that feed your energy, such as adequate sleep, exercise, or spiritual practice. These are most often neglected during busy or stressful times. You must take care of yourself. Which activities do you need to focus on during this season to ensure that you are prepared for the uncertainty and challenges you will face?

Your “red zone” activities are likely to be made up of some combination of these qualities. Take some time this week to consider what activities you are uniquely positioned to engage in, and that – if done daily – will generate significant momentum in your life and work.

The most accomplished people aren’t always the smartest or the most talented. Rather, they are the ones who do small, important things every single day for long periods of time. They succeed in the red zone.

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Focus is the most valuable tool you have as a creative professional. How you define problems, and allocate attention to them, will often determine your success or failure. However, many organizations allow significant “attentional drains” to infiltrate their culture and rob team members of much needed mental bandwidth. On this episode, we share three valuable strategies from Herding Tigers for building attentional buffers to protect the bandwidth of the team, and ways to talk to your manager about protecting your own attentional bandwidth.

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This week’s episode is about the impotance of rituals. You make your rituals, then your rituals make you.What is the first thing you do in the morning? The last thing you do at night? Your first action when taking on a new project? Your impulse when receiving good (or bad) news?

If you asked those questions to many highly productive people, they’ll have immediate answers. Not because they are micro-obsessive about their schedules, but because over time they’ve developed predictable rituals around key areas of their life and work. Over time, they’ve learned that the messiness of creative work requires a supportive structure, lest everything devolve into chaos. 

According to Orson Welles, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” Rituals provide necessary limitation on your focus, time, and energy so that you can delve deeply into the disorder of creative problem solving.

Rituals are important for several reasons. First, they provide solid ground when facing the uncertainty of your daily work. A ritual is like a bucket you can fill over and over again rather than trying to decide which bucket you should use. A good, solid set of rituals provide context for your work so that you can spend the majority of your energy focusing on the problems you’re trying to solve.

Second, rituals help you forge healthy habits. When you return to the same ritual over and over, you are reinforcing the kinds of behavior you want to see manifested in your life and work, which creates a kind of infrastructure or supporting scaffolding for your creative process. Be mindless about the non-essentials so you can be mindful about the essentials.

Finally, ritual helps you achieve flow in your work. Just like your body adapts to a regular bedtime and a predictable sleep ritual, your mind will also learn to settle into regular rhythms and rituals related to your work. If you always focus on specific activities at certain times of the day, or if you dedicate blocks of time and energy for your ritual, you are far more likely to settle into a state of immersion in your work.

You make your rituals, then your rituals make you.

Here are a few rituals that have served me well over time:

– The first thing I do when I wake in the morning is prep my coffee and breakfast – the same thing every day, by the way – and spend an hour reading, thinking, and writing. It’s become such a ritual that it’s now a habit. Most of my best ideas for my work come out of this time. I couldn’t function without it.

So, how do you begin your day? Maybe your ritual includes immediately putting on your running shoes and getting in a workout. Maybe it’s sitting in your favorite chair and meditating with a cup of coffee. Maybe it’s hitting the floor and doing ten pushups before you leave your bedroom. Having some structure to the start of your day immediately sends a signal to your mind that it’s time to get moving. It helps demarcate your time, especially when so many of us are living and working in the same space.

– I listen to the same music over and over when I’m writing. In fact, I’ve written all of my books while listening to Ambient Music Therapy’s Deep Meditation Experience. When that album kicks on, my brain knows it’s time to start writing. I also light a candle when I write and only when I write. Again, it’s a small ritual that signals that this is deep, important work and that this moment is important.

What small things can you ritualize to infuse meaning into the mundane tasks you engage in every day? It could be sitting in a certain chair when you do a specific kind of work, or using a certain pen only when you are brainstorming. It’s up to you. The value of a ritual is the meaning that it creates in your life and workflow, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else...

This is part four of a series on everyday bravery. If there is one place where bravery is most needed (and often most lacking) it’s in the workplace. Brave people create brave workplaces, and brave workplaces ultimately change the world around them. However, in order for a culture to operate by principles of bravery, individuals must be willing to engage in brave actions every day.

Here are a few principles for engaging bravely in your workplace:

Own your words and actions. ​Be an individual with a backbone. If you say or do something, accept the consequences, whether good or bad, for your choices. Never throw a teammate under the bus.

