Personal Improvement
Whether you are the leader of the company, your department, or your cubicle, what you do and how you do it affects the members of the team. A team culture that follows certain protocol will ensure a more effective and energetic team environment. Team leader or not, take any opportunity to contribute to the overall effectiveness of your team. Use the following 10 Tips as a checklist to measure how your team is functioning and see if there is room for improvement. Share these tips with your teammates so everyone is on the same page.
1. Celebrate the Individual
A team is only as good as the sum of its parts. And a team is just that: a collection of parts, individuals actually, each marching to the beat of his or her own drummer. Remembering that will put more soul into your team spirit.
2. Establish Role Clarification
Each member should be able to articulate clearly what they are responsible for, and how what they do contributes to the team’s or organization’s goals.
3. Be Inclusive
Along those lines, team members have different strengths and talents and a well-rounded team benefits from incorporating all of them. Teams need enthusiastic energizers, deliberate doers, supportive collaborators and question raisers. While no type should dominate or bog down a team, value and respect each for its diverse contribution.
4. Start Each Meeting with a “Check-in”
Before every team meeting, take a few moments for each team member to “check-in” with the group on a business or personal note. The result? Team members are less distracted by outside circumstances and feel more connected to each other.
5. Creative and Environment of Trust and Safety
Establish these as ground rules. Members should feel comfortable talking about any concerns or issues. Have a conversation about trust. What are members willing to talk about? What feels less safe?
6. Encourage Healthy Debate
Trust and safety lead to lively debate. Are all ideas being expressed? Are different points of view seen as critical to creative work? Brainstorm in an environment that is tolerant and encourages participation.
7. Go for Commitment vs. Consensus
Healthy debate leads to buy-in. But rather then go for 100% agreement, strive for commitment. In other words, be sure everyone can truly commit to a decision even if they initially challenge it. Keep talking until the decision is refined and everyone supports it.
8. Hold Each Other Accountable
Accountability in teams is where the rubber meets the road. Become accountable for getting the best out of each other. Hold each other accountable to promises made – not your expectations.
9. Conduct Team Performance Reviews
Ask yourselves regularly, “How are we doing as a team?” Consider the following criteria: Trust, healthy debate, buy-in, accountability. Patrick Lencioni says more about these team-building strategies in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
10. Recognize Successes
It is amazing how rare this is. If you are a team leader, pay extra close attention. Bosses tend to think, “Succeeding is your job.” While that is true, check the winning team at the end of a football or baseball game-any sport for that matter. They certainly succeeded at their job. How do they behave? How do their coaches behave?
Personal Improvement
I have often said that the greatest thoughts of the past two decades are written on bumper stickers and t-shirts. It has become a part of my mission to look at these missives in a spiritual light. Once such bumper sticker that has been around for quite a long time now is, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.” The concept is easy; whenever it comes to mind simply do something nice for someone you do not know. This might be paying for someone’s newspaper at the grocery store, or paying the freeway toll for the car behind you. It could be helping someone across the street, or even holding open a door for someone.
Now please allow me to bring to light a practice that you can use to more fully engage in the spiritual aspects of kindness.
In his book The Power of Intention Dr. Wayne W. Dyer teaches being kind as one of the seven facets of connecting with intention. He outline being kind to ourselves, others, and the world as a whole. I would like to focus on being kind to others. Dr. Dyer begins by stating, “A fundamental attribute of the supreme originating power in kindness.” P. 43 He later continues, “Kindness given is kindness returned. If you wish to connect to intention and become someone who achieves all of your objectives in life, you’re going to need the assistance of a multitude of folks. By practicing extending kindness everywhere, you’ll find support showing up in ways that you could never have predicted.” P.45 It would follow that the more people we are kind to the more kindness we experience from others in return. I believe, however, that the amount of kindness we receive is inversely proportional to the amount we give. That is to say we get back more than we give out.
I have long held a belief that everyone we connect with on this planet is here to support our journey. This may be someone we meet once for a brief moment and it may be someone that is an intimate part of our life. This may be someone we hold the door for or someone that holds the door for us. No matter how short the interaction there has been a connection and that connection serves both people. It could be a simple as someone you have never met smiling at you as you pass on the street corner only because you are smiling. These types of instant connections are actually a form of kindness. If you are smiling and I smile at you smiling; your feeling tone has transferred to me and I have picked it up and will pass it along to another. Kindness works this same way. Once you are the recipient of kindness are you not more inclined to pass it along and be kind to someone?
If knowing kindness is a flowing aspect of the supreme and knowing it comes back to us as we freely give, why do some people hoard their kindness and share it with only those they know, or “Randomly” share a little kindness with someone the do not know? This is the question I intend to replace today with a new paradigm of kindness.
Kindness can easily be considered an aspect of the supreme creative force that I call GOD and invite you to call by whatever name serves you. Kindness therefore is holy, sacred and divine. When we share our kindness it flows out into the Universe and returns to us in greater proportion that what we sent out. Our kindness has the ability to impact thousands of other people across the globe. One simple act of kindness can change the world.
How can I make the claim that One act of kindness can change the world? I suggest if you at all question this statement you take a look at the research done by Dr. David Hawkins, his book, POWER VS. FORCE proves how the high vibration thoughts of just one person can influence the low vibration thoughts of 90,000 people. If one act of kindness influences let’s say 10 people to think at a higher vibration that would be 900,000 people whose low vibration thoughts are being counterbalanced in the universal field of thought.
