The world doesn't revolve around you! Practicing Compassion

 Understanding that other people have their own problems and interacting with them with compassion instead of selfishness - will change your life - for the better.

From the online course: Planning for Personal Success. https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/

Planning for Personal Success - a humanist way.

As the new year approaches, you may be thinking about your New Year's Resolutions. Let me help you plan for your personal success, as a humanist.

Learn how to stay focused and not give up when you hit a roadblock on your road to success! This book discusses how Humanists approach the important business of living a life that is fully realized and understanding what success really means. It is designed to help you think more explicitly about how to live your values fully, using critical thinking to improve your odds of success and to remove the fears that overwhelm you. Topics covered include: The World Doesn’t Revolve Around you – a reality based approach. Life Isn’t Fair: Keep at it Anyway – overcoming obstacles. Your Actions Have Consequences: Choose Wisely – putting critical thinking to work. It’s Not all About You – improving your interpersonal relationships. Finding Happiness – what really matters & how you define success.

Available As:

• Book and E Book: https://amzn.to/2TNCKpH
• Audiobook
• DVD: https://amzn.to/2Efdq6
• Online Course: https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/

Advice for first-time leaders and supervisors

I teach humanistic leadership and management skills at Humanist Learning Systems. In fact – I have a brand new online course – Humanistic Leadership Principles, which teaches the 7 deadly sins of staff management and leadership principles to help people understand the role of a leader/manager.

You're in a leadership role at work for the first time. What should you know?

 2 Things Good Leaders Must Understand

1. You have 2 customers. Your bosses – and your staff. Yes – your staff are your customers. Your bosses are going to want you to file reports and let them know what work is being done.  Your staff – need you to support them.  A manager/leader is a support rule. The work is being done by workers. The leader’s job is to make sure workers have what they need to be able to do their job well. Do they need training? Supplies? Information? Information that is in another department? That’s the job of the manager. So – think of yourself as being below your staff – your job is to do the grunt work required to make sure – your team can function well. 

2. Bullying management is bad management. Bullying negatively impacts workflow and causes real harm to real people. Successful leaders – build up and support employees. They champion them. Help them feel valued and included. Kindness and compassion in everything you do – should be your guiding principle. That’s what makes a good leader a great leader. They inspire people to be the best they can be. Bosses – order people around. Be a leader – not a boss.

Are you a new leader?

Often folks are thrust into these positions without real training about how to supervise employees or take the lead on projects.

Understand – you were chosen because your managers have faith in you. Be diligent and conscientious and you will do fine. If you don’t know how best to do something- ask for help and advice.

Take online courses (like mine) and learn what you don’t know but need to know.  Everyone starts every job learning. Most people don’t become productive for several months.  You will feel pressure to perform but remember – you have a lot to learn – so part of your new job – as a manager/leader – is to learn how to lead. And there are plenty of resources to help you. You may also want to ask one of the senior managers/ leaders to mentor you.  Not only will that help you in your future career – but it will help you become the sort of leader you want to be.

Even if you're just supervising one intern, what are some things you should keep in mind? 

Treat everyone with dignity. Behave with dignity. When in doubt  - think -  with compassion and dignity. Eleanor Roosevelt once said – in her book You Learn by Living, to treat employees as if they are volunteers.  You don’t have the right to “boss” people around. Even if you are paying them. And especially if you are not. Treat people as if they matter and as if they have a choice. Treat them with gratitude for the work they are doing and with grace. Support them. Encourage them. Help them learn how to be awesome productive citizens of the world.

 Are there additional things to know as a young leader versus someone older or with more experience in the workforce?

“If you want to slide through life, try being polite.” – Christopher Shaw (my father).  Kindness will take you places that meanness can’t. Remember – to be kind. You will like the sort of person you are, and your employees will appreciate the effort you put into helping them be better.

And again - take my online course - you will be glad you did. https://humanistlearning.com/principles-of-humanistic-leadership/

Create a Plan for Your Personal Success

Are you lacking structure? Unsure how to be the person you want to be?

These concerns are quite common. We struggle. Who are we? Who should we be? How can we be better?

