Gotta Love Formulas!

How are you feeling today? If you’re more disappointed than normal that it’s Monday, you’re probably in good company. Get this – this might very well be the most depressed you’ll feel all year according a formula that’s been worked out by a British psychologist using variables such as weather, expected timing of New Year’s resolution failures, debt, and Christmas cheer wear-off.

Although he had the people in the UK in mind when he wrote out the formula, I’d say that those living in Seattle have better than even odds that it similarly applies to us, given as far north as we are and the fact that we also have pretty lousy weather during much of January. We already know that we're more impacted by Seasonal Affective Disorder than those farther south.

On the other hand, at least we're not dealing with two feet or more of snow like the folks in New England.

Reading books by the fire, staying in bed all day (hey, why not schedule off January 24 every year?), light therapy, and such have all been suggested by various experts as effective ways of dealing with today’s type of depression. Here’s another couple of ideas worth considering (offered from a decidedly non-expert)… one is to reconnect with an old hobby. Do something you enjoy.

Also, if you can think of something small you can complete and feel good about crossing off your list, that would probably make a difference too. And, at the risk of sounding self-serving, if your New Year’s Resolutions need some help at this point, consider hiring a coach or simply working with a buddy to start gaining some traction.

I'm going to stand back a bit & whisper for this one... If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you might consider (shhh!) knitting. Really.

About now is when I’m really sorry I bother to include my photo in the bio – I just know you’re going to write this off now as a dumb suggestion from a chick. Trust me, I am not domestic. I don’t cook, I don’t clean and I don’t sew. You’re more likely to find me outside laying drip-hose for the garden than gardening and inside tearing apart the vacuum cleaner and putting it back together again than actually running the thing to pick up dirt.

I have started knitting, though, and as far as I can tell, the interest it holds for me is the same as what a lot of guys – even executives – are getting out of it. Apparently, knitting is getting to be quite a trend for men. Back to their fishing roots, I guess. Hey, it's just a bunch of slip knots...

For me, I like working out the puzzles. I like the fact that I’m doing something where a mistake doesn’t have to be the end of the world – it can be corrected. I like the math and the “figuring out stuff” that happens.

As a coach, I’m particularly appreciating the “now-ness” of knitting these days.

There’s an appreciation of past successes and learning from mistakes that happens when you go back and check your work. There’s some planning for the future as you work out a pattern and then figure out how to follow it, whether you’re following it, how to get back on track, etc.

The act itself requires a meditative conscious working of each stitch as you’re doing it. There is no stitch before or stitch to come… only that one that you’re working right then. And yes, it’s very relaxing. There's certainly no thinking about work.

Don’t ask me why I'm getting so into it. I suppose you could try, but I know I haven't got a good answer yet. I certainly didn’t start out wanting to knit for any other reason than getting over a sense of childhood failure and increasing a bond with family members who knit. Yeah, they're all women. Go figure. But I had to do something. Sewing was not going to cut it.

Laugh if you want. At the end of the day, it’s just a suggestion. And a few more rows of warm fuzzy wool that makes a dreary day seem warmer and brighter. Makes looking ahead to January 25 a little easier at any rate, 'cause hey, it all gets better from here on out.

What non-lethal response would you have to someone who made a comment on your knitting?

There's Always More...

“I thought I was wrong once – but I was mistaken.” When did you last have to re-think an opinion? If your answer is “never”, then you might want to check to see if you are taking enough risks in life… or to see if you might have been in error – however slight – in that assessment.

Personally, I recently had to totally re-think an opinion of my own. The polite version went something like, “How in the world did this guy ever make it two days, let alone two years as an on-air weather anchor?” on seeing a clip of Mark Mathis and the work he did until a few short months ago for a Charlotte, NC station.

