The battle of the two faces

[ Two faced ]
Originally uploaded by Andrea LUCY Lex

"You're so two-faced!" one teenaged girl says to another when she catches her in a lie.

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?" Abraham Lincoln

Inconsistency in our messages can lead us to look to others like we have two faces. When they see differences between how we handle one situation versus another one that might look identical to them, they get confused about what might be the best way to relate to us. If they observe us saying one thing and doing another, they a) notice the difference and b) believe what we do rather than what we say. When we're two-faced we can become unpredictable and frustrating to them. Which is our "real" face, and why the inconsistency?

• We show our real face when our behavior is consistent with our beliefs, when our espoused theories and our theories in use are aligned. Unfortunately, for many people there's a gap, sometimes a sizeable one, between what we say and what we do.
• We often show different faces (aside from the values-based interpretation of it) when we are in different roles. At work we might be the dutiful enforcer and at home we may be the supportive caretaker. We are court jester with our friends and protector with our children.

Sometimes it's not easy to be our authentic selves.

• When you put your fake, adaptive self out there you feel less risk of rejection - if they don't like it, too bad, because that's not really you. If, on the other hand, you make yourself vulnerable by showing your real self and they don't like that - well, that can cut deeply. So many people get caught up in taking the lower-risk option and forget who the real person is.
• If you're trying to be a better person, you're not always already there. You forget or backslide, you make a mistake or you have a bad day. This two-faced behavior isn't a cover - it's an unfulfilled promise to yourself.

The "new and improved you" is often an intangible thing. Clients have found it helpful to

1. break that intangible "better parent" or "physically fit" down into specific behaviors or criteria, then
2. set goals around those more tangible factors and
3. be intentional about your self-talk so you can keep your desired behavior top of mind and reinforce the confidence that helps you resist the urge to fake it

Turning it over - for real

Do you have a bit of the control freak coursing through your veins? The people I know who will confess that the answer to the question is yes, they do, would tell you that they have reasons for being that way:

• They genuinely believe that they can do it better
• They want a great outcome and don't want to leave it to chance
• They lack trust in others' followthrough because they've been burnt at some time in the past
• They have habits of thought that say the best way to be responsible is to do it yourself

There are a couple of problems with these reasons, perhaps the biggest being that we never really control anything. Control is an illusion. Yes, we can take initiative and move our hands and feet. We can prepare. We can follow up. But ultimately the moment of reckoning involves factors bigger than us, beyond us. Another person, or the weather, or yeast, or God, steps in between us and the outcome. And then we have to respond to whatever is at the time.

The need to control can become a big barrier in relationships with other people. We invade their space when we try to grab the steering wheel, either literally or figuratively, out of their hands. We demonstrate that we do not trust, that we think they are in some way less than we are. We show that we are afraid when we thrash away at circumstances or people, trying to change them. Other people have their own lessons to learn, and when we grab the wheel from them we take away their opportunity to discover the relationship between cause and effect.

Perhaps the best form of control is self control. Perhaps the best thing is to resist the pull of ego, of skepticism, of fear, and to turn it over - for real - into another capable person's hands, or into the hands of a higher power. We need to recognize those times when it's really not our responsibility, then sit back, relax our minds, and prepare ourselves to respond to whatever happens.

You too can be a genius

I'd bet that you'd be tickled pink to have someone say to you, "Wow, you are an absolute genius when it comes to understanding people!" (or getting the big picture, doing small engine repair, etc.) You do have genius inside - it's a matter of identifying it and focusing your energies on developing it.

I've just finished reading What's Your Genius? by Jay Niblick, a newly released book that not only provides a means by which you can uncover your talents, but also that gives you a game plan for helping your genius grow.

Niblick defines genius as "better than excellent," and cites five levels of accomplishment that lead up to it:

1. Level One - below average
2. Level Two - average
3. Level Three - above average
4. Level Four - excellent
5. Level 5 - genius

One of the biggest issues that interferes with the development of genius is that a vast number of people focus their efforts on shoring up weaknesses rather than developing strengths. Niblick says that they try to change themselves instead of changing their jobs to fit their genius better. "They turn left instead of right."