I think one of the reasons why people struggle, is because they weren’t taught critical thinking.  To answer the above questions, we have to spend time thinking. The more effectively you think, the more effective your answers to these rather existential questions will be.

First, you have to have an understanding of who you want to be and more importantly why. It’s very easy to create a goal, much harder to work towards it. If you already have a goal, ask yourself – why this goal. Why out of all the possible things you could work on – did you choose this one.

This act of questioning yourself is part of what it means to think critically. What you will find when you question your assumptions is your real motivation. Your real motivation brings clarity. It is much easier to make decisions about life paths when you know what you are really hoping to accomplish.

The other thing people who come to me seem to struggle with is really grasping the concept of consequences and how this impacts your chance of success.

Humanism is all about agency. We humans have the ability to choose our actions – to a certain extent. Every time we make a choice and act, we get consequences. Our goal should be to maximize the good and minimize the harm we do to ourselves and others.  This seems simple enough but I keep meeting people who don’t ever take the time to do the cost benefit analysis for themselves. *cough* Charlie Sheen *cough*

Taking the time to weight the pros and cons doesn’t mean being a buzz kill. It means understanding the risks you are taking and taking precautions to minimize those risks – in advance – so that you can maximize your benefits and minimize the harm.

Now – I want you to imagine what sort of impact this sort of considered decision making will have over the course of your life. Now I want you to consider signing up for my Planning for Personal Success program at: https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/ 

Lacking Structure?

Finding a clear path to take on the road of life isn’t always easy. At some point we all find ourselves lost. We find ourselves at a crossroads and we don’t know which path to take. Which way will help us to be happy and to thrive?

People struggle with whether to stay in less than ideal relationships or whether to cut their losses and run. They struggle with finding a job and knowing which jobs to apply for and should they take this job when the job they really want is a possibility too. Should they stay at their job, get married, have kids, or whatever.

We all have decisions to make and some have huge consequences for us. The reason I teach applied Humanism is because it provides a solid ethical foundation on which to make those decisions.

The reason certain decisions are so hard to make is because there are no guarantees in life. And that’s ok. As a Humanist I accept that there is no supernatural force conspiring to help me. I understand and accept this reality as part of my life philosophy and it affects how I approach my life.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right.”

I love this quote because it reminds me in those moments I am making difficult decisions, that all I can ever do is what I think is right, in that moment! And that’s key. If in the future I learn that I made a mistake, I can always choose another path.  My future is not set in stone. I can create and recreate my future as often as I need to. And I have.

Knowing what you really want to accomplish in life is half the battle. The other half is being willing to make the best decisions you have in the moment, with the incomplete information you have in the moment. Is it scary? Yes. Will you always be right? No. But if you make an effort to make good decisions, your outcomes are bound to be more good than bad.

To learn more – consider take Planning for Personal Success! A Humanist Approach with Jennifer Hancock. This 1 ½ hour program will help you figure out what your ultimate good is and how to make better decisions so that you can live life fully and intentionally.

Reason and Leadership

Making good decisions requires a reality based approach and that requires good reasoning skills. Here’s why.

Say you are trying to solve a problem. Doesn't matter what the problem is.  All problems have a cause and influencing factors. If you are going to solve your problem, you have to know what is causing it and what can influence it.  And finding out what is really causing our problems isn't always all that easy.

Most people guess and hope for the best.  If you want to improve your chances above – hope, then it’s worth taking a bit of time to question whether your guess as to what is causing your problem is actually based in reality.

Here’s the secret to successful problem solving. The more your understanding of the problem reflects the actual reality of the problem, the more effective your problem solving will be.

To figure out whether what you think is causing your problem is what is really causing your problem, you have to think. And that process of thinking through problems in a logical sensible way is called reasoning.

Once you have figuring out what is really causing your problem, you then need to figure out how to solve it. And again, most people guess and hope for the best.  But if you think about it a little bit and consider what other factors may be influencing your problem, you can usually come up with a strategy to fix it.

Coming up with a well-reasoned strategy may not solve your problem, but it’s going to give you a better chance at it than guessing and hoping for the best.

How to reason well?  Mostly it involves seeking the truth and not allowing your passions and biases to derail you from the search for the truth. (Here is a cool graphic from wikihow on how to reason well: http://www.wikihow.com/Reason)

To reason well you need to learn how to ask yourself questions. Why – why is that my problem? Is there a problem that is causing my problem? What might solve this? What other things might solve this?

