Click on the image below to make it readable (and laughable).

Next time you’re booking a room at a hotel these symbols may come in handy.  (Thanks to architechture.myninjaplease.com)

From our newsletter Outside the Lines

That Great Work thing

In my yes-it’s-really-coming-probably-in-early February book, Find Your Great Work , I talk about the five core truths of Great Work.

One of them talks about the importance of focus.

It’s inspired this month’s article, because today my business partner (and as it happens, wife) and I will be sitting down to make plans of our own.

Making plans

We do this every six months or so, a time to hit the pause button, step out of the minutiae and ask ourselves just what the heck is going on around here.

We’ve already started sketching out the topics and issues we want to talk about, and I’m noticing how they fit on four different levels:

The first two levels

The immediate, everyday business level.  “What’s happening on this project?”  “Did you send X to Y?”  “Is it you or me who was supposed to do Z?”  This is all about tying up loose ends from the daily and weekly work we do.

That typically leads to…

The 2009 plan.  “What would be the two or three big wins in 2009?”  “What’s our Great Work for the year?”  “What other structures do we need to build?”  “What’s the right balance between travel and staying at home?”  This will involve calendars, figuring out what to say No to as well as Yes to, and committing to what I once heard someone call “the valuable few”.

The final two levels

Often, that’s where planning stops:  glance at the here-and-now, glance ahead a little and we’re done.

But I think the deepest shifts occur when you really change your focus.  The next level you can look at goes to…

The personal level.  “What do I want to achieve in the next little while?”  “What do I want to learn?”  “What will be my own adventure this year?”  “What’s my Great Work?”  This is all about getting clear on your own agenda and what makes you tick.

And rarely, very rarely, you create space to get to…

The Meaning of Life level.  “What does happiness look like?”  “Where will we live?”  “What’s the life we’re trying to build?”  This shifts the focal length again and makes you ask whether the life you’re building is actually the life you want … or whether it just happens to be the life you’ve gotten into the habit of.

Where are you looking and thinking right now?

So before you get swept back into the here-and-now and start being busy again, let me ask you:

• What plans have you made?

• What do you want?  For yourself right now?  For yourself in your life?

(And if, by the by, it’s more Great Work then sign up for pre-publication offers on Find Your Great Work here.)

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking aloud about focus and planning.

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general & politician

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
- Roald Amundsen, Norwegian explorer

Read more quotations on focus and planning here.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking aloud about focus and planning.

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
- Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish inventor

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general & politician

“Focusing isn’t just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.”
- Bridget Riley, British artist

“I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s were the fun is.”
- Donald Trump, American entrepreneur

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
- Mark Twain, American writer

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
- Gloria Steinem, American feminist

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
- Alan Lakein, American business writer

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
- Roald Amundsen, Norwegian explorer

Check out these resources I love and refer to often.  Look below for UK or Canada links.

Getting Things Done - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

When Things Fall Apart - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Is Your Genius At Work? - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

The War of Art - Buy from Amazon.ca

NLP at Work - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Taming Your Gremlin - Buy from Amazon.co.uk  or Amazon.ca

The Answer to How is Yes - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

The Creative Habit - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Tribes - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Think Better - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Stumbling on Happiness - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Simplicity Survival Handbook - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

You Can Have What You Want - Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca

Click on the image below to make it readable (and laughable).

Maybe it’s time to update your resume. (Thanks to Domestic Abuse.)

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

A Choice

Wisdom often lies in having to make a commitment, a bold judgment on the state of things.

It’s a way of cutting through the messy complexities of everyday life; complexities that keep us busy and doing - and not thinking too hard about the situation at hand.

It turns gray into black and white.  It’s not that this means it’s necessarily the truth - but it does create an interesting moment of pause before you take the next step.

You’ve already heard a few of my favourite questions to ask in that pause.

• Is this Good Work?  Or is it Great Work?

• Does this move you closer or further away?

• Is it a Yes or is it a No?

Here’s another one I’ve been chewing over recently.

• Are you doing this “to” or “with”?

The difference

This distinction gets to the heart of the way you work with people and the nature of the relationship you create with them.

You’ll get the difference straight away.

“With” takes you to an “adult to adult” relationship, where you and they both ask for what you want and both feel free to say Yes or No.

It’s not necessarily a touchy-feely or even a deep relationship.  You can have transactional relationships that are “with”, just as you can have more intimate relationships that stay stuck in “to”.

In short, it’s a place where you’re reminded of their humanness, what Martin Buber would call an I/Thou relationship. (see I And Thou)

“To” on the other hand is when the dynamic shifts.  It’s no longer “adult-to-adult” and something has happened to corrupt the way the power and responsibility is shared.

Buber would call this an I/It relationship, one where the other person’s essential humanity has been forgotten and you no longer respect and hold their freedom to make their own choices.

You’ll remember the times you’ve had things done “to” you - and just how that can subtly or otherwise diminish you.

And you’ll remember those people with whom you’ve worked “with” - and remembered the sense of trust and growth that engendered.

