Putting off distractions

This is the primary lever that I have successfully used to stick to my morning routines for years now. This actually begins the night before to be perfectly honest in the fact that I turn my phone to airplane mode when I lay down to go to sleep. This delays all texts, delays all social media notifications, delays all emails, delays everything! So that the all important thing called sleep can happen unimpeded and uninterrupted.

Yet for over a decade I would check email first thing in the morning, and that mental productivity and problem solving and challenges of the day, would funnel my energy into a tornado of work work work. But starting my day with work is very very counterproductive. I know that sounds really wrong, but it is not. I have measured my outputs throughout the day, and I can consistently get more done each and every day, by not starting the day with work.

Instead I start the day with development. I need to develop my primary asset which is me myself and I. So I develop my flexibility in a mental way first. I play a couple of puzzle games in order to get my brain up and moving in the mornings. When I successfully conquer those, I develop my physical flexibility. This gets ever more important as I get ever more older! 15 minutes of stretches, twists, reaches, crunches, curlings, stretches, twists, bends, and stretches. There is a pattern here.

Then a couple of hours of working out on the bicycle, weights, pull ups and dips and curls, all the while listening to audible books on the earbuds, makes for an energizing and high accomplished morning.

Now it is time for the best meal of the day, spicy noodles is my preferred breakfast, but I can only get that when in Asia. When at home in Europe, I often have two eggs soft fried, with hot spicy peppers all over them. And of course my daily pot of coffee!

One would think that it is time for email now, but no, because email is a lower productivity activity than reading a couple of hours of leadership material, blogs, leadership tools, and research. This requires my very best energy and speed and insight and thinking, so it gets premium time in my work day. Only after I have completed all these other highest priority tasks and events each day, do we get to email . . . which as we all know, can suck the rest of the day away like hurricane.

But this consistent putting off of all distractions until the most important things are finished, produces an amazing result over time, that allows me to make my best impact on the world. This is what makes life significant and meaningful. I live it intentionally, rather than allowing the urgent to drive the immediate, which in the long run are just distractions.

Holidays?

Macedonia has the most holidays of any country in the world it feels like, honestly there is one every week I think. And for me, as an ex-pat here, these constant holidays just disrupt my schedules and plans and life for the most part, because I don't work on the Macedonian payroll somewhere. However it has come to my attention while my daughter and my granddaughter are here in Macedonia, I, me, myself, haven't taken any holidays for quite a while. Not. Good.

First and foremost it is a terrible example to the hundreds of people I work with, who hear me advocating PTA (protect the asset, and YOU are the asset) regularly, who hear me preaching the genius of the word "no" often, and who read this blog and realize that I don't update it nearly often enough because I of all people have overbooked my life. Do I hear someone saying "is it time for vacation yet?" 

I wrote that I am on vacation for two weeks in my weekly letter on Saturday. Every single letter in response so far has basically said, "YES about time, enjoy!" I have my auto responders on in my three primary email accounts stating that "I am completely unavailable" and so I am actually on vacation right now, and will be for the next couple of weeks.

So why am I blogging one might ask? Well because blogging, is an expression of a life with appropriate margin and space in it. Blogging is a thinking time, an analyzing time, an assessment time, a relaxing time. It represents that I have enough space and time in life to sit on this park bench, enjoy a Cuban cigar, and write my thoughts down on digital paper. As we say in the Balkans, "I am on holidays!"

And I hope to leisurely write a number of these blogs, over the next two weeks, although I may just be absent and not. So far today I have just enjoyed taking care of me, tickling my granddaughter, laughing with the wife and daughter, getting a massage, riding my bike, playing with some new apps, and reading. How is your PTA going?

You can't have it all and neither can I

There are no truer words out there, that we really don't want to hear. Clarity in life often comes down to this statement though, because we need to know that we can't have it all and we must do that terrible horrible thing called choosing. We are forced to make the choices of what we give our attention to and what we focus on. Today I am sitting here in the Zurich Airport, and there is an entire wall taken up with this advertisement, "Am I a good father? Am I working too much? Can I have it all?" Of course, along with a wonderful pic of an eternally happy and joyful family. Everyone is asking this question.