This clip has been making the rounds on the internet, so perhaps you’ve seen it already. At one point, I was all-out, jaw-dropping horrified as I watched him clowning around with a graphic in the background showing some extremely nasty-looking thunderstorms. As a former broadcast meteorologist (also facetiously known as “weather bunny” in my house, with full knowledge that I possess enough of the credentials to make fun of the work in a way guaranteed to annoy me if it ever came from anyone questioning said credentials), I found it appalling to have him be that flippant with serious weather. It nearly ended there for me. I feel fortunate to have had to courage to reconsider my gut reaction on this one. Perhaps I was being overly serious about the matter though I do still like to think people want to know about major thunderstorm activity.

It all started when curiosity overcame me and I had to find out more of the story; one thing I know - there's always more than what's obvious. I started trolling for more information about this guy. How had he lasted as long as he did, acting like that on-air in the 28th largest television market? Charlotte is not exactly small potatoes so he and the station had to have had quite a lot on the line.

What I learned from "the rest of the story" began to re-shape my opinion. It turns out that part of the reason was that people loved him… or loved to hate him, far more than I’d given him credit for. From a Charlotte Observer article, it sure sounds like the station probably hired him – and kept him around – for exactly that reason. Then they dumped him for breaching the standard morality clause in his contract, supposedly having nothing to do with his on-air antics.

I’d like to point out that I never was comfortable with those clauses and several others like them – it made me into one of those people afraid even to have a glass of wine with dinner if I was out on a night off, or even consider a different haircut than the one I had when I was hired. And, like similar sorts of clauses I’m sure you can find in your own corporate employee handbook, my opinion is that they are rarely used except as an excuse to terminate someone they plan to be rid of anyway when they don’t care to share their real reasons for their actions.

Here’s the cool thing about this guy though, and the reason I’ve come to admire him – he fully owns who he was and the events and actions that led to where he is now, even if there is still some question of the station management’s role in what happened, and he’s actively taking responsibility for his own life at this point. I can see no whining here.

If there’s any truth to the additional information I’ve read, it’s quite possible that getting fired may have saved his life. What’s more, I’m thinking that Mark is poised to take advantage of this turn of events and make some major improvements in his life – perhaps even using his even greater notoriety for even greater impact. It’d be a great thing to shoot for anyway.

Meanwhile, the station is still searching for a new weather anchor, a real meteorologist this time. Much as I'd like to see weather being treated less flippantly, I have to wonder if that will help them get back their ratings to the level they had when Mark was hamming it up?

Ultimately, there are so many ways it occurs to me that this story might impact the rest of us and our lives. It’s funny and entertaining in a train-wreck, “misery loves company” sort of way. And it’s inspiring in a “you have to lose it all to find what’s important” sort of way. It also shows us how we can allow our own mistakes and the poor behavior of others to chew us up and spit us out if we hold on too tightly to our own righteous indignation… or we can choose to find some positives in the situation and take that to make life better somehow.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Now it’s your turn. I’m sure you can think of even more ways this story might be relevant so I hope you'll take a moment to drop a line at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - if it's iced over, I'll know it's cold; I still remember how the weather rope works.

What would you want to accomplish if looking stupid was no barrier?

Blow It Already

"I don't want to blow my own horn," seems to be the most popular response whenever I mention the need to market ourselves. I've heard it before; I've even said it before myself. The trouble is, it's a myth. There are several factors that contribute to this. Which are your weak spots? I know I have mine.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons that I've seen why people mistakenly believe they don't need to provide status updates. Or can't. Or shouldn't.

1. MYTH - Only brown-nosing suck-ups try to make themselves look good.
   REALITY - No one's advocating being a sycophant. Never could stand 'em myself. I'm only suggesting that you let people know what you're up to and how it's coming along.
   
2. MYTH - I won't be mistaken for a brown-nosing suck-up if I don't talk about what I'm doing, because I won't be marketing myself.
   REALITY - WRONG and WRONGER - If you're going to get hung up on brown-nosers, then think about it logically for a moment. Sycophants are out to make themselves appear better than they are, usually at the expense of others. That's how you tell the difference, not by whether they talk about what they've accomplished. It's how it's done that makes the difference. As for marketing yourself, if you're not letting people know about your achievements, you're just depriving them of the good news about what you're doing. You're still marketing yourself; the trouble is, it's more likely to be in a negative way.
   
