Ride the wave to the career and life YOU want!

Welcome to Staying Your Course – a Teleconference for Premium Members only!

Join us for a monthly teleconference, Stay Your Course, on the 2nd Thursday every month. These teleconferences are fantastic opportunities to get the support you need in staying YOUR course.

In general, the intention for SYC is to support you in staying focused on your essential best, learning from drama, banishing stress, and shifting beliefs that keep you from creating what you REALLY want with your work and life.

Don’t worry if you miss a call, because they will be recorded…

Call-in numbers and archives for Staying Your Course are available to Premium Members only …

Use the following call-in information for our Staying Your Course group coaching call:

Dial-in Number: 1-712-432-3066
Conference Code: 490274

Access archives of past calls here.

If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or topic suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

Staying Your Course: 6/14/12 – 1pm ET is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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You’ve figured out what you want with your career, it feels exciting, and a bit daunting. How do you keep the faith and keep feeling essential?

The following are the 7 key practices I have discovered for keeping the faith. I’ve experienced significant turning points with every single one. When combined and used daily, you will tap into your most essential power.

First a caveat: Your success is inevitable, sooner or later. These practices are not intended to make your success happen; your success became a given when you discovered what you wanted. Instead, the practices are designed to align your essential Life energy with your desires (ongoing), so the process of manifesting your dreams is as fun and easy as possible.

7 Key Practices for Keeping the Faith:

1. Be Grateful  – Gratitude is the perfect way to align with the infinite abundance of Life that is your essential life-force energy. Be grateful for what you have and you will see all the ways that Life is already providing you with exactly what you want and need.
2. Handle Drama – Whatever your favorite flavor of drama (self-doubt, worry, family crisis), it will make an appearance as you move toward your precious desires. Welcome and learn from drama, and you will quickly and easily transform it from an obstacle to a pathway forward.
3. Feel Alive – Proactively connect with your essential best by remembering your values, strengths and motivations. Embody your essential best by feeling the essential life-force energy that flows through you, using tools such as meditation, acupuncture, and massage.
4. Set Boundaries – Boundaries can be used to focus your essential best energies on your desires. E.g., I recently decided to work solely with collaborators with affiliate systems.  My energy isn’t wasted manually tracking commissions and my desire for sharing abundance is ensured!
5. Visualize Daily – Imagination is one of your most powerful tools for keeping the faith. Just 5 – 10 minutes a day of visualizing your wishes coming true, and you will feel the essential nature of your dreams. Start with visualizing feeling happy and fill in with a few essential details.
6. Get Support – There is nothing like an inspiring book, movie, friend, quote or coach to keep you on track. Stay away from people who don’t believe or experiences that might bring you down. Expect Life to support your dreams and you will start seeing evidence everywhere!
7. Take Action – Don’t worry about correct or efficient action, but instead focus on pleasurable, feel-good action. Life will provide you with the guidance you need. Your work is to move forward, be open to Life’s gentle nudges, and enjoy the process of learning!

When combined, these 7 practices serve to give you an experience of what you want now. The gap rapidly closes between the ‘reality’ of your experience today and the future you desire. You will focus on the very real evidence of how what you want is already happening. This evidence will increase every day until – viola! You are living your dreams!

Premium Member Follow-up

I could have written a separate article on each of these key practices, but decided a high level summary would be useful and that you likely have some experience to work from. Let me know what questions you have or additional information you need to use these practices. I will discuss details in this months Premium Member Staying Your Course group coaching call.

These 7 key practices also follow the IAM Maps and of course the IAM Way. I’m curious, what components of the IAM Way do you see in these practices?! For example, which practices come from the Essence Map, Energy Map, and Navigational Compass?

Video, Video, Video!

I also had a brainstorm while writing this article: each one of these 7 key practices could be combined in a single tool that could be used every day to easily and powerfully establish all 7 practices! What is the tool? : A 5 – 10 minute video that captures the details of each practice for you to see and experience every day.  Talk about a powerful experience of living your vision, keeping the faith, and feeling essential!

I’m currently making a video for myself and I already have 3 clients lined up to make videos for themselves. Let me know if you are game! I estimate 2 hours of coaching for clients I’ve worked with to pull together text, images and video clips, I’ll handle the actual video creation gratis, and I promise that it will be a fun, easy and rewarding process!

