Human Daylight Time

Human Daylight Time
We move hands
On man-made clocks
And do nothing to the tides.
Nor change the currents birds will ride
To migrate when good and ready.

The sun pays us no mind,
And sets when it darn well pleases.
Hurricanes shrivel in cold water,
Not because they're out of season.
Leaves go yellow,

No matter how bright our days.
Whales don’t heed human time,
Which cannot be saved.
We move hands on man-made clocks
And change – well - nothing, really.
© David C. Facer, Jr.

The Holidays - Insanity or Sanity? Choose Now.

With the feast of Halloween upon us, we have begun the year-end holiday season. Did you know our Halloween rituals date back to the Celts in the British Isles and Northern France, and to the Romans?

A Season of Rituals
The end of the year is an important time. In the days when most people lived on the land in a more intimate way, the Halloween ritual symbolized crossing a threshold - leaving the season of light and abundance and entering a time of rest, dark and cold. Feasts were more than entertainment; they included sacrifices to the earth, as a gratitude offering for its abundance. Some spiritual traditions still contain offerings of ordinary food to spirit and to earth.

In the northern hemisphere, the winter nights were cold and long. Food stocks accumulated during the harvest season must be made to last the entire season of hard, recuperating ground. Faith was important; would the food last? Would illness slither in on its ice cold belly?

Our modern holiday season contains some of the same rituals. We feast ahead of the long winter. Those of us in the middle and upper economic classes don't really fear life-threatening illness or starvation. Nonetheless, the feast ahead of the dark and cold signifies we have some understanding that the energy of summer and the earth-tone radiance of autumn have subsided.

Unnatural Movement
That may be where the comparisons end. We keep pushing through the winter as if it were summer. We go overboard with the festivities in our holiday season until we are exhausted. We pack our schedules so full that we lose touch with the slowing pace of the food-providing earth. We manipulate the clocks to "make the days last longer." Of course, it doesn't change time. In all, we slow down very little.

Every year I hear people tell me what they have planned for the holiday season. The stories are the same - year in and year out. The standard tales are told with a mix of foreboding and pride that they can endure the exhaustion. "Look at me. I'm strong because my season will be exhausting and I'll still survive it." The stories are always the same.

This year I have less tolerance for them. I no longer have high tolerance for repetitious tales of fatigue woven into lists of upcoming events told with puffed-out chests and slumped shoulders.

Right Thinking
We are not victims to exhaustion; we are seducers of it! It is a fallacy to think that a full life includes no silence, no stillness. It is a fallacy to believe that sitting quietly and moving slowly with the colder air means we're not powerful. It is wrong thinking to drive the body hard against natural rhythms as if it is ignorant of its needs - and yours. Refusing to listen does not make us right.

A good and full season should include slowness, silence and peacefulness. And, it's up to you to pull those into your days. This culture, this all-activity-all-the-time culture, will not make it easy for you. It is the river to the salmon. You must be strong and determined to make it to the top. On balance, you must make a super-conscious choice: will your seasonal rituals lift you up, or break you down?

What will it be? Holiday insanity or sanity? Choose now.

Are Rivalries Pointless?

Who doesn't know the Chicago White Sox won the World Series of baseball this week?

If you don't already know, there is a rivalry in Chicago between the two teams that play there, the White Sox and the Cubs. If you know a Chicago sports fan, they have surely told you who they root for. My friend, Adrienne, pulls for the Cubs.

But, when Adrienne's team didn't make it to the playoffs, she began pulling for the 'cross-city rivals, the White Sox. That's neat, if a bit unusual. This got me thinking; are rivalries pointless or meaningful.

The Downside
Rivalries are pointless when they divide people into groups. Of course, each group tries to assert its dominance over another. Each group tries to "beat" the other.

Several years ago, my brother and I attended a NY Jets vs. NY Giants football game. Like the Cubs and White Sox, you are a fan of either one or the other. In the stadium that night, the energy was electric. There was extra security to deal with violence. The yellow-jacketed guards were very busy. My brother and I left early because the guys (yes, they were mostly guys) were quickly dumbing themselves down from shouting words of no more than two syllables and showering each other with beer to physically fighting.

In that way, a rivalry is stupid. My favorite team is better than your team is one idea. It might even be supported by statistics. But, the "your team s**ks!" and the range of personally-aimed expletives which tend to accompany that idea do little more than stir the blood. They certainly don't stir one's thinking in any useful way. Rivalries often lead to segregation.

In business we don't fight in quite the same way. Instead, we disparage each other's products and services. We gossip about each other. We close our minds down to the possibilities of collaborating. We violate patents. And when we stop thinking, we enter the gray zone of questionable ethics.

The Upside
A rivalry is meaningful when it focuses our attention on performing better than normal. It can be a source of positive stress. When I worked at EMC, we considered IBM our rival. The industry and financial media liked to pit us against one another using the word rivals - as if we needed more reminding we were David, they Goliath. At the time, the younger me enjoyed sparring with my IBM marketing rival in the press, each of us trying to out-insult the other.

The Best Thing
The most useful thing about the Chicago White Sox vs. Cubs rivalry is that many Cubs fans quickly turned to supporting their 'cross-city rivals when the White Sox made the World Series. In fact, there is a great picture of the message, "Congratulations Chicago White Sox" posted on the light-board at Cubs stadium.