3. MYTH - I'm being humble by not telling my boss about my achievements.
   REALITY - Bullsh*t, plain and simple. Really now - who are you fooling? You don't tell anyone what you've done? How about some of your buddies or your peers... the ones who you think are smart enough to get it and appreciate it? The truth is, we tend to tell only the people we think matter. It'd be nice if your boss was on that list.
   
4. MYTH - If what I have to share mattered to anyone, they'd ask.
   REALITY - Face it, sometimes they don't even know what to ask. They're busy too and sometimes other folks won't even know enough of what you're doing to know that they might be (or should be) interested. That includes your boss. Remember, the idea is to educate people more than it's about trying to convince them you're great. That ought to make you feel better about #3.
   
5. MYTH - They're too stupid to understand or care.
   REALITY - Don't make the mistake of confusing lack of knowledge or expertise in a particular area you consider vital to the human race with stupidity. That makes you look like a moron. Most people are intelligent in at least one area; presumably the person you believe to be a know-nothing dork is actually pretty knowledgeable and experienced in some aspect of what they've been hired to do. The fact that you don't understand it or think it's worthwhile is more likely an indication of your own ignorance than that of their/your boss. Or maybe they just need to educate you more about what they're doing, if you'll let them.
   You could be right of course (see #6), but statistically speaking, if your place of employment is still in business, chances are better that you're wrong on this one.You'll do yourself a favor in the long run if you get over it and start accepting the fact that yours is not the only worthwhile form of intelligence. If they still don't care, you might try doing a better job of educating them. And yes, that's still marketing.
   
6. MYTH - My boss is an idiot.
   REALITY - See the explanation for #5. I shine a light on bosses apart from everyone else for a specific reason. It's one thing to work with people we think are stupid. It's quite another to work for someone we think couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. Your boss may be more intelligent than you give the guy credit for (as pointed out above), but if you can't bring yourself to see it, it may be time to ask yourself if it really makes sense for you to work for the idiot - even if his idiocy is purely a figment of your imagination. How well can you work together under such circumstances?
   And even if you find a way to put up with it yourself, do you really think your disdain doesn't show? Most people don't much care for being looked down upon so if this one applies to you, you might consider whether it might not be better to find yourself some position that suits you better before your boss helps you out the door. Landing on your butt when you thought you were sitting down in a comfortable chair hurts a heckuva lot more than simply sitting down on the floor.
   
7. MYTH - My boss doesn't ask for a regular report.
   REALITY - You don't need permission to provide a status update. Sure, the best leaders do ask for this information. You can benefit yourself in the long run by regularly supplying it anyway and helping your boss to become a better leader.
   Cover the highlights in your 1-1 meetings or send an informal email. It doesn't have to be a formal report requested by your boss. While you're at it, copy other people who might find the information useful (just make sure it's written with them in mind - edit as necessary to make it relevant to them); if the other people are department heads for other parts of the organization, it might be smart to check with your boss about this one.
   
8. MYTH - Providing updates is too hard.
   REALITY - Status updates don't have to be difficult. The process is much easier if you work with a template.
   Prompt yourself to write something down about a few basic categories - successes you and your team have had recently, challenges you've faced and what you've done (or are doing) about them, what help you could use (in addition to the steps you're already taking, of course), patterns you notice that could influence business, etc. so you don't forget the sort of highlights that are helpful to provide.
   Just make sure your update isn't a litany of complaints. Branding yourself a whiner is not the sort of marketing we're encouraging here.
   
9. MYTH - I don't have enough time to write a big report.
   REALITY - It doesn't have to be a big report. Jot down a little bit each day and roll it into something you can use at the end of the week or the end of the month and that's all there really is to it. It should take 5-10 minutes max each day and maybe a half hour to clean it up prior to delivery. Providing a status update on a weekly or monthly basis can make a significant difference because then everyone who needs to know understands better what's going on. For an added bonus, when you take all of the information together, you'll have most of the foundation you need for a ready-made self-evaluation or resume should you ever want or need that.
   
