Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Which is harder? The up front planning, setting the stage, building out the roadmap or delivering on the action items, meeting the deadlines, and rallying the team to complete each step?
The answer of course is: yes.
Going into both with the mindset that it’s meaningful work is exactly what makes the work meaningful.
Anything short of that just won’t add up.
Stay Positive & The Equation Needs To Be Balanced
When a joke hits right, the connection between the storyteller and the audience increases exponentially.
You probably didn’t need convincing of that.
What you may need convincing of is that though when a joke falls flat, you may get questionable looks or a headshake or deadpan silence, it’s only temporary.
If there’s one thing people move quickly on from it’s humor.
Which is to say they move on even from good humor.
(Can you recall any of the jokes from the last stand up show opener that you laughed hard at?)
All the more reason that humor needs to be shot after shot to be effective.
Stay Positive & Huh Huh
There’s not a single job description out there that is all encompassing. Not a single one covers all the facets that you’ll need to lean into. And certainly, there’s no description that could possibly cover all the potential you have to offer.
But much of what’s missing from a job description is unpredictable. The business doesn’t know where it will be when you hit your two-year mark just the same as you don’t know where your passion and curiosity will lead you to ideate around.
There is, however, one variable that is predictable and missing in every job description: internal relationship building.
Maybe they call it leadership. Maybe they say relationship building and mean external when they really mean internal. Maybe they guise it as management which is a specific industrial style of relationship building (or breaking, depending on how you use it).
The funny thing about the relationship building component though is that everything else outside the job description is dependent on that.
The better the relationships, the better everything you didn’t know you’d be doing or influencing becomes.
Stay Positive & It’s About The People
It’s not visible until it is.
An overnight success isn’t actually an overnight success. It’s a thousand invisible successful moments that led to this one visible moment.
And failure didn’t happen today. It happened in a hundred small moments leading up to today.
What’s important is that we do what we think and feel will lead to a success… every day. Drip by drip by drip.
Get comfortable with the lack of visibility. Success isn’t like putting colored sand in a jar.
Stay Positive & Don’t Slow Down
The book sucks half way through and you have the choice to set it down or keep reading.
Same decision is available to you about your happy hour deal at the bar.
Same with the 30 slides you’ve worked on in the presentation.
It’s all just a decision and we shouldn’t feel ashamed by cutting something short.
Far better to realize that making that kind of decision is more about creating the time and space to do better.
Stay Positive & When One Door Closes…
If it brings you joy, no one can argue that.
Same if it brings you anger.
“You made me angry” can be argued against. “I feel angry” can’t.
It warrants reminding that while your emotions are your own, so are theirs.
In the end, here’s what matters most: are you feeling what you want to feel?
If not, then, ya know, maybe start.
Stay Positive & You’re In Control
Leaders do a lot. No doubt about that.
One of the elements of leadership they never lose traction of (at least the best leaders don’t) is that their team maintains the 101.
They do the required readings.
They know the product or service.
They can tell the backstory.
They can tell a story.
Need a real life example? A bartender that doesn’t know what “up” or “on the rocks” is on a cocktail menu that only has those two options. Sure it’s bad on the bartender, but they’re a reflection of the leadership.
That’s what we are and that’s what our teams are to us.
Stay Positive & Mindful Of The 101
