I’m done with writing goals. Good-bye. Good riddance.
I used to write them faithfully – at least once a year and sometimes in between. A lot of smart people told me that they were good and necessary and vital to my success, and since I have a habit of listening to smart people, I not only wrote them but I told other people to write them too. (After all, I wanted people to think I was smart too!)
But I’m done with goals. I’m kickin’ them to the curb. Because they’re not the most effective tool in my tool kit.
You want to know what works better than goals?
Questions.
Yup. You heard me right – questions work better than goals.
We have all been taught the value of effective goal-setting, but rarely have we been taught the effectiveness of curiosity. Research has shown, in fact, that curiosity and openness help us get MORE accomplished than determination and goal-setting do.
Three social scientists once conducted a series of experiments to determine which was more effective, “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) or “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) Before the participants tackled the problem, though, the researchers asked half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task. The other half of the group was instructed to tell themselves that they would complete the task.
In the end, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.
The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”
This experiment resulted in the same outcome as the first. People primed with “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In follow-up experiments, the same pattern continued to hold. Those who approach a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.
My nine-year-old daughter Maddy figured this out before I did. (Or perhaps I had it figured out at nine too, but somewhere along the way I let smart people convince me otherwise.)
Not long ago, she started her first journal. “Mom,” she said, “I’m going to call it ‘A lifetime of questions.'” And then she proceeded to write pages full of all the questions she has about life, leaving blank spaces after each question in case she finds the answer and wants to fill it in. Sometimes she shares her questions with me and sometimes she doesn’t.
The other day, she was waiting in line at six in the morning to audition for The Next Star, a TV talent show that’s like Canadian Idol for kids. After the original giddiness had worn off, she plopped herself down on the ground, pulled out her journal, and started writing her questions. She didn’t show them to me, but there’s a pretty good chance at least one of them was “will I be the Next Star?”
The answer to that question was, unfortunately, “No” (she didn’t make it past the first round of auditions), but if you ask me, she’s a pretty big star just for having the guts to do all the research about how and where to audition, practice her songs relentlessly for weeks on end, get up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, wait in line for five hours, and then march off alone into an audition room full of strangers (I wasn’t allowed to watch) and compete against kids who were mostly a few years older than her – all at the risk of failure. (One of the first questions she asked me afterwards was “Mom, can I take singing and dance lessons so I’m more prepared next year?”) That little girl is a hero in my books!
So I’m taking the lessons I’ve learned from Maddy and those researchers, and I’m living a lifetime of questions.
Remember that black canvas I painted when I was in the depths of despair over my long surrender? I decided to fill it with a bunch of hopeful questions.
I’ll let you know what the answers are when I find out!
Note: For this and other unconventional wisdom about how to take a more unique and powerful approach to life and leadership, check out How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on. There’s still room in the learning circle (along with the fascinating people who’ve already joined) and we’d love to have you!
Sometimes an idea grabs ahold of you and just won’t let you go until you follow it.
The moment I first heard that Cath Duncan was going to walk 100 kilometres in honour of her little Juggernaut (her stillborn baby), I knew instantly that I wanted to join her. In the weeks that followed, I came up with every good reason in the world why it wasn’t a good idea (it’s in Alberta and I can’t afford to travel right now, it’s bad timing with kids starting school, it’s too hard to fundraise all that money, etc.) and yet I couldn’t deny the deep longing I felt to join her.
And so, finally, after working through all the resistance, I committed to it! I want to walk!
Why?
For one thing, Cath and I share a similar story. Like little Juggernaut, my son Matthew was stillborn. His eleventh birthday will be a few weeks after the walk. I felt so drawn to Cath’s story that I knew I wanted to do something to honour her little girl (and, at the same time, my little boy).
For another thing, I think Cath is an amazing woman with a lot to share with the world and I want to see her live a long and healthy life. I want to see a cure for Kidney disease so that Cath can continue to shine her unique light in the world. I want to do what I can to honour and support people living with illness like Cath who continue to fill the world with dignity and beauty despite their struggles.
And for a third reason… I am on a journey toward greater health myself – physical, spiritual, and emotional health. I am on a journey that has seen me take up running for the first time in my life and I am LOVING it. At the beginning of this summer (just after I turn 45) I will be running my first half marathon. It seemed fitting that I would book-end the summer by walking 100 km at the end of it. Running and walking make me feel strong and alive, physically, spiritually and emotionally, and I look forward to this challenge and what it will bring to my life.