Taking accountability for your actions does a few things. First, it signals to others that they can trust you to shoulder responsibility, and to do the right thing. This is no small matter. If others sense that you’re playing games and that your primary interest is in protecting yourself and your reputation above actually performing, they will tolerate you but will never trust you. Second, it removes the stigma of falling short. If we are doing difficult things, we are going to fail occasionally. A workplace culture in which nothing difficult is attempted requires no bravery. Only teams on a mission to do difficult things need to be brave. Taking accountability for poor results, and attempting to fix them, is a signal of authenticity and courage, and it pushes others to do the same. This is the essence of good leadership. We can never tolerate blame shifting.  

Is there something you need to take accountability for today?

Encourage​.This literally means to “put courage into” others. Brave people embolden the people around them, speak words of affirmation to them, and cheer them on to be their best. They are not threatened by the successes of others. 

Cowards hold back encouragement because they believe that life is a zero-sum game, and that if someone else gets attention for something it will only tarnish their own standing with the group. However, brave people willingly and truthfully put courage into others, recognizing that we need one another in order to succeed. Brave people are outward focused. Cowards are obsessed with themselves and their own needs and feelings. 

Who can you encourage today? Be proactive about putting courage into others. 

Embrace personal growth, even when you look foolish.​Some people fear trying new things, learning new skills, or tackling new kinds of projects because they fear that if they fail they will be “found out”. Brave people know that occasional failure is simply a part of doing hard things.

To grow, you have to stretch yourself to the point of failure. Now, you have to balance this with wisdom, meaning that you shouldn’t attempt things that are obviously well beyond your present ability. (Just because I’ve climbed rocks in an indoor, controlled facility doesn’t mean I’m ready to free climb half-dome.) Intentionally stretch yourself, have uncomfortable but necessary conversations, and push yourself to learn new skills even when you will appear foolish to those around you for a while.

What do you need to do in order to grow yourself?

Share your ideas, even when they aren’t received.​You cannot control whether someone else likes your ideas, but you can control whether or not you share them. The regret over inaction is too high a price to pay. If you are in a meeting and you have an intuition that something might work, share it. Share your insights with a peer who is struggling with a difficult problem. So many brilliant breakthroughs are lost because someone was too afraid to share what they were seeing with...

As I mentioned a few episodes ago, if I had to choose one gift to impart upon every person I meet – one master key that unlocks their potential – it would be bravery. We need radical bravery in our workplaces, our schools, our neighborhoods, and – God help us – in our politics. If more people committed to making brave choices daily, we would see stronger, more effective teams, less corruption, less unhealthy conflict, and more progress on the societal issues that truly matter.

Organizations need leaders committed to cultivating a culture of bravery, and who themselves are making brave choices in the face of uncertainty. The marketplace needs more business owners who are willing to step up and do the right thing for their employees and their communities, even at the risk of personal cost. And, society needs more people to cultivate brave, empathetic relationships with people who think differently from them.

More than almost any other place, our workplaces need brave leaders. We need people who are committed to standing in the gap, protecting their people, and fighting for the mission of the organization even at personal expense. 

Here are a few principles that brave leaders abide by:

Brave leaders assume accountability for their actions. Many leaders revel in the glory that comes with success, but brave leaders are also willing to put themselves on the line and be accountable when their actions fail. Many are familiar with Dwight Eisenhower’s letter to the Allied troops on the eve of the D-Day invasion in June 1944. It begins, “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.” Inspiring leadership, for sure. However, fewer people are aware that Eisenhower wrote a second letter, only to be delivered in the event of an unsuccessful landing.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Brave leaders are willing to accept responsibility for their actions, including their failures. Are you avoiding accountability for your actions, or pointing fingers at others when you fall short?

Brave leaders have the uncomfortable conversation.​ It’s far easier to avoid difficult chats with direct reports, but brave leaders recognize that it’s more important to be effective than to be liked. It’s never comfortable to discuss performance issues, to deliver uncomfortable news, or to challenge someone’s attitude, but these are the kinds of conversations that brave leaders (cautiously and wisely) step into because they know that their position demands it. Is there an uncomfortable conversation you need to have, but have been avoiding? 

Brave leader speak truth to power. ​As a leader, you must be willing to defend important principles when you perceive they are being “ground up” in the organizational gears. Cowards “go with the flow”, especially when  speaking up might mean losing their organizational standing, but brave leaders are willing to abide by their principles even at personal cost. As my friend riCardo Crespo often says, “you can’t lie to the person in the mirror.” Brave leaders can look themselves in the face every day knowing that they are living out their principles and standing up for what they believe to be proper and just. What principles are you willing to defend, even if it affects your reputation or position?

Brave leaders put their resources where their mouth is. ​Cowards say bold things, but are always hedging their bets. Brave...