I am returning from 6 days in Berlin Germany where I work with a number of teams and ministries and non-profits. And no matter what the supposed topic of conversation was over those days and in all those different situations, the underlying (often unstated) question was, can I have it all? No you can't and neither can I.

It is known as the "reality of trade offs", no one can have it all or do it all. FOMO indeed (see previous blog)! Greg McKeown points this out graphically in his book "Essentialism" which may be one of the most important books written this decade. He states, "Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?” And it is here that we can start to gain some traction in life, make real progress, resolve some of the thornier issues that plague us.

Once we grasp and accept this truth, then we can start the all important process of eliminating the unimportant from our lives, to paring life down the really meaningful and very significant. To living a beautiful wild life where we change the world, and make our mark on it. While you can't have it all, you can do the amazing.

The astonishing experience of freedom

I worked for my previous employer for 23 years. I lived in the throes of FOMO (fear of missing out), every single day followed a powerful and amazing horrible cycle - no matter how free the day may seem at the beginning, it would fill up by 10 am, and overflow by the afternoon, and find me exhausted by the evening! I said this, pointed this out to my lovely wife over and over, "it's amazing how the day fills up with work work work." That was because I did not know what I should be doing, the one or two absolutely necessary things that I love and can make the best contributions with, and consequently everyone else prioritized my life for me. Every. Day. For. Decades.

Now I have a different challenge, a different experience. Now that I and I alone am prioritizing my life, there is actually space, margin, limits, boundaries, time in my life to do????? Yes, I actually come to a place many days now (every successful day) where I find myself with nothing to DO!! Does this mean I am no longer important? Does this mean that my work load is not heavy enough? Does this mean that I am gonna be bored for the first time since I was a teenager??? No, no and no. However, what it does mean is that I am doing only the right stuff for only the right reasons. It means that I can watch hockey three nights a week. It means I can take my wife out for dinner and not feel like I should still be grinding away at the computer. It means I can leave my phone at home in the evenings and turn it completely off every night. It means I am living exactly in the sweet spot of doing only the significant and meaningful work that I am best suited for, and that I can do better than almost anyone, and I am not chasing endless pointless activity in the name of progress or forward movement.

It means I can enjoy my cigar while watching the moon rising in the east, with a glass of excellent something, with no other pressing matters to be accomplished today. It means that I am free from endless meetings where I have no contribution to make, no reason to be there, and am free to not be there! It means I can call my parents more often, talk longer. Ditto for the kids! It means I can "be here now" and not mentally somewhere else. It is an astonishing experience of freedom, a chance to be still, and not frenetically pushing to the next whatever, because you finished today's super important work, and that is all the work you should be doing.

As this beautiful Seth Godin blog said today, 

"Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.

Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.

It's also the only place to start.

It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it's urgent."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices..." William James

Closet cleaning questions and screaming babies

I fly to work these days, or I simply connect to the Internet. Those are the two ways that I go to work. Honestly I much prefer the Internet mode of travel. Currently on a flight from hell with 9 screaming recalcitrant children surrounding me, the whole plane is shaking with the volume and pitch of their screams. In the old country, my mother would state, that "these children are begging for a spanking" but of course having consequences to our actions is not allowed in the modern world, but that is a blog for a different day (btw, these are 2 year old or older children, not infants, and that is a big difference to me).

The Internet is a much friendlier and more peaceful route to make my way to work each day. However, there is much to be said for face to physical face chats and good meals, smells, stories, hanging out, cigars, drinks, laughter, sharing of burdens and struggles, celebrations of the good stuff, etc, etc that simply rarely happen in the virtual meetings online, no matter how good the connection, and no matter how painless the "travel" of getting there. It seems that a balanced mixture of both is required to maximize the leader/developmental dynamic that I am seeking to find.

