Coaching – Page 4 – The Thrivable Society

Zero-Sum Games

Have you ever heard of zero-sum games? How about non-zero sum games? For those of you who have not heard of zero-sum games, allow me to briefly explain and share some links. It comes from political and economic theory, and it means if wins are plusses and losses are negatives, the equation will end up with zero. Think about money. We start with zero, Alfred borrows 10 so he can buy widgets from Zeno. Alfred gives Zeno the 10. Alfred has -10 and Zeno has +10, and the system has zero sum.

While there are lots of games we play that actually add up numbers, such as football, in the end one team has more points than the other and is therefore the winner. What matters is not how many points but the difference between them and who has more. This zero-sum game mentality shows up in our behaviors toward each other. Do we act as if my having something means you can’t have it? It puts us in a competition mind frame, and we behave like opponents.

What if there are non-zero sum games? Can we, as humans, transcend the competition mindset and behave cooperatively? What if there are games where helping you do well helps me do well? Sure, there are lots of places we interact where this is appropriate! I have always been surprised that business plans have competition analysis and yet don’t adequately describe the cooperation network the organization will be embedded in.

The real question I want to address here, now that we know a bit about zero-sum and non-zero sum games: how do we work in non-zero sum ways when people we need to work with operate from a zero-sum mind frame?

First and foremost, trying to change others through argument or explanation often just makes them defensive and resistant. I suggest a two-prong approach.

Use their zero-sum mentality to your advantage – and the advantage of the group. Ask where the zero-sum games are – because they exist, and point these zero-sum minded folks to those opportunities.
Demonstrate success of non-zero sum approach. Model what you want to see in the world. Be the change you seek. Through demonstration, others can see the success that comes from it. What they are truly after is success.

That sounds all well and good in an abstract theoretical way. But the situation at hand is not an ideal – it is a specific. And likely in that specific, you, my non-zero sum friends, are on a board of an organization having to navigate decisions about the organization with a zero-sum thinking collaborator, for example. What do you do?

photo credit: Evil Erin

First I want to talk about body work. So much of what we communicate happens in the body rather than through our words. Avoid sitting across from people who want to act oppositionally. Sit beside them. When they talk about a problem, be sure they gesture toward a shared space in front of them rather than at you. Imagine that they are playing dodgeball as if they were one of those tennis ball launching machines – stay away from the physical space they are launching at with their gestures.

Second, I want to talk about a model of understanding interpersonal dynamics. I use this model often when talking about relationships between people. The diagram, at right, shows two people, A and B, as well as a third node – the WE of A and B. Zero-sum thinkers usually think of their connection as the gray line from you to them. Helping them think beyond zero-sum involves helping them understand the WE connection. When we are in the AB relationship, we still use words like: I, me, mine, you, yours. When we are in the WE of AB, we talk about: we, our, ours. These pronouns point to what we have together in the relationship. demonstrate WE language. Start with you and the zero-sum person. As the language becomes reflected in their statements, you can begin to expand the WE to include others. Keep expanding until you reach we as a community (or what level you need to be at for the group objectives).

Next I want to share a bit about facilitation questions. Our zero-sum thinkers say they want to do something. Ask, “what will that get for you/us?” When they give an answer, ask again, “What will that get for you/us?” First, this helps them feel heard. They have the attention. Be sure to ask in a kind and inquisitive way, because they will quickly intuit if you are asking in order to undermine them. Remember, they think in competitive ways. When you get to a gem – something that is common ground for the collective – in the answer you get from the “what will that get for you/us” THEN ask, “how else might we be able to get that?” Bring in others to help answer that.

This is a brief introduction to ways to navigate zero-sum thinking. We can continue to explore, especially with specific stories. If you have specific needs you want to discuss, we can discuss your issues in a private context via my coaching services.

I would love to hear ways you have navigated zero-sum thinkers in the comments or on twitter (@nurturegirl).

