Change

Reframe your work and make the most of it today.

June 3, 2016 0 Comments

photo credit - Nafina Putra

Reframing starts with the difference between “I have to” and “I get to.”  If you’ve ever met a person with an “I get to”  attitude you will remember them. You will remember them not just for what they do but for how they make you feel. One of my favourite check-out technicians at the Marine Drive Super Store in Vancouver gets it. Her attitude and joy is infectious. She greets every weary customer and makes the checkout experience fun or funny. She makes a difference in the stupor that so easily takes over the heart from the madness of grocery shopping.

 

“Get to” and “have to” — its a difference of attitude. You may be reluctant to tackle it, but as soon as you hear yourself saying, “I have to” its time for an attitude check. For some odd reason we all have moments when we love being in a crappy mood. In moments like that we are taking strange solace in treating ourselves as objects cast about on the sea of life. Fate has beset us and we live as if we are subject only to the constraints and hardships of our responsibilities. Like all emotional postures the “I have to” attitude can become dreadfully habitual.

 

It’s a terrible way to live! However, I’ve discovered a little shift in attitude can start the difference in my happiness, my relational trajectory, and the fruit of my labours.

 

It seems like the grind of routine can easily take over my life. That’s when I find myself muttering…

I have to…

  • get up.
  • go to work.  (Perhaps your story right now is different: I have to go to school.)
  • take this test.
  • make a lunch.
  • clean up and wash these dishes.


But I keep reminding myself, a shift is available to me!


I get to…

  • experience a new day. Its a gift!
  • make a difference in someone’s life.
  • grow through an artificial or a real-life challenge.
  • create order out of the chaos – at least for the moment.


“I get to” is built on hope and purpose. The internal shift in language to “I get to” brings about an external shift in how we approach the work and treat the people who are with us now. Reframing starts with “I get to.”

 

Author, David Sturt, explores the power of reframing work in the book, “Great Work: How to make a difference people love.” Great work exceeds expectations and makes a difference people love. It can happen in any domain of life, but truly great work shares something in common; it begins with the internal mindset of the person doing the work.

 

As you will see, an “I get to” approach refuses to settle for a pragmatic definition of ourselves or our work. For example when another Sunday rolls around I could wake up muttering, “I have to go deliver another talk today.” (If you didn’t know, I pastor a church in the UBC campus community.) Or I could wake up declaring, “Wow! Today I get to go connect with some amazing  people and explore what matters most in life!” Are you starting to get the picture? You can reframe your own life and work.

 

Sturt’s book is a quick read with helpful and inspiring stories. Below are two videos exploring his ideas. The first video tells the story of Moses and the extraordinary difference he makes in the lives of children and families. And then the second is from David Sturt, the author, laying out his organization’s research and findings.

 

Career, Change, Work

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Post Graduation Script Deprivation

May 27, 2016 0 Comments

Thinking in nature

When the joy of graduation wears off some graduates enter a period of confusion and malaise, unsure of themselves and unsure of what to do besides making sure they eat tomorrow. I believe one of the shocks these university graduates are experiencing is generated by the absence of a script. They’ve been living off of someone else’s script for years. And it may have served them well. They read the lines and made the grades. But now on this side of graduation there is no script for the drama called life!

 

Did you graduate recently? Perhaps you are experiencing script deprivation.

 

A script gives you a straight-line process or pathway for getting from “A” to “B.” Let’s say you figured out a few years ago, “I want to graduate with a degree in finance.” Then, you paid the school to take care of you by charting out the courses you needed to “get a degree in finance.” You succeeded! But now your point “B” looms “out there” and no one is going to chart the path for you. You are going to have to blaze your own path.

Look, you are not alone. By the time we finish 18 years of school most of us are conditioned to living on someone else’s script. We have had it all scripted for us. It went like this:

Go to school.
Take the classes.
Learn the material.
Pass the tests.
Graduate.


But now… 

There’s not a script for shaping a career.
There’s not a script for starting a business.
There’s not a script for being your own brand.
There’s not a script for creating a social life.
There’s not a script for building significant relationships.

 

Your friends have probably been living the same school script you were on, so they are not much help for living without a script.

 

But you do have some options:

  • Gather some mentors who have been living in uncharted waters for a while.
  • Plan a trip without tour guides and head out on an adventure.
  • Take some personal assessments to discover your genuine desires and strengths.
  • Make your grand life vision of success smaller by aiming at something contained in it (that’s usually called a goal) and then remind yourself, “Everything doesn’t have to be perfect!”
  • Attempt something related to your goal and as you do it, make a personal agreement with yourself that with the completion of each small step you will ask yourself again, “How did this go?” And, “What do I want to do next?”

Soon you will be living your own script and enjoying the rewards of living with purpose through your challenges.