Call or email if you are interested by 5/8 5pm ET – I’ll work with the first 5 people who contact me!

7 Key Practices For Keeping the Faith is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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Deciding when it’s time to move on from an unhappy work situation is a common topic of conversation with my clients. Often, a change in perspective will shift a difficult situation to good. Sometimes, what’s really needed is an ending and a move on to something better.

How do you know when to stick it out or when to call it quits?

Before I answer this question, I want to address thinking that typically clouds a ‘stay versus go’ decision:

1. Expecting work relationships to last forever.
2. Deriving a sense of safety from work relationships.

Relationships, including those at work, can last for a moment, a season, or a lifetime. The key is to know when a situation is complete, at which point a natural ending is best.

Too often people expect relationships to last forever, especially when they get a sense of safety from that relationship. Think about getting a steady paycheck. People on both sides of giving and receiving pay often continue the relationship well past its natural conclusion – because both sides are avoiding what they fear will be a difficult conversation or ending. It feels safer to stick with the situation as-is.

We are free to make changes that are good for everyone involved when we aren’t stymied by the fear of conflict or an ending, and we derive a sense of safety from faith and trust in ourselves instead of the stasis of relationship. All relationships, including those at work, have natural seasons that we need to honor.

Given this understanding, here are some typical factors I’ve experienced myself and with my clients that are important to consider in the ‘stay or go’ decision:

• Lifelong Learning
• Stay/Keep: Healthy life-long relationships are built on ongoing mutual learning. A dedication to learning keeps relationships interesting, productive, and growing.
• Go/End: Dysfunctional relationships are caused by a lack of ability or willingness to learn. People who are blaming are not learning, they are stuck in drama patterns, and the last thing you want is for their drama to become your drama.
• Shared Leadership
• Stay/Keep: Relationships are long lasting when both sides take 100% responsibility for maintaining healthy communication and interactions, including process checks.
• Go/End: Relationships break down when desires/needs/wants are withheld. Learning about performance/contribution dissatisfaction at a yearly performance review or after months of silence means leadership is not being shared.
• Essential Best
• Stay/Keep: Mutual benefit is maximized in an ongoing way when both the employee and employer experience fun, creativity and joy by bringing their essential best to work.
• Go/End: Drama such as persistent health issues, family challenges, and excuses about lack of engagement must become openings for essential learning or these situations will create unsustainable relations.
• Common Values
• Stay/Keep: Common values are like magic in a relationship; they make it easy to focus on ‘what matters most’ for all people involved in a work effort.
• Go/End: Working with people who have different values is like trying to function on an alien planet. It’s better to say aliens are ‘not my thing’ and simply leave rather than struggling. Aliens are not bad or wrong, they’re just alien!
• Leverage Strengths
• Stay/Keep: Optimal productivity occurs when people use their talents and strengths. Relationships are long-lasting when people support each other in using their strengths to the greatest extent possible.
• Go/End: The goals of an organization change over time, as do the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to accomplish work. When the goals of a business no longer require your strengths, it’s time to either reinvent yourself and the work to fit, or move on.
• Honor Motivations
• Stay/Keep: Honoring your motivations and interests becomes the passionate fuel that keeps relationships evolving toward a shared vision.
• Go/End: People who use their talents in an organization but are not interested in outcomes to which they are contributing, cannot and will not be sustainably engaged and excited about their work.

Very few unhappy work situations are clearly complete. It usually takes some time and effort trying to address the issues of poor fit described here, to know when you have reached the end of a season.

Employment situations are different than entrepreneurial collaborations; the stakes are much higher for small businesses that have very little spare energy and resources to invest in dysfunction and drama. I rarely see successful entrepreneurs waste the learning that comes from drama.

In all situations, once it is clear you are complete, you must act. Your integrity, your energy, and the results of your business are at stake. And I promise, creating clean and healthy endings is something that you can become really, really good at! The end of one season means the beginning of another.

When determining the season of your work relationships, you must decide what factors are right for you to consider. I know for sure that unhappy work situations are caused when the factors I’ve discussed here are not addressed in a timely fashion.