Transformation Kit

by Thriver

Recently I got a late evening call from a good friend. A crisis had emerged. In 5 minutes I packed and headed over. Well, I brought beer, because this friend and I often met for beer and conversation. And I also brought chocolate. A girl knows in times of change, a good bar of high quality organic dark chocolate is a necessity – both for the incredible yumminess of it as well as the chemicals they say it triggers in the brain. I brought nuts. Several kinds. I didn’t know how long our conversation would last. Protein is important. I wanted an easy snack that could act as a supplement or get one over a skipped meal. You get the point – it was a 5 minute grab bag of essentials.

Nurturing is most critical and visibly necessary at moments when our lives take a drastic turn quickly. In truth we can use nurturing all the time. Personally, as someone willing to ride the edge, I have fallen off the edge more than once. I have my little patterns now for recovery, as many of us do. Some of the patterns are about giving into the darkness and despair enough to feel it thoroughly. Some of the patterns have emerged from successful tools I have used for recovering. So, I am thinking about developing something of a Transformation Crisis Nurture Girl Kit.

To nourish the body

list of items to have on hand and what each is for
list of stretches and other body care ideas and how they help

To nourish the heart

activities and exercises to tap into love
resources on the heart, love, and friendship

To nourish the mind

inquiries and challenges for thinking about situations differently
quick reference guide to non-violent communication process

To care for the spirit

list of inspirational quotes – the wisdom of those who have passed this threshold before
ways to clear space for spiritual reflection

photo credit: S?ndy

Suffering in transition is a sign of our care and attachment. Having tools at hand for mediating our experience and challenging ourselves to grow and evolve can be invaluable.

What would you want to have in your Crisis Kit? And what do you do – and how are you being – when you or a loved one experience radical transitions?

The Power of Coaching

by Thriver

Five years after going through coach training, I am reflecting on how much it has impacted my life. I mean not just in terms of clients I have worked with, but in terms of how it has impacted what I have done. I was explaining to my coach today how it has grounded me.

During times of transition, I used to feel like there was a freefall into an abyss. What I thought was true shifted and my hooks on the world melted away. I would lose my place. I always managed to land on my feet and make something of my transitions. However, the chaos rippled through many spheres in my world. I am, once again, in a space of transition. There has been a limbo state for a few years, working on projects, working on self, working on my spirituality, working through my divorce. And oddly, despite all the upheavel in the last few months and the shift I sense is coming, I feel grounded. I might, at times, lay down on the foundation floor instead of standing proudly on it, but there is no abyss I am falling through.

Coaching gave me the tools to look around – where am I at right now? What can I learn from the past to get closer to where I want to be? What do I most want? How do I prioritize what I want? Knowing the gap between where I am and where I want to be, what do I want to do to bridge that gap? When will I do that? And how will I know I am making progress? These are often big questions. And they don’t get answered in a day or a week. They evolve. And while they evolve, coaching offers tools for managing my headspace and heartspace in the process.

How do I not take things personally? How do I navigate conflicts? How do I leave behind beliefs about the world and relationships that are not working for me? Coaching gives me these tools. My particular coach training also relied heavily on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). They work incredibly well together. Coaching is aspirational – dream bigger dreams, believe in yourself and others as whole, creative, and resourceful. NLP is a set of best practices on how the brain works. Or how the brain and the body actually work. It doesn’t aim to have an overarching theory of psychology, instead it assumes that what one person can do, another can do. The trick is being able to perceive how. Its practices can range from body and eye movements to strong visualization tactics. Together, coaching and NLP reinforce each other’s strengths.

Coaching has given me answers to the questions I pose above. And the question I haven’t addressed is what that means for me. What did I do or achieve because of this work? There are many things that are too personal to share, and I will give a short list of some I can share:

came to terms with a failing marriage and successfully ended it while maintaining a solid relationship to support my children’s well being.
created and evolved my own business. I work on my terms with clients I admire, striving not for high returns but for deep alignment.
have regular, solid and sacred time with my children and family.
repeatedly decided to attend events (such as SoCap) or achieve milestones and developed creative ways of making them happen.
developed an international network of support and care, making me more resilient and more open to possibilities.
learned to listen deeply and proactively to others, which is a gift in itself.
set and achieved audacious personal and business goals in terms of what I did/do, who I am with, and what benefits I receive.
healed enough to love fully, openly, compassionately, and resiliently. Able to communicate effectively across any range of emotion.

