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What are you curious about?

If you met that question with speechless silence, you’re not alone. Somehow as busy, focused adults, we forget to wonder.

Remember wondering? When you were little and the world was so big and mysterious? And your mom was so smart, and your dad was so strong, and every plain brown package that arrived at the door was a world of possibility?

I have two sons, Jackson (who’s six) and Morgan Adam (he’s four). Talk about curious! We have a little game we play at night. I let them ask me two questions – anything they want. And are they ever curious!

Jackson, especially, can hit that two-question limit in no time. Left unchecked the kid would talk all night! Why do people work? Why are my eyes brown and Morgan’s are blue? What happens when you’re late to school? How come Jeremy is so much taller than me? What do I have to do to be better at tetherball? Am I going to have homework tomorrow? How does Santa know you said I can’t get a skateboard?

And as he goes on and on, I have to wonder – is he ever going to stop asking these questions? I sure hope not.

And if you want to be an exceptional leader, you won’t either. Patrick Byrne is the CEO of Overstock.com, and it’s his advice to you.

You have to stay curious. If you’re not curious your organization is going to wither beneath you.

So will your team. Your results. Your ability to create.

If you’re out of practice, try this exercise. I call it People Wondering. It’s People Watching, with a twist. The next time you’re in a busy place, waiting (think traffic, the airport, the supermarket line at 5:15), look around you and start to wonder. It sounds like this.

I wonder if this sale lasts all week? I wonder what’s making that man laugh so hard? I wonder if I’ll eat all of these bananas before they go bad? I wonder if the sushi rolls here are as good as the sushi bar’s? I wonder how fast I could check a basket full of groceries?

Then start wondering about your goals and aspirations. Get curious about what’s possible.

I wonder what would happen if we flattened our organization and went to a matrix structure?

I wonder what our company would actually look like if we doubled in size?

I wonder what we would have to do to raise profits twelve times over?

Free yourself not to have all the answers. Get curious. Ask some questions. Just wonder.

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here for more information.

Have you ever had that thing happen where you make a decision and it suddenly gets reinforced by some completely unrelated signal? Just as you decide to cancel your beach day it starts to rain. (“Hey! It’s a sign!”) Right after you choose to go for that next promotion someone quits and leaves open a great position. (“Look! It’s a sign!”)

Well, those “signs” can actually be a powerful way to access your intuition and make quicker decisions, if you can just learn to give them a little thought. Your job is not to make these signs appear, but just to recognize them when they do. Just as you tune your radio through the static until you arrive at a clear signal, you are tuning your mind to the messages you’re receiving until you arrive at the answers you seek.

There are a few different ways of tuning into the message.

Drawing out the Meaning

One way of tuning into the message is to look for “signs” and draw out the meaning. “Drawing out the meaning” is a technique sometimes used by coaches to help people access their intuition. It means using the environment around you as if it were filled with secret messages to tell you what to do. For example:

You’re on Section Nine of the research report you’re writing. You listen to Track Nine of a CD to clear your head. Track Nine turns out to be very short. Does Section Nine also need to be short?

You’re going through an extremely difficult time. You’re anxious and stressed. You walk outside and a gust of wind blows over you. Could it be that this situation will blow over as well?

You’re finally ready to print the final draft of your letter when the printer jams and you can’t get it out. Could it be that for some reason this letter isn’t ready to go out either?

You may be thinking, come on. These are just little mind games. Tricks. Playing with words. And you’re right. That’s just what they are. But they are tricks and games that help you open your mind to new possibilities, new ways of seeing and understanding.

Notice everything around you. Observe the details, the sounds, even the smells. What’s happening? What do you notice? Then wonder, if this tiny slice of life had something to tell you, what would it be?

Seek Serendipity and Synchronicity

Another way to tune into the message is to seek Serendipity and Synchronicity, those twin tendencies for life to deliver enchanting coincidences just when we need them.

            Serendipity is unexpected good fortune, or discovery by accident.

            Synchronicity is a timely, meaningful coincidence.

Put them together and you have those mysterious moments in which you accidentally discover exactly the right thing at just the right time.