What other factors do you consider when deciding to stay or go in a work situation? Let us learn from your experience!

The Seasons of Work Relationships is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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Too much, you have ... A real job, you must find ...

A powerful article by IAMLC member, author, and blogger Shannon Turlington.

When I was a full-time writer, I heard a certain question a lot. It was posed different ways, but it always amounted to the same thing: “Do you make any money doing that?” And the implicit question behind it was: “Why don’t you get a real job?”

Real job meant, of course, a job that paid a salary. A job that took place somewhere other than my home. Where I had a boss telling me what to do.

The idea was certainly attractive. As a writer, money and my next project were constant worries. I had to provide my own benefits and pay my own Social Security. But it was only after I took a couple of gigs that didn’t feel were right for me — but still, I needed the money — that I decided to chuck it in and get that real job.

Here were some things I learned while I was working my real job. Nothing can be done without holding a meeting — or preferably, a whole series of them — first. “Collaboration” means spending countless hours consulting everyone without anyone helping you do the actual work.  Having to be in a certain place at certain hours even if it wasn’t the most productive use of my time feels unpleasantly like being back in middle school.

I don’t have a real job anymore. I don’t have any job right now, unless you count mothering as a job, which most people don’t. And it feels great. I know that I don’t want to go back.

Reflecting on this brings to mind the eye-opening book Your Money or Your Life. We must each ask ourselves: “How much value does my life have? How many hours should I have to work to buy this pair of designer jeans or this new television or this DVD I don’t need? Is it worth it?” No one else — certainly not your boss or the company that gives you that real job — will be asking these questions for you.

It saddens me when I hear people say things like: “I’m lucky just to have a job.” Yes, even in these tough economic times, we must remember that our time and labor still have value. We have to establish our own value. We can’t let our employers determine how much our lives are worth.

Everyone acknowledges that there are no more jobs for life. I would argue that there are no more real jobs, even. Companies showed no hesitation at shedding workers when hard economic times hit. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Health insurance and other benefits are being cut back, and more of the cost is being passed on to workers. Companies show no loyalty to their workers, so why should workers be expected to be unquestionably loyal to their employers?

We all work for ourselves, even if we have real jobs. We can’t expect our employers or the government to look out for our best interests anymore. Each of us is a corporation of one, and we are our own CEOs. And it’s time we start deciding for ourselves what our time, what our labor — what our lives — are worth.

Get A Real Job is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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The IAM Career Alignment Assessment is an essential guidance instrument to align your career path with your soul journey.

Free Members in the IAM Learning Community automatically have access to this tool!

The IAM Career Alignment Assessment …

• reveals the 5 key factors of career alignment
• clarifies ‘the right’ next steps in your career
• includes an in-depth report with detailed scores
• charts your scores against the IAM Career Alignment Matrix and 5 key career factors
• provides recommended actions to continue on a soul aligned career journey

Access the assessment here:
(be sure you are logged in)

Sorry, you do not have access to this content.

IAM Tool – Career Alignment Assessment is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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It can seem impossible to think of your career development path as “abundant” when you feel stuck in a dead end job.

IAM has always had abundance and an abundant philosophy baked into our methodology for career alignment and transformation. The recent meteoric launch of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s persuasive book, Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think, appears at a perfect time to bring heightened awareness and focus to seeking a more abundant life, fueled by abundant careers.

But when your resume appears to shackle you to a limited career path, “abundant” is perhaps the last adjective you would choose to describe your life.  Even worse when your current work environment feels stagnant or seems to be a never-ending spiral of politics and drama.

The daily grind can easily grind you into mush and hopelessness if you don’t do something to reset your career view and break the cycle of work that appears to lead nowhere.

Fiona’s Common Career Dilemma

I recently worked with a client in exactly this kind of state. When Fiona looked at her education and resume, she saw herself locked into a future path that she didn’t like very much. Her choice of education had been based on family history and something she “thought” she would like to do for a living.

After working in her career for a few years she discovered two things:

1. She didn’t like the work her education prepared her to do at all, and
2. Her job was a far distance from what she enjoyed and really wanted do with her life.

To complicate the situation, office politics and the tension she felt about her career seemed to make matters worse among her co-workers. Contentment and abundance were nowhere in sight.