And that brings me to the final reason… holy COW! Can you imagine how amazingly mind-blowing and life-opening it will be to spend three days walking through a beautiful part of the world with three incredible women? (Yeah, I have some selfish reasons too.) For this happy wanderer, I just can’t imagine a more FUN way to spend three days!
For Cath, for little Juggernaut, for Matthew, and for myself, I will walk 100 km!
Will you sponsor me? Please? My 45th birthday is coming up on May 20th – perhaps instead of that gift you wanted to lavish me with, you can spend the money on the Kidney Foundation?
Just one other thing… go on over and “like” Team Juggernaut on Facebook and follow along! There’s a super-duper Secret Project soon to be revealed that I KNOW you’ll want to be in on!
A few days ago, I blogged about my response to Osama bin Laden’s death, asking myself (and you) whether there might be a better way of responding to the horror of 9/11 than spending the last 10 years seeking vengeance. I’m happy to say there IS a better way, and it is this:
Invest in love instead.
Invest in and encourage courageous women (and men) who are committed to seeking peace. Invest in people who live out the call to love. (That includes yourself – invest in yourself so that you can live out the call to love.) Invest in people committed to shifting the paradigms in the world, challenging the status quo that calls for aggression and over-consumption, and stepping into the power of their feminine wisdom. Invest in people who demonstrate Sophia leadership.
Invest in people like Suraya, the founder and director of a women’s organisation that runs women’s shelters to protect and support women fleeing violent homes or forced marriages in Afghanistan.
Visit Marianne Elliot’s blog post to read more about Suraya (she knows her personally). And then go to “To Mama With Love” to make a donation that supports her work directly (and honour your mother for Mothers’ Day while you’re at it.)
Until enough people stand up and challenge the status quo, we will continue to live in a world where aggression, over-consumption, and protectionism are the status quo. Let’s stand up and say we want a change. Let’s stand up and say that we want women like Suraya to represent the new paradigm.
Throughout this federal election, I have been watching to see whether any of the people hoping to get elected to represent Canadians in Ottawa would exhibit the qualities of Sophia Leadership. I had almost given up the search (oh, politics is such an ugly game, isn’t it?), until I watched the acceptance speech of the first Green Party representative ever elected to Parliament, Elizabeth May.
When I watched her speech, I thought “Now THERE’S a woman who deserves a Sophia Leadership Award!” And so a new award was born out of that thought. Because I think that, along with encouraging more people to unleash the power of feminine wisdom in their leadership and their life, it is my responsibility to celebrate it when I see it in practice.
With that in mind, I honour and acknowledge the work of Elizabeth May.
Elizabeth, I hereby present you with the Sophia Leadership award:
– for your courage to restore civility and respect to the House of Commons
– for your determination to end heckling in Question Period
– for your deep and unwavering commitment to the environment
– for modelling integrity and authenticity in a political arena where those things are not often valued
– for speaking truth to power
– for refusing to embrace the politics of spin
– for giving us all hope that a new leadership paradigm is possible
– and for demonstrating that women can be strong and fierce without compromising those things that make them feminine.
Yesterday I had stuff to do – guest posts to write, videos to create, and some new ideas to wrangle into submission. So, what did I do?
Well, watch the video to find out…
And guess what? Sitting at the centre of the labyrinth, I created three videos, finished a writing assignment, and came up with a couple of new ideas. Productive? You betcha.
In my e-workshop, How to Lead with Your Paint Clothes on, there is a section called “Pause and Reflect” about the importance of incorporating times of quietness and contemplation into our leadership journeys.
Here’s an excerpt:
When M. Scott Peck, a busy writer and internationally-renowned speaker, is asked how he gets so much accomplished, his answer is “Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.” Those two hours of doing nothing are the most important hours of his day. For three forty-five minute periods throughout the day, he spends time in solitude and silence, meditating and praying. It’s the only way he can keep up with the demands of his schedule of writing, traveling all over the world, and speaking to thousands of people every month. “I cannot survive without it,” he says.
* * * *
“We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.” – Brenda Ueland
* * * *
Leaders often make the mistake of assuming that quiet contemplative time is a luxury they can’t afford. I would argue that we can’t afford NOT to take those times. If we keep denying ourselves the kind of space and time for our minds to take a deep healing, re-energizing breath, we will burn ourselves out, blow up at our staff, and/or cease to be of any value to our organizations.
Want to be more efficient, proficient, productive, and just plain brilliant? Go find a park, a labyrinth, a meditation cushion, or just a lawnchair in your backyard.
You can purchase How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on and join the learning circle that already includes some amazing people here.
One of the videos I created in the labyrinth was specially for the Paint Clothes tribe.
