Global currency

I continue this week with my thoughts about the book I've been reading called The Dream Manager. I've since finished it and have embarked on creating a list of my dreams - since I am my own best guinea pig!

Matthew Kelly suggests categorizing the dreams on your list. Although categorizing isn't a bad idea, I didn't find his particular 12 categories all that useful to me. I imagine though, that if I write down 100 dreams, the way he suggests, then I will be able to review them and find some themes that are relevant for me. I'll have to see as I do it. So far, I have noticed that I got to about 20 dreams on my list and then I was stumped. I stayed with it though, as he suggested, and found I was able to pick up again, but with a different flavour. I was having to dig deeper. I finally had to put my pen down because it was well past when I needed to be asleep. I'm at #67 and I will finish it today.

My next step will be to live with the list for a while - reread it, tweak it, add to it. Matthew suggests keeping your dreams in a book bought for this purpose, and dating new additions. We need to keep it front and center so that it doesn't get lost in the flotsam and jetsam of day-to-day life. I took advantage of serendipity today and worked with one of my clients to get a list started. It will be interesting to hear someone else's reaction to the process.

While I was reading the book, I was considering the organizations in which I have worked over my career, and how much this might have helped them. As I have said many times to many people, and at the risk of repeating myself, I have never liked the concept that human beings should keep themselves separated into compartments - one for home and one for work.

Oh, I agree that I wouldn't be an effective surgeon if I were operating and thinking at the same time about the fight I had with little Janey this morning about whether she could have an unsupervised sleepover. That goes without saying. What I object to is the idea that one doesn't affect the other, positively and negative. We know about the negatives but perhaps the positive aspects don't get enough attention.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been teaching supervisory skills when workshop participants have spontaneously blurted out in the group that the skills they were learning would help them in their marriage or with their kids. And if an employee gets better at strategic planning and budgeting at home, it has to be that they bring those same skills to work. A 'team' at work is your family or neighbourhood at home. Similarly, good listening skills apply anywhere.

Think about how much more productive we are at work when we have a supportive partner at home; someone who listens to us, believes in us, and helps us to cope when life gets hairy. Conversely, there are times when life falls apart at home and we need the support of our work team to get through it and out the other side. Death and/or illness in the family, or divorce, are just a couple of examples. You can say to someone that they shouldn't bring their divorce to work but we are now recognizing that it's more effective to acknowledge that we are coping with adversity or change, and provide some help so the person can get through it. Nowadays, we have employee assistance programs for this.

Let me get back to the idea of dreams though. When you ask employees to share their dreams at work, they bring more than their skills and their life challenges; they bring their hopes and aspirations. This is positive stuff. This is what inspires others, including the customers. Matthew recounts an interesting by-product of the dreaming process at work, when he observes that colleagues were getting a tremendous sense of satisfaction from helping one another to achieve their dreams; big or small. They started keeping track of one another's progress and offering encouragement and even resources, and then celebrating the successes.

When I'm my best, or progressing to be my best, in either my work or my home setting, one impacts the other. Once recognized, we can capitalize on it. People who are optimizing their lives, in whatever way is right for them, have better self esteem, they make better citizens - both corporate and global. It's win-win for everyone. Matthew says in the book, "Appreciation is the strongest currency in the corporate culture." Let me expand that sentiment to life! And what better form of appreciation can there be than helping someone to articulate and go after their dreams - work or personal? Talk about ripples on a pond!

It's such a simple idea and the ramifications are so grand. I can see now that I've been waiting for someone to articulate an idea like this and set it in motion. It makes me wonder, as with all good ideas, "Now why didn't I think of that?"

Books fall off the shelf

Sometimes I walk into the library and books 'fall off the shelf and into my hands'. Not literally, usually, but metaphorically. Last week it was a little book called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly. I suspect, when I stumble across books in this manner, that there is something important in them and it would behoove me to pay attention. (Likewise when someone sends me a book - but that's for another week.)