But right now, I just want to find either some noise-destruction headphones, or help 9 little children go into a deep sleep. I finally understand the whole rationale for adult communities in Florida and other retirement centers - my capacity for endless mindless shrieking unhappy children is almost at zero.

AND the fun did not end once I arrived in Vienna at the airport. I arrived on concourse F. My connecting flight leaves from concourse F, exactly three gates down from my arrival gate. However in typical aviation paranoia I can't just go down the concourse three gates. Even though I got off a secure airplane into a secure airport, with only secure hand baggage, I STILL had to go through passport control and customs AND another full security cycle, in order to make this huge circle in the airport and end up right back where I started. While I enjoyed the walk and the chance to stretch my legs, the purposes of doing so, were only irritating and unnecessary, not much different than 9 screaming children. Oh, and for the record, the second flight has at least one screaming child too. It is simply that kind of day I guess. Let's make the best of it somehow.

When days go like this one, the best way to get back on track is to ask the three "closet-cleaning questions" from the book Essentialism: do I love this? Do I look great in this? And do I wear it often? Translated into my professional world, do I love my work? Is it my best contribution? And is it meaningful and significant? Oh yes! Screaming bambino's be damned!

Quitting or getting it done!

The difference between quitting and achieving our goals? The right mix of willpower and planning, according to Michael Hyatt. I have already been doing this for decades, and didn't know it! The official phrase is "intention implementation." You anticipate the obstacles and once plans are made to remove them, you just do it, you get it done. 

Scroll back to May 1995, some of you weren't even alive then, but for those of us who were, we can go back into our memories and see and remember where we were and what we were doing with whom. Me? I was living deep in the former Soviet Union back then, and I was a basket case health wise. Over the years I have learned that I eat my way through stress, and boy was I ever doing that well back then. I weighed 295 pounds give or take 5 or 10, and I was a walking talking time bomb. At the end of the first week in May 1995, I had a brain aneurysm. Long story short, it's simply a miracle and gift from God that I survived it at all.

Today I am 165 pounds and I have little stress in life, and I am very very healthy. After the aneurysm I started exercising. Every day. Every week. Every year. And have pretty much every day for the last 20 years. Every day for the most part. Perhaps 1-3 days per month, my work and schedule keep me from doing that, but I exercise pretty much every day. I have evolved to use this "intention implementation " to make sure that it happens every day.

Now I don't weigh 165 pounds because I exercise every day. I weigh 165 pounds because I eat like a 165 pound person. That is simple portion control and nutrition. Exercise provides fitness, not a calorie deficit. I have vascular health because of exercise. But I digress. This is about doing it every day. The difference between quitting and achieving our goals. We remove the obstacles and then just do it. I can't imagine a life without exercise now. 

I also can't imagine my life weighing 295 pounds any longer, or working a super high stress job where no good deed goes unpunished, or working with people who are negative and vicious, or working with a team that is filled with jealousy or envy, or spending my days with clients who only celebrate my failures, etc etc. you can apply "intention implementation " to every area of life, and achieve all the goals that you have for yourself. Quitting? What's that??

FOMO

FOMO

This "fear of missing out" is fracturing our one and only real choice in a time-obsessed western mindset - our focus, or if you prefer, our attention. We can blame the company we work for, or the spouse we married, or the expectations we place on ourselves, but FOMO is driving us to waste our focus and attention on the insignificant and BSOs (bright shiny objects) in life. Usually they are in essence whatever makes the most noise, email, phone calls, information overload, project overclocking and expectations of never missing out on any single opportunity ever in our short lives.

I once was that kind of person. Now I am aiming toward, and sometimes succeeding, at being an essentialist, as Gregg McKeown describes it, the diligent pursuit of less but better.  There are however a number of things that are undermining my success. While I personally am no longer caught in the mindless FOMO, almost everyone around me still is, and their FOMOs are urgently trying to feed mine, engage mine, overwhelm my resistance, overburden me with their FOMOs. This sabotage is amazingly constant and persistent. My daily clarity about . . . well, what I am about, has never needed more shoring up and defenses than now.