I still have lots of room for improvement.

I have always been courageous – committing myself to a vision and willfully making it real no matter how uncharted the territory. So that isn’t new or about coaching. And I have always been committed to approaching life as a journey to grow through and experience deeply. Coaching and NLP gave me a toolset for acting upon my core self and in ways that I want to show up in the world. And I am deeply and profoundly grateful.

Huge thanks to my coach and dear friend Jill Palermo and to my trainers specifically Tim Hallbom and Jan Elfline. And very hearty thanks to Drake Zimmerman and Dan Rose for encouraging me on the path.

Making Bold Leaps

by Thriver

Very rarely in life do we encounter clear decisions points – two roads diverge. The majority of our decisions are slow arcs following trajectories we have set for ourselves. How, when we have the opportunity to make a marked shift – a bold leap, do we muster the determination to do it?

Extreme leaps of Parkour

From experience with others and myself, I offer you one possibility:

Be clear about the benefits and consequences of both or all choices. When the choice you want is clear, image the future that this choice brings – what do you imagine it smells and looks like to be in that future?

Place yourself into the future, taking in through your five senses, the experience of it. How does it feel in your body? Did you shoulders settle? Did you shift into a more desirable state? Higher energy? Less tension? Experience it. Then, imagine accepting the consequences as worth the opportunity. Does it still feel vivid and viable?

Look back at where you are now and see the path emerging from that time of decision to the time of experiencing the rewards of the decision. Know that it is possible. And that, if it matters to you, a path will form.

Come back to the present moment of decision. Feel the imagined future pulling you toward it. You stand on the precipice of your future. Fall into it. Get a running start with small steps, if that helps,…and then let the gravity of the future vision pull you towards it. leap into your new path. A leap is part jump and part fall. Once you jump, the falling it effortless.

How have you made bold leaps? What have you learned about yourself? What bold leap will you take next?

Zooming

by Thriver

Ah, the wonderful art of zooming. Magical, really. Do you find yourself incredibly flustered? Even angry? Find some detail so engrossing you lose track of your objectives? Of all the skills on managing the mind that I have learned and developed for myself, this one may be the most powerful.

Enough sales pitch – try it.

Let’s imagine that there is a distance between you and what you are focusing on. That distance has two factors – how emotionally engaged you are and how much of your view it consumes. These factors are highly correlated. When we are upset or flustered, we are using a microscope to look in at an issue…we don’t see much context to it, and we may even be so zoomed in that we can’t see the whole thing, but only a portion of it. No wonder we can’t wrap our heads and energy around it to take effective action! We zoom in and our heart and emotion gets tangled up in our perception – we are emotional around what is huge and vibrant to us.

I hereby empower you to use an adjustable zooming tool. Take it with you where ever you go. So lightweight you can take it anywhere. Alright, I am being silly…but really, you can manage your interaction with the world and with others by adjusting how close or how far away you want something to be in your perception.

Let me give you an example: Terry is looking over finances and sees how the income and expenses are converging (and maybe that credit card statement shows a distinctly negative balance). Terry gets frustrated. The inner dialog sounds something like, “I am trying so hard, and yet I am falling behind on my plans. I am never going to be able to afford my dreams at this rate. What am I doing wrong?” and maybe Terry has a wide enough lens to see what friends appear to have, and the inner dialog continues, “Sam seems to get by on a similar salary and have better things…where did I mess up?” And most of us like to play a blame game, so add in for good measure, “If my boss would just acknowledge how hard I work, I would get that raise. Then this wouldn’t be a problem.” This sort of conversation happens in people whose income is far beyond the poverty level. Really.