Career, Change, Graduation

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Vancouver Millenials: Make the most of living with parents

May 17, 2016 0 Comments

living with parents

It doesn’t seem like news at all especially if you are living it. But the trend for Vancouver millennials to live with their parents is a shift from the lifestyle expectations of many people in generations before us. For some cultures and families, “living with the parents” until you get married, has always been the expectation. However significant pressure is building around the high cost of housing in Vancouver. Combined with the erosion of earned income spending power, Milllenials are responding to the pressure by choosing to live with their parents… longer.

Here are ten ways to make the most of the opportunity to live with a parent during your twenties.  Without some intentionality its too easy to coast while living at home and neglect the development of important life skills.

Ten ways to make the most of living with your parents.

1. Pay yourself rent even if you are not paying rent to your parents. Make “rent” a regular savings. Someday you likely will pay monthly rent or you will have a mortgage.

2. Start a business – even if you are going to school. Both the extra income and the entrepreneurial skills will serve you well. It might even turn into a career.

3. Develop your budgeting and saving skills. Make and remake a budget monthly by telling your every dollar where to go. Consider reinvesting money earned in your new business, back into the business since your “overhead” costs are low.

4. Discover an interest and start blogging about it.

5. Accept household chores and make a significant contribution to home-life by conscientiously choosing to do things you might not be great at but are necessary life skills. You’ll become a better roommate or spouse someday.

6. Build a few significant relationships and a social network that promotes values that fit your vision for life.

7. Learn how to build trust in relationships by “letting your folks know what you are doing and where you are going.” It’s actually good manners and a great practice for building trust in relationships.

8. Get involved in your community and serve others to make it a better place. Community leadership with volunteers is one of the most challenging spaces for leading.

9. Do something new or novel each month so you nurture a growth-mindset responsive to change.

10.  Have some conflicts. Learn the skills of crucial conversations. Learn how to disagree as an adult without blowing up or creating a cold war.

Change

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What am I going to do with my life?

May 13, 2016 0 Comments

No doubt there are lots of ways to tackle this question. If you are twenty you are probably asking it a lot. But you don’t have to know everything you are going to do. You just need something reasonable and purposeful to move towards. The joy, money, flow mix used by Chris Buillebeau may be useful to you as described in his new book, Born for This. Here’s an animated core message capturing Chris’ message.

And here’s the audio of a good interview of Chris with Brian Johnson.

I keep finding that you don’t have to be twenty to explore these issues again. I’ll never be twenty again but the intersection of “again” shows up for lots of reasons and if you pause there to thoughtfully explore and experiment, a new and fruitful enterprise may be just around the corner. I love the idea here that we all need to treat ourselves as “self-employed.” We each of the personal responsibility for developing our work (or some side-work) and keeping it meaningful. Its too easy to turn work or career into a life-sucking venture in greed. The benefit of this mix developed by Chris is that it acknowledges money in the mix but keeps joy — which relates to purpose large in our considerations.

Give it a try and connect with me to talk about it some more.

 

 

 

Career, Change

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In need of smarts? Keep reading books!

May 11, 2016 0 Comments

books

Getting smarter requires reading — reading books. Here’s why: blogs and online articles are quick reads but they don’t force you to do mind stretching work. The extended thought and working of the ins and outs of ideas requires more digging and exploration than most blog articles provide. Blog articles typically only scratch the surface of an idea. The creator of WordPress and a leader in the blogging realm, Matt Mullenweg, advocates for reading books. I like what he said to Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires:

“A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers. The book as a format is underrated in the digital age. I’m the first one to say blogs are fantastic, obviously. But they tend to be shorter form. Longer-form works stretch my mind more. When you write a book, it consumes you. What you get when you read that book, then, is someone’s entire life for several years or more, distilled into one work. That’s really powerful.

 

“I feel like these things have super-cycles, and I think we’re at the nadir of long-form writing. I think we might have just passed it, and it will rise again. The e-book revolution put an entire library into something as small as a paperback. For me, as I stopped reading books in favour of Internet content, I felt myself getting dumber. Several years ago, I thought, ‘Man, I don’t think I’m as smart as I used to be.’ I just felt a little duller. So I realized I had to start reading again. When I was starting [my company] Automatic, I realized, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, so I need to read as much as possible.’ An e-book is ten dollars these days. Anyone can afford a book. Take some of the best books on entrepreneurship. Maybe Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker. Or The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, which I was really inspired by when I was first starting out. What’s holding you back? Its your time and a few dollars. Or to go the library if you don’t have a few dollars. And you can have access to the world’s greatest wisdom on any topic.”

 

Michael Ellsberg, The Education of Millionaires: It’s not what you think and it’s not too late. 2011. p. 174

Change, Education, Leadership

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