Thinking-Outside-of-the-Box Archives

New Year’s Resolutions, No! How to Make Positive Changes that Have Meaning and Stick

December 30, 2006 by Liz

Never Made One Yet

The first time I encountered the term, New Year’s Resolution, was in the comic strip, Peanuts, by Charles M. Shultz. I was 8, maybe 9, years old, and Peanuts was the top comic in the Chicago Tribune. As I went through the comic strips that day, making resolutions was a recurring theme in them.

I found the idea of New Year’s Resolutions curious, and I wondered why I’d never heard of them. I sought out the only available expert I knew. I asked my mom.

My mom answered, “Because most folks make resolutions and forget them the very next day. That’s just not how most people change.”

I can still tap into the relief I felt when she said that. My imagination had made this ferocious picture of what a resolution was. I had seen myself climbing into a splintery, wooden shipping crate labeled “FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE WITH NO HOPE OF EVER GETTING OUT.”

Thanks to that conversation about New Year’s Resolutions, I’ve never made made one yet.

New Year’s Resolutions a New Approach

On Open Comment Night December 5th, the subject of New Year’s Resolutions came up. We agreed that they don’t work as a list. Christine Kane explained her approach was to choose a word. Ben took that idea back as the Absolute Best Way and described it on his Instigator Blog.

Boy, I sure like their ideas a lot!

But I need more than that to execute — if I want to make a positive change that will stay with me. So if Ben and Christine don’t mind, I’m going to expand on the spirit of their ideas, knowing they already “get” it.

How to Make Positive Changes that Have Meaning and Stick

Changing habits is hard to do. The hard part is getting the new ones to stick. It’s easier when we approach our habits the way we approach our tasks and our skills — knowing our goal, not taking on too much, and making use of the “do over” rule when we need it.

Here’s how to make your positive changes stick.

Choose one thing to change. One thing done is always better than 12 things started. If you’re working on gratitude, you might narrow it to saying thank you and meaning it. If you’re working on snacking you might replace one snack food with a healthful one or one time that you snack with another activity.

Write your choice down and define it as an objective. I will say thank you out loud and give a brief reason for my gratitude when folks do things simple for me, such as listen to my ideas, and I’ll note their response. Now you know it is that you’re going for and you’ve got a clear objective.

Make it measurable and make a measurement goal that increases. The measure can be simple. It might be how many smiles a day you get. Without a measure though, a goal is easy to lose track of or forget. How will you know if you’re getting better without a measurement?

Check in at the end of the day to see how you did. Record your measurement and compare it to yesterday. Plan for tomorrow, but don’t think about next year — that’s a lifetime away.

Forgive yourself when you slip or have a bad day. Everyone does that. Don’t give up — with that response no one ever would learn to bicycle, skate, or be a leader in any sense. Pick up where you left off, knowing the practice you already have will make the forward momentum that much easier.

Celebrate your successes when you have a great day. When you live up to the change you are going for, let yourself know that by doing something really cool with a friend, taking in a great movie, CD, or book, or whatever else feels like a reward.

When the change is fully a part of you, go on back to choose another positive to add to what you do.

Changing habits is like taking on new skills. We need to make room to learn, see progress, dust off our mistakes, and celebrate our successes. We’ve been doing that since we went to school. It’s what learning is.

Take a word from Christine and Ben, don’t make a resolution. Make a change that is meaningful.

When you make a positive change that sticks, other positive things will happen too. You’ll also be changing the world just a bit.

New Year’s Resolutions. Positive changes in the world. Have you thought about this? The quickest way to change other folks’ behavior is to change our own?

Thank you for that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Mind Mapping: Right Brain Work Ahead — Enter At Your Own Risk

November 14, 2006 by Liz

Let’s Get Visual

You wake to a song on the radio, an oldie that takes you back to where you heard it. That was at a summer concert on the freshly mown lawn. You can almost smell the grass again. You see the faces of the friends you were with, especially your steady date. Bits of conversation from that night come back to you. You start to laugh at a joke you thought you’d completely forgotten.

Almost all of the work that made that experience happen was your right brain making associations. The song you heard was associated to the event and each detail that radiated out from it, until you had a picture of the event.

Mind Mapping

Mind Mapping — The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential — is a way of taking that kind of relational thinking out of your head and putting it where we can see it.

You might already know how to do it. Chances are you know a kid who can. Grade schools have been teaching how to organize and map ideas this way for a couple of decades. In school this technique is called clustering, idea mapping, concept mapping, or idea webs. They’re part of the curriculum as early as age 7.

When to Use a Mind Map

Mind maps are useful for clearing your mind of the thoughts around an idea. A mind map is best used for capturing an idea and its parts while it’s happening. They work well for most people because they allow for information to be structured in the same way as our brains relay it: I made the mind map below as I was conceiving the basic services for the Perfect Virtual Manager (PVM).

