Reinventure Me

Envy. It’s that thing that makes you annoyed anytime you see someone doing the very thing you long to do. Turn that envy into inspiration. Here’s how.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Chuck Swindoll:

“There is only one you… Don’t you dare change just because you’re outnumbered!”

Face it. We all love excellence, especially when it’s in ourselves. Seeing it on others, especially in an area we long for in ourselves but haven’t yet achieved, can stir up envy, however.

St. Thomas Aquinas once defined envy as “sorrow at another’s good.” We see their success and it calls our own into question. The business writer Michael Novak says, “Envy is so pervasive among the human race that in the Ten Commandments, under the name ‘covetousness,’ God forbade it seven times.”

When envy strikes, there are five truths to remember to help turn envy into inspiration:

This week’s Challenge Me:

Who do you envy? Write down the excellent things you see in what and how they do what they do. What can you imitate? BONUS: Write them a thank you note.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

Winning isn’t guaranteed. Failure is. The setbacks we experience have value for our next beginning, if we embrace them.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from John Killinger:

“Failure is the greatest opportunity I have to know who I really am.”

Setbacks happen. It’s not how many times we get knocked down but how many times we get up. Here’s how to get the most from setbacks:

This week’s Challenge Me:

If you are experiencing a setback, take inventory of what you gained from it. Write it down.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

If we are going to create what matters most for our future, we need to take a deep look into the one thing we are largely oblivious to: the structure in which we work.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from J.C. Ryle:

“He would would build high, must first dig deep.”

In episode 50, Leary and Armin talked about the need to develop strategic margin. The key concept from that episode is that to increase margin, it’s more effective to increase personal power than decreasing load. This episode discusses the last of five ways to increase your personal power by increasing your structural power.

Structure is the support system we use to accomplish our goals. We need structure especially in areas where we are weakest. But most of the time we are unaware of it.

Leary likens structure to ballroom dance. Both have three essential components: routine, rhythm and relationship. In dance you learn your steps (that’s the routine), you learn your timing (that’s the rhythm), and you learn to do it cooperatively with a dance partner (that’s the relationship). To accomplish your purposes, you have the same three elements. Routine are the habits you form to do what you do. It is the what. Rhythm are the pace and times you do what you do. It is the how. And, relationship are the people that support what and how you do it. It is the who.

Our personal structure may be more or less fluid. Changing our structure is key to gaining strategic margin. We can change our activities, but we need to understand something of our underlying structure first. According to Robert Fritz, “If you try to change your behavior without first changing the underlying structure causing that behavior, you will not succeed. This is because structure determines behavior, not the other way around.”

Structure forms unconsciously but can only be reconfigured consciously. We are naturally resistant to change, so our ego will defend the current structure. That’s why this element is the hardest of the five elements we’ve discussed to achieve greater strategic margin. The way you evaluate and change structure is to:

To make these changes requires two fundamental commitments: the commitment to experimentation and the commitment to identifying the tensions that we manage. Leary discussed three: the tension of process, control, and motivation.

This week’s Challenge Me:

What are your personal and professional aspirations for three years from now? Is your current structure going to achieve your goals?

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

Creativity. Whether you think you have it or not, you are creative. And one of the keys to unlocking more margin in your life is to increase your creative power.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from one of the most creative minds, Albert Einstein:

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

In episode 50, Leary and Armin talked about the need to develop strategic margin. The key concept from that episode is that to increase margin, it’s more effective to increase personal power than decreasing load. This episode discusses the fourth of five ways to increase your personal power by increasing your creative power.

Creativity is giving yourself permission to play. We’re often so busy trying to manage our responsibilities that we don’t fall in love with an idea. Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, says, “The reason you would create anything is because you love it enough to see it exist.” More often, we get infatuated with ideas, rather than making the commitment to love them.

Fritz goes on to describe two orientations that we may take: A “reactive/responsive” orientation that is motivated by our circumstances or a “creative” orientation that is motivated by the outcomes we desire to create. These are in opposition with one another. Those in the reactive/responsive orientation seek only the hows to survive their situation, whereas those in the creative orientation seek the whats or the outcomes of what they want to create, regardless of their circumstances.