This "turning left" habit creates "The Problem" - "an epidemic of people who feel frustrated and dissatisfied with their own performance and success." Overreliance on non-talents is what creates weaknesses, and Niblick's take is that discussion of weaknesses is a completely preventable activity when people choose to "turn right" instead.

Niblick has included in the book an assessment for readers to take to start to identify their talents and their non-talents. Then he shifts gears to talk about how to "turn right" more often. Instead of trying to jam themselves into roles that don't fit, geniuses use one or more strategies to create more alignment.

1. Select one talent to increase your dependence on and one non-talent to reduce your dependence on. Repeat until you are satisfied with your results.
2. Talent Barter - choose another person whose talent complements yours and team up with them so they can do the things they are good at and you can do the things you are good at doing. This is a process that helps both of you become more specialized in your respective areas of genius.
3. Dump and Grab - Get rid of the activities that rely on your nontalents (by delegation, etc.) and take hold of more activities that use your talents.
4. Change Roles - If the role you are in doesn't suit you, you're unlikely to perform at a genius level doing it. This will result in you earning less than you could if you were to serve in a role that's aligned with your natural gifts.

Niblick says that the steps above will help increase your effectiveness, your authenticity, and as a result, your success. His recommendation would be to "Just do you!"

Emotional engagement vs. emotional display

From Life Nature Library's, "The Primates," by Sarel Eimerl and Irven DeVore, 1965
Originally uploaded by seeka6

I'll freely admit it - my emotions are very close to the surface and directly connected to my tear ducts. I used to cry at Hallmark or AT&T long distance ads. And last Spring at my daughter's KidWriting volunteer thank-you party I leaked relentlessly when as part of the program my kindergartener read me a poem about helping her class grow. When I'm sentimental I well up. When I'm frustrated and angry the tears threaten as well. I laugh heartily and I cry while I'm laughing.

I'm not alone in this, I'm certain. Being emotionally engaged can be quite an asset, from the standpoint of understanding where other people are coming from, and intuiting an appropriate direction and pace at which to take a discussion. The emotional connection creates some of the spice in life. And genuine emotion reveals that the individual is truly involved and committed to a specific result.

But dagnabbit, sometimes at work it feels like a weakness, or it's viewed that way by others. Although there's no correlation between being emotional and handling problems, it seems that in the workplace it is incumbent on we emotional types to manage our noisy and sometimes moisture-laden responses to the events around us. Being dragged around by our emotions is not a good thing - but channelling our emotional connection with other people, and using our gut knowledge of ourselves to focus our energies can be an incredible engine for change and improvement.

On a related note, I can think of an individual who uses emotional display to try to achieve her goals. This is different from emotional engagement. Emotional engagement is internal and its physiological symptoms (like smiles or leaking eyes) are unintentional, while emotional display is strategically structured to elicit a certain reaction from an external audience. Its physical manifestations are orchestrated, constructed with prior knowledge of what "works" on the targeted recipients.

The six-year-old who, when thwarted, will pull a frown and work themselves into crocodile tears, is engaging in emotional display. You can tell it's a strategy and not real because of the delay between the triggering event and the response - sometimes you can even see the strategy unfolding like it was written in red letters on the culprit's forehead. And sometimes the individual will "try on" a couple of different emotional strategems until they identify one that elicits the reaction they want.

Emotional display can be particularly effective with groups, because at a distance it's harder to distinguish the small inconsistencies in facial expression and body language that reveal the displayed emotion's inauthenticity. I know of an educator/band director who spoke of a "policy" of flipping out in front of his students at one rehearsal per term, strategically timed approximately two weeks before the concert. His rant, coming from a person who is usually low-key and easygoing, made the students sit up and take notice. "Wow, Mr. _____ is REALLY mad!" They would embark on a flurry of individual buffing and polishing, so by the concert the band was really tight.

I suppose it would be far less messy in the workplace if we could simply operate like calculators, add two and two and reliably come up with four. But what fun would that be? If you take the volatility out of the stock market you reduce the risk but remove a large proportion of the reward in the process. The same goes for people and their emotions.

Feeling fuzzy? Start dreaming.

unfocused
Originally uploaded by Chintan S

Are you feeling a bit fuzzy and out of focus? Are you having a difficult time choosing which task should come next? It might be that you're suffering from one of the multitude of little bugs circulating right now, or you might be depressed. Maybe it's just another day of dreary skies and rain getting your goat. But more likely is that you don't have goals toward which you're working, or you haven't prioritized them.

