First of all we killed no one

First of all we killed no one

That was a miracle all by itself, because I am pretty sure we broke every single law in the country as we sped through village after village on our way to Battambang. We covered a three hour trip in two hours and 20 minutes. Our wake probably harvested some of the rice fields we passed in a blur.

I just kept my head down and continued working on my client work, rather than watching our constant near misses and getting all tense and frustrated and fearful. Death won't be any more or less painful because I saw it coming. I can't control most of these events in my life, the driver speaks no English, and I speak no Cambodian. Just trust Jesus and pray for the brakes.

Now the return trip begins in 41 minutes.

Dissatisfaction with yourself

Dissatisfaction with yourself

This relates to self-awareness. According to HBR only 10-15% of leaders are self-aware. The general population will be even less for sure. This is awful amazing. I meant to say it that way, because it is awful and amazing at the same time. To never or rarely consider how others experience you in the world, is a pure tragedy. The wake we leave in life needs to be considered carefully and regularly. Irresponsible living is the only other result possible. This line of thought is largely about others dissatisfaction with how they experience you.

However an aspect to a lack of self-awareness that is not considered very often is the dissatisfaction with yourself. I find 100% of the people who are dissatisfied with themselves, are basically about as self-aware as cement block. They can't figure out WHY they are dissatisfied, nor what things they need/could do to rectify the situations of their lives in a positive manner. This of course leads to ongoing never-ending dissatisfaction. It is a repeating circle of pain and unhappiness.

There are other negative results that come from a lack of self-awareness, and no positive ones unless you consider cluelessness throughout life to be a positive. Hell, just pay attention to your anger, stress and you will get tons of feedback about what you value and what your weaknesses are, if you think that you need some kind of special dispensation to excuse your bad attitude.

Wake up man! See and feel how others are experiencing you! You will eventually be a lot happier with yourself when you get a grip on this one.

Reframing your thinking

Reframing your thinking

There are a number of ways that leaders of every variety accomplish this, from changing the narrative that they are telling themselves all the way to changing the lens through which we view the scale and scope of the problem or opportunity before us. It is the last way that I want to focus on today. But let me state that the first one is really important too! In fact it has produced the best and largest changes in my day to day experience of any tool I have used in the last three years. And having shared it often with others, they too regularly quote it and practice it as well. I am sure it works.

But to change the way you think on a larger and deeper scale, especially as you get older, requires more than just changing the narrative, as powerful as that may be. Changing lens is necessary because the one most of us employ is from our childhood - and this is a very very different world than you grew up in and developed in. The lens most people use is just too limited to be very helpful. You need a better view, a better perspective to be able to reconstruct what you are trying to accomplish. Most people die with their best work still inside them, because they are using an outdated or too small lens.

When I was a boy growing up in MooCow GA, there was a woods behind our house. It seem large and huge and vast to me as a kid. Now I realize that it only covered a couple of acres at most. After living in five different countries over the last 30 years, that tiny forest was in reality just a stand of trees. But the lens of my youth could not see it for what it was. Having said that, it was adequate for what I needed at that time in my life. I need far far more today. Likely you do too. Especially as we get older, for the tendency will be to pull in our boundaries rather than forging new and expanded ones.

Whether you like what I am stating or not, it doesn't really matter, since you will invariably face opportunities and challenges whether or not you want this to happen. It is simply part and parcel of living. As long as you are living, you might as well live well and fully. My learning curve and my change curves are so sharp, that it makes my hermit soul shudder and scream! But in order to see the world, _my world_, as it really is, I have to move out of the woods of my youth, and fly high so that I can see the endless jungles of the Amazon or southeast Asia.

When we change the lens through which we are viewing the world, we can change our entire reference point. This is how we can thrive in the opportunities and challenges that we have coming our way. The questions that I ask myself each day to reach these heights, are "what value am I providing in this situation?" "What do I need to learn in order to help this move forward?" "What can I ask to help others see a panoramic view?" What will bring clarity to this situation or event or person?" "What needs to happen to see growth?"

How much do you need to be rich?

How much do you need to be rich?

Ok it might of had the smell of clickbait, but it was fairly irresistible clickbait. I bit. And it made me think hard about being rich, and that thought makes me stop literally (stopped here to text the kids and say thank you for recent actions). Ok thank you said. So clearly I measure the idea of "richness" more along relational lines than financial lines, but as I was thinking about it, you could measure it in a number of other ways as well. 

Lots of people measure rich in terms of experiences. Like this business class lounge where I currently sitting would be considered "rich" by many peoples standards and expectations. However I sit in a lot of business class lounges and not a single one of them equals the comfort and pleasure of sitting in my own living room. On the other hand, they are more comfortable than what those people outside of this lounge are sitting on. So business class travel I would put into the category of experience that the more rare it is, the more rich it feels. And now that I consider that thought more carefully the more I think that this will likely be true in most categories.

So what is rich, yet not in the rare experience category? Well I think that my relationships with my wife and dad, then my children and their spouses, and then my grandchildren, and then my friends have generally an even and steady flow of rich about them. They aren't rare, but they are almost always positive. That is rich of the first order. Hell, it might even be rare as well. Relationally and emotionally and spiritually and physically my life is very rich by any standards.

It was the financial amounts listed to qualify as being rich, which astonished me. When surveyed 1000 people said that to be "comfortable" financially they needed $1.4 million, or $2.4 million to feel "wealthy." While I may be very very rich in many ways, these numbers don't even feel real to me. Completely in a different financial universe than were I live. Not really all that interested in this much stuff because I want to own my stuff and not have it own me. I am already rich beyond counting. (You can read the article that got me thinking along these lines here)

Every year it gets more difficult to change

Every year it gets more difficult to change

This is more technically known as "cognitive inertia" as most of the time we find ourselves searching for and seeing confirmation for what we hold as true or accurate - confirmation bias they call it. But change is more important than ever as we age, and in fact is one of the few undeniable things that we can't avoid if we want to continue to have a life.

