What owns you?

Filed Under Business Life, Comments, Guest Writer, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, Survival Kit | 2 Comments

I’ve done more travel lately over the past few weeks than I normally do and the concept of ‘things as tether’ has floated across my consciousness more than once as a result. Earlier in this series, I wrote a blog about envy as it relates to acquisition/status and how it keeps us from being independent. This week’s installment is a variation on that theme.

Lugging your possessions through lobbies, airport terminals and along sidewalks gives you ample time to contemplate the usefulness and true value of what you are carrying. Two Georges help me illustrate my point: If you’ve ever watched George Carlin’s comedy routine on “Stuff,” or watched George Clooney in the film, Up in the Air and his ‘backpack analogy,’ then you’ll understand where I’m coming from with this post.

On a very personal note, I filed for divorce about two and a half years ago and have spent the time since literally giving away most of my stuff. A five bedroom house. Gone. Most of the stuff that furnished it. Gone. Thousands of dollars of blankets, decor, candlesticks, …stuff. Gone. Donated to Goodwill.

Clearing my life of extraneous clutter and stuff helped, but this post is also about why we accumulate things in the first place and how that compulsion to do so keeps us from our independence. I am not a monk and I’m not suggesting that you become one; rather, I would encourage you to take a look around your house. Take a quick inventory of the things you purchased either for status or because it was something that society said that you needed to own in order to ‘qualify’ for the role you wish to represent.

What things do you really LOVE? What things express your individuality or add joy to your life? What things reflect your true values? How many of them are duplicates? When I was lugging things hither and yon this past month and a half, I carried with me the essential, yes, but also things that made my travel a joy.

“Simplify. Simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau

When we take a moment to cull our possessions to the essential, authentic items that combine elements of utility and beauty, you will find that you need fewer of them. You will be packing lighter, so to speak, and anyway, you can’t take nothin’ with you but your soul (to paraphrase John Lennon). When you have fewer dust catchers, you have more time to devote to other things: your studies, your vocation, a hobby…other people. You’ll have more time to evolve into the person you would like to become, perhaps.

One of the best books about the exchange of energy for stuff I’ve read is Your Money or Your Life. For me, it distilled my focus into realizing what truly was important to me and gave me a guideline to achieve my goals. (NOTE: I do not benefit financially from this link. It’s simply a recommendation).

Stuff is wonderful; stuff is beautiful and having the right stuff when you need it is priceless. Understanding our relationship to Stuff is essential to claiming our independence, however. What owns whom? What has been your experience?

——-
Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive)

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What do the voices in your head say?

Filed Under B.A.D. Blogger, Comments, Community, Content, Guest Writer, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, leadership | Leave a Comment

I received a few messages from folks about last week’s blogpost, mentioning the use of both George Bernard Shaw’s quote and my own grandmother’s prompt to “pretend you’re alone,” when faced with making decisions. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot this week, as I’ve run my errands or while exercising on the treadmill, about the impact quotes and mantras have on us (or, in the instance of this particular blog entry, me).

Anyone who has participated in self-help books or self-improvement exercises has usually been advised to place reminders in various places around their home where they will be seen. Usually in the form of Post-it notes or notecards with quotes, these sayings or goal statements serve as visual cues to stay on track. Faithful readers of this series will note that I traditionally punctuate entries with various quotes as a means of underscoring my content.

I like quotes for a number of reasons: seeing wisdom encapsulated in these written snippets provides a ballast or redirect for me. Quotes also help me when I realize that I share a commonality, in terms of understanding a mutual lesson. It is reassuring when I see that I agree with someone who has achieved a level of success to which I aspire.

As it relates to independence, I also see quotes as an invisible coach of sorts, encouraging me from the page. When I feel as though I am not getting anywhere or, worse, going backwards, seeing/remembering a quote reminds me that all is not lost. That I have the power of choice.

So I thought that today, I’d share a few quotes that provide the framework for my work across strata: as a mother; as a friend; as a businesswoman. A few days ago, on twitter, there was an exchange among three other “tweeps” who were talking about work vs personal lives and personas. My answer was that mine intersect. I work with people I like. My work is woven into the fabric of who I am as a vocation; therefore, the quotes I use are applicable across roles.

Many of my personal favorites originate with Eleanor Roosevelt. There are literally hundreds of her quotes from which to choose, but the ones that drive me:

“It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.”

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do” (emphasis mine).