Yeah, so that last statement was part of zooming. What sort of view can be included in the perspective that hits a reset button? Zoom out, and see some context. Take a flight up to 30,000 feet and view where you stand in relation to the rest of humanity (are you living on $2 a day?) and then farther out through time….throughout human history… If that doesn’t help you see how incredibly lucky you are to be where you are with this tiny issue around cash flow, then zoom farther out in the vast reaches of space – the mere fact that you even exist on this tiny planet just the right distance from the sun with just the right ingredients for life…and a strange twist of arching fate led to human evolution and here you are. A gazillion of miracles converging to make it possible for you to be here right now.

You don’t always have to back that far up. You are the author of your own stories. What is the context you want that story to be in? Zoom in or out to choose a story that works for you. Choose what you include in your field of vision and perception.

Zoom! Zoom!

Warning: zooming does not absolve you of responsibilities, it simply mitigates your attachment. Thus you can be clearer about prioritizing and taking action on your responsibilities and opportunities.

Thrivable Living: Edge-Riding

by Thriver

How do you lead a thrivable life? Let’s begin by looking at edge-riding.

One of my colleagues asked me once, why do you insist on riding the edge? To be honest, I think there are lots of ways I am not pushing the edge. And some ways that what I do might be pushing some cultural edge, but it isn’t an edge for me. For example, the father of my kids has them the majority of the time. We have been doing it this way for five years (and three of those years we have been separated.) Our kids don’t seem to think this is strange. It is how we are. I don’t wake up in the morning debating about it. It is what it is, and for the most part seems to work for us. Creating Thrivable.org, on the other hand, feels like edge-riding to me.

Wisdom from the darkness
I do sense that there is something about living a thrivable life that has to do with riding the edge. When I talk with people who have faced their own death – whether through an accident that they have willed themselves to come back from or the threat of cancer, the death of a loved one near to them, or just a serious wake up call, I hear a craving for the edge. Sometimes it grows slowly, and often times it comes in the blink of an eye. This life is short and precious. As Mary Oliver’s poem goes, “What are you going to do with this one wild and precious life?” Well, I am not going to spend it sitting down and passively letting the world go by me. And when I talk with people who have suffered tremendous loss – of wealth or love, passion project or dream, I hear there too a certain resilience that allows for riding the edge. An “I know how dark the darkness is, and I learned to survive that, and I can survive what comes next” attitude emerges in the ones I admire. Whether having faced death or failure, questions emerge that can bring one to strive for edge-riding:

What is the worst that can happen? Can I survive that?
If I don’t do anything or don’t choose this course, will I regret it later? In 5 years? 20?
Can I look in the mirror with integrity and love myself?

But what will my friends think of me?

Most of us ask this question when we ponder something on our edge. We look to them to externalize our sense of ourselves and the norms of our tribes. However, the answer does not rest with them, it rests in our own hearts. You are the only person you have to live with for the rest of your life. The only one. Not your significant other(s), not your family, not your work circle or faith circle. You. When you are 80, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of your family play at your feet, will you look in the mirror and say, “I lived a thrivable life – living in dynamic balance with myself and the world around me?” No one else is having to look in that mirror with you.

If you can’t look into the mirror today and love yourself, then you won’t likely be able to do it when you are 80 unless something changes. You are the only one responsible for that change. That is the integrity test – looking in the mirror and knowing that you have integrity – with your nature, your dreams, and your inner most self. Being able to do that, well, I think it is worth riding the edge for. If you really want to honor your nature…really want to achieve your dreams…really want to connect to your innermost self, then find your edges and ride a few until you evolve in the person that feels a glorious tingle when you look in the mirror and discover – “cool, I actually admire the person facing me.”

Fund Thrivable.org kick-off

by Thriver

After three years of exploration and network building, writing and discussion, planning and processing, Thrivable.org is just about ready for kick-off. We will have a soft launch to our friends and collaborators this month (August) and will run a pilot for three to six months.

While I have self-funded the development until this point, the work is for the commons. And if it is to be our shared organization and movement, then it must expand beyond my effort and my funds. We own this work together.