This is the second episode of a series on the importance of bravery. Just to re-cap, in the last episode I gave this definition of bravery:

Bravery exists whenever someone a person engages in right action at the potential expense of their own comfort.​ Cowardice, on the other hand, exists when someone chooses self-protection at the expense of right action. It is possible to appear brave to others while actually behaving in a cowardly way, or to appear a coward to others while doing the brave thing. 

In order for something to be considered an act of bravery, it must be sourced in the desire to do what’s right even at the risk of personal cost. Which begs the question: how do you decide what’s ​right?​

On this episode, I want to share a few distinctions between everyday bravery and cowardice, then on upcoming episodes I’m going to share the specifics of what this means, especially in a work context.

Understand that every single person at times exhibits remarkable bravery, and also cowardice. This isn’t something we all get right a hundred percent of the time. However, we all have the ability to choose our response to our circumstances, and simply stopping to consider what “right action in the face of discomfort” means can help parse brave action from cowardice.

So, here are a few qualities of brave people versus cowards, and how they play out in work and life:

Brave people are protective, cowards exploit.​ If your actions are to protect someone or something vulnerable, whether a person or ideal, then there’s a good chance it’s right action. However, if your intent is to take advantage of someone or to deprive them of something they might otherwise enjoy, it’s certainly not. Now, please understand that I’m not talking about marketplace competition. When we compete in the marketplace, we agree to certain rules, one of which is that someone will likely lose the competition. I’m talking about leveraging advantages to exploit those who don’t even know they are being exploited. That’s the definition of cowardice, because it’s hidden action that if revealed would look really bad. Are you exploiting others?

Brave people reveal truth at the right time, cowards conceal it.​ Brave people know that the truth is never really a threat, but even if it costs them their livelihood or relationship, the cost of inaction is simply too vast to take the easy way out. This gets to the issue of character. A willingness to face the truth is critical if we want to exhibit everyday bravery. Is there any place where you are hiding from or concealing the truth? 

Brave people consider context and scale, cowards think right now. ​The brave choice is the one that takes into account nuance and context, is empathetic, and scales in a positive way. Cowardly action is only concerned with immediate consequences. My actions today have resonant consequences tomorrow, and next month, and next year. Brave people think about those consequences, not just getting what they can while they can. Are you thinking about the downstream consequences of your actions? 

Brave people are principle-driven, cowards go with their gut.​ Brave people have a framework for making decisions that is so ingrained that their actions in the face of adversity are almost automatic. Cowards just “wing it” and do whatever feels best in the moment. Do you have a framework for making decisions, or a set of principles that guides your behavior? In Herding Tigers, I offered a framework for developing one as a leader, which is essential so that your team knows where you stand and can follow you with confidence. What are your guiding principles? 

Brave people face consequences, cowards blame others.​ Brave people are willing to be known by their

Is the grass truly greener on the other side of the fence? Many creative pros spend their career wondering if there is a better path for them, or whether they’re missing out on something that everyone else knows about. This can result in hopping from job to job, or never really fully embracing the opportunities in front of you because you’re always “hedging your bets” and looking for a better option. Patrick McGinnis coined the phrase Fear Of Missing Out in a college paper several years ago, and he’s just released a book by the same title to help us work through our anxiety about forgoing opportunities.

Here are a few key ideas to help us avoid FOMO:

Move Toward, Not Away From

I’ve had many conversations with people who never seem to be satisfied with their job. They hop from company to company thinking that there has to be some place that will better mesh with what they’re looking for. The problem is that these people are often chasing vapor. They are perpetually moving away from something they dislike, not something they aspire toward. People who thrive learn to move toward their ambitions and goals, not just away from discomfort.

Is there any area of your life or career where you are simply moving away from discomfort rather than toward your goals?

Be Decisive

Another hallmark of thriving professionals is that they are willing to be decisive in the face of uncertainty. That doesn’t mean that they make foolish or rash decisions, however they don’t wait for absolute certainty before moving forward. Instead, they make decisions with the best information they have knowing that if they make a mistake they can typically navigate back on course.

Is there an area where you are paralyzed because you are being indecisive? What decision do you need to make?

Don’t Compare, Except To Improve

There are two kinds of comparison, and one is harmful and one is beneficial. The beneficial kind of comparison is when we look at someone else’s performance in order to gain insights into how we can improve our own skills. By studying those who are great at their craft, we can see where we are deficient and establish a course of action to help us improve. The harmful kind of comparison is when we become envious about what someone else has, or fear that we are being “robbed” of opportunity because another person possesses something that we want. This can lead to bitterness, self-destruction, and eventual hopelessness.

Compare yourself to others in order to improve, not to stew about what you’re missing out on.

Don’t worry about what’s “out there”. Be present this week and tackle the opportunities in front of you.

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