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

The naturalist and spiritual seeker in me is drawn to transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. These two men drew strength from nature and endeavored to align themselves not only with their environment, but also with their inner natures.

Here are three Emerson quotes that regularly filter to the top of my consciousness:

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

Of these Thoreau quotes listed below, one is literally affixed to my refrigerator in the form of a magnet!

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Other quotes attributed to favorite public figures from whom I draw strength: Pablo Picasso, Maya Angelou, Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde. Please share some of your favorites in the section below. Have any quotes made a difference in your life? How?

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Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done?

Filed Under Business Life, Comments, Marketing, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, Writing | 9 Comments

We’re Awfully Good at Debriefing Failures and Just Toasting Our Success

It takes a team to achieve a major business initiative. The research, the trials, the final product, the sampling effort, the trade shows, the tests and metrics, the PR, marketing, and social media effort designed amplify the buzz all took people, time, money, resources invested where it counts.

And when that sort of investments fails, we’re all over it to figure out where it went wrong. We hold meetings to debrief our choices, our missteps, and errors like so many grains of broken glass ground down to sand. In the name of learning from our mistakes we own our loses like so many merit badges. Sometimes we beat the losing horse until it’s long past dead with a mantra never to forget or to repeat the mistakes we made again.

But when we win, we toast to our success and move ahead.
What if we put the same rigor to debriefing our success?

How to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done

We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success. A quick look at Bloom’s taxonomy will show that what we often do when we debrief a losing situation is we work all of the way up from knowledge through evaluation of what didn’t work.

Suppose we followed that toast to our success with an equally granular discussion of what worked with our success? It might look like this.

Knowledge – What it is we accomplished? What were the key parts that led to the success?
Comprehension – What do we know now about the project, the team, the customers that we didn’t know before?
Application – How can we use what we’ve learned from this success to build the next initiative like this one?
Analysis – How is this project similar and different from other projects we undertake?
Synthesis – What overall learnings can take forward from this success?
Evaluation – How as this win change what we understand about what we do as a business?

Raise that toast to your success. Then ask the six simple questions to claim what you’ve won.
The moments of reflection that bring you to the answers are the time you need to incorporate, internalize, and own what you’ve done — to move the “winning behavior” from a possibility into a natural response.

The evaluation of the win is the way to claim your rewards, to own them, and to leverage that learning from then on.
When you own your success, it shows every time you walk into a room. That’s how claiming rewards from success leverages itself into more success.

The good news is we can all go back — alone or with our teams — and claim our rewards for every success we’ve ever won.

Not everything we learn has to come from what we do wrong. Are you ready to learn from every right thing you’ve done?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Thanks to Week 269 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Be Ever Grateful for What You Have

Filed Under Comments, Marketing, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

Thanksgiving. Families. Rooms filled with people. Old torn relationships and new relatives. Or worse. A diner and a meal alone with faded memories.

We can’t bring back or remake today into what once was.
We can’t get the folks we love to behave exactly as we might want.
We can’t orchestrate the world to turn slowly to our best thoughts.

But we can be grateful for what we’ve got.
Every day. No matter what. We can recognize and celebrate what we value most of all.

How to Be Ever Grateful for What You Have

When that clerk in the grocery shop snaps and cracks and can’t even look up to see the person that you are, think about the generous person might have seen. Smile anyway and say “Thank you.”

When that person at work treats you like an inconsequential robot, think about the value you add every day. Smile anyway and say “Thank you.”

When that family member takes over the center of the universe, think about how much nicer you can be when you’re able to see the view from the perimeter. Smile anyway and say “Thank you.”

When that person you misinterprets your good deeds, think about good feelings that came with the doing. Smile anyway and say “Thank you.”

When that gossip says things about you that aren’t true, talk to your friends who would never believe such things about you. Then smile anyway and say “Thank you.”

Thank you
for showing me I don’t get thrown by little things.
for helping me see who I am is not what you say about me.
for the opportunity to try a positive response to your negativity.

Thank you can be an invitation to set the table differently.

But most importantly,
When the people who help you thrive show up,
smile every time and say thank you.
You’ll know them by the way
they consistently say and show they have faith in you,
by the hope and time they invest your dreams,
and by the endless love they provide to see you through.

Make every breath a smile and a thank you.
Say it out loud and show to proudly in every way you know how.

It’s a forever gratitude … a generosity that goes both ways.
Smile and say “thank you” out loud to recognize how rich your life is.
Every day.
———
Thank you to everyone who has changed my life.
My gratitude is huge and will always come back to you.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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