10. MYTH - By the end of the month, I can't remember everything worth writing down.
    REALITY - This one's probably true. That's the other reason for writing things down on a weekly, or even daily basis. The more frequently you make a couple of notes, the better recall you will have for the significant points worth including in your update. It'll also save you time overall in compiling your report.

Hopefully some of these thoughts and ideas make the whole notion of self-marketing a little less scary. With a fresh start to a whole new year, they're some worthwhile ideas to try out. Really. And hey, if you are still sure I'm wrong on this, we could always turn it into an empirical test: give it a try and let me know the results.

As always, you can send them (along with any other thoughts or observations you may have about why it's such a heinous task to provide status updates) to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and we'll see where we go from there.

What is one thing I can do to make this year even better for myself than last year?

Shameless Self-Promotion

I find that I gag when people try to sell me solutions to problems that don't really exist. Most geeks do. It doesn't seem honest and makes us wary of the ulterior motives behind most sales and marketing efforts. On the other hand, sometimes issues do exist and we're just waiting for a better solution.

I saw an ad on television for one of those "better solutions" the other day and I remember noticing that instead of feeling marketed to in a bad way (read, slimed on), I was glad to have the knowledge. Done right, marketing serves a valuable purpose - bringing together a true need and a true solution. Done badly, it simply annoys the heck out of us.

All of us market ourselves, every single day. Yes, even you. The question is whether you're doing it effectively or not. Plenty of us regularly engage in our very own negative campaigns, literally selling ourselves short.

It's a good idea to get used to the notion of there being a right way to engage in marketing that finds the right people and draws them toward you... and an ineffective way of marketing yourself that pushes folks away or draws in the wrong crowd - people who are not a good fit.

Drawing the wrong crowd is as bad as not drawing one at all; in fact, often it's worse. When it's not a good fit, it means we're generating negative publicity for ourselves down the road and that's bad marketing.

Think of good marketing as education more than selling, and you'll be on the right track.

In the case of this blog, I've heard from folks that the randomness with which I make entries can be a bit of a problem. They check back every once in a while to see if I've written anything but I'm sure it's as annoying to them to visit when I haven't written in a while as it is disappointing for me to think that I've made and entry and people may not know about it.

If you're a Windows user trying to figure out when I'm going to get around to writing another post, then I may have a solution for you. I recently discovered a site that facilitates building custom toolbars that can include RSS-aggregator elements so now you can have your very own SME Toolbar.

The toolbar is kinda cool, I think. You can see how many recent posts are available and how many you have not yet read, right there on your browser toolbar. There are other cool features too and I'm hoping that with your help, I can make it even more useful.

For those of you who already aggregate feeds into a reader, I hope you'll let me know if you ever experience a problem with the XML, Atom or RSS links that I've been providing. I'd also love to know what reader you use. I'm still looking for one I really like.

You can send your toolbar and your reader recommendations to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com as well as your thoughts on what sorts of self-promotion works for you and what you dislike or find difficult about marketing yourself. Let's have some fun with this.

What kind of marketing do you do for yourself?

Politics in the Workplace and the World

Sometimes a new way of looking at things is a huge help in finding ways to make things better. That was definitely true for me last night when I had the opportunity to hear author Donna Zajonc speak about her new book, The Politics of Hope.

With so much of the nation feeling disappointed or even bitter about the results of the presidential election and many of the rest telling them to get over it, and with the Washington State gubernatorial race still in question as we head into a manual recount after a machine recount further narrowed governor-elect Rossi's tight margin of victory, tilting into the holiday season and the start of a new year with all its promise, I felt the timing could not have been better.