Remember the old commercial where the alarm clock rings and the fellow trudges out of bed muttering, "Time to make the donuts..."? When your work and your life don't include aspirations you're likely to look at them in the same way as the donut guy. Another day, another dollar fifty.

Does a plan for the day or a plan for your life guarantee that it's going to work out the way you want it to? Of course not. Stuff happens, priorities change, unanticipated events throw logs across the road you're traveling. But what if? What if, with some concentrated attention and action (and some belief thrown in for good measure,) you could really turn the the trip from a drudge to an adventure? What if you could create something that you love, or do something that you believe you were designed to do?

Someone will be setting the agenda for your life, and it might as well be you. Start by making a blue sky list - a dream inventory. Date your entries, and put down the things you would like to do, the places you'd like to see, or the people you'd like to meet. Start thinking about the possibilities.

Dreams are the place where the "want to" goals begin. You don't have to commit to all of them, or any of them right now. But when you write them down you won't lose track of them. Once you've made your list, mark the ones that you think that, if you really wanted to, you could achieve in the next 12 or so months.

This is your list. Nobody's going to tell you that you have to do anything about it. But if you want to emerge from the fuzzy land of autopilot, this is your first step.

Stuck on the escalator?

Swiss Cottage Escalators
Originally uploaded by Tetramesh

I was reading an economic forecast a few days ago by Alan Beaulieu of the Institute for Trend Research. In it, he said he anticipates that

"the shape of this recovery will be a broad "U". For the next 12 months we
will be bouncing around on the bottom of the "U"."

He doesn't see indication that there will be a quick recovery, or a small recovery followed by a downturn.

So, assuming Beaulieu is correct, what do you do when you're at the bottom of the "U"? It can feel similar to being stuck on an escalator. You expect it to go up, all the time. Now that it's stopped you can choose to continue to stand there and wait for it to start going up again.

Now imagine this: you're standing there for a few seconds and it's no big deal. You stand there for a minute and you're starting to feel impatient. If the escalator stays stationary for more than a minute you're likely to take matters in your own hands and start walking it.

The stopped escalator is not preventing you from making upward progress. It might not be helping you, but it's not stopping you. If you don't want to wait you will need to exert your own energy for the steps to lift you to the next level.

We have seen evidence that forward-motivated companies are starting to walk it. They're not waiting for the escalator to carry them. They are ramping up their sales efforts, training their staffs while they have more time to do so, and they are refining their longer-term plans with specific strategies to deal with the bottom of the "U". They are determined to be prepared, and to be the first ones up as the escalator resumes its climb.

Refining your marketing message

Thanks to Ryan Scholz for the inspiration for this post:

How do you describe what you do? If you're like many privately held business-to-business companies you're probably not spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns. You might not even maintain a regular relationship with a marketing firm. How, then, do you help prospects understand that they should have a chat with you about buying your product?

It's not about you - the message starts with them

Who are your customers? Are there particular market niches that you serve? What do they have in common with one another?

• "I work with businesses who won't take no for an answer."
• "I provide process improvement services to the food processing industry."
• "I help family-owned businesses create and implement their long term plans, including the owner's plan for his or her eventual retirement."

It's focused on problems or issues the customers face

Think about the situations that precipitated a purchase from you. What were some of the scenarios?

• The owner wants to spend more time on big picture, more strategic issues and less time up to his elbows in the daily work processes.
• The company has a need for high quality cutting tools.
• The company's sales force is slumping in its activity level and conversion rate.
• Productivity is down because of employee concerns about job security.

Incorporate the outcomes your products or services create for customers

• "Many of our customers have been able to shave 20% or more off of their production waste."
• "Our clients have reduced their downtime because our product requires fewer changeovers."
• "We've seen sales increases of 15-50% as a result of helping the sales staff and sales processes improve."

If your message isn't customer-focused and instead is oriented toward yourself and your product, you could wind up sounding like a rep from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company (from the movie Forrest Gump for you non-moviegoers):

"We've got fried shrimp, steamed shrimp, shrimp creole, popcorn shrimp, shrimp bisque, shrimp on a stick..." You get the idea.