I got myself into a black hole project because I failed to ask the important questions.  Now I’m stuck for the next few weeks on something that’s probably not going to go anywhere.

Here’s the information, if I would have pushed for it, would make these next few weeks more likely to be worthwhile.

Success or Exit Information

What information will tell you we’ve made it, you’re successful? How will you know you’re done?

What information will tell you you need to quit? This is rarely discussed, but it’s so important. Not every project is worth pursuing – most aren’t. Not every idea is worth pursuing, but you need to have an idea of when to kill it.

Path Information

What information tells you you’re on the right path?  What will signal you’re going in the right direction?  It makes sense.  You’re going to slog away at this for a few weeks.  If there’s a way to know you’re making progress, let’s have that way available.

What information tells you you’re going in the wrong direction?  How will you know when you’re off the path?  Better to know this quickly and adjust.  Even better to know what to look for before it ever happens.

Viewpoint Information

What information would disprove the way you are looking at things?  It’s natural that once you’ve made a commitment you hunker down and only look for ways that confirm and validate what you’re doing. That’s not always helpful – you’ve turned our brain into a “yes man.” You need to have an idea of what dis-confirming evidence will look like beforehand. You’ll be more balanced as you work and think about the project.

So to summarize, have questions on what stops the project.  Have questions on how to know if it’s moving in the right direction.   Have questions on whether the project inhabits reality.

Get this information.  Nag.  Explain why it’s important.  Plead.  For your sanity’s sake, do it!

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Increase your chances of surviving the job you hate…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Know your environment!

This doesn’t mean know where you are on the earth (if you’ve forgotten, knowing so may help) and it doesn’t just mean being able to label what’s happening where you are.  It means have a good clue what’s going on rather than what you assume is going on.

Part of knowing your environment is knowing with whom you’re communicating.  Knowing whether you are communicating with a five year old or Nobel laureate is helpful.

When dealing with a difficult customer, here’s something to look for to help you know who you are dealing with.

Are they are matcher or a mismatcher?

Do they tend to agree with what you say, as in do they tend to look for points of agreement, or do they tend to contend with what you say, do see the exceptions?

Pay attention to this because it can help you immensely when interacting with them.

What do I mean by matcher/mismatcher.  First off, let me clear.  I’m not looking to give you more labels to put on people, they rarely help, they actually keep you from knowing your environment.  “Oh, you’re an X.”  Is the first step in being completely blind to who and what you’re dealing with in a situation.  A person IS NOT the label, the label clues you in to a potential pattern of behavior.

I’m sorry I feel it necessary to beat this point in, but people have a tendency to want to take a helpful tip and make it into a law of nature…they are not and doing so gets you in trouble.  You have to keep your brain on all the time, you can’t check out because you’ve effectively “labeled” a difficult customer.

A Matcher

They tend to agree with what you’re saying initially.  Their first expressed ideas tend to go along with the direction you’ve gone.  They tend to stay within the mental play area you’ve set out.  They will find similarities in their situation, experience, and imagination with what you’ve been expressing.

Part of this may be because they want to be liked and respected by you.  Maybe that’s part of their personal culture they grew up with in their family.  Perhaps it’s a bit of the wider culture – go along to get along.  Or perhaps that’s just how they’ve trained their brain to work.

It doesn’t matter.  Be aware of something…with you both agreeing you may miss things…big things because you are tending to see what works, what’s right, and what makes sense from the one perspective you both unintentionally are working.

A Mismatcher

Depending on their personality and people skills they can be interesting to annoying to work with.  More self-aware and/or mature people know when finding fault, problems, and exceptions are helpful and when they are useless and/or damaging.

A mismatcher finds where what you’ve said won’t work.  The first things they tend to express is the exception to the rule, the slight ambiguity in the definition you are using, the potentially false premise you are basing your point upon.  They may say, “Well actually…” quite a bit.

A mismatcher seems to want accuracy, but more often then not they see their response as an opportunity to show how smart they are or that they are the smartest in the room (yep, I have a strong tendency to be a mismatcher).

When dealing with a mismatcher you may find discussions are bogged down in details and what ifs more than seems necessary.  It feels as if the other person is trying to prove how dumb you are (not necessarily the case, they may, often do, have a strong need to show that they are smart…it’s a learned behavior, show others value through intelligence, it’s cheap and addictive), and this can deter effectively working together.

Working With Difficult Customers

Most likely the difficult customer is a mismatcher, strong mismatchers rub many people the wrong way (and they don’t realize it because their need to be been seen as intelligent is bordering on addiction or obsession…again, personal admission).

Realize with whom you’re dealing so you don’t get sucked into a pointless argument.  Then be proactive (you can be proactive because you know your environment) by gently putting parameters around your questions.