This map represents the thinking at stage 1. It shows the groups PVM would serve and the basic services each might use. The map helped me define the service and became a visual to talk and write from when I was discussing the idea with others. Now the fledgling concept shown here is far more complex.

Perfect Virtual Manager Map

One look at the mind map and folks have the “big picture” of what kind of service I’m offering. It gives them a solid grounding through a visual. What began as a way for me to work with my thoughts has produced a useful tool for sharing the first stage of the offering.

Mind mapping is particularly good for situations in which you want to share somewhat structured ideas with a client, but you don’t want them to look so finished that the client has no room for input.

Here are some resources for mind mapping. You don’t really need software to do it. I find a pencil works well too.

Have you mapped your mind lately?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Critical Skill 7: Bias Toward Action with an Eye on Opportunity Cost

November 7, 2006 by Liz

Failing Faster Isn’t Enough.

Three tasks on a desk. Three people are asked how to do them. One says jump in and get started “Just decide.” The second, more thoughtfully offers, “Wait. Let’s study them first.” A third person walks in to say, “Why are you wasting your time on revamping our flagship product? Use those resources to take down our competitor’s newest entry.”

Which of the three has the right approach? Put them together, and they all do.

It’s true, if we don’t act, we won’t move forward. If we don’t risk failure, we’ll not learn or innovate. Planning and packing and moving on that trail used to be the explorers’ way. Being an innovative explorer is no longer enough. That philosophy has a major part missing.

[Read more…]

Hold the Sky, Feet on the Floor . . .

September 25, 2006 by Liz

Often before I write I need time to reflect, to find the words. I put on my headphones and let music to get me there. Music takes me from the worries on my desk and lets me access my center.

Today, I wanted to hold onto a beautiful day in Chicago.

I let Howard Jones help me.

Ordinary things in life are where
this heaven likes to be

Hold the sky, feet on the floor
Hold the sky, feet on the floor

We make our sun to shine
We make our space and time
We make the weather
We make it change

Howard Jones, We Make the Weather, People

I’ve listened to this song for years. Yet, every time I hear it, I learn a little more about what it could mean to me.

What a great way to approach to business, life, relationships. Hold the sky, feet on the floor. That client who didn’t show for a meeting last week, he can’t stop my sun from shining, neither can the numbers in my blog stats or the phone that won’t stop ringing.

Everyday is a new day and we get to decide what the weather will be. It’s not such a hard concept, if I take time to breathe.

Isn’t that part of our branding? We problem solve to change bad weather? Don’t we innovate by changing time and space? Aren’t the best big dreams well-grounded in what we can actually do?

And the people . . . the relationships that add the greatest value to my life are the ones that just by being change the weather. They are the friends and colleagues who teach me to dream BIGGER and still keep myself standing in reality.

Relationships like that have changed my life. They have the power to change the world.

Today is the only today I have. You can bet I’m going to hold that sky with both arms standing right here in my living room.

We make the weather. We make it change.

Liz's Signature

5 + 1 Habits that Make Good Things Happen for You

September 7, 2006 by Liz

Make Things Happen

Some people say “It’s smart to be lucky.”

My favorite boss used to say, “I’d rather be lucky to be smart.”

I’ve always said, “You don’t need luck, if you can make good things happen.”

Everyone hears about someone who has all the luck. That person who is “in the right place at the right time — almost all of the darn time. How does that someone do that?

It’s not fate. It’s not an accident. It’s not even a lucky star.

That someone knows how to make good things happen.

It’s not hard — change some things and it could be you.

[Read more…]

Great Find for the Mind: A New Measure of Intelligence?

August 31, 2006 by Liz

As I Charge My Brain

Business schools are all looking for ways to add innovations and right-brain thinking to their curriculums. Tufts University is looking for a new way to gauge intelligence.

Great Find: Toward a New Measure of Intelligence

Permalink: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2006/id20060803_891819.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_the+creative+corporation

Audience/Topic: Anyone with an interest with innovation trends in business

Content: Robert Sternberg at Tufts University is looking for a new way to measure intelligence. In this BusinessWeekonline article by Romy Drucker, we find out the details of just what that means. Here’s a quick look.

BETTER PREDICTOR. Sternberg defines intelligence as mental activity devoted to “purposive adaptation to, selection, and shaping of real-world environments relevant to one’s life.” It is no wonder, then, that he believes the university should think about education “in terms of skills that matter.”

His research indicates that when applicants’ creative and practical intelligence are quantified and considered together, there is a substantial increase in the admissions committee’s ability to predict academic success in the first year of college.

He also thinks that the modifications in the Tufts rating system will have the effect of admitting more students who reflect the institution’s values of civic engagement. Given the research correlating test scores with socioeconomic status, the reforms should also help admit a more diverse class

To check out the whole article click the title shot below.

I’m off today working with clients on creativity and innovation. We’ll see whether that helps my own intelligence factor!

–ME “Liz” Strauss