• Brant was puzzling over where to take his defunct laptop for a checkup when after taking a wrong turn he ran smack into a storefront computer doctor.

• Caroline discovered that her 10:00 meeting was cancelled just as she was thinking to herself, “If only I had an extra hour.”

• Ginny was still fretting over fresh news that her accountant was about to quit when a long lost friend – a CPA – called to ask if she knew of any job openings.

“It’s a sign!” you think. A wink from the universe. A little gift. If you pay attention to these moments when everything “clicks,” you might just uncover new possibilities.

To take advantage of these moments when the lights all seem to turn green, you need to pay attention. Whenever you’re tempted to say “it’s a sign!” follow it with the words, “Maybe that means I should…” and see what answer comes next. Then go do it. You might just find that the doors at that moment are open and you can slip right through.

Learn to Trust Your Instincts

Yet another way you can tune into the message is to learn to trust your instincts. Earlier we talked about the importance of making room for your intuition; you also need to be able to recognize the messages, listen, and act in keeping with whatever’s true for you.

What does your intuition feel like? Some say it feels like a zing, a snap, or a click. You might feel it in your stomach, your chest, or your heart. For one person it’s a calm, perfectly still knowing. For another it’s a heavily weighted thunk. Another describes a sudden peace; another a taptap of the mind.

When possibilities fall right into your lap, you may feel like some invisible force has granted your silent request. It’s often accompanied by a feeling of speechlessness, almost disbelief.

When you feel that, the search for solutions is over.

Recently, I met a leader who had an unusual set of skills.

Antonio was a linguist with an MBA.

“What does a linguist with an MBA do, exactly?” I asked him.

“Mostly backpack around Europe,” he smiled. But that was then. One day in his meager years as an unemployed post-doc wandering around Sweden, he came across a copy of the Harvard Business Review. In the back, he found an ad for a “naming company” that was looking for (can you guess?) a linguist with an MBA. A consulting company wanted someone clever with words to help assign memorable brand names to their clients’ products.

Thunk.

He scoured the fine print for an address. Manhattan. Antonio lived on Long Island, just across the bridge.

Thunk.

Antonio finished his European tour that month and headed back to the States. He had saved the ad and wondered if the job had been filled.

He called. Job still open.

Thunk.

He got dressed and headed for the address. Without so much as an appointment, Antonio walked in and asked to see a manager. A manager appeared. Antonio showed him the ad and introduced himself as a linguist with an MBA. As Antonio describes it, you could see the manager’s own instinct thumping him in the head.

Antonio was hired and has been there ever since.

The knowledge that something – an idea, a step to take, the way ahead – is right is very hard to put into words. You have to learn to feel it. Raise your awareness of what it feels like for you to hear opportunity knocking. The next time it does, you will be more likely to answer the door.

The strategies for “Tuning into the Message” –

• Drawing out the Meaning
• Seeking Serendipity and Synchronicity
• Learning to Trust Your Intuition –

– these are all ways of accessing information that seems to be around us all the time, but that somehow we manage to miss. To expand your awareness of what’s possible, sometimes you just have to notice.

Exercise

• Look for “signs,” then ask yourself what they mean.
• Watch for Serendipity and Synchronicity, and follow where they lead.
• Stay alert to your intuition. Learn what it feels like, then practice following it.

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click for a Preview and to Order.

Paris was gray, cold and damp. So was I. It had taken a full day, two buses, a ferry and eight hours to get there from London. When I learned I would have to negotiate the metro system and then walk three blocks just to get something to eat, I could have cried. Tired and miserable, my traveling companions and I wedged ourselves in silence between the commuters on the train. When we emerged from the tunnel, it was raining. Perfect.

We rushed under a rooftop and looked around. Every café was either wet or closed. We spied a lone crepe stand open for business. Dinner. We raced through the rain and hunched under the umbrella. With much apprehension, I asked in my very best French, “May I please have one crepe?” The vendor raised his eyebrows in confusion. He hadn’t understood a word I’d said. This was going to be a very long trip.