Yet increasing years and the culmination of experience and our histories, combined with a nostalgia for the well-polished past, selective memory about ourselves and our actions, decreasing mental agility, overflooded minds, under-active imaginations, little play, ever more limited energy, and obsessions with health issues, among a hundred other concerns and foci, make change take on an oversized pressure and challenge. It "feels" more difficult, and that becomes a self-fulfilling experience for most as the years pile on and on.

All of this came to mind today as I met a "husky" young man this morning as I was starting my daily bike ride of 11 miles straight up the mountain. I immediately felt terrible for this young fellow. Husky was the polite word used for overweight boys in the 60's and 70's. I bought jeans out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue in the "husky" section. I continued purchasing clothes in husky sections and the big man sections, and then XXL sections of stores until I was 50 years old. And honestly I may do so once again in the future. But miraculously (for me), I changed.

I changed my belief that it was in my genetic makeup to be overweight. I changed my belief (i.e. excuse) that I had no control over my weight. I changed what I thought was an appropriate amount of food to eat each day. I changed my acceptance that I did not have the personal resources or self control to take charge of my life. And as I said, it would be ever so easy to allow my discipline to fail, and for me to return to my husky state of existence, but at least for the last six years, I have been weight-appropriate for the very first time in my life. But if I do return to that undisciplined state I lived in for 50 years, it won't be because I no longer believe that I can't change. It will probably be because I am a lazy butthead, or some other nonsense as that, but I HAVE done it for SIX years. I did and have changed.

Some other things I am thinking through about changing are like: work, alcohol, church, what kind of son I am to my dad, purpose, significance, meaning, impact, technology, communication, power, money, retirement, and my wake in life ... I am at various stages of reassessing these matters - all of them.

I am intentionally and consciously changing and reassigning these matters importance in my life, and what I will choose to do about them. This kind of thinking is "thinking about thinking" kinds of reassessment. The very foundation of change. I have been meeting entirely too many people my age who are walking through their one and only life sleepwalking, or at the very least just waiting for it to end. So perhaps this blog will not resonate with you at all, but perhaps it will shake you up enough to realize that you are largely the sum total of your choices and beliefs and that you can chose where you stand on each one of them and do it differently. They call it change, and it will never be easier than today.

4:53 am and the sky is lighting up, but am I?

4:53 am and the sky is lighting up, but am I?

Yes this means that I am back in Macedonia, where the sky begins to color and the Muslim call to prayer both are happening at 4:53 am. It's been a very short night and will be a very long day as my jet is lagging more and more with every trip I take it seems. This is a day for strong coffee, grit and low expectations.

But I am in the world where I am this morning, Eastern Europe. And only I have the decades of history and experience in this place where I am. Only I have walked the paths that I have walked and with the peeps that I have walked this life with alongside of me. I have a definite unmistakable perspective that I can bring to these situations and these lives here. I have unique insights because I am unique. Perhaps I can even be astonishing and world changing with the ideas that are floating around only in me.

Seize the opportunity to be you today. There is no one else like you anywhere else, and we need your best self. (I am beholding to Nilofer Merchant for spawning these thoughts in me today)

Five Guys, . . . but not those five guys

Yes I wish this were a post about Five Guys, the bestest hamburger and freshest fries in the whole world kind of place, but it is not. Instead it is about you and me becoming like the five people we spend the most time with, or as Jim Rohn said it, we become the average of the five guys we spend the most time with.

The terribly difficult thing for many people who work regular jobs, is that they have little control over who they spend the most time with because their daily exchange of time and energy for money (work) dictates who those five people will be. I know. I "worked" for 33 years. Never had any real control over those five people.

But this is both true and not true, because now that I run the company and I only pick people to work with that I adore and value, I have come to realize the power of these choices is breathtaking. I have a number of teams of five guys that stretch pull push bulldoze smack shove force invite and tease me to be the best version of me. In fact one of the leaders of one of those teams of five, JS, I often say to him, "may I be the man you think I am" as I sign off on one of our great emails (that are often more meaty than actual conversations with regular mortals). And if you are fortunate enough to get an email from JS, or even better yet BV, then you better put your thinking cap on and show completely up, because these guys expect you to bring your best self to the table.

Yet the five guys is not true in the sense that you can raise the stakes and make it 10 guys, or 15 guys, or maybe even 20, but I don't have the relational chops to intensely interact deeply with that many people. But Rohn still has a point in making the five (in my case I made it six) guys be an intentional choice on your part. Own your life, decide what average you are gonna be.

“You have the face of an Italian”

”You have the face of an Italian”

Yes this was actually said to me! I know that you think I am joking but I am not. I have been called many things in my life but this was a first. Maybe I should get my hair cut at that salon more often?

Clearly the police officer was delusional but like all of us, he has certain concepts that he is dealing with. In his mind, however strangely, today I looked like whatever concept or mental picture he has of what an Italian face looks like. Now no one in Italy thinks I look like an Italian, but I digress.

These concepts we all carry around with us, shape what we see. Moreover they cause us to see things that may or may not actually be there. Clearly they can misinform us as well as help us make mental leaps. 

So while we cannot, not have these concepts, we can treat them carefully. They are mental spaces where we store things, or construct things that keep our presuppositions and assumptions warmed up and ready to go. They can also be mental handcuffs that prevent us from seeing and experiencing and changing the world with our eyes wide open and our hearts engaged. So I need to regularly question how I think I know what I think I know.

My apologies to all my Italian friends, but I rather liked the idea of having an Italian face.