While I am not trying to convince anyone that FOMO is negative, I have merely come to the conclusion that it is negative for me. I cannot live all of the options that come my way, nor can I experience every possibility, nor can I even pursue most of them because many of them are in conflict with one another. As a friend told me this week, when listening to a breathtaking example of guitar virtuoso, that he would "give up parts of his manhood to have skill of that level" what he really said although he did not realize it, is that he is unwilling to commit to the endless hours of practice that this represents - the one desire is in conflict with his other desires. He cannot live the life of a guitar virtuoso, because he also wants so many other things . . . more than he wants to be a guitar virtuoso, irregardless of the claims to parceling out significant manly body parts.

FOMO is driving him crazy. I plainly told him that he could indeed be a virtuoso, and he immediately responded with the question "how". Oh about 10,000 hours of practice practice practice, I told him. Well that is not practical he responded, and he is totally correct. He can't live the life he has, AND the life of a virtuoso. Either or, yes, but both, no. And so he has made a choice, an unwilling unhappy choice from his point of view, a necessary and inescapable choice from my point of view. The only way to overcome the life of fractured focus and attention, is to realize that this is the only real currency I have to spend, and I need to spend it carefully, wisely and thoughtfully.

The moon and the cross

I am sitting outside on my balcony on a balmy summer evening with a great view of a 3/4 moon and the cross on the top of Mt Vodno. The moon is reflecting the sun light and the cross reflects the Son's love. It is a great time to stop at the end of a long but highly productive day and be grateful, thoughtful and content.

Sometimes you have to go back to go forward

I learned a ton of lessons today and will blog about some of them, but the most amazing one was that sometimes you have to go back (or backwards) in order to move forward or in order to make real progress.

My dad is an amazing engineer with an 8th grade education. He rebuilds antique cars with a passion that is energizing and awe inspiring with breathtaking results. All this with no formal training or schooling. Today's lesson came from a simple brake job on my ancient Japanese made pickup. We disassembled one side, leaving the other side intact. He has told me many times over the years that he takes “mental photographs” to remember how to reassemble whatever he is working on. I have none of this ability and that is probably why I never became a mechanic like him, even though I really enjoy tinkering with tools and engines.

We did this project together, because my dad is 75 years old and he simply can't physically do all that he was able to even in the recent past. As we attempted to reassemble the brake assembly, we repeatedly failed to attach a particular spring that was in the back. You guessed it, we eventually had to backup and disassemble the whole thing again, in order to install this particular spring and have a completed brake assembly. 

This is important because I had to do the second brake! Dad was out of gas, and thankfully I had paid careful attention the first time around. Long story short, this backing up process in order to move forward, enabled me to complete the second rebuild much more quickly and correctly the first time, than we experienced on the first rebuild even though the “master” was doing the first one.

What a great teaching tool and what a great learning process! This has lots of applications to other areas of expertise. As I am sure you can make many applications yourself, I will only make a one directly related to my area of work. When something isn't working, it often pays to back up, disassemble, start over or retrace your steps, in order to find the point of failure or disconnect or dysfunction. When a client is struggling to accomplish a goal, task or level of development, sometimes we need to wind things back until we find the fly in the ointment! Then we can start to make forward progress as the disabling spring is resolved. I did this mentally this past week as I spent several days traveling by car alone. I was able to “back up” and find the missing piece, the missing step to why several projects and clients were stalled, and we were not making any forward progress. I was also able to disassemble several problematic situations and find the missing spring that was preventing me from finding a good resolution. What about you? Where might you benefit by backing up in order to move forward?

How to drive a go-cart from PA to FL

Well it is almost a go-cart. In reality it is an ancient Isuzu Pup pickup with a quarter of a million miles on it, literally. Most people, all those who are sane, would never even begin a trip of this distance with such an old and worn vehicle. However I am not sane, much to my chagrin, and I am on this trip. It has let me down only once (so far) and prayerfully that little episode has been resolved. The key to driving something well past its prime condition is two fold: excellent care and a sustainable pace, neither of which mean what you may think. Let me explain.