The author of The Dream Manager is saying that successful businesses, in fact successful organizations of any kind, are going to have to look at motivating their members/employees to stay with them in the near future, because the available pool of talent is going to become thin on the ground. Their survival will depend on it. He says the following in his introductory chapter:

It has been forty years since Peter Drucker observed the single greatest error and deception of our accounting system: people are placed in the liability column on the balance sheet. Machinery and computers are categorized as assets and people as liabilities. The reality, of course, is that the right people are an organization's greatest asset. We may have acknowledged this truth in theory, but we have not allowed it to sufficiently penetrate the way we manage our organizations, and indeed, the way we manage the people who drive them.

The fly-leaf describes the book as:

A business parable about how companies can achieve remarkable results by helping their employees fulfill their dreams. ... Beginning with his important thought that a company can only become the-best-version-of-itself to the extent that its employees are becoming better-versions-of-themselves, Matthew Kelly explores the connection between the dreams we are chasing personally and the way we all engage at work.

I am still reading the book and so I can't fully comment on it yet but I am intrigued by the idea of investing in people's efforts to make their dreams a reality. It was my experience in the 80's that the world of business was obsessed with short-term gain and not particularly interested in the welfare of it's employees, treating them as raw materials used up in the process of production, to be disposed of if they didn't fit the mold, or if they were 'used up'. Conversely, if the employee was valuable enough, the company would negotiate to pay more in order to keep him(usually a him). If not, well, they were expendable. My fear is that this is still so but I haven't tested it recently to find out.

Beyond getting our basic needs met, I don't think that people working in organizations are as motivated by money as we've been led to believe. I acknowledge that it is a factor but I watched a lot of talent walk out of the organizations for whom I worked. Unless they felt they were being grossly under-compensated, their reasons for leaving had more to do with their values and whether they were treated with respect.

Twenty years ago, from my perspective in the organization's HR department, I could see that employees were the business' greatest assets but that they weren't being treated as such. I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. Once I started to work as a therapist, I was in a position to gain more insight. Many people felt trapped in jobs without personal meaning. The lucky ones were able to get out but even they soon found that the next job had similar issues.

That's why The Dream Manager, and the fact that it is being read so widely, is encouraging for me. It gives me hope that we can make workplaces more creative and meaningful. We spend such a huge chunk of our lives at work. It would be invaluable if it could be a place that engendered satisfaction and growth instead of resignation to the status quo.

I was having coffee with a friend today and we were talking about passion for our dreams and what such passion feels like. I have noticed with my clients that when they talk about what makes them passionate in their lives, they light up. Their eyes sparkle and they get more animated. It is a joy to watch. It's even contagious! And those people who have not yet identified what their passion is tell me they feel flat and that something is missing in their lives. then the challenge is to help them to find it.

I knew a man in England who gave a speech on the occasion of the retirement of one of his plant employees. After the speech, he went up to the man to wish him well and to ask him what he thought he was going to do when he retired. It turned out that the man had been a band leader all his adult life and that retirement meant that he could do it full time. This was clearly his passion. Who knew? Certainly not the management. It had never occurred to anyone that anything could be more important to him than his job - that it might have been just a means to an end. And if the employee had not had that band, he may not have been able to stomach his repetitive job for all those years.

I believe that my passion is what makes me who I am - uniquely me among all others. It is through my passion that I express my life force, often my talent. It challenges me, gives me joy and a sense of deep satisfaction. I can work at it when I have no energy left for anything else in my life. It gives my life meaning. I believe I bring my passion to my efforts to attain my dreams. Perhaps it's even what fuels my dreams.

I'll leave you with this: Have you given any thought to your dreams lately? Can you articulate what they are? Do the people nearest and dearest to you know what they are? Does your boss? Have your dreams been slumbering in a forgotten corner for a while? What would it take to dust it/them off and give them some attention? It might be worth it. And if you manage other people, you might want to ask them what their dreams are. You may be surprised. Who knows what passion and creativity might be unleashed!

Remember what felt right?

I had a long discussion today with a great friend of mine about how you know when you're doing the 'right thing' in your life, or making the 'right' decision. We were hearkening back to various crossroads in our lives, when we took a road that changed things for us, and how that felt at the time.