“Okay, we need to see how this may work and may not work so we can better understand what we’re up against.  First, how might this work and why would it be of value…”

“Okay now, how might it not work?  Dave, I know you’re chomping at the bit on this, what do you got?”

See by setting things up from the beginning acknowledging both tendencies you keep things civil.  Guaranteed to work.  No.  Just because you give parameters doesn’t mean anyone has to follow them, and people won’t, but you can gently guide things back if you need to.

Dealing with a matcher is a little different.

It may be that they want to be liked or accepted so they agree with everything that’s said.  “Uh huh uh huh.  That’s right.  Yeah yeah.”  These are strong signs.

Funny thing is, you have to do the same “tactic” to get them to think of how things might not work.  Set parameters to think within.  Note: it may take a minute for them to get into it.  Their minds do not normally work this way.  They can do it, but it requires a little bit of a reboot and then it takes a minute for the Brain OS to come back on line.  Be patient.  They’ll get into it.

There you go.  Matchers and Mismatchers.  Know who you are dealing with in your environment and you’ll give yourself a much better chance to survive and thrive.

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Want to further improve your chances of survival for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

We’re looking at three famous authors in the realm of motivation and behavior.  Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi of Flow fame.  Daniel Pink of Drive (he also wrote A Whole New Mind).  And of course Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (known best for his bestseller Blink!).

What we’re doing with them I think is called a mashup.  It’s a social media term from a few years ago – wiki it.

The premise of Daniel Pink’s book is that what motivates people is autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Malcolm Gladwell quips in Outliers…

“Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Before we get to Mihaly’s Flow, let’s see the interaction between Pink and Gladwell.

Autonomy – well, both have that.  Defining for yourself the how, the with whom, the when, the where, and the with what of your work.

Mastery – Complexity.  Mastery is the getting better at an activity.  Complexity is the surrounding context of mastery.  The more complex something is, the more mastery becomes a factor.  And perhaps, the more fulfilling mastery becomes.

Purpose – connection between effort and reward.  These aren’t too far off.  Pink’s purpose (what is Pink’s purpose, wait that’s the music biz, wrong tangent) is belonging to something bigger than oneself — this phrase is now becoming cliche, but it’s apropos here.  When you look at purpose from a different perspective you see that what you want is for what you’re doing to mean something.  So purpose is another way of saying you want a connection between what you do and the results you get…it’s just one tends to define results within a bigger “thing” than just your career…which would be selfish, and lacking the bigger purpose…tsk tsk.

From Flow (psychology) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Bold print is my additional commentary.

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.  Purpose

2. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it). Mastery

3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness. Mastery

4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered. Mastery.

5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed). Purpose, Mastery

6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult). Mastery.

7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. Autonomy.

8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action. Mastery, Purpose.

9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it). Mastery, Purpose.

10. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging. Mastery

Can you find these things in your job?  Can you carve out more autonomy?  Can you discover means to mastery?  Have you uncovered a greater purpose?

Must you have a boss or a business give it to you?  That would be nice.  It would make the workplace more productive, definitely.  But if they’re not going to give you it…and you’re not going to go anywhere else to get it…then you’ll have to muddle your way into bringing it into your job.

Survive.  Then thrive.

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Want to further improve your chances of survival for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Push

What’s probably the case with your job is it’s a push away from experience. You want to move away from the job you hate more than anything else you seem to be consciously aware. Maybe it’s the people, maybe it’s a certain task, maybe it’s a specific room, or maybe it’s all the above.

Either way you’ve got strong motivation to move away from it.

The good part about that motivation is that the closer you are to the job you hate, the more motivated you are.

The bad part is this…the more you move away from it, the less motivated you become.

It’s kind of like staring at a bright light bulb. The closer you are to it the more painful it is to look at, the more heat your feel from it. Yet as you move away from it the less and less effect it has on you.

Pull

Here’s where your wishes show up. What you want is out there. You know it, you can feel it.

When you really know what you want and you know how to move toward it and you can see whether you are moving toward it or not…you have a pull mechanism in place.

A pull motivator is one that the closer you get to it the more motivated you are. It’s like a large solar body whose gravity pulls you ever closer. The closer you get the more it pulls and pulls.

It does have a disadvantage.

When you start out, it’s very far away and has almost no pull upon you. It’s a nice thought, but that’s all it is, it’s not real enough to pull you out of the mire you’re in now.

So what do you?

Combine the two!

The push fires you away from your current situation strong enough to put you in a space where the pull grabs you and brings you in.

Now you’ll have to play with this. And there are many ways to do so. Maybe you won’t have just two poles (push/pull) but several mini ones on the way – I’d advise this actually. The point is to make sure you have two.

Why? Because you’re most likely going to just have a push pole. And ANY DIRECTION away from something you consider bad is “good”. But any direction doesn’t get you where you want to go.