To put this in IAM terms, Fiona’s “career path” had verged way off of her “soul path” and now she had no idea how to find her way back. Fiona’s dilemma presents such a common pattern that it is almost a textbook portrait of most people’s career stories.

How Do We Lose Our Soul Path?

It happens more often than not.  We choose an educational or career focus because it is something we think we want to do or simply because a job is available. We begin to do some aspect of work well even though it may not be something we like to do.

People recognize that we do it well so they give us more of it. Before we know it we get promoted, receive more pay and maybe even are asked to manage other people in an area of work that does very little to light our passions.

Five, ten or fifteen years down the road our career path is so far off our soul path that we can’t see the forest for the trees that now suffocate us. The tread mill that keeps us on that path never stops and only seems to go faster.

Combine this scenario with a drama-filled work environment and your job can look a lot more like living hell than any kind of vision of “abundance”.

IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW, KEEP READING …

The Path Back to Your Path

There are three essential realizations that are invaluable in helping unlock you from your current career path and align your journey back to your soul path. These are important mind shift changes that lead to changes in action. Collectively they can majorly reset your career.

(Realization 1) Your education and career history are not life sentences.  We often hear people attempt to justify staying in a career they hate because of the “investments” they have made in their education and work experience so far. That is roughly equivalent to a company trying to get full price for inventory they purchased five or ten years ago that should have long since been depreciated down to zero.

Accountants call investments made in the past “sunk cost”.  In other words, that investment was already made and is water under the bridge.  Far better to retool those assets into something more valuable than to keep trying to milk old value out of them and remain in a career that does not ignite you. Your career assets are often more valuable aligned with something you love to do.

(Realization 2) Resumes can be counterproductive.  Your resume can work against you in your goal of aligning your career with your soul path. Resumes are often deceptive and counterproductive documents when it comes to finding the right career for you. That’s because they aren’t accurate portraits of what you “want” to do; they often simply record and market what you “did” do. Your resume is not the sum total of you.

If your resume presentation doesn’t contain a balance of your work history AND your future career desires, it will most likely perpetuate your problem by finding you more of what you don’t want to do.  Far better to use your resume as one piece of the larger story of your career direction, including your past history AND future vocational desires.

(Realization 3) Abundance is available NOW.  This may be the most difficult of the three mind shifts to make. As you consider realigning your career, your current situation, including all of its joys and sorrows, is exactly what you need to get you to a better place. In fact, your deepest current agony and the most troublesome people in your life are often the best clues to your release into career enjoyment.

We call the challenging stuff, “Drama“, and it contains some of the most valuable assets you have in recognizing your current situation as “abundant” (see my previous article, “A Guys View of Drama”).

States of Vision and Contentment

One clue into realizing how to create “Abundance Now” comes from Vishen Lakhiani, the founder and CEO of Mindvalley.

Vishen defines four states of vision and contentment that can easily be applied to jobs and careers. These states determine whether we are sinking in a negative spiral of misery, trapped in neutral states of stress or complacency, or rising abundantly in what Vishen calls a “State of Flow”.

Combining Vishen’s vision of “Flow” with IAM’s approach to managing Drama can provide you with a structured framework for transforming your current “job” situation into a career about which you can feel “abundant”.

IAM’s Tools for Achieving Career Abundance

The career path mind shifts and the career alignment framework are enabled on the front end by two IAM tools we have been discussing for the last few months:

1. IAM Career Alignment Assessment – “Are You Aligned and Essential” – FREE with Membership
2. IAM Career Desires Navigator – Only $27

Individually these tools are invaluable ways to assess and chart your desires for your career alignment journey.  Used together, there is no more powerful way we know of to align your path for abundance.

Regarding our client Fiona, who thought she was stuck on some career path train tracks she couldn’t exit … a few hours with the IAM tools above, assisted with IAM career coaching enabled her to jump the tracks and head back toward the career path where she belongs. According to Fiona, her outlook now is very hopeful.

Your Purpose = Your Abundant Career

You were uniquely endowed with a purpose. You are the only person on the planet who can serve that purpose in the unique way that only you can. Aligning with that purpose can lead you to abundance faster than you think … NOW, in fact.