Back in Episode 44: The art of self promotion, Leary and Armin introduced the creativity cycle. They elaborate on it further in this episode:

This week’s Challenge Me:

Consider the Creative Cycle above and score yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is high, 1 is low. For Curation, ask yourself: Am I reading widely, meeting new people, learing new things? For Cultivation, ask: Am I taking time to evaluate, reflect and play with new ideas? For Communication, ask: Am I putting my work out there for others to respond to, learn from and offer feedback? Then for each score you gave yourself, decide what it would take to increase the score. Pick one thing to work on this next week.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

The strategy for your future could very well be influenced greatly by a person you have yet to meet. Reciprocal networking is vital to increase your strategic opportunities.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Jesus Himself:

“Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.” (Luke 6:38 MSG)

In episode 50, Leary and Armin talked about the need to develop strategic margin. The key concept from that episode is that to increase margin, it’s more effective to increase personal power than decreasing load. This episode discusses the third of five ways to increase your personal power by increasing your reciprocity power.

Marketers know the power of reciprocity. When something is given, a sense of obligation is created. This is such a powerful concept of human behavior that it easily abused. When we seek to give something only to receive something in return, we have manipulated the other party. Those who continue to do so are soon recognized as self-serving and begin to lose the power of reciprocity they may have had if their focus where instead on what they gave rather than what they need.

To harness the power of reciprocity in a healthy way requires a commitment to discovery; to genuinely inquire into the needs of another. And it requires a commitment to help another even when there may not be a clear payback for you.

Three ways to increase the possibility of reciprocity (from Martin, Goldstein & Cialdini, The Small Big):

This week’s Challenge Me:

Keep your eyes open for that opportunity this week to give value to another, expressly without expecting anything in return.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

To truly accomplish more—and to release the best within you— you need to unleash the power of delegation. And you don’t need to be a leader of a business to do so.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Harry S. Truman:

“You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.”

Back in episode 50, Leary and Armin talked about the need to develop strategic margin. The key concept from that episode is that to increase margin, it’s more effective to increase personal power than decreasing load. One of the five ways to do so is by increasing your delegative power.

There are many benefits of good delegation: save time, achieve more, relieve stress, empower others, increase flexibility, balance workloads and strengthen communications. But despite the benefits, delegation can be difficult to do because it’s difficult to give up the personal rewards we receive from doing something well. We may also have a such a strong vision for how something should be done and we don’t want to “settle” for less from someone else. And, often we may have concerns that we might have to spend more time recovering from a failed effort that we’ve delegated to another.

There’s a difference between delegating a task and living out of delegative power. The former is expedient to get something off our plate. The latter is a lifestyle requires understanding of your own strengths and that of others and a tremendous amount of trust. The key is knowing yourself. Leary shared this quote from Randy Komisar: “Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can’t tell the difference.” The real test of delegative power is that you don’t care, as Harry Truman suggests, who gets the credit.

To decide what to delegate:

This week’s Challenge Me:

Decide your higher purpose objective. What’s keeping you from it? What can you delegate to another? Then do it.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

Why does our fervor to keep New Year resolutions drop off so precipitously in such a short time? Maybe it’s because we don’t really understand how willpower works. Here’s what you need to know.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Os Guinness:

“When it comes to willpower, will is common but power is rare.”

If we want to live powerful lives, we must possess more than intent. We need to put our willpower to work for us. Yet, according to researchers, willpower (or self-control) is listed as the least likely virtue people use to describe themselves Willpower seems to be something we all want more of, but fail miserably at knowing how to increase it.

Leary and Armin discuss the four kinds of willpower: emotional control, impulse control, performance control, and thought control, and why it is important for us to be aware of how willpower works in order to move into a new beginning.

