Accountability, Responsibility and Joyful Contributions

Recently, my good friend and continual source of inspiration, Bob Burg, challenged us to reconcile a couple of well-known and generally accepted idioms.

“If it is to be it’s up to me.”

And

“No one does it alone”

So which is it? Are you Atlas with the weight of the world on your shoulders or are you part of a team effort?

Does your individual success rest on you or on your team?

Why does it have to be either/or? Let’s start with who is accountable. That one is easy, we are accountable for our actions, our behavior and our personal performance. It is up to us to take initiative, we are in the driver’s seat and that means ultimately that vehicle only goes forward when WE put it in gear and it only goes where WE steer it to go. It is up to us to do our best under any circumstances.

But that doesn’t mean we make the journey alone. We can delegate tasks that are essential to our success, we can build a team. Notice I said “delegate” not “abdicate.” We can make other people responsible for tasks by an exchange of value, hiring, outsourcing, bartering, etc… They do not take on being accountable for our success, only responsible for the tasks they take on. It is still up to us to make sure those tasks are being completed to standard and in a timely manner. So it is also up to us to surround ourselves with team members who accept responsibility and perform to our standards.

It is also up to us to surround ourselves with people who will support us in reaching our chosen destination and who will challenge us to dream of destinations we could not imagine without them. It is up to us to communicate clearly and openly, first with ourselves and then with others, about where we want to go and what we need to get there. And it is up to us to support others in their journeys as well.

Another cliche that happens to be true – “no man is an island” – we do not go through our lives in isolation. That is part of the “if it is to be” – that doesn’t just refer to our achievements but to the outcomes of the community, the society, the world!

We all have the opportunity to make joyful contributions to the journeys taking place along side of our own. We can lend a hand to a fellow traveler, or an ear or an encouraging word. Sometimes it is the joyful contributions that propel us forward the most powerfully because they are not offered from a sense of obligation; out of accountability or responsibility, but from a sense of companionship and camaraderie.

It is up to me, and up to you, and up to everyone else. We begin it, we commit to it, and we invite others to join us because “no one does it alone.”

Got a burning question about something in this post? Email it to me at Dixie@PureSynchrony.com and I’ll send you a personal response.

Mister, Do You Pray?

I don’t know what the weather was like in your part of the world last night, but here in St. Louis it rained.

That is an understatement – it blew water out of the sky so hard and fast that, looking out the big front window of Sub Zero Vodka Bar, you just saw sheets of silver moving horizontal to the sidewalk.

Thank goodness I was in good company, the aftermath of a “tweetup” of St. Louis folks who use twitter to make connections - yes we do occasionally prefer to see each other in person - so I decided just to sit it out. But driving home an hour or so later in the still gusting winds I was reminded of why my father refused to fly if he had the option of driving.

It seems that he was traveling in a company plane during similar weather conditions. Just him and the pilot, circling above the landing field, unable to land because of the wind and running out of fuel. The way my father tells the story, the pilot turned to him and said, “Mister, do you pray?” Of course, the way my father tells the story, he not only knew how, he’d been praying constantly and fervently for some time. But due to that experience, I traveled to most of the 50 states before I was 18 but never had the opportunity to fly until I was 23 years old.

Now it isn’t important to me what you call your act of prayer. Think of it as time spent in mentally, emotionally and yes, spiritually, focusing on desired outcomes and appreciation for the blessings and privileges you have. It might be your meditation time, your dream time, your future journaling time, or your religious time. It might be directed at an outside force, it might be internally focused. But it is time you are giving 110% to the forces that shape your life and your future.

When do you engage in that activity? Every day, once in a while when you have time, or only in times of crisis? You’ll notice that pilot didn’t ask “can you pray?” or “will you pray?” He was looking for someone who did it on a regular basis because that’s what it takes to get results.

Right now we’re looking at the economic future - certainly there are other problems, but let’s just stick with topic of the day – and we see the equivalent of gale force winds and torrential rains. It’s blowing a lot of people off course. It’s easy to lose sight of your destination and become focused strictly on survival.

I contend it will be those people who “pray” who will still be aloft when the sun comes out. The people who have created a practice of focusing on outcomes and giving thanks for blessings. And more than that, the people who have created a fellowship of people who “pray” with them, who give them encouragement and keep them firmly on course.

Because those people will continue to fly, they’ll keep moving toward their destination regardless of the weather and, when the weather dictates a little time out, they’ll be surrounded by good company with whom they can sit out the worst of the gale until they’re ready to take flight again.

What storm has made you afraid to fly?

Who’s on your flight team?

What are you doing to build a practice of strong “prayer” of a focus so powerful that nothing can blow you off course?

Want some tips for creating that practice in your life and career? Send me an email at dixie@puresynchrony.com and I’ll send you a list of 25 elements of creating a “storm proof” flight plan.