Your Abundant Career Now is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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The IAM Essence Map is a tool that shifts organizations into alignment with their best performance, one individual at a time. It starts with personal alignment with your soul self – your Essential Best as defined by you.

The results for people who regularly work with the Essence Map are radical – a complete transformation into creating your work and life exactly as you desire. Likewise in an organization, individualy by individual, we can transform how we conduct business by amplifying best practices, leaving behind once and for all the practices that deplete people, resources and the planet.

We use the Essence Map to talk about what is essential versus what is drama, and thus create awareness of our attention. What we focus on is what we create. So the choices we make in our focus are critical to the results we achieve.

Most business people would easily agree that they want to achieve the kind of results that are possible when the people involved in the business are performing at their best. But too often, our problem solving natures pull us into a focus on ‘fixing the drama’. Which results in more drama!

You know you are focusing on drama when you are blaming others, your choices are driven by fear, or you are struggling to achieve what you want.

The alternative is to focus on what is already working well, on your strengths, on what you can appreciate, on the positive – what we call ‘the essential’. Here’s a view of the most common words our clients have used with the Essence Map:

The more attention we put on being our Essential Best, on acting from a calm and centered place, on supporting people in being their best, the more best case results we can achieve. Focus on the Essential is the single most important leadership skill to have.

One of the tricky aspects of Focusing on the Essential is that it’s looking at something intangible. It’s like putting your trust in the wind: you can’t actually see it but you can see the effect it creates. How do you put your trust in something like the wind?

Two things are critical:

1. Personal experience with an Essential Focus
2. Organizational understanding of a collective Essential Focus

You can put your trust in Focusing on the Essential when you see for yourself the results: the increasing ability to create your experience exactly as you want. Unless you learn to trust what happens when you focus on your own personal Essential Best, you will not have the clarity, confidence or courage to guide others to their Essential Best, let alone be able to model the behavior for others.

You can put your trust in Focusing on the Essential when you understand the benefit of doing so for your business, and the organizational cost of a drama focus. A simple cost / benefit analysis is needed.

The benefits of focusing on the essential:

• Full engagement
• Energy
• Creativity
• Innovation
• Health
• Productivity
• Focus
• Sustainability

The costs of focusing on drama:

• Exhaustion
• Health issues
• Boredom
• Stress
• Insomnia
• Detachment
• False limitations
• Decreased performance
• Sabotage

Yes, the cost of drama is high and as a whole we have spent many trillions of dollars trying to fix problems with a drama focus. Think about the results: we focus on resolving conflict by fighting wars, we focus on healing by battling illness, we focus on interpersonal challenges by managing performance. In each of these examples we spend huge sums of money only to create more of what we are trying to resolve. Sure, there is good in the process, but the ultimate result is more of the same problem.

A focus on drama creates more drama.

Please, please, please know that in exploring these examples of drama I do so with great love and understanding for why people undertake drama oriented approaches. I understand. I see the results. I want something different. I know it’s possible. We have a better way…

The better way is to go back to step 1 above: personal experience. Instead of focusing others, my invitation is to simply focus on yourself. For example, if you are a leader and you are not getting the kind of behavior you want from your colleagues, stop focusing on them, focus on yourself, and get yourself back into alignment with your Essential Best. I can assure you, any issue you  ‘see out there’ is a reflection of turmoil that exists within yourself.

Here are some steps you can take to act on the business case for Focusing on the Essential, both for yourself and an organization:

1. Make it personal. What is your personal point of pain? What is the businesses point of pain? Identify a compelling need for change for BOTH.
2. Paint a picture. Use the Essence Map or some other way of demonstrating the benefit of an Essential Best focus, and the cost of drama. Emphasize that a different way is needed to achieve results that are liberated from the constraints of drama.
3. Bring hope. Ask yourself what you really want. Ask others about what they want. Start with your desire for something better. Be relentless about seeing the Essential Best in yourself (first!) and in each person you work with.
4. Keep it simple. Stay clear by being at your own Essential Best. Drama is confusing and creates complexity.
5. Take a stand. Be a leader for yourself and others – by being at your Essential Best and by coaching and challenging others to be their Essential Best.
6. Become an expert. Being able to shift from drama to essence over and over will give you the confidence to coach and lead others.

