Lessons I Live By #6

Time to read: 16 seconds

More vintage!

Today is short: Happiness is counter-cultural. Satisfaction is revolutionary.

Think for a moment of all the complaining you heard today. Perhaps your own complaining :-). People complain constantly about their jobs, the service, traffic, food, family, fill in the blank, and people complain about it.

What if instead, you found reasons to be satisfied? Grateful? Even happy?

Sometimes being fulfilled and happy feels like a salmon swimming upstream.

Try it. It feels good to swim upstream.

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Lessons I Live By #5. Stop Overthinking!

Time to read: 47 seconds

Gorgeous copper MCM dish

Are you the person who spends hours perfecting a slide deck or obsesses over the wording in every email to get it Just Right? Today's lesson is for you.

Stop overthinking.

The way I think about it is develop an action-orientation. Move faster. Hit send. Pick up the phone.

(A caveat: some things require thoughtfulness and time. Writing most emails is not one of them. And if an email is that sensitive, then it's better to call.)

A couple of weeks ago, I used the word tenant instead of tenet in this newsletter. I so appreciate the emails I received to correct the mistake. And despite the mistake, the earth kept spinning. With his newsletter, I have a rule that I write, read/edit once and hit send. If it took me hours each week to produce this, I would stop from the stress and time suck.

If you're ruminating and overthinking, you probably already know what you want to do. You are just afraid to do it. (What if you make a mistake? What if someone is offended? What if your words come out wrong?)

Trust yourself. If something goes sideways, you have the skills to clean it up.

Just hit send.

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Lessons I Live By #4. No Such Thing As Win-Lose

Time to read: a few short seconds

1960s Bambi and Faline. Some of you won't care (like my husband. Someone of you will love them!)

Once upon a time, back in my corporate days, our main competitor had a major win in the market. I observed to one of my colleagues that this was bad news. "They win, we lose," right?

She said actually, a win for our competitor was good news for us because it meant there was a pathway and market for our similar products. Ah, that is what win-win looks like.

In life and work, your only options are win-win and lose-lose. Win-lose is a fallacy based on scarcity and fear. Win-lose implies there isn't enough to go around, and puts you in constant competition with your colleagues, friends, and neighbors. The fact is that someone else's success means success (however you define it) is available to you, too.

A rising tide raises all ships. Look for ways to raise the tide and find a win-win. It's good for you, and good for everyone else, too.

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Lessons I Live By. #3

Time to read: 36 seconds

Happy winter in the US!

Today's lesson: Nothing is urgent.

For years, I behaved as if everything, every day was urgent. Homework! Cooking dinner! Scheduling! Planning! Coaching! I drove myself and my family crazy.

The truth is, I was uncomfortable with uncertainty and lose ends. I operated as if urgency ensured everything would get done. I believed it was possible to force life to be certain if I just tried hard enough.

This lesson took me a long time to learn, and I'm still learning. Nothing is urgent. (OK. A broken arm is urgent. A natural disaster is urgent.) In daily life, very little is urgent. However many things are important. We often sacrifice the truly important under the falsehood of urgency.

Homework is not urgent. Your email is not urgent. Your relationship with your children and employees is important. I found that I confused the two and focused on the wrong things. Take a good look at what is actually important in your life and figure out how to focus on that. Drop the urgency.

Your life and work will get a lot easier!

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