Here then is the call I feel pulling me into a greater expression of my life. What if rather than practicing “Random” acts of kindness we were to practice consistent acts of intentional kindness? What if everyday we looked not for one or two opportunities to share and cultivate our kindness, but made it part of our normal operating system? What if every moment of everyday we choose to express kindness regardless of the events we are experiencing?
I have a vision of how the world will change when only a handful of us begin practicing consistent acts of intentional kindness. When we begin living our lives as examples of this concept there are no limits to the good we may share. I know every one of us already makes a difference simply by being present on the planet, now how much good can we bring when we are being intentional about our kindness. I suggest no longer waiting for the right opportunity or the right moment to practice kindness. Rather I suggest we make kindness a way of life, a part of our being, and a portion of whom we truly are on this planet and why we have come here. I believe we have been practicing for quite a long time and it is now time to be kind, to live kindly, and to express kindness in all we do, think, and say.
Will you join me on this adventure? Can you commit to being kind regardless of the situation? Will you stop being random and start being intentional? Can we create a new bumper sticker? I suggest we begin today, right where each of us stands and practice consistent acts of intentional kindness. As we do this I promise the world will change and change for good. Kindness now shines through each of us out into the world so all may see the LIGHT OF KINDNESS.
Personal Improvement
Celine, an only child, was 7 years old, her mother died tragically in a car accident. She and her father were devastated. However, unlike so many of my clients who lost parents and no one was there for them, Celine’s father was completely there for her, even while dealing with his own grief and heartbreak. Celine could call him anytime at work and he would talk to her or come home to lovingly hold her. Because he was so completely there for her, her feelings of grief, heartbreak, sadness and sorrow did not get stuck in her body. Each time they came up, they were released due to the caring, compassion, tenderness, gentleness, consistency and understanding of her loving father.
As a result of her father’s love, Celine did not develop the fear of intimacy and loss that so many people experience as a result of the loss of the parent. She did not close her heart to protect herself from future loss.
However, most of us did not have loving parents to help us move through the heartbreaks of childhood. In fact, many of us had parents that caused much of the heartbreak with various forms of abuse. We needed to numb out and find protections/addictions to manage the heartbreak and loneliness of rejection, abuse, and loss. As a result, the pain got stuck in our bodies, causing both physical and emotional damage.
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE
Without a loving parent such as Celine’s father, we had no choice but to learn to buffer the pain. You might have learned to use food, drugs, or alcohol at a young age. Perhaps you became addicted to TV, computer games, tantrums, fantasy or caretaking. You might have learned to stay focused in your mind rather than in your body, and to live in the past or future rather than in the present moment. In one way or another, you learned to disconnect from your deeper feelings of heartache, heartbreak, loneliness, helplessness over others, sorrow, and grief, because you did not have the ability to manage these very painful feelings any other way.
But addictions and inner disconnection cause other problems – loss of a sense of self, low self-worth, fears of rejection and engulfment. The more you disconnect from your feelings, the more you are dependent upon others for approval and acceptance. This leads to relationship problems and to more addictive behaviors. The result is living with anxiety, depression, fear, anger, guilt, and/or shame.
Childhood heartbreak has hugely devastating effects that need to be healed as adults. Now, we can go back and learn to give ourselves what didn’t receive as children – compassion, caring, tenderness, gentleness and understanding – and heal much of the emotional damage. We can learn to manage the deeply painful feelings that we could not manage as children.
PHYSICAL DAMAGE
When children are physically and/or sexually abused, the energy it takes to survive caused a huge amount of stress in the physical body. When stressed, the body goes into flight or fight, which means that the blood leaves the organs, brain, and immune system and goes into the arms and legs for fighting or fleeing. However, when we cannot fight or flee, we freeze, causing the blood to stay stuck in our arms and legs. This gradually erodes the immune system, preparing the way for illness. Much current illness is the result of childhood abuse.
While we can currently eat well, get enough exercise, and heal the emotional stress, sometimes the physical damage is deeply challenging. It is not easy to heal the years of damage caused by the stress of abuse. It is vitally important for you to not judge yourself for the illnesses you might be suffering that started as a child from being abused or from suffering unbearable loss.
Today, you need to be gentle with yourself. Judging yourself for the emotional and physical damage of heartbreak only causes more heartbreak. Instead, you need to be deeply caring, tender and gentle with yourself, consistently giving the love and acceptance to yourself that you did not receive as a child. This is what heals.
Personal Improvement
Abd Mubarak was on his way to Mecca when one night he dreamed that he was in heaven and heard two angels having a conversation.
“How many pilgrims came to the holy city this year?” one of them asked.
“Six hundred thousand”, answered the other.
“And how many of them had their pilgrimage accepted?”
“None of them. However, in Baghdad there is a shoemaker called Ali Mufiq who did not make the pilgrimage, but did have his pilgrimage accepted, and his graces benefited the 600,000 pilgrims”.
When he woke up, Abd Mubarak went to Mufiq?s shoe shop and told him his dream.
“At great cost and much sacrifice, I finally managed to get 350 coins together”, the shoemaker said in tears. “But then, when I was ready to go to Mecca I discovered that my neighbors were hungry, so I distributed the money among them and gave up my pilgrimage”.