Are you willing to make a commitment to becoming thrivable? Buy me a virtual cup of coffee to keep me alert on this effort.

Have you already felt the effects of my work and the emergence of thrivable? Pay it forward for others.

My sincere gratitude for your faith in this emerging idea and project. Thank you for your commitment to a better world for all.

Experiencing as…

by Thriver

Last winter I started playing a little game. Call it “I am the universe experiencing itself as…___”

It began after having an awakening where I saw myself as one perspective that the universe has for seeing itself, and holding that as one among gazillions of others. Let us imagine the the universe, or god, or whatever greater consciousness may exist, is using everything created as a way to perceive everything else. Let us be in that perception from a state of non-judgment. No experience is more valuable than any other in this game with our imaginations.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trodel/3598596315/

by http://www.flickr.com/photos/trodel/3598596315/

Imagine a rock. A common pebble you find in your walk. What does it experience? How was it formed? How did, over time, it transform into the current shape? What is the experience of time to the rock? A grain of sand. A drop of water? A tree? A piece of petrified forest? A star?

We begin. Number of players: 1 to ? Rules:

Begin each turn with “I am the universe experiencing itself as…_____”
Fill in the blank at the end.
When playing with others, try being radically different in scale or experience, place, or time. Alternately, try surprising your playmates with a completely different angle on the same body. Say, one person fills the blank with _body of a 5 year old boy in Africa_ then the next might say _the bacteria in the boys intestines_ or _his great-great grandmother_.
Be creative. You win when you are moved by it. To laughter, to tears, to ahas, or to sleep. 😉

Spots of interest. Note from the perspective of the universe that the experience of death is not a pain felt in the body as pain – it is an experience. There is a slight detachement to what that experience feels like because it is all taken in as information about the experience. Also, all experiences add to the knowledge of the universe, so the experience of being vomit is no less valuable than the experience of being the body of a superstar. This exercise can be (or has been for me) a great leveler. And yet, I don’t think of the world as all being equal. It is different. Apples to oranges. Usually when I describe this, I use the metaphor of my hands. Why would one hand be better than the other? They are different (one being right and one being left). Or the cells in my foot are no less valuable than the cells in my ear.

Try it. See what happens for you. And tell me how it goes for you.

Messes–there is no right answer

by Thriver

I still find myself resisting my own crazy idealism. But life experience has brought me to understand something a wild teacher in high school said to us.

“There are no right answers, there is only more or less appropriate.”

Life is messy with little black and white and a whole lot of rainbowed spectrums. story of stuff

Work is complicated. There are always compromises. No worker or organization lives in some ideal world where they don’t compromise. What matters is the choices around when and where to compromise. And each of us are the only ones capable of making those choices and living with them.

What makes this all bearable? One, we have no choice. Bear it or do something else. Two, it is navigating this complexity which makes it interesting and each of us unique. Three, the spectrum brings color and light to life, embrace the intricacies as life flowing experience.

Language is not black and white either, though it might look it sitting on the page in colored ink and white space. It is a fluid breathing beast that roughly translates what we have inside us to others. Metaphors are never perfect. It is all messy. And therefore everything that we do through language is already and always to some degree imperfect and unpure. Scientists, theorists, and other black/white seekers might want rigorousness, but as long as they use language, there is always a resonance of poetry and multiple meanings and multiple interpretations. Multiple frames of understanding and relevance. There might be more and less appropriate, but there is little black and white, right or wrong.

Thus we have play…difference…complexity.

Collaboration and Complementarity

by Thriver

Collaborate with others to build your visibility, their visibility, gain access to resources, share access, increase value. Complimentarity. And I mean something pretty simple with this–who compliments what you are doing? Who has a similar market to your which will allow you both to increase your visibility to your target? What products and services compliment what you are offering? How can you leverage that compliment to build your revenues?

It matters significantly less what your competition is doing (unless you want to stay in red oceans) and does significantly matter who you have explicit and implicit cooperation with.

See Blue Oceans.