Excellent care is not only regular maintenance, although that can not be allowed to lapse. Excellent care means to understand the nature of the mechanism, that it is a machine, and that parts wear out, that they need replacing even though they are not part of regular maintenance. This applies to our PTA as leaders in a complete and whole way. We have to recognize (read self-awareness) and understand the mechanism, that we are social, linguistic, relational, limited, finite creatures. We have limits, and those change over time. Sometimes you even have to get parts taken out or replaced that are not part of regular maintenance! Consistent PTA = excellent care in the leader's world.

Sustainable pace for a nearly go-cart type vehicle is not Interstate Highway Speed. It actually probably never was for this type of low geared small truck. But for sure it isn't the typical 78-82 mph that cars routinely travel down the vast interstate highway system in this country today. A sustainable pace for this vehicle is 60-62 mph max. My best sustainable pace, and your best sustainable pace is much slower than you think as well. And it takes a great deal of discipline to maintain that pace which is so much slower than everyone else's pace! In 2500+ miles of driving this truck at 60 mph on the interstate, I have only passed broken down vehicles and pedestrians - everyone else blows past me like a rocket! 

On the other hand, I noticed two things; that most people pass me multiple times over the course of driving down the road (which means our actual forward progress is closer than you would think) and that I am still moving forward (which is the whole point of driving at 60, that it keeps moving!) This informs us much about sustainable pacing, and I am sure you can see a dozen apparent lessons for yourself in the metaphor. I actually am living this successfully most of the time in my life as a leader. Some observations: I am much happier, content, alive, balanced than I was before in the hyper-ratrace we call productivity; I can more and more "be here now" in this moment rather than living in the next trip, curve, project, task, etc; and I can see that I am far far more productive in fewer hours than before. In fact recent research suggests at we produce as much in 11 hours now, that was produced in a 40 hour work week back in 1950. All the more reason to live a sustainable pace, you already are producing far more than generations before. But a sustainable pace for a 53 year old guy is slower than you would think, I easily have the equivalent of a quarter of a million miles on me, and I need to own that wear and tear in a responsible way. The results can be astonishing.

The dilemma of need and want

I have been on a long trip across America, some 4000 plus miles so far, and there is the most curious thing ever that I have seen this visit, a Cadillac pickup truck. I know that some of you, perhaps many of you, haven't even noticed. But to me, an occasional visitor to this great country, they stick out like a giraffe armadillo. No, there is no such animal that I know of, but a Cadillac pickup truck seems just as unlikely to me. Having grown up on a small farm, where a truck was a working tool not a transportation statement, this does not compute.

As I work with clients that are USA based I have noticed a similarly unlikely expectation. They can't say no. They have no clarity about the difference between a want and a need, a passion and a calling, a Should and a Must. I spend much of my time listening to how ovwhelmed and overclocked their lives are, and how this whole experience just happens to them. I am deeply sympathetic. I understand pressures from multiple directions and sources. I get how many opportunities can come your way, especially at the peak of your working years. I resonate with the confusing options that come at even ordering food at a restuarant.

However, each yes is a no to something else, and each no a potential yes to some other more valuable event or activity. Only you are responsible for your yeses and your no's. I know you don't want to hear that, and I don't want that responsibility either, but there it is. It will never change. Ever. You can never escape from this, you can only choose. When you do not think you are choosing, you have chosen. There is no where to lay the blame, there is no one to lay this responsibility on, there is no one but the face you see in the mirror. There are Cadillac pickups, but they are neither Cadillacs nor pickups. Wants and needs are not the same vehicle either. Have clarity. See clearly. Chose. Or someone else will make the choice for you.

Systems revamped!

I had a real embarrassment today, like I haven't had in years. I completely and totally forgot about a very important meeting. 15 minutes after I should have been there and on point, I get a phone call, and BAM instant awareness that I had majorly blown it!