Since the man only sold one thing – crepes – we managed to get our point across and sat down to eat on the driest chairs we could find. I just wanted to get into bed. Begrudgingly, my friends pulled out the map and we tried to orient ourselves back toward the subway. Heads down, we shuffled our way out of the alley.

As we rounded the corner, I heard my friend gasp. She pointed and grabbed my arm.

“Joelle! Look!”

There before us in all its glory rose Notre Dame Cathedral, pink in the light of the setting sun and framed by the sparkling Seine. Out here in the open sprawled a panorama of Paris at dusk. Pink and orange clouds were clearing to reveal a crystal blue sky. We gazed up at the majestic stone masterpiece, as glorious as it was promised to be.

Seeing Notre Dame that evening made an unforgettable impression on me. It wasn’t just because of the extraordinary architecture, the breathtaking view or the shock of standing before one of the most famous buildings in the world. It was because that moment revealed possibility. Without our knowing it, this surprise hid around the corner, just waiting to be found. That moment taught me about the wonder and magnificence that’s available to all of us, if only we’re willing to see.

Staying open to possibility is as important in day-to-day life as a vacation in Paris. In rare but pivotal moments, we realize life is so much bigger than us. Beyond our efforts lie answers, ideas and solutions we could never come up with on our own. They present themselves to us, if we let them. But most of the time we don’t. Like tired tourists, we soldier on to finish the tasks before us. Eat; subway; bed. Finish the meeting; get through the email; make it through the day. This chapter is meant to show you how to see possibility – to find new ways of looking at things, to look up and around at what’s bigger and better than what you normally see. You will discover ways to break free from narrow limitations and discover the extraordinary.

Seeing Possibility is one of the ideas I share with leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more!

Most of the time in our lives as leaders, we are the ones asking for what we want. Now it’s time to listen. In the words of Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”

“Wishing…and hoping…and thinking…and praying…” won’t get you what you want. Or so they say. Do you really believe that? Not me.

You might argue that here in the real world, our work is driven by measurables, deliverables, and results. We just need to get things done, and the only way to do that is by hard work. Fine.

Just know that more is possible for you than you can achieve by just knocking out task after task. You have more wisdom, more potential, and more possibility than you may be giving yourself credit for. You have even more possibility than you’ve ever seen in yourself.

The only way to know that is to trust in more intuitive ways of knowing, being and becoming who you want to be – not just by working your life away, but by learning to wish, hope, think, pray, and be in a different kind of way.

Being able to trust in possibility takes a measure of faith – an almost spiritual dimension that’s sometimes lacking in our efforts to achieve. By “spiritual” I do not mean religious; I simply mean that grounded and trusting sense that sometimes guides us without our understanding how or why.

Author William Bloom, a meditation master and expert in the field of holistic development, offers a helpful definition of spirituality as “that whole reality and dimension which is bigger, more creative, more loving, more powerful, more visionary, more wise, more mysterious – than materialistic daily human existence.”

How can you open up to the spirit of possibility? There are a number of very practical, concrete strategies you can use if you’re interested. I call them “Invitations,” because they “invite” success to come to you (instead of you having to chase after it all the time). I’ll share with you the list of these activities, and you can choose the ones that suit you best.

The list is called Your Invitation, and it’s at www.TheInnerEdge.com. Click on Worksheets and Audios (on the left). You’ll find a FREE guide called Your Invitation when you scroll down the page.

As a leader, you want people to follow you. But are you worth it?

Do your employees and coworkers love you?

Are you the kind of leader that can inspire people (as one of my clients likes to put it) will walk through walls for you?

To succeed as a leader, you don’t just need respect. You need an emotional investment from the people around you. You need other people to contribute their

• Time
• Energy
• Effort
• Enthusiasm, and
• Talent

…to you. Why would they do that? How have you earned it?

You can inspire and motivate people in a such way that they truly want to do their best. Wendy Newcastle, executive vice president at Bank of America, calls this being an emotional leader.

Being an emotional leader is just as important as being an operational leader. By emotional I mean, why should people storm the Bastille for you, when in light of everything else, they might just as well stay put? In other words, all things being equal, why should they follow you?