Any direction could put in a WORSE position. Have you jumped out of a bad job into a worse job before?

So remember both when you get around to thinking about your motivation. You’ll get more bang for your buck.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving the job? For the cost of a cup of coffee check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Here’s a tip from Levit that applies…

* Make your boss look good. Go to lunch and discuss exactly what she needs from you. Determine how to surpass her expectations. Be self-sufficient and solution-oriented, respectful of her time, and accommodating.

via Alexandra Levit’s Water Cooler Wisdom: 5 Success Tips for Gen Y.

What?  Are you serious?!  My Boss is a class-A top tier biologically perfect jerk specimen!

That your boss may be, but you what…so might one of one clients when you’re your own boss.

Now you can play a game with yourself.  “I won’t work with people like that.”  And that means exactly nada, because you’ll be working so hard to get your business off the ground you’ll take just about any initial business you can take.  Then when you come up for air you’ll realize you have a client or two that are worse than any boss you’ve ever had.

So…

Find a way to make your boss look good now and you can consider this good practice for the difficulties of doing your own thing later.

I’m serious…

Often times we are temporarily trapped in a situation we don’t like…but it’s temporary.  Rather than stew on your misfortune reframe your situation.  Find a way to make this time investment time.  Make this time an exercise or practice for when you do get out into freer and greener pastures.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

You’re working on a complex project and things aren’t going as you’ve all anticipated.  You have an all-hands meeting to discuss what’s causing the problem.  You all bring up patterns you’ve seen, observations are made.  Your boss mentally clamps onto one concept, you idea of what is causing all this.  But it’s really not all that deep an explanation of what’s going on.  It’s kind of like this situation below…

So, if we see something like laptop sells declining while iPads are selling like hotcakes, we often jump to the conclusion that people are buying iPads instead of laptops. The actual cause of declining laptop sells could be that the economy is keeping some people from buying them, others are pretty happy with their current laptops and feel no need to upgrade, some are increasingly using their smartphones for email and bill paying and no longer see the need for laptops, and, of course, some people may be buying iPads instead of laptops.

Hopefully I am not telling you something totally new. Rather, my intention is to remind you that it is so easy for us to jump to conclusions rather than really thinking things through. We can do it without ever realizing it. Again, we are wired to do this, because being quick at determining a cause often meant the difference between life and death to our ancestors.

via Watch Out for Superficial Thinking.

Conclusions and causations.  Sometimes the obvious isn’t obvious at all.

Coincidences occur because there are always a lot of things occurring at any point of time.

There are a lot of things occurring at any given moment.  Time is moment after moment.  Therefore there are a lot of things occurring before other things occur.  Just because there is an occurrence before an event does not mean the occurrence caused the event.

The fact that many events are happening all at the same time and events occur event after event leaves many wrong candidates for causation.  It’s quite easy to find false attributions to causes.

What I’ve found really healthy is being quietly skeptical of any attribution to something causing something else.

Also, instead of seeing things causing things in a more or less one to one ratio, I try to remind myself to think, this may be a factor in that occurring.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

First, simple reasons to choose your battles. If you make this a fight…

Are you going to win anything worth winning?
Are you going to win something you don’t want?

Remember, on the downside of battling, fighting costs more than you realize: energy, attention, opportunity cost, reputation (others ideas about you).

On the upside, if you don’t speak up or persist the other person will have their way by default.  Have you ever been mistaken?  Perhaps they are.  Perhaps there’s some more valuable synthesis that can result if you have a battle.

The last important thing about battles is learning to let go.  If you really want to battle, but know it’s not worth it, and yet you cannot stop yourself…what’s the point of even being aware of all that stuff.  You’ll just use it later on to beat yourself up.  Learn to let go and save yourself some grief.

Okay, we’re all different and we rarely fit neatly into mentally constructed categories.  Actually, I see myself below in each one of them.  I do know I have strong tendencies though.  And as I’ve gotten older I’m seen these tendencies change.  Either way…

Which Type of Person Do You Tend to Be?

Aggressive

You tend to get yourself involved in too many battles.  And as often as the case is the 80/20 rule applies.  80% of your headache and heartache comes from only 20% of your battles.  What may really help you is the ability to stop a beat before you emotionally react.  The feelings come welling up and WHAM you’ve already fired the first salvo or POW you’ve decided you’re going to die on this hill out of principle.

You’ll seriously get the most mileage and best results out of being able to just wait a moment before you emotionally respond.  I’m not saying don’t respond.  I’m just saying you may save yourself quite a bit if you stop for a second.  How do you do this.  Notice that you’re getting angry or feel hurt or feel afraid.

