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Happiness is a Bus

4/29/2013

There are two dozen platforms ... from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. "Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer," Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction - maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes - and set off. Three stops later, you've got a nascent body of work. "You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn." Penn's bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else's path, "you hop off the bus, grab a cab... and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform". Three years later, something similar happens. "This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others." What's the answer? "It's simple. Stay on the bus. "
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

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7 Effective Traits

4/22/2013

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An effective mindset is one that makes the best use of available resources - your time, energy and efforts - and uses them to create positive change.

Enjoys and appreciates the present moment. The greater part of your happiness or misery depends solely upon your attitude towards any given moment, regardless of the events contained within.
Connects inner purpose with outer effort. Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give yourself to it.
Accepts and embraces great challenges. Great demands drive the growth of great virtues. Contending with great challenges forms the foundation of greatness.
Self-disciplined. Discipline is choosing to do what you know must be done, as often and as long as required. It's doing the thing you have to do whether you like it or not.
Remains positive and focused through failure. It's focused resilience that eventually leads you to your desired result.
Filters and channels anger effectively. Direct your anger towards specific problems that can be solved, not people or generalized situations.
Willingness and drive to help others. The most curing work is found in the challenge of helping someone who has less than you do. It's one of life's great paradoxes; when you serve others you end up benefiting as much if not more than those you serve.

From the Mental Health Association of Indianapolis

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Pep Talk

4/15/2013

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It's likely that you have already met the Kid President. If not, check this Pep Talk out.
http://www.wimp.com/peptalk/ - You were made to be awesome.

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April Loupon

4/9/2013

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BOGO

Buy One Seat, Get One Seat Free Leading with Emotions Workshop
April 16th & 17th, 2013 @
The Children's Museum in Indianapolis
We welcome author Karl Mulle for this rare two-day Emotional Intelligence workshop

Use Promo Code 4Loupon13

Register Here

Contact Brittney Helt with Questions or to register 317-475-9311 x 3 | bhelt@russellmartin.com

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Optimist vs. Pessimist

4/8/2013

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What is optimism? It is a belief that things in our past were good for us, even if that means they were hard and taught us lessons. It is also the belief that things will be better in the future.

Optimism breathes life into you each day
Pessimism drains you

Optimism helps you to take needed risks
Pessimism plays it safe and never accomplishes much

Optimism improves those around you
Pessimism drags them down

Optimism inspires people to great heights
Pessimism deflates people to new lows

Both self-fulfilling. If you are an optimist, you will generally find good things happen to you. As a pessimist, you will find yourself in the not-so-good situations more often than not. We can choose to look at the world and think the worst, or we can tell ourselves the good things about each situation. Taken from Chris Widener http://www.chriswidener.com/ .

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Awfully Absent: Five Failures in Accountability

4/1/2013

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"It wasn't my fault! It just slipped out of my hands!" Imagine a toddler looking at her mother with giant cute eyes after breaking a precious family heirloom the child knew she was forbidden to touch. Shades of the Garden of Eden. It's never our fault, right? My mentor Mike Donahue likes to say "as we get older and smarter, our excuses get smarter as well." We're good at tricking people and ourselves when we are not accountable. In our project management workshops, one of the largest complaints about projects is that people just don't do what they say they will do.
No surprise, we play a role in the lack of accountability in others. Below are five ways we each fail in driving accountability.

1. When someone on your team is perceived as not accountable, it spreads like cancer through a team. On my team, we often say the words "we just can't trust them to do that". If you know someone is likely to not help you the way you want to be helped, it's easier, with a GIANT sigh, to do it yourself then it is to hold them accountable. That is awkward, and we like to brush it off by saying it takes too long. The plague spreads. Be clear and reinforce your expectation. If you don't get what you want, have the difficult conversation as soon as possible.

2. I recently shared some feedback with an organization we partner with. This was feedback no one asked for. As one of their key vendors, I thought they'd want to know how we could make our hand-offs on both sides clearer. But I never asked them what they thought about the issues, or even if they thought there were issues. The response I got was respectful, carefully written and clearly 'proved' that they had done everything correctly on their end.

3. Projects create a great breeding ground for avoiding accountability. Both the Project Sponsor and Project Manager can have accountability issues. Executive Project Sponsors are often unclear what their role is on a project. Depending on their personality, he or she may either micromanage the project or disappear until the end with the famous words "Make it SO!" The project manager may think of the sponsor as a dumping ground for unsolvable problems, as in "Wa-wah I don't know what to do...". A great executive sponsor, as a great leader, knows how to hold the PM accountable to the role they play, while coaching and providing governance. A good project manager is looking for coaching, mentoring and political support.

4. From the recent studies of Emotional Intelligence (see April workshop with author, Karl Mulle, below), we know that stress can drive brain protecting fight, flight and freeze behaviors. Today's organizations create an environment that, if you CHOOSE, you can be constantly busy and never done. "We should do something about that..." is a meeting statement that seems like you are accountable, but you're really hoping it's someone else that gets the actual work. Lack of explicit action with names and dates becomes a comfortable way to pretend to collaborate without any accountability. Choose to manage your work. First calm your brain, then be real.

5. What the heck are you doing? Do you know what your base is - your vision, mission, value? Map your personal to your business strategy, which maps to tasks and projects. Use your base and strategy to prioritize your attention. Remember the basic Covey Quadrants - focus on what matters. Be accountable to yourself.

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Happiness is a Bus

7 Effective Traits

Pep Talk

April Loupon

Optimist vs. Pessimist

Awfully Absent: Five Failures in Accountability

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