FLIPPING OVER THINGS

After enjoying the assigned weekly reading for my Creating Leadership class, The FLIP manifesto by Dan Pink I was reminded of a book I was gifted last year called “Around the year with Emmet Fox”, a book of daily readings. I loved it because I found it to be witty and clever. An easy read, reflecting a day in a year of his life. Each day not connected to one before or the one after. You can read a page a day by opening a random reflection and go back and forth, mixing pages and experiencing them differently each time. If you didn’t know that Emmet Fox died over 5 decades ago, his wrtting in the book could be confused for contemporary. What I found even stragener and more fascinating is that Fox was a spiritual leader and priest who recorded his own interpretations of the scripture (which I am not familiar with at all). So I found his reversed psycohology interpretations of Proverbs pure sarcasam and a fenomenal tool for self help. For example, on March 7 Fox wrote about “how to be unhappy” and talked about all the things one should do to be unhappy. On March 10 he wrote about how to destroy your health. Fox said you shouldn’t sleep because that would give body a chance to recupurate, or excercise becasue that promotes circulation. The point he was making is, sometimes you have to look at darkness to turn towards the light, or decipher good from bad. Therefore I was inspired to FLIP things around in this week’s blog post.

BLOG REVIEW #1

As if stars aligned, my favorite leadership blogger Seth Godin posted a “reverso” topic this week called  Reverso g-h-o-s-t (off topic) which is about his favorite game. Just reinfocing idea that sometimes you just have to digress, take a mental break and take a walk down a different path just for the fun of it.

However, the very next day Seth posted a short nerattive called Important, popular or viral which talked about different kind of work, results we get from each type and about how we find a balance between multitasking and priritizing. This blog post just reminded me of my daily reality and reinforced my rebelious “take a break and slow down” momentum that started building. We simply can’t always be focused 24/7. And sometimes to be able to really focus we have to break the cycle and start fresh.

BLOG REVIEW #2

This week on HBR I found a great read about feedback. It’s called How to Give Feedback People Can Actually Use!  I’ve worked in an environment where “feedback is a gift”, you seek and give feedback and when ask for feedback you usually associate it with finding bad stuff about what ever or who ever you are providing feedback about. I am so sick and tired of random useless and sometimes hurtful feedback. When ever asked to provide feedback about a colleague I respond with no feedback, if I had any good or bad you’d know by know. So, this post hit it on the head for me! Feedback is a gift if it’s constructive! It needs to be big-picture focused and organizationally aligned. Needs to be behavioral and specific, focused on patterns and tied to impact. It has to be factual and not interpretive. Feedback can be both positive and negative.  But most importantly if there is an action or outcome that is expected it has to be prioritized.