Now that I have done as much damage control as I can exert today, I am sitting in a near empty cafe (because it is raining), drinking a mineral water, with a Nicaraguan and my mobile office, reviewing what happened and how it could have been prevented. It is like Peter Senge's seminal text The Fifth Discipline, came back to haunt me. Calm my racing heart! The very systems that I use to be as effective as any three other people, those very structures, my over-reliance on them, created a hole, and I fell into it.

This is a very important lesson, that I not grow weary of redundancy in my systems of execution, that I not  become casual about what I have allowed other people to place on my schedule, that I not let down my guard in the pursuit of excellence, that I always under-promise and over-deliver.

An ice cream free Sunday?

This time of the year is the, I-am-the-foreigner-and-I-know everything-you-need-to-learn-to-have-the-success-that-I-have-had, seminar time here in Eastern Europe. One after another! It is like they have a factory of these guys spitting them out our way! It is so frustrating, that a person from a completely different culture and language and history, believes/thinks/has convinced themselves, that if everyone does what I have done, the results will be the same.

This is not the Einstein equation of insanity where we are expecting different results by doing the same thing time and time again. This is Double Einstein equation of insanity where by doing certain actions in a totally and completely different environment, culture, language and country, and wanting and expecting the SAME results as you got in the first country when you did those certain actions! Doubly insane, perhaps even more so! This is like putting gasoline in a car and driving 600 miles, and then putting gasoline in a diesel car expecting to drive 600 miles, and you won't get even 6 miles! (This I know from very hard personal and expensive experience) This is like being in Northern Canada in the dead of winter and wearing very nice and wonderful Patagonia gear to stay warm, and then going to South East Asia the next week and trying to wear the same gear - you will die. This is like growing up under a constitutional Monarchy and then trying to enter into the ludicrous American political system of the electoral college. This is precisely like standing on a busy street corner in Russia trying to navigate the purchase of a house, while not speaking a word of Russian, with only Thai Baht for currency, and the lawyer across the table speaks only Siberian!

And on I could go, seriously. You have no idea how embarrassing it is to be an American living long-term abroad, and to have someone from your country come here and kill your credibility with ignorance and arrogance.  No amount of coaching can fix this, no amount of debriefing will help this significantly. It takes years of learning a language and a culture and a people, and LISTENING rather than teaching, of being humble, of understanding that the people you work with are your equals in every way that matters, that you have far more to learn than you will ever be able to teach.

The speaker yesterday gets up and says, "You have to make your churches seeker driven, user friendly, unchurched Joe sensitive. In our big huge church (ok he didn't actually say that part but it was implied) back in ole' America, a person gets greeted at least seven times. We start in the parking lot, where they get their first greeting, then the narthex", etc, etc ad naseum. Dude, we don't have parking lots at our churches. The vast majority of the people coming to church here don't even own a car! Why would you have a parking lot?!? And when you enter a church here, you shake hands with every.single.person!! Stick that in your "we greet every person seven times starting in the parking lot" pipe and smoke it! Do you sense that I am upset here? That is why you are reading this blog! You are one of the intelligentsia. 

America is event driven, time focused, and all about "creating community." Here we are relationally driven, everything IS community, there are no seekers, only the desperate. Take your socio-theology which has little to do with God, and much to do with Western Culture, and keep it to yourself. If you want to be missional (in the missionary sense, not the quasi-spiritual idea that everything is missions), and cross the oceans to learn. Cross the oceans to learn another language. Cross the oceans to learn another culture. Cross the oceans and learn some humility, and shed that ignorant arrogant coat from the West you are wearing in my country.

On second thought, just stay in America or wherever you came from! Thank God you don't speak Macedonian! You could do unspeakable damage with your ignorance and arrogance . . . and best of all we would not get to enjoy the translation mistakes :-). The speaker was most proud of the fact that his big huge church in America gives every guest a free ice cream sundae - and his proud point was translated, "every guest receives an ice cream free Sunday." 

 

Do it over?

It is Friday and the lesson of the week is, I am in charge of my schedule and I need to exercise that control. Otherwise I will overbook the week, and then spend all my time pissing and moaning about how busy I am and overtired I am. How counter-productive is that!