When you consider alternatives, you give yourself options. And then all you have to do is reason through them to figure out which of your options give you the best chance of success – and that’s your plan.

Keep your goals to yourself

Delaying your gratification makes a difference in whether you achieve your goals or not.

I like to tell my son when he wants something now that one of the hallmarks of being a human being is that we have the ability to delay our gratification. What does this mean?  It means that we have the ability to choose not to receive a reward right now.  Why would we choose that?  Well, in order to get a better reward later, of course.

This is just really a fancy, kind of scientific way to describe the concept of saying, we have the ability to plan for the future AND, that’s a good thing.

But there’s a problem. It’s not enough to make plans. In order to be successful, we generally have to do a bit of work to make our dreams happen. Sure, you can wish upon a star if you want, but successful people don’t stop there. They do the work that is required to make their dreams a reality.

Here’s where delaying your gratification really matters.  It turns out, that if you tell other people your goals, and they congratulation you on setting your goals, your brain treats that congratulation and a reward and – having achieved you reward, you don’t need to work so hard on it anymore. And that’s actually what happens.

I realize I seem to quote Derek Sivers a lot – but he’s right on a bout a lot of things. Here is a Ted talk he did on this topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself#t-173955 

What he says is that the more we share our goals and plans with others, the more likely we are to feel like we’ve already accomplished them and we mistake talking about our goals with doing something to achieve them. And because we think we’ve already worked on this when we talk about it, we don’t put as much effort into it as if we had kept our goal to our self. Apparently when we talk about it, our brains perceive it as real and that’s good enough for the brain.

I don’t know about you, but for me, perceived success ain’t nearly as good as real success. I’m not afraid of doing the hard work required to make my business a success. I make sure that when I talk about my business goals that I also emphasize the fact that they aren’t a reality yet – and that I still have a lot of work to do to make them a reality. Because unless I make it happen, nothings going to happen.

Don’t mistake your dreams for reality and don’t fall prey to the positive thinking movement’s non-science approach.  Thinking about what you want isn’t going to make it magically happen. And imagining it’s already happened actually makes it less likely to happen because it makes you less likely to put in the effort to see your project through to completion.

If you want to be successful, stay firmly grounded in reality and do the hard work required to make it happen.

My Best Mistake

Owning your mistakes may be the best thing you ever do.  Then again, maybe not.

I make a lot of mistakes.  I am a writer, and yet, I am crappy at grammar. But that’s OK. For every mistake I make, I get really nice people who offer to help me fix my grammar. And since I own up to my mistakes and correct them, I have ended up learning a lot and gotten to know some really cool people as a result of those mistakes. People who wrote to me who otherwise wouldn't have.

My attitude about mistakes is this.  I’m gonna make them. So, the sooner I admit my mistake and correct it, the less stupid I appear.

I have found that owning your mistakes but not letting your mistakes stop you from  making progress towards your goal, whatever that is, seems to work.  Correct your mistakes and keep moving forward.

Among other things, I’m a social dancer.  I quite good actually and have taught classes in social dance. One time I was dancing in a restaurant with a friend and someone asked us whether what we were doing was choreographed. It wasn't. They asked us, don’t you make mistakes?  Of course we do.  What separates the good dancers from the not so good dancers isn't whether mistakes are made or not. Mistakes are going to be made.  It’s how you respond to the mistake that differentiates the experienced dancers from the newer dancers. Experienced dancers make mistakes, smile at each other to acknowledge the mistake and keep dancing. Literally.  We don’t let our mistakes stop us from completing the dance. And, as far as the audience is concerned, as long as you start together and stop together – they think you are dancing well.  They don’t notice the mistakes.  You’d have to have a trained eye to notice and even then, this is a social dance, not a competition.

One time I was part of a group that won a free call square dance competition. This is where you don’t know what the call will be – the callers are randomly calling out patterns and sometimes interrupt patterns with new ones. You have to be quick to respond to do this well. We won this competition, not because we practiced the patterns, but because we instead practiced how to recover from our mistakes so no one noticed us making them.  It wasn't that we didn't make mistakes; we totally did. We just had a strategy for how to keep the dance going.  Our strategy? Whatever you do, don’t stop dancing.

