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Balance on the High Wire

Balance on the High WireBlogCulture

Balance on the High Wire – Part IV: Human Needs

by Ron Potter

The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity are swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance, bad things happen.

Over the last few of blog posts, I’ve introduced that Balance is the key ingredient of great decision-making, health, and happiness (human needs). Today let’s explore Human Needs.

A couple of years ago I wrote a short post on human needs described by Tony Robbins. I’m sure Tony didn’t invent these needs, they have been known and observed through human history as being part of who we are as humans. But, Tony has done a nice job of observing and describing the drives behind each.

The six (in my words) are:

  • Certainty—Uncertainty
  • Belonging—Standing out
  • Learning—Teaching

Certainty-Uncertainty

  • I’ve watched corporate leaders attempt to boil down the big-data they need so that it fits on their laptop or tablet. They are searching for certainty and assume that if they have all the data at their fingertips they’ll always make the right decision. If that’s true, why do we need the human element at all? Just let the big-data make the decision. Leadership is dealing with the ambiguity of the situation and making the decision despite the fact you don’t have all the data. Decisions are about the future. The future is difficult (impossible) to know. Life is full of ambiguity and people in general and good leaders are better at dealing with ambiguity than computers.
  • Leadership is about not being certain about the future but also not being afraid. Balance.

Belonging-Standing Out

  • This one is difficult to balance. I believe it takes a trusting team to accomplish. A great team encourages unique abilities, encourages them and helps develop But the goal is to serve the team, not the individual.
  • Individuals have a difficult time accomplishing just the right balance without trusting feedback. One of our great American philosophers, George Carlin once said: Everyone driving faster than you are idiots. Everyone driving slower than you are Morons. Which means you are one or the other to all others on the road. Balance.

Learning – Teaching

  • When both learning and teaching are taking place, both experiences are better. One of my clients explained to me that I provided the greatest value to them when I was teaching them about what I was learning. My energy and enthusiasm came through when I shared with them the insights of what I was learning through my reading and experiences. Balance

I started my career walking steel up to 200 feet in the air. No safety equipment. Just you, the breeze and balance. Up there, balance was life and death. Balance, Balance, Balance!

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Balance on the High WireBlogCulture

Balance on the High Wire – Part III: Stress and Health

by Ron Potter

The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity are swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance, bad things happen.

Over the last couple of blog posts (Balancing Act and High Wire), I’ve introduced that Balance is the key ingredient of great decision-making, health, and happiness (human needs). Today let’s explore Stress and Health.

Stress

The biggest issue in dealing with stress is founded in the ancient Serenity Prayer:

  • God grant me the serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change,
  • the COURAGE to change the things I can,
  • and the WISDOM to know the difference.

It’s the wisdom to know the difference that contains the real power of the Serenity Prayer. In their book “Performing under Pressure – The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most” Hendrie Weisinger, J. P. Pawliw-Fry do a great job of helping us distinguish between pressure and stress. (See the TLC Short Book Reviews)

Stress refers to the situation of too many demands and not enough resources to meet them: Time, money, energy, etc. In a stressful situation, reduction is the goal.

Pressure is when you perceive that something at stake is dependent on the outcome of your performance and there are good and bad consequences. In a pressure moment, success is the goal.

It’s when we don’t balance these two and assume that everything is stressful that we begin to fail in performance and health. Knowing the difference between stress and pressure (wisdom) has a tremendous impact on our health.

Work-Life Balance

I’m going to toss this topic into the Stress category because I see them as interconnected in our work lives. Because of the stress, or by turning even pressure situations into stressful ones, it seems we begin to lose our work-life balance.

Nigel Marsh, author of several books on developing a good work-life balance says “Work-Life Balance is easy when you have no work!” Nigel says it’s too simplistic and destructive to think that it’s simply work vs life. Life is made up of many aspects:

  • Career
  • Family/Friends
  • Significant Other/Romance
  • Fun & Recreation
  • Health
  • Money
  • Personal Growth
  • Physical Environment

It’s when we make the small investments in the right places at the right time that our life feels balanced. Allowing our lives to get out of balance and sacrificing one or more of these areas leads to poor health and a shortening of life.

Balance, Balance, Balance.

Health

Microsleep is defined as a period of mere seconds when

  • Eyelids will partially or fully close
  • The brain becomes oblivious to all channels of perception including visual
  • There is no awareness of any event that occurs during a microsleep

The main victim of microsleeps is concentration. It’s impossible to concentrate when your brain is using microsleeps to recover from sleep deprivation. How much deprivation causes these microsleeps?

  • One night of missed sleep (pulling an all-nighter) causes a 400% increase in microsleeps.
  • Four hours sleep per night for six nights causes the same 400% increase in microsleeps. Eleven nights of 4-hour sleep is equivalent to two back-to-back all-nighters.
  • Ten days of six hours sleep per night is also equivalent to an all-nighter.

Eight hours of sleep per night provides nearly perfect levels of concentration with no microsleeps.

Being awake for 19 straight hours (5 am to midnight) produces the same impairment as being legally drunk.

Long hours of “dedicated” work seems to have gained a level of admiration in corporate circles. It shouldn’t. Longer hours of impaired work and concentration is dangerous for the company and dangerous for the individual. Let alone the shortcomings that are created with the work-life balance issues listed above. Stop doing it. Stop encouraging it. It’s healthier too:

Balance, Balance, Balance.

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Balance on the High WireBlogCulture

Balance on the High Wire – Part II: Decision Making

by Ron Potter

The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity are swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance, bad things happen.

Over the last couple of blogs (Check out Balancing Act and High Wire), I’ve noted that Balance is the key ingredient of great decision-making, health, and happiness (human needs). Today let’s explore decision-making.

Myers-Briggs teaches us that human decision-making is a two-stage process of taking in information (Perceiving) and then making our decisions based on that perception. It has been my experience through 25+ years of team building and leadership development that we must keep those processes in balance.

My data is rather old (meaning more than a day at this point) but the last I remember seeing is that we create over 50,000 GB of data per second. I’ll let you look up what the size of that number really means.

The human mind can’t come anywhere near absorbing that much data (or even a fraction) every day to use in our decision-making processes. So, the mind needs to use shortcuts, models, and tricks to help us survive and make everyday decisions in our daily lives. Each of us uses a different method of taking in data related to a decision that we’re making. The two key areas that Myers-Briggs describes are:

  • Sensing
    • Facts
    • Details
    • Data
    • What do we know in the present?
    • What have we done so far?
    • What are the next steps?
  • Intuition
    • Bigger picture
    • Future
    • Implications
    • Where are we trying to go in the future?
    • What will the possibilities be?
    • What is the ultimate goal?

As you look at the written list you would likely agree that we need all that information in order to make a good, well-informed decision. The problem is that in our every day lives, our brain tends to focus on and give greater priority to either Sensing or Intuition. It takes a team and a good process to maintain a healthy balance. Without balance you’ll tend to be either too short-term or long-term focused. If this function isn’t balanced it can cause the business to fail.

Once the perceiving function is completed (and hopefully balanced) our “deciding” function kicks-in. Myers-Briggs identifies these as our Thinking and Feeling functions. A better way to think of these is logic and values. All too often in the business world, “feelings” are discounted as being too emotional. Decisions should be made on logic. But values are important to every organization. When values are violated, the culture begins to crumble, and the organization loses a sense of being. Logic and value must be balanced.

Just like on the high wire, goals cannot be met, and trust cannot be build when we lose our balance.

Balance, Balance, Balance.

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Balance on the High WireBlogCulture

Balance on the High Wire – Part I: Introduction

by Ron Potter

In 1974 Phillppe Petit walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center buildings (the ones that came down during the terrorist attack). They were nearly 1,800 feet in the air.

In 2012, Nik Welenda walked a tight rope across Niagara Falls. While Nik’s wire was only about 180 feet in the air, that one seemed more difficult to me. Why, because beneath him the Niagara River was rushing over the falls. Everything was moving. This is not to diminish what Petit did. Both would be terrifying. But it just seems more difficult to me to maintain your balance when everything around you is moving.

I’ve walked structural steel. I’ve also walked over the catwalk of a dam with rushing water under me. Both were terrifying, but it was harder to maintain my balance over the moving water.

In my story about walking structural steel I progressed through three lessons from the experience:

  1. Figure out your goal and stay focused
  2. Reaching your goal requires trust
  3. Balance, Balance, Balance. Without balance you will neither reach your goal or build trust.

The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world had become more interconnected. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity is swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance bad things happen.

Over the next few blog posts I’m going to talk about balance with a focus on three key areas:

  • Decision Making
  • Stress and Health
  • Human Needs

It seems that we are all living on the “High Wire” of life these days.

  • How do we maintain our balance?
  • Why is it necessary to maintain our balance?
  • What happens when we lose our balance?

Balance, Balance, Balance.

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