Who do you answer to?

I sat there in my car, facing West on I-70 looking at the tail end of a semi trailer in front of me and the grill of another one in my rear view mirror, moving about an inch per second. Not an auspicious beginning to what would now be an even longer than usual trip to see a client of 12 years who, if he and his team weren’t such a joy to coach, I would have dropped long ago just to avoid this very kind of situation.

This required more than music to distract me, it was either return some calls or tune in to NPR. Too frustrated with my current traffic dilemma to return calls – let’s see what NPR has going on.

I came into the middle of an interview about happiness. As in “are you happy?” and “how happy are you?” But also as in “why are people in their 40’s and 50’s so unhappy?” and “is there a limit to how happy you can be?” Huh?

Yup, turns out that there are studies that indicate that people are more likely to suffer depression in their middle years. And other studies suggest that we all have a “happiness set point” that determines how predisposed we are to being happy and just how much "happy" we are able to sustain.

Since I know that success in coaching means tapping into that “happy” that they were discussing and many of my clients are, like myself, in the age range they were saying is less likely to be able to tap into that “happy”, I "happily" listened to every theory put forth by the author, the show host and all the people who called in to comment on the air. I found it unsettling to realize that the theme of the views being aired was that we lose touch with our “happy” in our middle years because we aren’t able to realize our dreams. Then as the years continue to pass by we slowly come to terms with the loss of our dreams and become content and able to connect with our “happy” again. So they concluded that if we “lower our sights” and “accept our limitations” earlier in life we can avoid that middle age depression. Now that is enough to make ME depressed.

I thought about “happy” for a long time after I passed the construction that had caused my traffic snarl. Zipping along toward Kansas City I asked myself what I thought it meant to be happy. Did sitting nearly motionless on I70 make me unhappy? Not really. Frustrated, yes, but not unhappy. So I started a mental list of the things in my life right now and about each one I asked myself “does that make you happy or unhappy?”

Interesting and mentally entertaining (you might try it sometime) but not the heart of the matter here. The real discovery came when I started questioning why we would be more prone to depression in our middle years. Now I’ve had my share of clients who suffered from depression and not all of them were between 35 and 65. And I’ve had many clients in that age range who weren’t depressed (or at least didn’t let on to me if they were.) So I pondered our life cycles and my experiences with clients of all ages and I have a different theory to propose:

What if we get depressed, not because we lose sight of our dreams but because we lose sight of our lives?

Think about it; when we are young adults we don’t really answer to anyone more important than ourselves. We have parents, professors, bosses, etc… but we have the option to ignore them or exchange them. We are “big girls and boys” and we can make it on our own. We can drop that class. We can get a new job. We can choose! And when we reach retirement age we give up many of the people we answer to. Our parents have often passed on, if we have professors it is because we’re taking classes for the joy of learning and we can always walk away and if we still have bosses we also have the light of retirement shining within reach. Our children are grown, our relationships have become less turbulent. Again, we have choices!

But in those years in between we usually add lifemates, children and bosses that control the success of our careers. We may add employees and clients. We often are now caring for our parents and so answer to them almost as dependably as we did when we were children. We have a place in society and answer to the expectations of our peers. Nearly every moment of our lives is spent answering to someone other than ourselves. Even if our dreams are still intact and still within reach we don’t have an ounce of energy to reach for them.

So maybe keeping “happy” within reach means making sure you are still reaching for your dreams without giving up your life. So here is a challenge worth doing if you want to keep your “happy” in sight. This is an adaptation of an exercise called the Priority Bullseye which was developed by Kathy Kolbe, the theorist and author behind the Kolbe Wisdom. I use it often with my coaching clients.

Answer this question: “If I answered ONLY to myself what would I want to accomplish?” Now write it down. That’s easy, isn’t it? (If it isn’t easy you may have just discovered one major “dissync” that is keeping you out of reach of your “happy”.)

Next, jot down a list of all the people you answer to. Not people who want something from you but the people whom you either choose to or must try to satisfy.

Next, take another sheet of paper and draw a big circle, and a smaller circle inside that and a smaller circle within that and a little circle in the middle. (If it doesn’t look a lot like a target go back and do it again.)

Next, in the bullseye spot (the circle in the middle) write down the most important person you answer to right now. That one relationship that, if you screw this one up will cause everything else to suffer. Then in the space between the bullseye and the next circle write the person who comes next and so on until you've filled in the spaces in all the circles.

You’ve already guessed the next question, haven’t you? Where are you on the target? How much of what you would want to accomplish if you answered to yourself is "in sync" with what you can accomplish by answering to the people you’ve listed on your target?

Are your dreams and your priorities perfectly in sync? If not, how will you answer the all important question: “How do I bring accomplishing my dreams closer to the bullseye?”