Month: July 2019

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Get Help.

It’s one of the most common things I hear clients say…
and it’s not “I want a better desk chair.”

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My step-dad taught me to hike. Always have a map. Break-in your boots. Use a damn stick. Know a lot of jokes and stories to tell – these are pretty much the rules. Oh, and turn around and give the person behind you a hand.

After any particularly tricky ascent, he would always turn around and offer me his hand. If I was ahead of him and I turned and offered my hand, he would always take it. Even though he outweighed me, even though I often didn’t have such a great foot plant, he never refused a hand up. He also never failed to offer one.

There’s a dignity in having someone accept the hand you offer to them. There’s a mutual respect there. It’s nice.

It’s also good to have the person you’re hiking with, turn around and offer you their hand. They remember you, they acknowledge you.

A lot of hikers will refuse that hand offered to them. They don’t want to pull the other person off balance, they might say. But I think they just don’t feel comfortable taking a hand that’s reaching out. These same hikers would be the first person to offer up a hand or food or water on the trail. It’s not the offering of help that bothers them, it’s the taking.

“I don’t like to ask for help.”

I hear that one so often from my clients. They’re talking about seeking out an assist on a problem that they are wrestling with. They’re talking about trying to finish a large project when they don’t have enough time. They’re talking about what they make it mean when they ask for help.

Here’s what it means:

Nothing.

Work is a collaborative effort. Seeking help or accepting help is just how work gets done. Accepting help only means one thing – you’ll get done faster.

It’s possible to lean on people too much or to ask for too much help, but if you’re a person that doesn’t ask for any help – this is not your issue.

So this week, set yourself up for success. Resolve to offer help once a day, and accept help when it’s offered.

And that? Is just a good way to stay on track.

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The Pitfalls of Endurance

When all you’ve got is a hammer… everything looks like a nail.
If your one-trick tool at work is endurance, it could be a long time before you realize you’ve been cracking eggs instead of nailing it.
Don’t read… listen. Enjoy.

I’m an endurance queen. For over a decade, my shortest work week was 69 hours. I like endurance sports like hiking. I’ve got endurance big-time and it’s served me well. But the dark side to endurance is that it can set you up to overlook options.

When we use endurance to deliver results, we don’t stop to ask ourselves how we could be doing something faster or more efficiently. We’re too busy just grinding out the work.

For example, I was working on a task with our team. It was an important task and we were all focused on it. We divided it up and went at it. We worked nights, weekends and still didn’t finish. I realized that the deadline was less than 24 hours away, it was after eleven PM and I still wasn’t even close.

It didn’t matter if I could stay up all night. What I was doing would not be finished by the deadline. I closed my laptop and went to bed.

At 3 am, I woke up to the voice of my working brain.

Brain: “Hey! I noticed you gave up on the task we were working on.”

Me: “Ugh. Go away.”

Brain: “Um, so I’ve been working on an alternative. What you wanted to do? Wouldn’t really work for you later … it’ll always take this long. It’s not suitable.”

Me: “Huh. True. But Go AWAY.”

And because I’m a Zen Master when it comes to shutting my brain down so I can go back to sleep, I slept.

At 4 am, I woke to the voice of my working brain again.

Brain: “Hey! You approved the redesign so I’ve been tackling that.”

Me: Where am I? I’m in bed. I don’t work when I’m here. Go Away!

Brain: “Well, I just want you to know that if you let go of the design you wanted to use and do this other thing, it’ll take three lines of code and you can be done before you shower this morning. I’m heading out now.”

Me: “Wait! What?”

It wasn’t until endurance was no longer an option that my brain even tried to come up with another solution. Once working longer or harder was off the table, then I had to come up with another way.

It’s not just endurance that shuts us out from other options. Anything that we typically rely on to “win”, to succeed, to stay safe – is going to be an automatic “do that first” for our brains.

Sometimes, taking your best tool and leaving it at home can be your smartest move.

And that? Is just good to know.

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How to Build a Great Day

Great Mornings, Great Work Days and Great Lives might happen by chance, but why not DIY?

This is one of my ten best mornings. That thought changed my life. It was a beautiful day and I was heading out the door to work when the thought crossed my mind. This is one of the ten best mornings of the year.

I stopped in my tracks. Ok, not literally. I still headed out to my car, put the key in the ignition and headed out. But mentally, I was stuck. Why, I wondered, was this such a great morning? I started to pick the last few hours apart. I’d woke up, had great coffee, meditated and listened to music while I dressed.

Making these things part of my regular routine was not a great intellectual leap once I’d uncovered this. Over the years, I’ve added to my routine, noticing what makes a great morning and what doesn’t. I can pretty much have a blast before work on any day I choose now. A great morning for me includes not checking my cell phone, sitting quietly on my cushion with my dogs curled up beside me, getting outside with one of them and walking or running – all accompanied by my favorite playlist. If I really want to have a perfect morning, I’ll eat breakfast on my deck and continue the music during my commute.

You build great mornings and days by noticing what’s working.

You can also build mental resilience – strong, positive thought patterns – by noticing what’s working.

How to work with positive events: 

First off, we need to notice and celebrate the positive in our lives.  Why not, right?  We certainly pay attention to the negative. 

Next – analyze what happened. Figure out how you were feeling at the time and what actions you were taking. Jot down what you were thinking. Replay the thought and double check it… when you think it again, does it give you the same feeling you had? If so, you have found the right thought.

Putting positive events through analysis is a very powerful activity.    Here’s why:  When you are really on, doing great and being your best self, you’re having feelings that feel great, you’re taking actions that pay off and getting great results.   So figuring out what you’re thinking is really helpful.  When things aren’t going well, we have to work hard to find believable ideas that we can use to help ourselves.   Well, the stuff we’re thinking on a great day is exactly that – believable thoughts that work.  It’s good to have them in our back pocket for when we need them. 