In summary, people have become confused. Many people think that you solve a problem by spending time, money and resources battling the issue. Our premise is that no problem can truly be solved at the same level of consciousness that created the problem. Only by first shifting to our Essential Best and inviting others to their Essential Best, can we address the root cause of all problems which is a disconnect in our alignment with our essence.

As people remember that time with their families, their happiness, and their sense of well being is most important, we have an opportunity to help translate these realizations into more evolved ways of conducting business by returning to a Focus on the Essential.

Will you play a part? How are you creating more evolved ways of conducting business?

The Business Case For Focusing On The Essential is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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“The Flip” is a shift in perception and experience that leads from trapped and limited possibility where you are at the mercy of your circumstances, to experiences of liberation and infinite possibility where you are the creator of your reality.

Here’s how “The Flip” happened with one of my clients.

The Story of Sandra

I started working with “Sandra,” the director of her department, when her manager became frustrated with Sandra’s inability to be strategic and passionate about her work. Sandra was also aggravated by the craziness of her organization. Both Sandra and her manager agreed that career/leadership coaching would help.

Frustration was warranted on both sides:  Sandra was getting mixed messages about her performance from her manager and was working with a leadership team that demonstrated very little strategic ability themselves. She had become timid because of these mixed messages she experienced –  her hesitation reinforced her manager’s perception of a problem.

Sandra was allowing herself to be limited by a difficult situation. She felt trapped with no options and saw no clear action that would resolve the situation. As our coaching progressed even I was concerned that Sandra wouldn’t break out of her difficulties.

It was Sandra’s decision to quit her job that finally allowed her to become empowered and see more possibilities, both inside and outside of her organization. She decided that she had had enough of “the crazies”; she could and would try something different.

Ironically, once Sandra decided to quit her job, she became both more strategic and passionate about her work. Where before she had been afraid to take risks and “rock the boat,” she now felt she had nothing to lose and she became more assertive. She took the lead in conversations and projects that she cared about, and persisted in presenting her solutions.

As a result, Sandra’s manager began to see her as more strategic and passionate, exactly the goals of our coaching. Sandra had made “The Flip”.

Plato’s Cave

“The Flip” is not something that you can just read about and understand – it must be experienced. As a coach I have learned to be very patient with the process of flipping.

At the same time, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of “The Flip”. The sooner you flip, the sooner you start moving out of difficult situations.

The fictional story of Plato’s Cave from Plato’s work, The Republic, illustrates the power of “The Flip”…

A group of people is chained and held immobile since childhood in a deep, dark cave, their heads held in place in such a way that they can only see a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is a huge fire. Between the fire and the people is a pathway, where people walk with objects that create shadows on the wall the people can see.

The people live their lives seeing the shadows cast by others, believing that reality is comprised only of the images on the wall.

The story continues with one of the prisoners being freed. This person sees the things that create the shadows: the people, the objects, and the fire. After a lifetime of solely seeing shadows, these things are confusing and not recognizable. The fire is too bright and overwhelming and the person is compelled to look back at the familiar shadows for orientation.

It takes time for this person to realize that the shadows are just a partial component of reality.

The story continues with the prisoner being brought out of the cave into the world of the sun, with day and night, seasons, and plants: an expanded reality. Eventually the person acclimates and comes to enjoy this new reality.

But the freed prisoner remembers the people in the cave. How might they understand how shadows are created as projections from what Plato called “The Forms” or “thoughts”.  How might they understand the expanded possibilities of reality outside the cave?

“The Flip” is a process of answering these questions and understanding that the reality you know as true is a result of your perceptions and experiences, as in the story of Plato’s Cave. The IAM Essence Map is the tool we use in the IAM Way to make this flip.

The IAM Essence Map

When I started working with Sandra, her main focus was on her manager’s mixed messages and the reactive behavior (not strategic) of the leadership team: all true perceptions.

Sandra’s focus was on what we call Drama – the difficult details of her situation – the shadows dancing on the walls of her perception.

Once Sandra decided to quit, she broke the chains that keep her focused on Drama. She experimented with what we call her Essential Best – the ideas and behaviors that come from her Essence – the light that is the source of her soul or true self.