This is a lesson that I have to learn over and over again it seems, as I lower my guard and let slippage of my scheduling occur. It is a critical mistake on my part, and perhaps you find yourself doing the same thing? It is ever so easy to do, especially when trying to compress too much into too small a space.

We tell ourselves that we are leveraging the available time to maximize the results, but personally I just find this exhausts me, and marginalizes the potential value. I seem to be most susceptible to this negative phenomena when I am in a city for a short period of time, and when I have too many commitments to fit into that time. And I tend to do this when I have competing agenda's and work on either end of the trip - and then it spirals from there.

This is doubly negative when clients and work is shortchanged and nothing is as well accomplished as it would be under better planning. To have the discipline required to say "no" is the linchpin of decision making. If the work is important enough to do in the first place, then it certainly is worthy of having my best, and I (nor can you) can not produce the best work when under-resourced. Adequate time and energy to do it right the first time is the only way to do it right, and as John Wooden says, "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have enough time to do it over?"

More on Expectations

You could easily look at the Shoulds and the Musts as the Obligations and the Commitments. There are some nuances here, but really it was more a widening of the understanding of the implications of what living with these understandings mean, more than anything else.

The nuances for me are something like this; Commitment is softer and fuller than Must. Softer in the sense that it can, but doesn't have to have undeniable urgency. It is more adult in how it feels and less hormonal or driven. Fuller in the sense that it involves my heart and my brain and my experience in more complete ways than Must does. However, it fails to have the irrefutable inevitability that Must incorporates. It doesn't have that, "this is my air and I need to breath" feel to it at all. Instead it is a "let's be a responsible adult human being" feel and vibe.

There are a few things that I want to feel Must about. There are far more things that I want to be committed to. Nor do I think we have to vilify Obligations and Shoulds. While I don't want them controlling my life, they often bring great gifts to the party and journey. Let's not throw them under the bus! Rather, let's place them in a proper thoughtful place in our lives, where we have plenty of freedom to say "no" and clarity about when they are harming us or helping us.

Which one learns?

I just spent four intensive days on the road, meeting with leaders from early in the mornings, until late into the evenings. These leaders cover most of the spectrum of leadership, from those young and just getting started, to those older than me and at the peak of their game. It was fascinating to listen and learn, which one of them best positioned themselves to learn more, get appropriate feedback and make progress.

Logic would say that the older more experienced leaders would be the top performers and also the one's who most actively sought appropriate feedback for assessment and for making some forward progress in their worlds. Did.not.happen. Those leaders with the largest responsibilities and longest and deepest reaches, largely failed to activate the feedback loops which could have supercharged their leadership. Those who were just getting started, were sponges, and took some very direct hits, in order to move forward.

I am generalizing, and there were some beautiful exceptions to these examples. Yet a humble learning posture was the key missing factor in those that had the most to gain. They are the ones most blind to the story that they are weaving, to the opportunities that are passing them by because of their biases and agendas, to their failure to learn and grow.

And what about me? What about you? Which group are we in, and how are we certain of that? You got it . . . because we are gonna be humble servant leaders who invite (perhaps insist!) that our feedback group/mentors/coaches/peers, tell us the truth of the matter, about which group we are REALLY in. The one who learns is the one who is able to humbly listen.

Be Big!

I had an early morning conversation that ran through the trials and difficulties of working for non-profits and missions abroad. One of the things my friend and I decided was the most negative in those worlds is the penny-pinching and the tight-fistedness of those cultures. One of the stories that I told my friend, was how missions and non-profits consistently try to lower the rents each year, how to pay the local hires for sub-standard wages, and generally are well known locally to be the most selfish and the people who pay the least wage for the most work.

What a bastardly way to be known! We shared stories about how our PREVIOUS parent group was always pushing us to live in smaller and smaller places, to cut corners on all things financial, to pay the least for the most value at all times. 