So make sure to catch those thoughts like fireflies and keep them in a bottle where you can see them glow.

To learn how to slow down your thinking and catch the thoughts that work, book a free session with me – here.

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When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Friends

If you tend to hunker down alone and grind out work during stressful times, you might want to rethink that.

Burnout isn’t a four letter word. It’s a seven letter word that can be fixed by another sever letter word – friends. Shawn Achor writes about his research on this topic in his book “The Happiness Advantage”. He found that during times of challenge and stress, the students who pulled back and upped their social connections fared better academically. The example he gives is students who, when faced with a challenging semester, organized group study activities with peers versus students who isolated themselves and crammed alone.

We tend to reduce our social connections when faced with stress and challenging demands, because, well, who has time?

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, reaching out to other people could be the action we’re better off taking. For instance, I can’t count the number of times, when faced with a challenging code problem, simply explaining the issue to a person unfamiliar with the project, led to finding the solution. When we explain or teach something to others, we clarify it for ourselves.

Here’s another example – as we work late into the evening, our ability to quickly turn out good work starts to fade, we grow fatigued, we make mistakes. Disconnecting and spending time with a loved one, reduces stress, increases happiness and that makes creative thinking easier. (For more, see my earlier blog.)

There’s a backlash effect that can happen when you chose to spend time with family despite heavy work demands. When we’re used to grunting it out in isolation, working longer and longer, with less and less to show for it (see this blog for more) – it can feel wrong to spend time with family on the weekend.

Avoiding burn out, in my experience, requires a strategy that insists on honoring our own needs and limits, supporting our decisions once they are made, and making conscious choices to invest in our relationships, even when we have a lot to do.

This looks like getting enough sleep, stopping when we’re tired, prioritizing the most important relationships in our lives and then not blaming ourselves for doing these things.

Bottom Line? During times of stress:

  • Don’t isolate, socialize
  • Don’t overwork – seek out family and friends
  • And for goodness sake, don’t indulge in guilt after the fact.

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Intrinsic Value

I’m going off topic today… but then again, maybe not.
When we understand our own intrinsic value – we start the journey of bringing ourselves to work.

OK, so today, I’m posting – in its entirety – something I wrote a couple of years ago. I stumbled across it today. My stepfather is now in a nursing home, but on the day I wrote this, he was still at home with my Mom in Florida, and some days, he still could watch a movie and follow the plot. Here goes nothin’.

Do you matter?

Have you ever wondered if you matter?  Do you question if you deserve the love of your family or the blessings in your life?  No?  Then move along, come back next week for a different topic.  


Sometimes I question my value. Sometimes I want to know how I can matter when I’m just a woman from New Jersey who happens to love dogs.  I’m so banal, I’m practically a cartoon.  The most interesting thing about me is this drill-sergeant of a muse that I have, and frankly, he’s imaginary.

People have intrinsic value

That’s true, isn’t it?  I mean, you’ve heard that before right?  And you probably believe it to some extent. To some degree, we accept that humans have value that is not tied to anything we do, say, earn, make, give, or own.  That we matter, our lives matter, simply because we are human.


I have, of course, heard of the concept…it comes around when I’m thinking spiritually.  I agree without a second thought with the idea that all people deserve love, a shot at redemption or the benefit of compassion.   When I’m faced with need, the idea of intrinsic value is clear and easy.  I agree that a child I have never met, who is living without food or medical care deserves to receive care and support, simply because the child is a child. He doesn’t have to promise to grow up and be a Doctor in order to deserve food.

It gets messy when you bring it inside

But the idea of intrinsic value gets a little squishy when we try to apply it to ourselves.  Am I valuable just because I’m breathing? And if so, how valuable am I?  Sometimes it’s hard to understand just in what way I might matter. I can see how you matter…but how can I see that same thing about myself?


Think about it.  How do you know you have value that is not tied to your job, your actions or your possessions?  Asked another way, gulp, why does anyone love you?  Why should you love yourself?


These are questions I never hoped to find an answer to beyond a lame because God or Buddha or the Universe said so.  But I stumbled over an insight while picking a movie for my aging stepdad.  

You Just Do


 My stepfather has dementia.   It’s coming on slowly and he still has good days but more often now, he’s confused.   Just a bit or a lot.  It varies.  For some people, he’s a challenge – he’s stubborn and tends to hide in books.   He doesn’t like anyone to help him on a project.  He won’t eat onions or chicken on a bone and he’s positively violent about mushrooms.  I love him though.  


Yesterday, I helped him pick out a movie to watch on Netflix, settled him in a chair and went to take a shower.   When I stepped back into the room to check on him, he greeted me with a huge grin.  


“Hey!” He said gesturing grandly toward the TV. “You really know how to pick a movie.  This is exactly the kind of movie I like!”  He was quite obviously thrilled with the movie, with me, with his lot in life at that moment… the whole ball of wax.   A jolt of happiness belted me so hard, I had to step away, throw back my head and literally wrap my arms around myself to hold myself together.   It was wild.   


What the heck?


I was astounded by the ferocity of my love for him and the sheer joy of seeing him, enjoying himself so completely.   He’s an aging man, who sometimes doesn’t know how many floors the house has (one), can’t walk more than 50 feet on a good day, and refuses to stay in bed at night.   He’ll never take me hiking again.  He’ll never offer great advice again.  He probably won’t know who I am soon.  But he is so valuable IN HIS CURRENT STATE that just his joy is enough to floor me with gratitude.    

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