So what is my “best” mistake?  I’d have to say it was the time I was singing for a country-punk-a-boogie band.  We had a song with a stop in it: a moment where we all hit a note together, pause for a beat of silence, and then pick up the song again. When done right, it’s a super cool effect - like an explosion. But you have to hit it together as one for it to work. And ... one night on stage in front of a crowd and other bands, we played the song and missed the stop.  All 6 of us hit that stop at six completely different times. Like a stuttering train wreck. It wasn't just bad. It was glaringly obviously bad.  But we were performing and things like this happen and we didn't stop.  Even though we hit that stop at 6 different times, we all managed to start on the pickup back into the song together and we finished together! We got a standing ovation.   Not because our performance was flawless, obviously, but because despite the problem – we kept going and ended well!!!!

The lesson I want you to take from all of this is. Your goal isn't to be perfect. It’s to make it to the end of the song. Whether you are dancing, or singing, or writing, or working on a project or running a marathon, success is measured not by how perfectly you perform, but by whether you made it to the end of the song.

When you make a mistake, hang in there and keep dancing. Don’t stop until the music does.

Living a Life of Passion and Laughter

What my parents taught me about living life successfully.

My parents were and continue to be huge influences on my life. They are both amazing loving people whose are wonderful role models on how to live life successfully and fully. 

When I think about the main lessons I learned from them, it is this.  My dad taught me how to laugh at myself.  My mom taught me how to live life with passion.

I was talking on the phone to a friend last night and of course, had to deal with my kid who needed my attention and who was NOT doing what I had asked him to do.  I approached the problem as I always did, by laughing and passionately making clear – he needed to do what I needed him to do or – who knows what crazy mamma will do.  I remarked to my friend, yeah – now you know – I threaten my kid. I’m a horrid parent. She said – you laugh too much to be a horrid parent.

Her comment got me thinking – she’s right. I don’t take myself of the situations I find myself in seriously. They are all transient and really, being too serious makes things unpleasant. I find that injecting a dose of humor helps my son want to comply more with my requests.   He still has to do what I need him to do, but yelling at him and getting angry doesn’t make getting him to do it fun.  Using humor helps me to not lose my cool and help him find reasons to comply that make him want to comply while laughing all the while. And that’s actually a really incredible way to approach these sorts of every day disagreements that happen in every family. This doesn’t mean I don’t lose my cool, I just try to make the humor a habit so that the family works well and isn’t unnecessarily stressed.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not passionate. I am. There is no reason why passion can’t be fun. It should be and it must be if we are to be successful. I am passionate about many things. Things that matter, like the people I love, being alive to share life with them. I am also passionate about my work, and about doing what I can to make the world a better place. I am an engaged active citizen of the world. I really don’t suffer from ennui (one of my favorite words) because, well, how could I. Life is life. I always have something I think is worth working on. Even if it is a chore, like making cookies for tomorrow night’s Monty Python film fest with some friends.

I figure I have a choice. I can be cranky about all the little things that have to be done to sustain me and my family’s life, or I can approach it with joy and passion. There are no little projects.. Doing dishes can be fun, if you decide to take pride in it. Writing my blog is fun, it’s not work, because I’m helping other people live life more successfully. I’m actively engaged with my life and with my community and with the world. What more can I ask for.

It’s an attitude really. What my mom taught me about passion is that caring matters. Its an essential ingredient to living a happy life. Caring is not a burden. It’s the essential motivation of life. Embrace it and life opens up to you.

But like everything, passion has to be balanced. I balance my passion with laughter so that when I am tempted to think things matter too much, I am able to step back and find the balance I need to keep my passions from overpowering me.

Thanks Mom and Dad – I love you both oodles!

How to create a strategy that actually works.

4 steps to creating a strategy that will turn your dream goal into a reality.

As a Humanist I take problem solving very seriously. I want to accomplish my goals and not just dream about them. I wrote a blog post a little bit back on how to gain clarity of purpose. Today I want to talk about how to create a strategy that will actually work.