Personally I'm exhausted by it all and want only to find ways to make it better; I feel closer now to people with whom I disagree on political matters who are able to have a civilized conversation regarding our opinions than I do to people with whom I essentially agree but cannot get past the ranting. Having been in danger for a time of staying rant mode myself and still working past the occasional tendencies to regress, I find it's important to cultivate opportunities to surround myself with hope and steer myself that direction as an alternative to fear. As far as I'm concerned, this is as true within the workplace and corporate politics as it is in the rest of our lives.

Some of you know that I serve on the board for the local chapter of coaches, the Puget Sound Coaches Association. Part of that means that I make a special effort to attend all of our program meetings. Of course, I was doing that already, which probably has something to do with how I got nominated and elected to the board in the first place. In any case, my attendance record served me quite well last night because it meant that I was there to hear Donna speak about her insights around what she calls the four stages of political evolution. While she came up with this model as a way of viewing the democratic process, I believe it can be applied in a variety of situations, including leadership in the workplace.

Take, for instance, her views on trust... where are you and your co-workers?

Stage 1 - "Trust no one"
Stage 2 - "Trust our candidate to solve our problems"
Stage 3 - "Trust only yourself and your immediate family and community"
Stage 4 - "Trust the evolutionary process and our collective wisdom to create fair policy"
From the book The Politics of Hope: Reviving the Dream of Democracy, published Oct. 15, 2004 by Donna Zajonc; used by permission.

For the corporate environment, substitute the leader of your choice for 'candidate' and workgroup and department for 'immediate family and community' and it maintains its relevance.

I share with Donna the belief that as we begin to shift in our own evolutionary processes, so will the others around us. When we reach sufficient critical mass as a group, we will begin to impact what happens at a larger level. That kind of critical mass will only occur when we reach out to each other regardless of perspective. Mathematically, it cannot occur if our conversations are restricted only to those with whom we know we agree or if we are strident in our approach, pushing away the others with whom we disagree.

Whether you disagree or whether you have tips on dealing with people who disagree with you, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com to see what more we can learn from each other.

How are you bridging the gap between someone else's perspective and your own?

Finding Relevance in Silliness

A certain small person I know, like many other persons both large and small (myself included), very much enjoys blowing the paper wrappers off of straws. Unfortunately, the drinking straw manufacturers may have decided that this activity is potentially hazardous and are intent on discouraging such behavior. The perforations often found at the ends of the wrappers seem designed specifically to make this activity impossible.

My ploy is generally to see first if another person at the table will be successful in blowing off the wrapper. If they are not, I usually decide it is not worth the effort to try myself. On a recent foray into the land of fast food, the scene played out just has it had many times before... only this time with a bit of a twist.

Soon after the small person discovered the paper wrapper on his drinking straw was going nowhere, we all settled down to eat. Ever watchful of his surroundings (I'm going to have to learn to be this much more observant myself), small person calls out - "Hey, I saw someone shoot a wrapper!"

I've learned not to question the observations of this small person. He's nearly always right. In this case, I have no idea if he was correct or not; it turns out to be completely irrelevant.

Hearing, though, that someone else was successful where we had not been, caused my mind to race. If there was a way to make it work, what would it be? Then it hit me.

"I bet I can shoot a wrapper at you," I challenged. "But if I do it, you have to promise to let me tell you what's more important than how I did it."

It took me two tries, but ultimately I made it work. Even with a perforated wrapper, I was able to blow it off the straw, just like the old days.

The secret, I explained, was in first believing it was possible. Holding that bias meant that I did not give up until I had discovered the solution. My mistake in the past had always been that because I had seen other attempts fail, I had made the erroneous assumption that what I wanted was not possible.

What perhaps surprised me the most was how quickly I discovered a solution once I was certain one had to exist.

For anyone curious about how it was done, it turns out that sliding the wrapper partway off so that you have room to make a gentle twist or two that cuts off airflow through the perforations is one way that works pretty well. There may be others.

Do you have proof that drinking straw manufacturers are trying to eliminate good clean silly fun or do you have other counter-seriousness measures you care to share? Send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com so we can encourage more humor in life.

What if the challenge in front of you is not as impossible as it may seem?