| Happy Valentines month everyone! Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you were able to take just a moment to appreciate those in your life whom you love. I am very blessed to have a wonderful husband who puts up with a lot. Not only have I been away working in Japan this month, but I am also going to spend Valentine’s weekend away snowboarding with my best friend! In fact, I want to share with you a couple of stories from my trip to Japan that have inspired the topic for this month’s newsletter. On my first morning in Tokyo, I was sitting having breakfast in the hotel and gazing out of the window. It was not even 7:00am and the street was absolutely packed with people hurrying to their various destinations. They were walking briskly in every direction but somehow, they didn’t crash into each other. There are a lot of people in Tokyo. |
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| Later that morning I met the team I was to be working with and we joined the hustle, walking to the corporate headquarters that was the location for our meeting. Once in the building we summoned the elevator and when it arrived it was already nearly full of people. There were 8 of us waiting to get in and I thought there was absolutely no way that we were going to all fit. Our Japanese hosts motioned for us to get into the elevator and as we did, the people already in it seamlessly formed up in lines with everybody facing forward. We did all fit! The final example was later in the week when we all rode the commuter train to another location of the company I was working with. This train was absolutely rammed with people all trying to get to work, and yet there was order. People put their backpacks on their fronts and just tucked in together. With the train already bursting full we stopped at another station. There was a young woman waiting to get on and I was convinced there was no way she could fit. Well, she just took her bag off her shoulder, turned around, and slowly backed into the mass of people. Without any fuss, the mass sort of just swallowed her up. The point of these stories is that you might not always know how things work or what the rules are, but there is order even in the most seemingly chaotic situations. In order to see it, you have to pause your engrained ways of thinking and being for a moment and observe carefully. |
| My thoughts I am pretty smart and have spent an awful lot of years learning an awful lot of stuff, so much of the time I do know how things work and have the ‘right’ answer. That’s also pretty much what I get paid for these days. However, I do not yet know everything. It was a humbling experience to be thrust into an environment where I had no idea how most things worked and had to trust others to help and guide me. What I was reminded about was that this is OK. My Japanese hosts took great pride in showing us how things worked and how to navigate in this new environment. My US clients made sure I did not get lost by being left to walk anywhere alone (weirdly, my internal GPS which is normally perfect, completely malfunctioned in Japan). People like to help others, and if I don’t let them do this for me, I am actually taking something away from their experience, rather than (in my head) not being a burden. |
| How to My default is not a unique one. I know plenty of very capable people who find it difficult to accept help, and almost impossible to ask for it (there are lots of engineers in this category). I am trying to be mindful of this in myself and recognize in real time when this pattern of behavior automatically kicks in. This is difficult – being aware enough to see the habit in yourself AND then make a different choice (go against your habitual response) – especially if your habit is an unconscious one. Something that is very useful when you are trying to change a habit is to enlist a buddy. Research by the American Society of Training and Development shows that having an accountability partner makes you 65% more likely to achieve your goals after you commit to them. You can also get your buddy to help you in real time by letting you know when they see you start to behave in your habitual way. Between the two of you, you can devise a secret signal that your buddy can give you when they spot the behavior you want to change. This could be crossing their fingers or a look of some description, or even a single code word typed into a Teams chat for virtual situations. It’s a neat way of getting ahead of the habit kicking in – before it completely takes over, and a gentle reminder that you committed to doing something differently. Give it a try! |
| Happy Valentines Month! Eli Sharp. |
Posted in Making Work Flow!