Sandra made “The Flip” only after she saw for herself the response of her manager and the leadership team to her new behaviors. She created different experiences and an expanded reality that included possibilities that were not available before she flipped. This includes her being much happier in exactly the same situation she was in when we started coaching.

Some examples of what people see from a Drama perception include:

• Focus on people, situations and circumstances outside of yourself as the source of your problems
• Feel resigned about ‘what is’ with little or no belief that your career or life could be any different
• See other people as fragile or not capable of handling the feedback and challenge you can provide

Some examples of what people see from an Essential Best perception include:

• Focus on your beliefs and patterns of behavior as the source of your experience
• Find opportunity within difficulty to clarify what you want and then have that happen
• See other people as healthy, whole and resourceful

The IAM Essence Map can be used as a diagnostic tool for yourself and others to check where your perception is coming from.

A Continuum of Flipping

Once Sandra saw how people responded to her when she made some changes, we could discuss additional flips and possibilities.

Sandra and I now talk about her first major flip as we discuss the challenges she is facing as a leader. I occasionally remind her of what she was like before she flipped and challenge her to coach people in their own process of flipping.

“The Flip” is not actually one flip but a series of many shifts as we explore what it means to be powerful creators of our experience, more and more every day, leading others to be empowered.

The story of “Plato’s Cave” shows that it’s a process that takes time to journey out of a “dark cave” of sight and perception, into the world of possibility above “the cave”:

“The prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.   ~~ Plato, The Republic, Book VII

Remember that “The Flip” requires challenging yourself and others to reconsider what is “real” on an ongoing basis. The IAM Essence Map is a simple and practical tool that you can repeatedly use to guide people out of “dark cave realities” that are created when they focus on Drama, and flip to a focus through the perspective of their Essential Best.

Your IAM Coaches are here to remind you of the possibilities that are available to you in the world outside of “dark caves”, the kinds of experiences that are possible when you flip to a perception of the world that is available from the perspective of your Essential Best – especially in a holistic way that honors your head, heart and spirit!

So let us know the story your flip! Or your hopes for a flip … It’s all good  you know.

Have You Made The Flip? is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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Learning to lead and manage upward is critical to delivering winning results for your career and for your organization – double win.

This is a follow-on article to “The Myth of Hierarchical Leadership“, which I published in the IAM blog on December 22nd.  In that article we discussed how leadership in organizations does not just flow from the top. In fact, the majority of day-to-day leadership decisions and actions can and should emanate from all over the organization, particularly from the front lines of action.

In the healthiest organizations, front-line people are enabled, empowered and trusted to make autonomous decisions in real-time that benefit the health and goals of the organization. This kind of autonomy also enables higher job satisfaction and fulfillment in our personal careers. This is a key bridge between what IAM refers to as “Career Alignment” and “Workplace Alignment”.

From where does that trusted enablement and empowerment emanate? Is this yet another type of blessing that people must wait for from “top management”?  No … and that is the point!

The very words “enablement” and “empowerment” have become soured over time largely because many people see them as something they need to wait for someone else to bestow on them.  If so, the people and the organization as a whole choose to remain entrapped and limited within the Myth of Hierarchical Leadership.

It Begins with You

For decisions and actions that relate to your area of responsibility and your career, the path to trusted enablement and empowerment must begin with you. That begins by first realizing that most organizations have their management hierarchies turned upside-down. Healthy organizations flip the model of who leads and who serves.

One of the most important roles of senior management in any organization is to serve the needs of the groups and individual contributors within the organization, not the other way around. The best senior management leaders know that they serve their organizations and their people best when they operate continuously in service and support roles rather than in modes of artificial command-and-control.  If yours don’t, it is critical to your job and your career to help retrain yourself and them.

The best way for people in senior positions to know what service the organization needs from them is for you to tell and show them … you “Leading and Managing Upward”. Unless the people who have authority over budgets, people and resources know what you need to accomplish your goals, they are left in a position of guessing and you are left in a position of waiting. This simply perpetuates the Myth and a continuous cycle of us-versus-them … “We can’t get anything done because we are always waiting for them” … “They don’t accomplish things fast enough because they are always waiting for us”.