If you’re a good leader, working for you is exhilarating. It’s probably challenging. It sometimes requires full speed, long hours, and hard work. It means setting unbelievably high goals and exceeding them every time. It can be frustrating, it can be exhausting, it can be stimulating…

…and if you’re an emotional leader, it’s so, so worth it.

Tips for Emotional Leaders

1. Care about people. Ask about their kids, their colds, their hobbies.
2. Get results. People want to be with the winner.
3. Share the wins. Celebrate your team, all at once and one by one.
4. Develop talent. Don’t just use other’s skills and talents like paper towels at your disposal. Cultivate them like a bountiful garden.
5. Give back. What can you do to help people reach their personal goals?

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here for more information.

How’s it going?

Have you asked yourself that lately?

I don’t mean asked it in the “Hey, how ya doin’” kind of way, but in the “I have a vision. How am I doing?” kind of way. It’s no trivial question. It’s reflection. Empowered reflection – the kind that can sharpen your thinking and improve your results.

Empowered reflection is an ongoing, even routine process of paying attention to your progress. Basically, it means taking a time out to think about your vision and ask yourself, “How’s it going?” You step out of the busy-ness of life to ask yourself a series of reflective questions about your life and leadership. If you do this regularly, say once a month or even a few times a year, you will keep your finger on the pulse of your development as a leader and your progress toward your goals.

To practice empowered reflection you make it a habit to assess your progress. Below follow some questions useful for this kind of reflection.

1. What’s working?
2. What’s not working?
3. What would you like to change?
4. What accomplishments have you achieved?
5. What lessons have you learned?
6. Are the goals still the right goals?
7. What do you still need to know or learn?
8. How might you be sabotaging your own success?
9. What do you need to start doing, keep doing, and stop doing?
10. What’s next?

Every time you go through this process, you are putting a stake in the ground for what you want. You are declaring, “My vision is important to me, and I’m willing to continue thinking about it and reaching for it until I achieve it.” Practicing this form of reflection on a regular basis is a technique for accountability and focus.

Empowered reflection isn’t hard. It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t cost a dime. You can practice empowered reflection while driving, jogging, walking through the park, meditating, lying down, or even sitting in the bath. You can almost think of this practice as “visiting your vision” to see how you’re doing. That way it never gets forgotten.

Exercise

Whenever you’re feeling detached from your long term vision, whenever you could use a boost to get back into action, or whenever you want to step back to get an overall perspective on your progress, take a few minutes to run through the ten questions on the Your Reflection worksheet in The Extension. Doing so will resurface the motivation you need to make your vision a reality.

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click here for a Preview and to Order.

In school, an independent study is a way for students to learn what they want to learn even if it isn’t in the course catalog. Done well, it can be the launching pad to a student’s true calling, because for once the student gets to choose the content and explore what’s available an area that piques his or her interest. And even though independent study students are pursuing their own interests, they get credit for the effort. What a deal.

Have you thought about taking an independent study lately? It can be a fast and easy way to teach yourself the skills you most need to learn to be successful, in any area of your life and leadership.

You do your independent study in three steps, each of which starts with the letter A – the grade you’re going to earn in this class of your own.

1. Assess Your Options. What do you need to learn now?
2. Adopt a Topic. Of the options, which one will get you the most powerful results?
3. Activate the Learning. How could you learn about this topic independently, in your own way and on your own time, so that it is most effective and valuable to you?

In your independent study, you get to be a student again in the best sense of the word. No course requirements, no class schedules, and no final exams – just the chance to be new and green, seeing what there is to learn about something you want to know.

To really be strategic, make sure whatever you choose to focus on in your independent study is the area in which one big hit that will create the breakthrough.

Keep Learning is one of the ten practices I recommend for highly talented leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more.

How will you keep learning what you most need to be your best as a leader, and in your life?

When you’re a highly motivated person who’s driven to achieve, you’re often looking for ways to accelerate your progress. Did you know you can also excel-erate the process?

“Excel-eration” is the result when you achieve your vision faster, better, and with more success than you currently do. Right now you do things well. What you need to do is excel.

