Posts tagged Leadership

Integrity Always Wins

When one of your values is personal integrity, the road narrows, real quick. What does that mean? Recently I have made a handful of statements and commitments that mean the world to me. Equity and opportunity for those that deserve the opportunity regardless of race, gender, life experiences... I get so fired up about creating safe places for people to thrive. I’ve had more than a few opportunities to make decisions that impact this integral part of my belief system and ya know what, I’ve chosen to stick to my values instead of going with the alternative. Is it easy or “fun” to pass by opportunities, say goodbye or upset people to stay in integrity with my values, nope, not even a little. But you know what it does do, it’s like another squat at the end of a set when I am hitting fatigue, I know if I keep going the next workout I’ll be stronger, the muscle will break down and build itself back up even stronger and more resilient. I look at this photo and I see a woman that has weathered countless storms and chosen sacrifice over comfort. Why does this matter? Because, behind the scenes, behind my eyes is a vigilant determination to do what is right, and, I want that for you. It is so much more fulfilling to sleep at night clear minded than plot out the next move. I love not having anything to remember because I tell the truth. I share in the spirit of making sure anyone interested in the narrow path, to assure you it will not be clear of obstacles, instead... Buckle up, get a good group of people to surround you to champion the hard times and rally with, and let’s change the world, the right way, with integrity. #womenempowerment #womensupportingwomen #womeninbusiness #womenwithintegrity #womeninfitness #wifa #community #integrity

Lindsey Rainwater is an experienced business advisor, executive coach and the founder of The Women in Fitness Association (WIFA). WIFA is the global association supporting women in their career trajectory helping them rise to their fullest potential in business and life. She is known for her work advising businesses, her original published content, additionally supporting individuals in transformational change and leadership development. Her intention is to help individuals and organizations enjoy necessary change in order to succeed.

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End of Year Rituals that Create New Year Energy Bursts

As the year comes to an end many of us embrace our own practices and rituals, reflection and create time to rest. Typically then quickly followed by planning and goal setting the first few weeks of the year once the Holiday buzz starts to fade. I find these two weeks to be a particularly great time to reflect and plan, express gratitude and renew my resolve towards aspirations I am working towards. Over the past three years I have created a new practice for myself I would like to share, It is a combination of tools I have picked up over the years, and my top two influencers in this ritual are Kathlyn Hendricks and David Allen.

What I notice each year is that as the calendar comes to a close to turn over a new chapter, I feel an uprising energy to anticipate what is to come and also reflect on what has happened. Today I want to talk about tools to support your completion of a year, and allow for the most energy possible to come with you into the new year. I will share with you in two weeks what my rituals are around goal setting and intentions.

My first activity is to brainstorm and think of any possible items that have gone undone and make a list. I find that "energy leaks", absent mindedness or lack of focus are all a result of keeping too much in my mind and not enough on paper or in a reliable place I can come back to, to get things done. So step one, take an active inventory of all the items out there you might not have completed or are still in limbo.

After I have a good list of items that are still un done or slipped my mind, a practice I learned from David Allen, "Closing the loop" of communication. The term is somewhat self explanatory, and, It is important to get at the root at this concept which is proactively coming back to anything to "tie a bow on it" so everyone involved is on the same page. Closing the loop looks like when you say you are going to do something, and then you do it, go back to the person you told you would do the thing, and tell them what happened, close the loop. When loops are not closed, energy can get leaked out as it creates wonder or mistrust in the person on the other end. Closing the loop keeps a flow between the people you make agreements with and creates space for creativity and collaboration as well.

Once you have your list, you review it, communicate with each of the items or take action if only you are involved, that act is called "completing". You know that rush of energy that comes with crossing items off your to do list, well, this is what I am talking about, creating action around completing with all (as many as possible) agreements or things left undone that you have accumulated over the year. What this does for me is acts as wind at my back, giving me more energy and a more ready mind to go into the next year. You might say, I have actives that cary over into next year, of course, so do I, and the trick is to be conscious of that and have a plan for how those items play out. I have a tendency to have one large to do list or project list that is on going, and sometimes one of those items gets a little bit of work done on it each day for three months, and then it becomes complete. If you have items like that, I find having a deadline I am moving towards and time slotted to reach mini completions along the way. If it is an 80 slide presentation, divide it into sections of 20 slides and give yourself 2 hours a week to complete it over the course of 5-6 weeks. Those types of completion activities have really done wonders for my energy levels and I have Kathlyn Hendricks to thank for teaching me this skill.

As you spend time reflecting and realizing over the next two weeks, remember to actively evaluate your completions for the year. If nothing else do this from a place of wanting as much energy as possible to bring to your goal setting sessions in 2017.

In my next post, I will share with you my own version of how I set my goals and intentions for each year.

Thank you for reading along and please let me know if I can help you with these items, I have found that collaboration is of the highest importance to support ongoing creativity and I would enjoy collaborating with you!

Lindsey Rainwater, also known as Lindsey RainH2O, is a sought-after business consultant, leadership coach, writer and presenter to the fitness and wellness industry. For more information about Rainwater, follow her on Twitter @LindseyRainH2O

The Art of Knowing When To Stop instead of Start

One of my all time favorite leadership books is Good to Great by James Collins, I remember being in my early 20's and reading the book for the first time, it has remained a resource for me for over a decade. During my last read through the book, a concept stuck out to me that I had not really noticed before. Now I am sure it was because I was not ready to see the message, funny how life works that way, when the student is ready the teacher appears. The book centers around many wonderful topics, and the principle I want to share with you today is the art of the "stop, doing list". Isn't it intuitive for us to create a "to do list" that informs our actions throughout the day, of course! Collins suggest that we consider what to stop doing to really allow for true and dynamic discipline.