Recently I have gotten involved in anti-bullying work as a result of publishing my book – The Bully Vaccine. One of the things I’ve learned and that we all pretty much knew is that schools and teachers and administrators, however well-intentioned they may be, are not well equipped to help kids end bullying. There are some systemic reasons why this happens that I’m not going to get into here.

Suffice it to say that IF we want to help reduce or eliminate bullying, these systemic problems need to be resolved.   Wanting to change the way schools operate as it relates to bullying is a noble goal.  The real question is how we want them to change and what we can do to make sure those changes actually occur. Without a solid strategy we would be working aimlessly.

Deciding on a goal is easy. And most people are pretty good at that. The difference between people who are successful at actually creating the desired change and those who don’t is the ability to create a strategy.

Most people don’t. They just start doing whatever they think will work based on what they assume the problem to be and hope for the best, fail, get discouraged and decide that nothing can be done. Here are the steps to creating a strategy that will work instead.

1)      Laying the Ground Work

Someone who is strategic instead decided on a goal and then does a bit of research. How are things set up right now. Why are they set up that way? What are the goals that drove the system we have right now. Without knowing that – you won’t be able to develop a strategy that works.

2) Research

The next bit of research is to find out what actually works to solve the problem. What doesn’t work and what makes things worse is also important to know so that you can avoid those mistakes when you plan your strategy.   Most people don’t take this step either. They just assume they know and never bother to challenge whether what they think they know is even so. As a result, their strategies fail; they blame others and give up discouraged.

3)   Having a Plan

Once you know what you are dealing with and what you need to do to fix the problem, you can develop a plan, what exactly are the changes that need to be made? What do you want to keep of the old system and what needs to be changed to accommodate the best practices that are known to work.  It is only once you have a plan on what you would like to see happen that you can start to develop a strategy for how to accomplish it.

4) Strategy

Your strategy is the steps you need to take to implement the plan. Who do you need to talk to, who is in charge of the policies that need to be changed, what is the process for creating and implementing those changes. If your strategy has to do with education and disseminating new information, how are you going to disseminate it to the most possible people?

Having a goal is just the beginning. If you want to be successful, you need a solid strategy of how to get there.

Finding Clarity

Gain Clarity, Get Committed, and Capture Your Goals With Critical Thinking

Humanists are by and large internally motivated. Our philosophy helps us to prioritize our ethics and find balance between our competing needs, desires and responsibilities. Plus, and this is a big plus, the time we spend on learning how to think well helps us to find clarity.

I say this because a LOT of people think that critical thinking is boring and intellectual. But spending some time learning how to think about how you think is actually the key to gaining clarity and from clarity commitment and motivation to accomplish your goals, whatever they might be. 

So, let’s talk about the process of finding clarity in the context of critical thinking and Humanist ethics and how this will help us to be more successful in life. 

First up: Refection.

What do you want to accomplish and more importantly, why?

If you want to gain clarity of purpose in your life, you need to spend some time considering why you think the things you think and whether what you think is even so. This is the power of critical thinking and the power of why. Asking yourself why helps you properly define the real problem you are trying to solve. This helps bring clarity and puts in you a position to be successful! In a way that focusing on what you want to accomplish won’t.

Next: Visioning.

Now that you are clear on your goal, the next step is to consider what an ideal solution to your problem might be. And again, we have to do something thinking to get this right. If you don’t want your solution to be limited, you need to ask yourself is what if.  What if things were different? What if I could end world hunger? What if there were no limitations put on you. Finding the motivation to take on the world is tough. Spending time thinking about what if possibilities helps you gain the motivation by helping you truly understand what is at stake and what can be gained by your efforts. 

Finally: Strategy.

Once you know what you want to accomplish, why you want to accomplish and what the benefits are to acheiving your goals, the next step is to develop a pragmatic strategy to accomplish it. Pie in the sky ideas are great but they won’t become reality unless you do some hard thinking about what is possible in reality. What steps do you need to take to get there. What will actually work vs. what do you just think will work. And again, critical thinking is key. If your assumptions about what works and what doesn’t is flawed, you aren’t going to succeed.  Critical thinking is key.

Here is a nice exercise, share with me what your goals are and more importantly why you chose that goal.