Now this is quite different than telling yourself you ARE angry, hurt or afraid.  If you tell yourself you ARE something or say I AM hurt or angry, really, do you have any other recourse than to act that way?  But if you give yourself a chance to slow it down just a second by noticing you are starting to feel a certain way, you’ve given yourself a chance at control.

Passive

You’re a doormat.  You stuff your experiences.  You might think you have no right to feel a certain way (you have any right to feel any way you do, that’s like saying it has no right to rain today…it’s raining, handle the situation as it is, eventually it will stop raining, weather always changes, same with your emotions).

You probably need to experience more confrontations, more battles.  Battles are not always wasteful.  Sometimes they cannot be avoided…or better stated, sometimes you don’t have the time, experience, or insight at a particular moment to avoid a battle – you’ll always find a way later to see how you could have, after hours of thought…of course you had only 5 seconds in the moment, but why would you give yourself such a break?

Recommendation?  Battle more.

Not a lot more.  If you don’t ever get into confrontations I wouldn’t recommend you start having one for every single thing.  That’s childish.  One significant difference between an adult and a child is the understanding that there are more things than the exact opposite.  What do I mean.  You don’t have to be pleasant to everyone all the time.  Childish response: You mean I can be mean and nasty to everyone I come in contact with?  Seriously?  That’s the first thing that pops into your mind?  Here’s a tip, there’s an entire continuum between those two points.  Try something closer to where you currently are, get some experience and make adjusts, like the adult you are.  You are an adult.

Passive Analytic

You may be a little like the passive type, but when you are absolutely sure you’re right, you battle really hard and never let go.  You know what, you’re probably right 80% of the time…you think you’re right 100% of the time, you’ve developed a great mental defense mechanism of selective amnesia to when you were wrong.

So what’s the problem?  The problem is you’re still battling the wrong battles.  The right battles to fight are not the ones where you are 100% convinced you are right.  You may be 100% convinced you are right on a component of the project, but if that component is minor and now you’ve ticked off your whole team, you, the project, your company and the clients you serve are all worse off simply because of minutae.

Know-It-All, the Aggressive Analytic

If you say, “Well actually…” or consistently make adjustments to what people say, you’re the aggressive analytic.  You fight too many battles.  You are literally killing yourself by way of a thousand paper cuts.

You’re effectively being an intellectual bully.  Bullies tend to get their comeuppance, unless they grow up.  And yes, I’m saying grow up.  You know how you love that warm internal glow of being right and you despise and dread that cold falling feeling when you know or have been proven wrong?  Well guess what?  Other people do too.  Yep, those smiling, frowning, talking, walking entities called human beings enjoy being right and dislike being wrong.  They will avoid you more and more the more you focus on their being wrong.

It is childish.  Why?  Because adults have the ability to forgo instant gratification for greater rewards later.  Adults can forgo the instant gratification of correcting a minor issue for a smoother relationship and a growing respect.  Children can’t.  Children won’t.

Now, again.  Am I saying go to the opposite extreme?  No, that, AGAIN, would be childish.  Choose your battles.  If acting on what the person said would be damaging to them, yourself, or the client, ask for clarification or state, “Wait, you said 14%, did you mean the 17% from column D?”  If not, keep it to yourself.  You know what, forget keep it to yourself, DROP IT, let it go, forget about it, think about something else, continue to pay attention to what the person is saying.

One key point to take into account are unintended consequences. Unintended Consequences or UCs are difficult to predict (they are…unintended), nay impossible to predict fully.

What can help mitigate the problems they pose is thinking through what the changes to the environment your actions are making.

Stress is an example. The stress response does not kill you. But, over time experiencing stress again and again your body (the environment of health) becomes less and less conducive for healthy function and more and more conducive for disease and damage. Then when an opportunistic virus or bacteria comes along, you get ill. Or when you suffer physical damage your body is incapable of fully repairing itself leaving you more and more at risk for other problems.

Being on time is an example. If you tell your boss you’ll be there at a certain time, but you’re late…again and again.  Look at the effect on the environment of your work relationship.  The UC may be you are passed over for a promotion.  How?  What if you’ve just created an environment where your boss looks for how you’ll let him or her down?  Was that your intent, no of course not.  But, perhaps burning them this particular way has oriented them to seeing you disappoint them.  Unintentionally they’re NOT seeing the value you bring to the table.  Therefore when the time comes for promotions you don’t come to mind.  Maybe you talk later and you talk to them and get, “Hmm, you’re right, I didn’t think of that.”  Inside you become volcanic, it’s OBVIOUS the value you brought.  But unintentionally that value was missed because of a little effect you programmed into your work environment.

Bosses’ indecision can do the same thing. Especially if they are wafflers.  Over time they lay down a pattern of changes to projects and workflows.  The result is those who work for them put little effort into their work until the deadline is looming.  They start working hard when it’s too late to make significant changes.  Unfortunately what results is shoddy work and poorly thought through production.  The bosses waffling unintentionally effected the work environment.

Know your environment!  Be aware of how you’re effecting your environment!

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

…it’s so important to know whom you’re talking to; a lot of times, a group of like-minded people will assume they all agree about a hot-button topic or a divisive political figure (because they’re all in a certain place or a certain industry that “tends toward liberalism” or “tends toward conservatism”).

Often times we can be “lazy” and shut our brains off to what’s going on around us.

Laziness = assuming. Because most people in our office, industry, group, etc… seems to lean one particular direction (or at least seems to voice such openly) we assume that the person in front of us thinks and feels the same way.

One thing I’ve found helpful when dealing with another person is seeing the common ground that’s there behind the surface. We are so focused on the differences that (seem) to make a difference between two stands on an issue that we don’t realize the sheer common depth of the ground beneath us both.

Take for example the liberal – conservative contention on social and economic issues.

American Liberalism tends to want more freedom in social issues and more control over economic issues.

American Conservatism wants more control over social issues and more freedom over economic issues.

But look deeper.

In liberalism more social freedom means more avenues, safety and freedom of expression and identity. One problem. These have significant economic repercussions. Any time there is change there is an economic consequence. A change in values means a change in industries, businesses, brands, capital flows, etc… Businesses on the margin will shut down. Businesses that more align with changing values grow, therfore taking customers, money, and the top people from businesses less aligned.

And the fact is the regulating body, the government, isn’t privvy to what’s going on. It’s outside the industry and the market, therefore it doesn’t have the information to make good timely decisions.

The result, you don’t have nearly as much economic control as you thought.

It’s the same with conservatism.

If you have more economic freedom then you give more freedom for differing voices, differing cultures, and differing values to express themselves. A 100 billion dollar economy may not be large enough to support an alternative lifestyle’s cultural expression. In a 10 trillion dollar economy that culture can have more than one cable network.

What does that mean? You have less control than you think.

The common ground both sides rest upon is they’re in a situation, in a world, with less control than we think they have.

If you can see that, or the myriad of other things that you have in common you can have a good civil conversation.

It reminds me of the admonition, “Don’t make mountains out of molehills.” Well, compared to what? Compared to the sheer size of the planet on which they both sit — there’s not too much of a difference at all between them.

First off, today is November 2nd, election day in the United States.

In the US there are two main sides in the political spectrum, at least these are the two sides that get the most play in the media. They are represented by two parties, the Democratic and the Republican. There are cross overs – rarely is anything in life stark – but for the most part they are defined as a tendency toward liberalism and a tendency toward conservatism. Words change meanings over time, so the words don’t quite fit what the two sides are after, but for you readers outside the US. Liberalism tends toward more social freedom and toward more regulation of the economy. Conservatism tends toward more regulation of social issues and more freedom of the economy.

Here’s how I’ve learned to interact with the two sides, fairly amicably.

Most people in the US are not too politically savvy. That’s not a value judgement. For the most part most Americans do not feel the need to be extremely concerned with what their local, state, or federal government is doing. Therefore they know politics through a little bit of reading, some TV snippets, and catch phrases cycling through the popular culture.

If you find you are dealing with someone who is more liberal. You must first establish that you care about other people. First. Then once that’s established you can have a discussion on ways in which this care can be accomplished.

I’ve found if you do this effectively you can actually talk about things from a conservative perspective without raising the other person’s cackles.

There is a caveat. Vocabulary. There are certain words and phrases that identify you as an adherent of liberalism. Likewise there are certain words and phraseology that identify you with conservatism.

Interestingly enough, often times these words and phrases are ambiguous enough that you can use them on either side of the issue depending on your context and how you phrase things.

The same is true for conservatives. When you speak to someone who’s a conservative you must first establish that you believe in principles and effectiveness. I know, I’m quite broad in my terminology, human interaction is more an art than a science (at least when you’re crafting a short article). After you’ve established yourself in the space of principles and effectiveness, then you can discuss how to care for people.

What often happens in less than civil discussions between two people on different sides of the issue is what is a signal for one to interact is the exact signal for the other to disengage.

You talk to a conservative and start off “touchy-feely” you’ve identified yourself as a liberal, are probably crazy, and therefore an opponent. If you talk to a liberal and start off on principle and effectiveness you’ve set yourself up as a evil conservative and are therefore an opponent.

This brings me to the second point of politics in the workplace. Identification.

People identify with their political party in the US. Even if they do not spend too much time contemplating it. There are die-hard sports fans for the local team know very little about their current team. It’s not a knock on them. They choose to spend their time and attention on other aspects of life, everyone makes those choices.

I think of identification like the mathematical term, identity. A = A. 5 = 5. One side is the same as the other side.

Democrat = Me. Republican = Me. Liberal = Me. Conservative = Me.

Based upon those equations, what happens when you denigrate a party? You’ve denigrated the person. The two are connected, because in the person’s mind the two are almost the same.

It’s the same phenomenon in sports.

What makes things more touchy, is when other things are glommed onto the identification. Say ethnicity, culture or sub-culture, economic or social class, cause, etc… Then things become somewhat of a minefield with the person you’re dealing with. People who tend to have a strong coupling to many of these tend to be quite politically involved. Discussions with them tend to flow toward one of their touch points.

So how do you navigate political discussion in the office?

KNOW YOUR ENVIRONMENT.

Which means know who you’re talking to. Understand that who you’re talking to brings their own internal environment to the conversation.

Know that people generally bring three types of attitudes to the conversation. They want to interact, they want to be left alone, or they want to fight.

You’ve interacted with adults before. You intuitively know the signals and signs of annoyance and burgeoning aggression.

Know your environment and you can have a pleasant conversation with a liberal, conservative, libertarian, or marxist.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

What does believing in someone mean?  You’d that would be the direction I’d go, but no, like a rabbit evading a fox I jink this way…What happens in you, when you believe someone believes in you?  Why do you tend to perform better?

I submit you free yourself to fully perform.  Mentally.  Emotionally.  Physically.

Part of your unconscious (or subconscious, the part of your brain that’s working even when you’re not paying attention to it) is always pinging your surroundings like active sonar to see how you are doing socially.  It’s a defense mechanism, you are a social being and human beings do very poorly alone.  When you know someone believes in you these subconscious mental resources do not have to work so hard.  Resources can flow to other more important or necessary functions, such as your conscious attention.

This freeing of mental resources has significant repercussions.  You are now freed to bring another layer of awareness to the performance of activity, therefore you have more acuity for subtleties and nuances.  Whether you need to perform mentally or physically you have a greater chance of bringing the difference that makes a difference.

You have a less self-referential focus.  There is less thinking about yourself and more relaxed and confident attention to the task at hand.  Less self-conscious and more task-conscious.

This of course means less tension in acting, which means more suppleness in movement, thought, and sensing.  You move like you need to move, smoothly, rather than in a herky-jerky fashion because your brain is second guessing everything you’re doing.  The same with your thinking.  Less tension in your thinking allows your thinking to flow more effectively.  You see, hear, smell, taste, and feel more because tension tends to increase the noise in your head, dampening your ability to sense and interact with the people, the project, the office, or the client around you.

Finally, you have greater creativity, because you are less afraid.  When we’re afraid we tend to operate in established patterns of behavior (fight or flight).  In the brain this means more blood flows to the back of the brain and less is in the front.  It is the front of our brains where mental activity for creation and adaptation resides.

Well, perhaps your boss doesn’t seem to believe in you.  Maybe you can help change that by finding a way to believe in your boss.  Who knows that may be the weakest link in their chain.  Strengthening it may result in your work life becoming easier.

Or not.

No guarantees in life or work.

Lowered Expectations – NYTimes.com.

Danes seem to know instinctively that expectations kill happiness, leaving the rest of us unhappy un-Danes to sweat it out on the “hedonic treadmill.” That’s what researchers call the tendency to constantly ratchet up our expectations, a sort of emotional inflation that devalues today’s accomplishments and robs us of all but the most fleeting contentment. If a B-plus grade made us happy last semester, it’ll take an A-minus to register the same satisfaction this semester, and so on until eventually, inevitably, we fail to reach the next bar and slip into despair.

It’s here I’d like to introduce the difference between expectations and expectancy.  It’s covered in far more detail in the ebook.

Expectation

What is an expectation, in a general sense?  A mental image imposed upon others, yourself and/or the environment taken as a cosmic command to get that image fulfilled.

Really it’s three things intermingled.  The mental image, emotion and identity.  To have an expectation you have to have some image of some future arrangement of events.  It may be as vague as a warm fuzzy feeling coming out of a meeting to something as tangible as having an extra $500 on this months paycheck. Then there are feelings you glom onto that image.  Intense desire, confidence in it occurring, anger for it not having happened last month, fear, etc…  Finally there is the big bertha, identity.

What do I mean identity?  What I mean is you take your evaluation of getting what you want as an evaluation of yourself.  You take the two as equal.  I’m not saying it as clearly as I’d like, so I’ll use a metaphor.  Sports.  Your local sports team.  I’m in Chicago and it’s football season, American football, the one with the oblong that looks closer to a shoe than a ball.  If I’m a big fan then I equate the evaluation of the Chicago Bears with an evaluation of myself.

Chicago Bears = Me

If the Bears when, what does that mean?  It means I’ve won.  I’ve experienced a personal triumph.  If the Bears lose, I’ve lost.  Even though I’m sitting 5 miles away from the stadium half watching the game half checking my email.

Well it’s similar with expectations.  With expectations we take our evaluations of things going as expected as an evaluation of our self.  If we evaluate that our expectations are met or exceeded, we feel we’ve met or exceeded something.  If not, we feel we’ve been harmed or wronged somehow.

If a movie doesn’t meet my expectations then it’s insulted me.  I get angry because it’s harmed me (how, I’ve not quite figured that one out).

So when you combine a lot of emotion, a lot of “ooooooo it’s gotta go my way, I really really want this” with “what I expect = ME” you’re bound to get significant distress.

Expectancy

Expectancy is having an understanding of both what you would like to happen as well as a curiosity as to what may happen.

So expectation = mental image x emotion x identity

Expectancy = mental image + curiosity

Expectancy is where you have a lot less emotion glommed onto the result going your way.  Instead you displace that emotion into curiosity as what actually will happen.

So here’s a major difference between the two, how you see things turn out, as things are turning out.

With expectations you are seeing things through the filter of what you REALLY want and your identity.  Expectancy, has less of a filter (you always have a filter) because you are watching what’s actually happening to see how it turns out.

So perhaps a better way to say things is this.  With expectation you assume a posture of judging the situation.  With expectancy your posture is observing the situation.

Generally, observing is much less stressful than judging.

Generally, expectancy trumps expectation.  Because…

Expectation = entitlement

Expectation – I was told by someone whom I was told was an authority, therefore I believed what they said and I formed a mental image of what I wanted and I glommed on quite a bit of emotion to having it and I saw myself having that result and I evaluate my own value by how close I get that result.

The result occurs and my own evaluation of my worth and status is reflected 1:1 by my evaluation of the situation to my mental image.  So, assuming things fell short…I’d stew and fret, feel thwarted and resent.

Expectancy would say, “Oooo, that was unexpected,” and would immediately adapt to the new situation.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Half οf mу team hаѕ quit οr bееn fired, bυt I feel that I аm stuck іn mу current job аt lеаѕt until аftеr the baby іѕ born.

Thе other issue іѕ that I аm getting close tο full term and I hаνе missed several times due tο pregnancy related issues. Each time I miss work I tеll management immediately why I wаѕ gone, уеt they qυеѕtіοn mе аbουt іt repeatedly fοr days tο “verify that the absence wаѕ pregnancy related.” I feel they аrе trying tο discourage mе from missing fοr things I саn’t hеlр.?

via Pregnant and hate my job but I can’t leave? | Stress and Anxiety Information.

From the little bit of information we have, we can see that the working environment (it appears to be a call center of some sort when you read the full post) has a high turnover rate.  It probably has a high absentee rate.  As a manager one of your chief concerns is reducing those two factors.  Those are some of the largest expenses for a firm.  The cost and loss of value from a worker leaving plus the cost of finding and rehiring a work.  Also the daily value lost from an absent worker.  They also happen to be a couple of the biggest headaches for a manager.

The woman may not be one of those two types of workers (yet), but how is a manager to know?

Well she’s pregnant.

Just because a woman’s pregnant doesn’t mean she’s suddenly become virtuous and will refuse to game the system.  You can make the argument the exact opposite way, actually.

The fact of the matter is, the manager doesn’t know.  Therefore, signaling that you are not either one of these two types of people is probably your best recourse.

Explain to a manager the situation in a way the manager can understand it.  Not in the way you understand it.  When it’s about your job, it’s never just about you, but also one providing it…or at least with the ability to pull the job away from you.

Be proactive.  Have the hospital call the manager, email the manager, leave a voice mail for the manager on the day of the check up or appointment.  Heck, if you really need to be paranoid use your smartphone to take a short video of you meeting the doctor in the waiting room (with the TV on showing today’s news).

Assuming the manager is a normal person not completely corrupted by the sociopathic work environment, they will appreciate the forethought and how you’ve at least eliminated one stress and worry from their lives.  And most people, who are normal, make the life easier for those who make their lives easier.

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Want even more ways to improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Checking my email one day this week, I found one that started in a way destined to make my heart sink:

“I know we finalized this resume a while ago, but I showed it to a friend and he had some comments …”

My heart doesn’t sink because of the extra work – I don’t mind that if the comments are helpful – but because I know that they probably won’t be. So I now have two choices. 1) Make changes that will be detrimental to the document I worked so hard on creating or 2) get into lengthy explanations about why my client’s friend is mistaken. (I always go for the second option because I can’t bear to do bad things to someone’s resume).

Experienced this with your work?  Maybe a good client turns into a difficult client with just one conversation with a “friend.”

What you need is the professional’s reactive armor.

Near the end of the cold war.  There was an arms race between military powers along the lines of the power and protection of tanks.  Gun barrels grew larger 100mm to 105mm to 110mm to 120mm to 125mm.  The armor that protected tanks grew thicker and more exotic.  In the middle of all this, the wire guided missile arrives.  Now a team of two infantry men can stop a 60 ton multimillion dollar/ruble/pound/franc/rupee behemoth with a missile costing a few thousand and able to be manufactured in the thousands.

The response?  Reactive armor.  It’s really simple.  Missiles cut into the tanks by a jet of hot gases and liquified metal from their warhead.  The reactive armor is on the outside of the tank and explodes (reacts) before the metal and gases from the warhead reach the armor plating.  The result is it dissipates the effect.

(At one point it got so silly that there was a PR photo of a tank with 3 layers of the armor bolted on.)

How do you put reactive armor on your clients?  Preempt criticism while further protecting your clients with specific tidbits of knowledge.

As you are providing your service or at the final delivery of your service give them some of the inside information.  Explain why X is done and how those, not in the know, do Z instead and why Z is less effective for you.

Give them tidbits of your knowledge and expertise, give them a look behind the curtains.  If you do it right you can couch it as a secret (it is in a sense, those outside the industry don’t know it).

What’s the effect?

• You further elevate yourself as an expert, perhaps THE expert.
• You give them more information than anyone else has.
• The feel more confident in your product and in you.
• They trust your opinion and your work over others comments and criticisms.
• They’ll stand up to protect you and your work – they may even call or write you back to say how they defended you.  They are now in the know of “secrets”, they feel a part of your club.
• They’ll quietly laugh off the responses of those “not in the know” as ramblings of the ignorant.

Give your clients the reactive armor of specific semi-secret knowledge.  Defeat the man-portable missiles of offhand criticism before they’re even fired.

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Want to further improve your chances of surviving your job…for the cost of a cup of coffee?  Check out the $2.99 ebook Room 2 Maneuver HERE

Ouch.

How can this information benefit you?

Hold their assessments as you would something with a 1 in 5 chance of being correct. Investigate further.

Ask yourself, what’s really getting in the way to us doing this correctly? There’s a 1 in 5 chance it’s because we don’t know what we’re doing.  That means it’s a 4 in 5 chance it’s something else.  Well, actually, the stats are a bit off there, but you know what I’m getting at.  It’s closer to 5 in 6.

And you know what, the solution is probably not obvious to you or the management.  But it may be obvious to someone who’s not in your business culture or industry.

When we, as human beings, see things occur again and again we start to tune it out.  Stop for a second.  Listen to your environment.  Is there a humming sound, a ticking, is there something fairly regular happening that you’ve tuned out?

Our brains want to find new things, unique things, and interesting things.  We become blind to the humdrum.

If that humdrum is abject stupidity, we’ll be blind to that too.

What doesn’t work or what gets in your way from working more effectively, as a person, and as a business unit may be something that’s done day in and day out.  It is part of the scenery.  You’ve tuned it out and so has the management.

Perhaps it made sense last quarter.  Perhaps last year.  Perhaps the last large business cycle, but it doesn’t make sense now.  But you’ve done it that way time after time.  It’s now policy.

Policy, half the time, is enforced blindness.

So, you either have to look at things with new eyes or you have to bring new eyes in to observe.

The trick is getting your boss to see this.  How can that be done?

It’s not an easy task.  Especially if you don’t know where the problem is yourself, and you don’t have proof.

What I recommend is point out the mismatches. Point out how the assumptions you and everyone is making is not tracking with the results you’re getting.  Do not do it from a position or an attitude of you know best.  Ask simple innocuous open ended questions.  Plant small seeds in people’s minds.

Do this is through humor.  It’s a gentle art.  Try humor along the lines of funny anecdotes and quirky observations.  This is opposed to humor putting others down, embarrassing them or making fun of some process…because, remember, someone put that process in place.  Someone bought the machine.  Someone at some point had the guts to make a decision.  Make fun of the mismatch now, not the person or even the thinking then.  If you can, make fun of yourself in the midst of it.  Effective self-deprecation releases others from a feeling of indictment.  Again, it’s a gentle art.

While you are pointing out the mismatches look into the implications and costs of the mismatches.

“We expect X and we always seem to get Q.  What is the cost of the difference between X and Q?”

“What do we have to routinely do because we’re getting Q instead of X?”

If you can gently point these out you’ll find

a) you may move closer and closer to the root problem on your own…you’ll perhaps get in the neighborhood, and…

b) your boss may start to feel the need for an investigation into a change.

Yep, it’s a slow play.  You allow your boss to come to a conclusion to act.  Hopefully the action isn’t a knee jerk “we have to train you more.”