365 (and a bit) days to make stuff happen...

Social media feeds are filled with the anticipation of a new year and all the best wishes that come with it — it’s the time of the year to reflect and dream and resolve to do better in the upcoming year. The calendar is reset, and we enter a new year fresh with endless possibilities — we are given another twelve new months to make stuff happen.

To everyone, great success with making stuff happen in 2023 — better yet, great success with making the hard stuff happen in 2023.

Well there you go, I’ve done my part by wishing you a happy and successful new year; an easy proposition if ever there was one. The rest is now on you (and me I suppose because I know people have wished me a happy and successful new year).

This does feel so very familiar and there is an imperative somewhere in all of this. Oh right, it’s my new year so it’s only fair that I’m the one to make it happen.

Good thing I have done this New Year Thing before and can reflect on what has worked before and look at what hasn’t worked as “growth opportunities”; although if memory serves me, there are no guarantees what worked before will work again so I better stay sharp. Where is that list of reminders again?

• Have goals (plans, resolutions, wants, desires, objectives) and at least get them scribbled down on a napkin.

• Work fuckin’ hard.

• When your plans go south (and this happens a lot) you cannot quit — you must keep your wits about you and find a way.

• Cherish your relationships and give more than you take.

• Whining is OK when it gets hard, but keep it to a minimum, and keep going until you’re finished doing what needs to get done. (a personal favourite)

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Do have a safe and healthy 2023, and let me know if I can ever help.

iamgpe

The evolution of what motivates...

I recently set up my new workspace and decided to unpack some boxes I had labelled office eight years ago — long enough to be as much different as I am the same. Time is funny that way.

Some of what I found came in handy, some went into the garbage reflecting a new definition of utility, and three motivational wall hangings received a reprieve from their confinement.

Dream your tomorrow

Believe in your dreams

Keep calm and carry on

I am not sure why I chose these sayings back then — did they really resonate with me or did I just have lots of wall space that needed to be covered? I’m leaning to the latter, for no other reason than they just don’t offer much in the way of motivation anymore. As I look at the words, I find them trite, and although there is a place for vision (and vision boards), I find them soft. I do realize Keep Calm and Carry On is a reminder regarding how to deal with bombs that are literally being dropped on your head, but I would suggest that these words have been turned into a merchandiser’s dream and lost any original meaning, and most definitely the character that lies behind it.

As I look through a different lens, I find my resurrected motivators are soft and without character to actually make things happen… and maybe that is it.

My lesson coming out of the pandemic is movement really matters — both literally and figuratively. It is how you develop the ability to get through things and with it, develop knowledge, strength, grit, and the ability keep your wits about you. And the more difficult the better!

Because Easy doesn’t change you

Comfort Kills

Work harder, nobody cares

Prepare for the unknown

Sure, these are also somewhat trite and can definitely be found on t-shirts in your Instagram feed, but they do reinforce that success and growth only happen when it’s hard and you have to put in the work.

This can not be found in dreams.

I will admit all of this is half baked and something I pondered the other day when I got a little nostalgic — and in the end, maybe just the evolution of the words I look to motivate me. But as an aside, if you have found that your dreams have come true, you’re comfortable and everything is easy-peasy, I wish you luck and there is no need to explain.

I understand. I just don’t care...*

… I have work to do.

iamgpe

*— this definitely came from a t-shirt which some of my friends will be receiving for Christmas.

Find your blind spots...

“I’m quite easy going”

A dear friend looked at me confused and said, “What are you talking about, you are one of the least easy-going people I know.”

I went on to explain myself with little success and we agreed to disagree.

Many things have happened since then — I shifted from a corporate setting to more of an entrepreneurial one, took on the city experience, became a professional blogger (you can say professional when you get paid), continued to craft my skill as a sales and marketing journeyman… and then a virus decided to make its presence known and changed everything. Like many of us, I hunkered down to ride out the storm, managed a small bubble, and worked hard to keep myself healthy and mentally sharp.

Segue to a small app called MindPal which became my companion to sharpen my mind — various games and puzzles designed to keep the mind challenged and nicely categorized to identify your strengths and those areas for development.

As the pandemic faded into fresh memory, I stopped playing MindPal and eagerly got back into a world that was the same but different — most importantly though, I was in motion again. Recently I picked MindPal for no other reason than to play some games, and in a non-pandemic mindset, intently studied the categories that in effect illustrated what my competencies looked like.

Speed, Memory, Attention, Flexibility, Language, Math and Problem Solving

I was not so much interested in the scores as much as the relative comparisons and was particularly relieved that Problem Solving was the strongest category (for no other reason than it validates my main value proposition). As I moved down the list I landed on flexibility and couldn’t help but smile.

Then, like now, she had been spot on.

Success comes with the ability to leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses and this ability creates the alchemy you need to meet any opportunity or challenge that comes your way. Unfortunately, an aspect of the human condition is to focus on our strengths (and those things that come easy to us) and shy away from our weaknesses (that are harder to deal with) — and this is a problem.

Not dealing with your weaknesses, to either turn them into strengths or minimize their impact, will impact the alchemy to drive success. Worse still, not recognizing you have a weakness simply creates a blind spot, and how will you make your way if you can’t see? I appreciate there are two viable strategies when looking at strengths and weaknesses — you could work to optimize your strengths and weaknesses so net-net you are in a good place or leverage your strengths so much that they overshadow your weaknesses and in effect become irrelevant. The merits of each can be debated but either way, you need to know what your weaknesses are and assess if they are impacting your success.

And one more thing.

There is a comfort that comes with our strengths because they come easy and during the pandemic, as I played with my MindPal app, I was reminded of a truism that tends to get dismissed because it is so counter intuitive — Comfort Kills.

We were not built to be too comfortable and are hardwired for challenge — if you don’t challenge your strengths and search out any blind spots (and improve on them), you will slowly find ourselves getting softer, weaker, duller, lazier, and less engaged; until one day you find yourself looking in the mirror asking yourself what happened.

I just gotta figure out the whole easy-going/flexibility thing.

iamgpe