Key Factors of Managing Upward

The most effective way that you can serve your organization, your own career and your personal job satisfaction is to realize your role as a leader in your organization and Manage Upward. That means being very clear in your communications about exactly what you need to accomplish your role in the organization and exactly how you need senior management to serve you in that role.

To be most effective, your communications about your wants and needs should have at least five important characteristics:

Context:  Understand the other goals and priorities of the organization and do your best to present your request within the context of those other priorities. You do not work in isolation. Often decision-makers must weigh your requests and recommendations in the context of other, perhaps competing, priorities. Help them with that.

Fact-Based: Do your homework, understand the details as best you can and present the facts. Stay away from speculation, estimations and personal assumptions. The time to use your gut-feel and intuitive judgment is AFTER you have the resources you need, not when you are trying to get them.

Results-Oriented: Frame your requests and recommendations within the context of how they will benefit the organization. These benefits should be as tangible, realistic to achieve and measureable as possible.

Concise Clarity of Need:  Be as specific as possible about what you need from the person you are asking, as well as from the other resources within his or her range of responsibility.

Timing:   Timing is very important. Being specific about urgency and when you need the resources will help ensure you get what you need when you need it.

Fruits of Empowerment

The fruits of a workplace of enabled and empowered people are literally limitless.

When individuals and teams operate in an environment of autonomous freedom, the agility of thinking, nimbleness of response and latitude in the ability to be creative and innovative takes on dimensions that cannot be achieved by environments constrained by structures of top-down management.

When you realize that empowerment is yours to create, your career and your workplace will be transformed in ways beyond your imagination.

Managing Upward Requires Re-Training

Creating an environment of empowered autonomy for yourself and your organization will probably require some retraining for you and for the people who have ascended to senior management positions. The Myth is strong, self-perpetuating and requires work to dismantle its fallacies of command-and-control.  The best way for you to help dismantle it is through your communications and actions. Letting people in senior management positions know exactly what you need and why you need them will not only build their confidence in you, it will give them guidance in what the organization needs from them.

Your enablement and empowerment begins with enabling and empowering yourself. If you choose to remain trapped within the Myth of Hierarchical Leadership, including the crippling effects it has on your organization and on your personal career, look nowhere else to blame but in your own mirror.

Leading and Managing Upward is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

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Welcome to our archives of past SYC calls!

Our Monthly Staying Your Course teleconferences are focused on topics that Premium Members want to discuss.

In general, the intention for SYC is to support you in staying focused on your essential best, learning from drama, banishing stress, and shifting beliefs that keep you from creating what you REALLY want with your work and life.

Let us know what topics are of interest to you and we’ll be sure to include these on a SYC call! (Add your topics, questions, comments below …)

Calls are scheduled on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 1pm ET. Don’t worry about missing a call as they are all recorded and archived here. These recordings are for Premium Members only…

Sorry, this content is for members only. Click here to get access.   Already a member? Login below… Email Password   Remember me (for 2 weeks) Forgot Password

Staying Your Course: 2012 Past Call Recordings is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

Related posts:

1. Protected: PLF MM Call – 7.15.11 There is no excerpt because this is a protected post....

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Welcome to our archives of past SYC calls!

Our Monthly Staying Your Course teleconferences are focused on topics that Premium Members want to discuss.

In general, the intention for SYC is to support you in staying focused on your essential best, learning from drama, banishing stress, and shifting beliefs that keep you from creating what you REALLY want with your work and life.

Let us know what topics are of interest to you and we’ll be sure to include these on a SYC call! (Add your topics, questions, comments below …)

Calls are scheduled on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 1pm ET. Don’t worry about missing a call as they are all recorded and archived here. These recordings are for Premium Members only…

Sorry, this content is for members only. Click here to get access.   Already a member? Login below… Email Password   Remember me (for 2 weeks) Forgot Password

Staying Your Course: 2012 Past Call Recordings is a post from: IAM Learning Community. The IAM Learning Community is a career exploration and workplace transformation forum. Career development and workplace alignment with Soul Purpose is our mission. Career and workplace Transformation using the IAM Way is our proven path to success on that mission. The result is careers aligned with Purpose, organizations aligned for peak performance, and a reduction in workplace stress.

Related posts:

1. Protected: PLF MM Call – 7.15.11 There is no excerpt because this is a protected post....

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