We both felt that when we weren't sure about whether a choice was right for us, then it actually wasn't right. The 'right' choices, such as the ones we had just been discussing, that changed the course of our lives, seemed easy to us at the time. The triggers, or flags, or invitations to action at these crossroads, looked like coincidence, and we followed up on them without giving it all that much thought.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was remembering how I had felt when I was clearly doing what was 'right' for me. There was flow. There was a sense of ease. I'm not saying that it wasn't challenging, but I had the motivation to meet those challenges and trusted that I would somehow make it through to the other side.

When I compared that feeling, to the feeling I have when I am considering something that I'm not sure about, there is literally no comparison to be made. The two don't feel anything like one another. I have often heard the saying, "If in doubt, don't", which I think is true, but I think it's more involved than that. If I'm plagued by doubts, then it isn't the right choice for me, because if it were, I would probably blow off the doubts and do it anyway.

Another part of this decision-making process, unscientific as it may seem, is that 'right' choices seem to come from my heart and not my head. I may 'make up my mind' but I feel the rightness of it with my heart. If it doesn't feel right in my heart, I find myself falling back on rationalizing, making lists and formulating arguments, for and against.

I surely know this with my clients. I can tell by the language they are using, whether their heart is behind the choice, or they are talking themselves into or out of the decision. When the arguments get convoluted, or they are trying to convince me, they are most often trying to convince themselves; or rather, trying to convince their heads.

With my clients though, I have the advantage of being able to watch their body language, whereas I'm not always aware of my own. Clients will often shake their heads no, while they are verbally answering in the affirmative. You've probably noticed this with people you know. The movement may only take a nano-second. You might not even be sure you saw it; almost like a flicker. But that is the body giving away the person's truth, even if they aren't aware of it. In my experience, bodies don't lie.

When I point this out to people, some are angry at me for giving voice to the part of themselves that they had thought to have safely overridden - a part that isn't acceptable and might be dangerous. Others are relieved that I am giving space and time to the side of the argument that had not been allowed to speak. Often this response is accompanied by spontaneous tears for having hit home with the truth.

And so my rule of thumb is ... compare how you feel when you are uncertain, with what it felt like when you did something that you can now tell, with the benefit of hindsight, was right for you. My friend an I agree that when a choice is right, the synchronicities line up like well-choreographed and rehearsed dancers, with the addition of just the right shot of adrenaline and inspiration.

You might be inspiring someone!

Many years ago, when I was in my late twenties, I had a friend whom I met through the psychic classes I was taking at the time. She was a little older than I was and had been working steadily since she was a teenager, without a break. When I met her, she was working in the hectic world of advertising. Sometime during our course, her marriage broke up, prompting her to take a look at her life and what she really wanted. She decided to take some time out of her career and reassess, going back to school and taking some classes in women's studies for a while.

I remember being impressed by the courage it took to walk away from her job and take care of her own needs as a person. I was still not earning very much and had no safety net to fall back on. I believed that what she was doing was completely out of the question for me and yet I was somewhat envious of what she was able to do. I doubt if she had any idea at the time that I was watching her.

A few years later, after a job change that left me disillusioned and exhausted, I decided to leave the business world, move across the country and subsequently, to get some further training in a related field and change my career direction. It was a scary thing to do and, looking back now, I can see that I had this friend's example in mind as I walked off the edge of my world.

She didn't make me do it, didn't even suggest it, but the fact that she had done it and survived, even blossomed, led me to believe that it could be done. My reasons for doing what I did may not have had anything to do with hers but I saw someone do something that I considered to be courageous, even if she didn't think that of herself as she did it, and based on my interpretation, I went ahead and did what I needed courage to do.

If I were to have the chance to talk to her today, she would probably be amazed to hear that I responded to her choices the way I did. Sometimes we are so busy trying to keep life and limb together, fighting our demons and summoning the courage to face each uncharted day, that it doesn't occur to us that we might inadvertently inspire someone else along the way. Wouldn't it be nice if we could know it at the time?