I like that because it showed an unusual camaraderie. The Cubs management took the high road. They showed a city of 3 million people how to congratulate a neighbor for a job well done. For a few hours, that sign helped bring people together. That's a very good thing.

I wonder what would happen in your company if you thought of a competitor as a potential collaborator. I wonder what would happen when the salesperson we are in a rivalry with (maybe a one-sided rivalry?) is asked to share some information about how she does it so well. I wonder what would happen in our families if we refused to see our siblings as rivals and saw them as people to learn from. What could we learn about respect, honor and generosity?

In the end, I'm still a bit undecided about how useful rivalries are in everyday life. What I am certain about is this: Any thought or behavior that stirs the blood and shuts off the brain deserves to be changed.

Blog Fridays - Coming Soon!

Dear Dedicated Reader,

You may have noticed a decline in the number of blog posts here recently. As my business has picked up, and school has consumed the remaining energy in my workday, I have slipped in my blog writing.

I intend to turn that around by making Fridays Blog Day. Every Friday is now officially, Blog Friday. Each Friday I'll post a new entry. That will ensure four to five posts per month, probably as many as you can handle given all you're up to.

Next quarter when I add more administrative help, I may be able to post more often.

If you're interested in my perspective on a hot issue, how about sending a question via email and I'll respond, like a Dear Coach column?

No sense in this being a one-way affair!

More to come...promise!

Sincerely,
David

Piling Evidence Means Change!

Everyone has heard the quote, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

How Insane Am I?
I have never heard anyone say it's isn't true; we all believe it. But, acting on it can be hard. This weekend, I got another pile of evidence of both parts - that it's true and that acting on it is hard.

What is really happening when we do not act upon something we know is true? What's that all about?

The answer is as easy as stating the truism; we often don't know what really needs to be done or how to do it. We also are fantastic at avoiding feeling or looking like we don't know how to do it - so we avoid practicing doing it. The end result is insanity.

A Strategy
Let's go further. Here are three steps for changing unhelpful and ineffective behaviors. This is right out of research-proven motivation science.

We need to:

Number ONE (1) - Know what needs to be done.
Number TWO (2) - Know how to do it.
Number THREE (3) - Have competence in doing it.

Now, the first two are easy, right? Knowing what needs doing and knowing how to do it - both very easy. Well...

ONE
...Number ONE is pretty much intellectual. We have an idea of what needs to be done. Usually it's easy for us to identify what needs doing, except for when the situation is complex. For complex situations, the simple 50,000 foot view of "I need to lose weight" or "I need to be a better team player" is too simplistic. Those statements don't deal with the issues at the root cause level. They don't deal with what really needs doing deep down. For example, in order for me to not rush into conversations, I need to understand what is motivating me to do it. So, my Number ONE statement should be more specific, such as, "I need to understand what is motivating me to rush in, so I can stop doing it." Maybe you don't need to understand what is driving you. Not everyone really needs to know the psychology behind their behavior. If you don't need that form of understanding, no sweat. Just make sure your Number ONE statement says what really needs to be done.

TWO
Number TWO is pretty much a head thing, also. Number TWO's saving grace, though, is, that when done well, it specifies a recipe for action. It's no easy, much less comfortable, thing to learn my motivation for talking a lot (even though it only happens with subjects I'm really excited about.) Nonetheless, I want to be more community- and other-people focused, and so I do the work to understand both what I need to change and what specific steps I need to take to make it happen.

THREE
Number THREE is where most change efforts will fail. I must be competent in the thinking and behavior that the Number TWO recipe card mandates - in order for me to get the result chosen in Number ONE. Number THREE, then, mandates repeated PRACTICE.

For me, I am quick to know what needs doing, and the approaches I should take to get there. But, I'm sometimes darn stubborn in developing my competence - or actually practicing the steps in Number TWO so I get to Number ONE.

Why? Because when I focus on keeping up appearances, or not feeling awkward or incompetent, I choose feeling comfortable and looking in control over being effective. Period. The management consult and author, Peter Block, would say I've chosen safety over freedom. Ouch.

Go to New York and ask a cab driver how you get to Carnegie Hall. "Practice, Man, Practice."

Number THREE is all about practice. And, whether you think of playing the piano well, being a masterful leader or baking a cake, all THREE mandate that you practice. And, in order to practice well, you MUST be willing to think hard, look deeply into the hurdles you need to overcome in order to be better, and be absolutely willing to keep practicing in spite of getting it wrong some of the time.

If I ultimately want to get to Number ONE via Number TWO, I must practice Number THREE. I develop my competency through action - through practice!

If I don't - the evidence that I keep getting important things wrong will keep piling up - as will the fall out, until change is absolutely mandated in order to survive, or, I'm left alone, outside the larger group, perfectly comfortable in my ineffective behavior.

Get Going. Get There.
It's simple, not necessarily easy. But, something being hard is no excuse for avoiding it...If I really want to have the experience of being wiser and more effective next month than I was this month, I'll get moving with Numbers ONE, TWO and THREE.

One final word - you will surely notice as you get more practice, you will have more successes. That will feel good. Make sure you enjoy the gathering successes, they make up a new pile of evidence - that your competency is improving and change is successfully happening! Ready...ONE, TWO, THREE...Now Get going...Get there!