Drama Triangle

One of the models that helps explain this to me is the Drama Triangle, a model that has its roots in Transactional Analysis.

The Drama Triangle suggests that when a relationship is dysfunctional - when it’s in a “to” phase - three roles get played out.

> Persecutor
> Victim
> Rescuer

The Persecutor is the bully (or more subtly, the micro-manager), the person who doesn’t trust anyone and who feels surrounded by people not as good as themselves.  The “to” side of this is pretty obvious - when you’re working with fools, you can’t trust them to work “with”, you have do this “to”.

The Victim is the whiner, the “it’s all so hard, and they’ve let me down, and I can’t do anything.”  The Victim is a genius at attracting people who do things to them - either the Persecutor or the Rescuer.

The Rescuer is a role as dysfunctional as the others, although it can somehow feel a little better as you’re just “helping out.” Rescuers love Victims and are forever jumping in to save them.  That’s not “with”, that’s “to”.  It’s a role that gets played out in organizations all the time.

If you find yourself dancing around the Drama Triangle - and we all do at some stage or another - then there’s been a shift from “with” to “to”.

Something to ponder

Scan the list of people with whom you work.

• With whom are you “with”?  With whom are you “to”?

And perhaps more interestingly…

• What is it that flips you from one to the other?

• What helps you get to “with”?

• What pulls you back to “to”?

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about recognizing others’ humanity.

“Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

“The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.”
-Marguerite De Launay, Baronne De Staal, French writer

See more quotes and add your own here.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about recognizing others’ humanity.

“Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

“Humanity is the keystone that holds nations and men together. When that collapses, the whole structure crumbles. This is as true of baseball teams as any other pursuit in life.”
-Connie Mack, American businessman

“Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.”
-Margaret Lawrence, Canadian writer

“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”
-Thurgood Marshall, American judge

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”
-Desmond Tutu, South African cleric

“I love humanity but I hate people.”
-Edna St. Vincent Millay, American playwright

“What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly - that is the first law of nature.”
-Voltaire, French writer

“A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.”
-George Santayana, Spanish poet

“The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.”
-Marguerite De Launay, Baronne De Staal, French writer

From our newsletter Outside the Lines

Great Work

I’m blogging like a madman on my new Great Work Blog.

I’d encourage you to subscribe - you get a sweet little drop of me in your Inbox five days a week.

You can subscribe here

And here are three of my favourite current articles on the blog

=> Strive for Adequate (Why Excellence is Overrated)

=> Three Ways to Remember Your Great Work

=> Messy’s Not Just Good - It’s Necessary

X marks the spot

You may have noticed, it’s election time.

Obama v McCain - the whole world seems to be watching that one.  Here in Canada, we have our own national election. And in Australia not so long ago, there was a swap in governments … it seems change might be in the air.

I became Canadian so I could vote.  There’s something powerful and definitive about walking into a booth and putting an X next to the name you want to support.

It’s a statement of intent.  It’s a statement of engagement.  It’s also a moment of aspiration:  this vote carries dreams of what I want to be different and want to be the same in my life.

We’re all voting, all the time

Of course, you don’t need to be political to be voting.

Here are five ballots you’re voting on right now.  Imagine your making your choice between these pairs.  How will you cast your vote?

Joy
Indifference

Calm
Busy

Tasks
People

Doing
Being

Brave
Safe

Now vote with your feet

One of my favourite quotes is from Lou Holtz who said, “When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done.”

So let me ask you this - if I had to guess how you’d voted just by observing your behaviour, what would I have guessed?  What vote would be the same?  What vote would different?

Making obvious the gap between these deep choices about life and our actual behaviour is a little uncomfortable … and luckily, you can do something about it.

Pick one of those pairs, perhaps the one where you’ve noticed the biggest gap between how you voted and how you behave.

==> What’s one thing you’ll start doing to bring your vote and your behaviour into alignment?

==> One’s one thing you’ll stop doing to bring your vote and your behaviour into alignment?

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about  voting, choices, making a stand.

“Vote early and vote often.”
- Al Capone, American gangster

“Votes should be weighed, not counted.”
- Friedrich von Schiller, German poet

“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.”
- Robert Frost, American poet

You can read more Quotations on voting here. And if you have a favourite quote share it in the Comments section.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about  voting, choices, making a stand.

“Vote early and vote often.”
- Al Capone, American gangster

“Votes should be weighed, not counted.”
- Friedrich von Schiller, German poet

“To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.”
- Kofi Annan, Ghanaian statesman

“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”
-Theodore Roosevelt , American president

“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.”
- Robert Frost, American poet

“Stand, you’ve been sitting much too long, there’s a permanent crease in your right or wrong.”
- Sly Stone, American musician

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
- Emma Goldman, Lithuanian activist

Find time

Lose yourself in a book

Actually taste your lunch

Call a friend

Seek adventures

Visit new places

Visit familiar places and look for what’s news

Step out onto the edge of your own fears

Ask for

What you want

Love

Trouble

Watch The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun