Tag:

Endurance

Afraid of Failure

by Ron Potter July 3, 2011

Image Source: True New Zealand Advent, Creative Commons

I am not a trekker. Although I do own a trekking stick (very high tech with a camera mount on the top) and for a while I did subscribe to a trekking magazine with wonderful, high gloss photos of small groups of people in their hiking boots, cargo pants and trekking sticks walking across pristine landscapes in Scotland and Ireland with periodic stops for wine and cheese and their porters ferrying their luggage to be waiting for them at the next B&B. While adventuresome is portrayed a very serine and safe journey.

But recently, I read an article about Carmichael. His day time job is the CEO of a high-end coffee supply company. His avocation is Trekking. Real Trekking! Having accomplished treks across some of the most remote and inhospitable places in the world, his latest challenge is Death Valley. Hard-core trekkers regard Death Valley as undoable and there is no known record of any human being accomplishing the task. He had just failed at his second attempt to trek across the valley. Listen to some of his words:

“Everyone focuses on risk and failure. What happens if you fail? How do you mitigate the risk? I look around and see people who live in the safest places in the world, and they are preoccupied with anxieties and fears because they don’t know what risk is anymore.”

Once he said it I realized that I observe this exact behavior in all of the people I meet and even in the corporate cultures that I work with. Some people take on entirely new careers in their lives while others make one shift to a different team in a company they’ve worked at for twenty and think “phew, I made that leap without failing”. Some corporate cultures are moving into emerging parts of the world with processes and technology totally different from what they’ve used for fifty years while others will make a merger offer and then back away from it as too risky when a slightly increased counter offer is presented. We seem to use the same scale for measuring risk as if we are a kid contemplating jumping across a puddle or if we’re walking steel 200 feet in the air (a personal experience of mine ;-).

After his second failed attempt to trek across Death Valley, Carmichael said “That’s it. It’s over dude.” At that moment of failure he didn’t see any way that he would ever attempt this one again. But later he had begun to absorb his experience.

“The word that goes through your mind is fail, fail, fail. But once you get some perspective you realize that you learned something important. In the end, it’s not about how many tries you needed to get something done. It’s about not quitting and keeping at it until you achieve the goal. So, no, I didn’t fail. Failure is if it broke me. I just didn’t make it – this time.”

How do we break out of our own ring of risk? That bubble that we live in where the most risky thing inside our bubble looks like the riskiest thing anywhere? We get outside of our bubble! We get to know people who live in other bubbles. We learn of their efforts, failures, successes, heart aches, joys and start seeing the world through a different set of eyes. Suddenly when we look back into our own bubble, we realize that that daunting risk that we’ve been facing is nothing more than a little puddle. If you only see the world through your own perspective, it can become a very risky place and you will become very risk averse.

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Bloging is Easy

by Ron Potter May 20, 2010

Image Source: Dwayne Bent, Creative Commons

Blogging is easy.

Writing is difficult.

I started blogging for two reasons. The main was that many of my clients were asking for some regular input and reminders of the many things we talk about during our consulting and coaching engagements. The second reason was that I wanted to experience the technology of this relative new media form and for the discipline of writing. Well, I’ve experienced it and found myself to be lacking in the skill and discipline of writing.

I’m surrounded by writers. My wife has that wonderful ability to write well. She can finely craft the written word in ways that just amaze me and has at times done professional writing. Both of my daughters are also talented writers. One of them could make a living as a professional writer and the other one writes very witty blog posts. Because I’ve “written” a book, one of my clients asked me where I learned my skill because he wanted to upgrade the writing skills of his team. I had to admit that I had not learned the skill but rely on my writing partner, Wayne Hastings, for our published materials.

Blogging is easy. Writing is difficult.

But, when I take the time and make the effort, I enjoy the practice of writing. I’m concerned that through texting, email and powerpoint presentations we are losing the art of well written documents. We recently discovered a newspaper published by my great grandfather (another writer in the family) in Colorado in 1892. That newspaper was written for the common man in a small town west of Denver. The vocabulary and writing structure was well above what we receive today in the few papers that even put out a printed edition anymore.

Consider doing more writing. It forces you to organize your thoughts more than texting, emailing or powerpoint presentations.

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Blog Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance – Transition

by Ron Potter February 19, 2010

Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):

Another moment in our career lives when things seem to get out of balance is during times of transition or transformation.

Transition

I was working with a client recently who may be one of the smartest and quickest people I work with. She had recently (about 8 weeks ago) taken over a new division within the company that was going to require the exercising of new leadership and management muscles that she hadn’t developed in her previous assignment. When I met with her she was expressing a great deal of personal frustration that she still didn’t know how to answer questions in certain areas and more importantly, didn’t know if a certain question or piece of information might be critical or just another piece of information.

During times of transition there seems to be two time frames that exhibit some consistency. The first is that it just takes about three months for you to get a handle on a new job. My client had stepped into her new role at the beginning of November. So, while she had been in the job for two months, with all of the holidays and vacation time taken during that time of year, she had really only experienced about a month of actual job time. I encouraged her to keep her frustration in check for a couple of more months and felt sure she would be feeling better about her job knowledge by the end of February.

The second time frame to pay attention to is something called the “window of opportunity.” The window usually opens about nine months into a new assignment and closes again at about the one-year tenure. If possible I recommend that new leaders not make any major changes (people, organization, vision, mission, etc.) before the window opens up at about nine months. If a leader makes these major moves before about nine months, people often wonder if they gave the incumbent person, system or process time to prove themselves. If the leader is still running things as usual after a year, people also wonder what new value the leader brought to the position. Now, there are always exceptions to this rule but if you’re feeling the stress of a new assignment, you might evaluate what are realistic expectations at this point in the transition.

Transformation

Transformation happens when you or someone else (or outside condition) is forcing a major transformation change on how work gets done. If you are the one being affected by the transformation, there is always the natural fear that you won’t have the ability or skills to perform and thrive in the new environment. This is the time to devout yourself to being open and learning what the new requirements and expectations are going to be. It is not the time to complain or lament about the way things used to be. Change happens. Get ahead of it.

If you’re the one driving the transformation, one thing I have always observed is that you will come to a point where it feels like failure. The new environment or approach hasn’t taken hold, the new vision or expectations are not emerging, or people are complaining and wanting to go back to the old way of doing things. To get through this one, turn to chapter 16 of my book “Trust Me” that’s titled Endurance. If you’ve taken all of the right steps (previous chapters) and know you’re headed in the right direction, stick with it. It’s always the darkest before the dawn.

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