I don't know about you, but I do not want to live this way first of all, and second of all, I never want to be known for being such a money-grubber. I mean why would anyone ever want to follow the Savior of a group of people who live like they are on the edge of poverty and despair all the time, while being actually rich people in a poor country!?!? Why??

Well of course no one wants to follow such a Savior or such followers. My friend and I have long come to the conclusion that we want to be BIG people. Not the Wal-mart American variety, but rather the amazingly generous, the unwaveringly selfless, the indefatigably unselfish, the incredibly responsive . . . that kind of BIG. The success or lack of it that follows you, is probably related to this issue, no matter what field you are in. Be Big People!

Don't ever

If you are in the helping/coaching/guidance/perspective/development business as I am, one of the most difficult things to NOT do, is make decisions for people, or pressure them into a certain path. While you may find that you are far more objective and experienced and aware than your client may be, you still cannot do this for them.

If you do, you will find invariably, that you also become responsible for the success or failure of what you pushed them toward. Even if they only partially follow your directives, you still will (in their minds and in reality, truthfully) bear the burden of responsibility for future events and results (or lack of them). In other words, you have to provide clarity, ask questions to help them discern, paint verbal pictures of what the futures might hold, tell the story in effective ways, to help them see and decide their destination or next steps. You can only be non-directive, no matter how certain you may be in your conclusions of a matter.

It is their life. It is their future. It is their decision. You will never have the freedom to push too much or too hard for a certain path. If you can't restraint yourself from doing so, then you need to find a different career. You can freely say what you "think" will happen down each possible path, and you can describe what often happens when people chose or don't chose a particular course of action, but no one, no matter how wise and no matter how experienced can accurately calculate the human factor. It is the unknown wildcard. It is the beauty of this one wild beautiful life that we have been given, that we chose our paths and courses in life, and we have to live with the consequences, be they good or bad . . . and that perception too, is probably unknowable as well.

Expectations

I see that being back in Eastern Europe is not conducive to my blogging patterns in the same way as Asia has been. What is different? Expectations.

The Shoulds versus the Musts. The Shoulds are what other people think we ought to be doing. Musts are what we have to do, what we are compelled to do, what we are called to accomplish, they come from deep within our hearts and passions. Expectations that others have of me in Eastern Europe keep me on a different track and schedule than the Musts in my heart.

When the Musts are at the top of the work pyramid, life is simpler, there is more clarity, less clutter, less busy tasks, more satisfaction, more contentment, more certainty, less ambiguity, more "no's", less "yes's", more accomplishment of what matters and has meaning and significance for and to me. A big part of living a life that matters is moving toward a life of Musts rather than Shoulds. It is the heart of Essentialism, the art of diligently pursuing less but better. It is what I push myself and all my clients toward daily. It is THE key component of PTA - protecting the asset - me.

What is driving your actions today? Can you recalibrate and move toward the Musts? I have reset this day even though it is late in the afternoon, because I realized that I was doing good and important things, rather than the best and most valuable things. It is a subtle but critical difference.

Transitions

Life is full of them, mine more than many others. A highly productive, very satisfying trip to Asia is winding down. Laundry, packing, sorting, last stops at the noodle shops, kind of day. Now a long two day transition back to Eastern Europe, with lots and lots of long hours of sitting, people watching, reading, flying, and hopefully some sleeping too.

It feels like flying is a full time job and that airports are my second office/home. But since I am flying West this time, it won't interrupt my daily fitness routine nearly as much as flying East does. It won't even interrupt my work routines either, in fact, will give me a chance to catch up on some thinking, and writing as well.

The only downsides are monotony and limited geography (the confines of the airport) to walk around and explore, and the lack of decent high quality food at a normal price . . . and some physical stiffness from enforced sitting for hours on end. But since I am only going a quarter of the way around the world, rather than half way around the world, it won't be too bad I hope.

Asia has been good to me as usual, I feel 10 years younger here, my blood pressure drops into a completely normal range, the super spicy food is just so yummy, the temperature is sweaty hot, and the prices for just about everything are super low. Good indeed.