The hard part is you really can’t excel-erate any more on your own. You need someone bigger, further along, and more experienced than you. Someone who can help you uncover answers you didn’t know you had, or lend you some of theirs when you run out.

There are two people who can do this better than anyone else:

1. Your Coach
2. Your Mentor

Your coaches and mentors give you an edge simply by being sounding boards with good ideas. But they also bring you insight, wisdom, knowledge, and opportunities. You get more than learning when you meet with those who support you in this way. Not just acceleration, but excel-eration.

Don’t have a coach right now? Haven’t got a mentor? Let’s go find you one of each. Go to www.TheInnerEdge.com and click on Worksheets and Audios for your FREE Guide to Exceleration. This two-page set of directions will walk you through the questions you need to find these two important people who can help you move right on into the fast lane.

 

One time I was on a flight from L.A. to Santa Barbara. As we ducked into the tiny puddle-jumper – not at all the jetliner I was expecting – the flight attendants eyed our gear and directed us to put our carry-on luggage on either the left side or the right. As she explained to a puzzled passenger, they were trying to balance the plane.

Balance the plane? I thought. Shouldn’t the engineers have thought of that?! The whole idea of an unbalanced plane freaked me out. I flew white-knuckled in nervous fear that my laptop should have been on the opposite side of the aisle.

I learned later that an airplane not properly balanced will fly poorly, or may not fly at all. As I read online (www.rcmagazine.com, if you’re interested):

If an airplane is nose heavy, it will be sluggish in pitch maneuvers, tend to dive in turns, and make for some pretty fast landings. If it is tail heavy, it will be extremely sensitive to pitch controls, and could snap at a moments notice.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my airplane to be sluggish or sensitive in “pitch controls,” whatever those are. I most certainly do not want to be that way myself.

As leaders, if we don’t want to be sluggish, make dive turns, have a crash landing, or for goodness’ sake snap at a moment’s notice, we also need to balance ourselves.

Howard Putnam, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, used this advice himself when he created his leadership teams.

To stay grounded you have a very small team of people that are cross functional and that you trust. I always add four or five people that had totally different backgrounds than me. I tried to find the right people so that we could balance each other out.

If you want to learn how to balance your team, the best kind of balance is a “brain trust” – one in which you have people who are hardwired with a variety of skills. My favorite tool for understanding the way people think for the most powerful team is called Emergenetics, which you can find out more about from Emergenetics expert, Chris Cox, at www.amplitudetraining.com.

You can also use the image of “balancing your plane” to round out your life. If you give ten hours to work in a day, you can balance it out with quality time at home so rich that it means twice as much. If you give 110% of your effort to everyone else in your life, choose an area in which you’ll give 110% to yourself.

There are many, many facets to living and leading well. Embrace them all, all at once. Think of it as saving your life.

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here for more information.

It’s a common recommendation for leaders to have a high quality team. But the concept of a team can be quite limiting for leaders who want to really get ahead. While a team can certainly be helpful, the real breakthroughs come when you turn your team into a partnership.

The main shift from a team to a partnership is in the focus. Your personal support team is about you – what you need to achieve and who will help you do it. A partnership is about the objective – the idea or project or results or outcome in which everyone on the team can play a role.

The strongest partnerships have common characteristics.

• Everyone on the team agrees on the goal or outcome.
• Everyone on the team cares about that outcome.
• Everyone on the team gets to use his or her strengths to achieve it.

You can think of the difference between a team and a partnership by comparing individual sports and team sports. In individual sports like tennis, golf, and track, one athlete is encouraged to find his or her personal best with the support of a coach, cheering fans, and fellow athletes they admire. In team sports like football, basketball, and soccer, many team members are all working at the same time together to score.

The benefits of a partnership are noteworthy. You have more ideas, but you need less effort to implement them. You have a greater variety of strengths, so everyone can contribute what they do best. You gain the camaraderie of the group effort, and in the end, you can get more done.

Exercise
To move from a team to a partnership, spend some time thinking about how to apply what you know of personal support teams to the groups of which you’re a part or the groups you want to form. The questions on the Your Partnerships worksheet in The Extension will guide you.

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click here for a Preview and to Order.