I love his thoughts he noted down on the topic found on his blog, jimcollins.com.

Each time the New Year rolls around and I sit down to do my annual resolutions, I reflect back to a lesson taught me by a remarkable teacher. In my mid-20s, I took a course on creativity and innovation from Rochelle Myers and Michael Ray at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I kept in touch with them after I graduated.
One day, Rochelle pointed to my ferocious work pace and said, "I notice, Jim, that you are a rather undisciplined person."
I was stunned and confused. After all, I was the type of person who carefully laid out my BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals), top three objectives and priority activities at the start of each New Year. I prided myself on the ability to work relentlessly toward those objectives, applying the energy I'd inherited from my prairie- stock grandmother.
"Your genetic energy level enables your lack of discipline," Rochelle continued. "Instead of leading a disciplined life, you lead a busy life."
She then gave me what I came to call the 20-10 assignment. It goes like this: Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?
That assignment became a turning point in my life, and the "stop doing" list became an enduring cornerstone of my annual New Year resolutions — a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.
Rochelle's challenge forced me to see that I'd been plenty energetic, but on the wrong things. Indeed, I was on entirely the wrong path. After graduate school, I'd taken a job at Hewlett- Packard. I loved the company, but hated the job. Rochelle's assignment helped me to see I was cut out to be a professor, a researcher, a teacher — not a businessman — and I needed to make a right-angle turn. I had to stop doing my career, so that I could find my real work. I quit HP, migrated to the Stanford Business School faculty and eventually became — with some remarkable good luck along the way — a self-employed professor, happily toiling away on my research and writing. -Jim Collins
Article can be found on Jim's Blog, Click here to see full article

Often when we create a new plan to ignite change, that plan is often coupled with initiates and tasks to set us on the new path and direction. In pausing to reflect about other possibilities, one suggestion that Mr Collins makes is that of evaluating what can potentially be stopped instead of started. Making the choice and having the discipline to stop is a high level demonstration of self awareness and discipline. Like he talks about in the article, busy can be a state we find ourselves in and without the proper discipline, can end up not accomplishing a whole lot even if we feel like we are and instead we are delusional to the reality we have created.

As you create plans for next year, business and your own new year goals, consider what you could stop doing instead of adding in more new initiatives. Ask yourself the 20-10 rule that collins mentions, what would you do differently?

The hardest part of change is having the motivation and discipline to sustain the change, and a large force can be a person to support that process. Reach out to me, I love to support people amidst change and would enjoy hearing about your plan and how it is going. Send me a note below, and let's talk about what you are going to STOP doing.

Contemplating Air Travel & Getting out of Your Comfort Zone

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about the miracle of flight travel, do you ever let yourself really think about what flying is, the up in the air invention that allows us to pass through time zones in the sky! I can leave my house at 6am, be in London Less than 10 hours later, that is remarkable when you consider it used to take a month to cross the ocean and some couldn't even make the journey! It is easy to allow yourself to expand your mind to think about the miracle of air travel, but how often do you let yourself think about other "big ideas" that contribute to your daily life?

Most human beings have the natural disposition to seek comfort, consistency and routine, it creates the feeling of accomplishment, and is a method in which to play inside the construct you invented that is your life. So what is it about the human condition that creates the desire for comfort more than the desire for growth? One conclusion can be that comfort can be seen as an avoidance to stress, you seek comfort, keep things the same, rely on routine to maintain what you know and do. A fairly frequent buzz phrase when evaluating your over all well being is "are you stressed?" That tells me that a large portion of our world is using the word "stressed" as a placeholder for the side affects of rapid expansion or change without a plan.

An alternative way of evaluating your stress levels is you can take an inventory of what kind of activities you are involved in and where do you really spend your time. Busy does not equal productive, and it is really easy to confuse productive and meaningful work with things that fill your calendar and to do list. I know for me, I have chosen to detach from the word "stressed", the word does not have any meaning I can relate to as I like to think I am choosing to do and participate in where I spend my time. I love what Jim collins talks about in Good to Great, the Stockdale Pradox, being willing to confront what you are spending time on and once you have looked the brutal facts in the eye, from there you can evaluate your steps forward.

When you can “maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be,” you are embracing what Jim Collins calls the Stockdale Paradox.

Another super meaningful dialog on the topic is found here in the below video. Gary Vaynerchuck is the CEO of a successful media consulting agency and at around 15 minutes into this talk he goes over what I think is a huge driver in the inability to "confront the brutal facts". As he talks about, no one wants to look at "the thing" that can be measured, to really point to success or not, because if they did then they would be accountable to "that thing". That would disrupt the "game". What Gary says here is everything. Maybe we are "stressed" because we can not take a hard look at WHY we are doing what we are doing and just got stuck in the wheel of work not having a purpose.

"The game is structured in a way where you are playing within it because you have mortgages , You are not making decisions based on what you believe, instead you are making decisions based on what is palpable and acceptable within the ecosystem that is created, here is punch line tho, if you are doing something to grow within an organization or not rock the boat and have stability it doesn't mean what you are doing is right, it just means its right for you within the context of the game you chose." -Gary Vaynerchuck

When you notice you are tired, not into what you are doing or looking for an escape, ask yourself why are you doing what you're doing? Did you say "yes" to a series of requests that placed you were you are today? Resulting in now it is just "what you do". Whatever you spend your time doing, My hope for you is that you have heart in it, heart does not promise daily glamour, in contrast it requires extreme levels of discipline. Here is the truth for me, when you have heart, stress isn't stress, your day is filled with what you want to do vs. have to do.

Are you part of a system unconsciously making someone else's dreams come true? Regardless of your position, the opportunity to take stock of your reality is always present and a fantastic way to live.