Here’s what you need to know about willpower, drawing from the writings of willpower researchers Roy Baumeister & John Tierney in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (see a link to Leary’s review below):

This week’s Challenge Me:

Look at the goals you are pursuing. If you are unhappy with the progress in an area, perhaps you have chosen too many things to do at the same time, overly taxing your willpower reserves. Decide which one change you will focus on first, then add another after that change has been habitualized.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

What do you do when you’re overloaded and you run out of margin? The impulse to off-load during those times may hinder your ability to develop true strategic margin.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from futurist Alvin Toffler:

“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.”

How true. It’s far easier to follow someone else’s vision and strategy than it is to develop your own. Developing your own strategy for your future requires sufficient margin. Margin is defined as the difference between your limits (your capacity) and your load (the demands upon you). It’s a simple mathematical formula: M (margin) = P (power) – L (load). To get more margin, you either increase your power (capacity) or you decrease your load (demands).

The problem is that the most expedient way to create margin is to decrease load; to off-load your demands—cancel appointments, delegate tasks, back out of commitments, etc. That’s good temporary relief, but it does nothing to help develop strategic margin. And it perpetuates a habit of choosing to bail out anytime overload occurs.

Decreasing load has no affect on personal power (capacity). However, if you increase your personal power, you can increase your load as well. This is how highly-effective people get more done.

There are five ways we can increase our personal power:

This week’s Challenge Me:

Ask yourself: Am I doing something only because I’ve done it before. Get back to the “why” questions. What’s the biggest thing that I’m presently doing that I really shouldn’t be doing? What would it take to give that up?

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

The answers for your next beginning are most likely in found in the questions you ask another. But how do we get better at asking truly great questions.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from scientist and inventor Charles Proteus Steinmetz:

“No man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”

Research has shown that we tend to ask the most questions around age 4 or 5. As we get older, we form presuppositions about how the world works and begin to rely on those presuppositions rather than challenging them. Really great questions challenge our presumptions.

Great questions, of course, depend on the purpose of the inquiry. Three purposes that Leary and Armin discussed were to deepen relationships, to resolve a problem or to satisfy curiosity. To get better at asking questions, Leary and Armin suggested:

This week’s Challenge Me:

Think about someone you plan to meet with soon and intentionally design a couple of questions to go deeper with them. Leave a great question for us (either one you have asked or one that was asked of you) on our show notes at reinventure.me/49

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

A new year and you’re off to a great start. But there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to hold you back: shame. Left unchecked, it’ll keep you from your very best.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from E. E. Cummings:

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

In this episode Leary and Armin talked about the one thing that will keep you from taking risk, from really stretching yourself this year: shame.

Leary told his story about how, over the last three years, he has been unpacking the effects that growing up in a dysfunctional family system had on him. He learned to create shame in his own life from boyhood. Leary shared the breakthrough discoveries he made at his most recent personal planning retreat and how that has liberated his thinking about shame.

Shame is way of thinking, related to guilt, but significantly different. Shame is the belief that you are fundamentally defective or unacceptable. Guilt is the belief that you did something wrong. Recognizing shame-based thinking can be very difficult for people who have grown up in family systems that regularly engaged in it.

The shame-based person is always seeking validation from others to feel good about themselves. As a result, they take fewer risks, play life safer, tend to respond more defensively when challenged, are less open to share and live with a sense that they have something to prove to others or to themselves.

Shame exists, to one degree or another, in all of us. It’s an attribute of what the Bible calls our “flesh.” The idea of shame is not new. It’s been around since the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were naked and felt shame. For the first time they needed a covering, and in a very real way, we’ve been manufacturing more sophisticated forms of covering for ourselves ever since.

Shame can never really be fully eliminated, but it can be managed. The first step is to become shame aware, knowing when you engaging in shaming yourself or another and choosing to adopt a more healthy, truthful view.

This week’s Challenge Me:

Start tracking how many shame statements you say to yourself. Any name calling like, “I’m an idiot,” is a symptom of shame. Begin to notice how those messages might be communicated in your family system, and how you may have communicated them to others. If you have comments or suggestions that may be helpful to others about shame, please leave a comment on our show notes at reinventure.me/48

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you: