Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The month that set the direction for the rest of my life

I want to share a personal story of how I have gotten where I am today. I owe it all to the month of August, 1995. What happened then? I was at summer camp. I know that doesn’t sound all too exciting but let me elaborate.

In August of 1995 I went away to summer camp (I was 15 at the time) as I had done for many years but this year I would be gone for four weeks instead of my usual two. The reason was that when a person turns 15 you are now too old for the regular camp and are now entered into the LIT program. LIT stands for leader-in-training but could also be considered a counselor-in-training program. For this program you live in cabins in a completely separate part of camp. The first two weeks are spent on team and leadership development and the last two weeks you spend working with a cabin of campers.

Going into this four week stint, I knew I wouldn’t know most of my fellow LITs (some would be people I have known for years). Anyone that has gone to a sleep-away camp will understand when I say that it’s own completely different world. It’s like a much more innocent version of the Las Vegas “What happens here stays here” slogan. That being the case, you often don’t mix camp friends with non-camp friends. So I knew that the people that knew me at camp only “knew me at camp” and I saw this LIT program as a chance to try something really new. It was a chance to really try to become what I wanted to be.

At the time I was rather reserved, shy, afraid to try new things, etc. I decided to check those bags at the door of my parent’s car when they dropped me off. I got settled in my bunk and met my cabin-mates. Once fully settled in, I took a seat upon a picnic table kinds off to the side in a grove of sorts and proceeded to meditate and reflect. Now I know that sounds contradictory to my intentions of changing but read on. During that time I thought about where I had been, who I was, and where I wanted to be. I reflected about my strengths, weaknesses, and who I wanted to be. I thought about what I wanted other people to think of me, what kind of life I wanted to live, and what I need to do to make it happen. Once I found something I knew I needed to change, I purposely put myself into a situation that would take me out of my comfort zone so that I had opportunity to try something new. During my four weeks at camp I did this daily (usually early in the morning). It wasn’t long before I had a few people who joined me for my meditative sessions and I showed them what I did. They have since told me that it has made a difference in their lives.

The first two weeks were full of the type of activities that you might expect at a leadership camp. Things like having most of us blindfolded while a couple of people tried to guide us by verbal directions to complete a task. There were team building exercises, character building exercises, etc. Some LITs were kicked out of camp for having prohibited items in their possession (I’ll let you use your imagination), some had relationships with each other, others had difficulty adjusting, and others (like myself0 had very moving experiences. Through it all we all grew in ways that I think many of us didn’t appreciate until years later.

I think that the combination of my state of mind at this time along with the relationships I forged really changed me at my core. I can honestly say that my life is very different than it probably would have been without this experience. To this day, I still take time each and every day to reflect and conduct a sort of self-assessment. I try to be as honest with myself as much as possible (which is not that easy as we tend to paint rosier pictures of ourselves) so that the excercise can be effective. I have come to realize that this reflection, along with a willingness to be outside my comfort zone, are what allow me to learn and grow. Now this experience very well may be unique to me, but I am a firm believer in self-assessment, personal inventory, or whatever you want to call it, because knowing yourself well can allow you to achieve so much more.

I know the readership of this blog may be limited at this time, but I invite anyone who wishes to share their own story of a moment of change either through a comment on this post or emailing me and once I collect a few I will post them.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Monday: Quote of the Week

So I’ve decided every Monday will be quote of the week day to get the week off to a good start. Here we go:

“Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true” - Leon J. Suenes

This quote kind of underlines a theme of mine (which you will see in future posts). It is one thing to have a dream or a goal while it is something else entirely to realize that dream. Often people give up when a road block comes in their way or are unwilling to do what it takes to realize a dream. The point is this – you have to be realistic about what you can accomplish. In other words – you can’t do everything really well, so listen to your heart and choose carefully.

Have a great week.

Monday, March 12, 2007

The art of failure and the side-effects of social praise

My overall goal with this blog is share my experiences and my thoughts in hope that it may help someone else. Helping people is something I simply love to do and when I was offered the opportunity to be a supervisor I jumped at the chance. I was extremely excited to have a chance to help my team succeed and grow. I had a absolutely fantastic opportunity to work with employees ranging in age from 24 to 64 and I thought that such a range was great – the younger employees could learn the fundamentals from the older while the older learned some new tricks from the younger. I was beside myself excited about this but then I hit an unexpected road block – one that challenged me in a way I never saw coming.

I had a young guy working for me just a few years out of college, we will call him Jeff. I had hired Jeff and relocated him to my area because he seemed full of potential in his interviews. He was a good communicator, seemed ambitious, and portrayed himself as eager to succeed. I started training Jeff on my own and laid out a typical training schedule with him which consisted of several weeks with me and then working with the other members of the team. Everything was going great until we let him go off on his own. The complaints from our sales team came pouring in. They all liked Jeff as a person, stating that he was a good communicator and seemed eager to help but he would freeze up when it came time to deliver. He couldn’t execute on seemingly simple tasks when asked – he wouldn’t even attempt them. After probing and prodding Jeff, I finally came to the root cause – he was deathly afraid of failing. He was so scared to fail that he wouldn’t even attempt to try something.

I would love to tell you that Jeff was the only one, but he wasn’t. I had a handful of employees who showed the same traits. All had this fear of failure but they would make some kind of excuse for why they couldn’t perform the task. I tried coaching them to just try and if they make a mistake it’s ok – just learn from it. Despite all my effort their inaction landed them reputations of laziness and, worse, liars as they would construct excuses and shift blame elsewhere. It was a tremendously disappointing situation but I learned from it.

The lesson learned here is that we all need to know how to fail, successfully. What do I mean by that? Well I don’t mean that if you know you are going to fail then fail spectacularly. I mean that failure needs to be part of our learning experience and we need to know how to use it to our advantage not fear it. The reality is that many of us are taught (be it not intentionally) to fear failure. When we tell our children that they are smart we are praising the result of their work – not the effort put forth. Subsequently, the child wants to succeed all the time so that they can get praised and eventually will not attempt anything if there is a chance of failure.

This idea has been studied with much success by Dr. Carol Dweck and a great article by Po Bronson about her research can found here. The article does a great job of explaining this issue and demonstrates some of Dr. Dweck’s amazing findings. Dr. Dweck’s study demonstrates how social praise (as Bronson refers to it as) can have the inverse outcome of what is intended. I highly suggest reading the article as I think this matter is critical to determine one’s success in life.

I wonder how many adults carry this fear into their work lives seriously stunting their chance for success in life. Failure should be looked at as a precious learning opportunity and should be treated as such by all involved. Plenty of time and effort should be put into learning what went wrong and how it can be done differently. Don’t be so quick to rule yourself out as the cause – this is a tremendous opportunity for self-assessment and reflection. Everyone makes mistakes, but if we learn from them and try with all our effort to not repeat them, success will follow.

So how can we apply this in our day to day lives? Next time you are fear struck by a task because of the possibility of failure, consider what you may learn for that task even if you do fail. Also, don’t be so quick to judge and blame others that fail. Teach your children that if they try hard and fail, to learn from it and try again. Focus on the effort, not the result with your children and yourselves.

Failure is opportunity for those who can understand and embrace it.