Guest blog by Alexa Cole, VP of Client Services, Cole Consulting

In the recent wake of my family trip to Seattle I’ve been thinking a great deal about what makes me me. What makes you you? I’ve been musing that there are three main reasons I am myself, me, I.

What I think, do, and say are all uniquely me. Of course, there are often outside factors, social pressures, and judgments that enter my mind affecting these things, but still I am the ultimate controller, guider of these three gauges that mark me.

Seattle also marked me in a proactive way of wanting to cultivate and expand the things I think, do, and say, and the latter was the main reason for the trip from San Francisco to the Evergreen State. I was there with my brother and father, associates of mine as well as family, to take a training in Fierce Conversations. Fierce Inc®, started by Susan Scott, is a training company that “helps organizations develop leaders, transform cultures, increase engagement, and create authentic, energizing and rewarding connections with colleagues and customers through skillful conversations.” It is a refreshing lens into the deeper constructs of how what we say and how we say it, really does shape us. The most popular adage of Fierce is: While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a business, a career, a marriage, or a life, any single conversation can®.

I pride myself a great conversationalist, an extrovert who can make friends with the bus driver, the Executive, and the check-out clerk all in a single day. But what about going deeper with these people? What authentic conversations are necessary in my personal and professional life for growth? What am I hiding behind? These are all questions that have been stirred up, not only for me, but for my brother, father, and the people around us who we have been sharing the principles of Fierce with.

I felt astounded and thrilled to be learning the tools of Fierce and immediately put the practices in place upon returning home to the Bay Area. I was astounded because in my nearly 30 years of studying, I had never before taken a class in how to have genuine, heart-felt, and direct conversations. Since it’s basically a no-brainer what Susan Scott says, that any one conversation can change the course of your life, why have we never been taught this?

I encourage you, dear reader of this blog, to take a minute and think about a conversation that has been hanging on the precipice for you whether in your personal life or career. Acknowledge that you are risking more by not saying what needs to be said than by risking being authentic and truthful to your friend, colleague, or boss. Take a deep breath, speak from your heart, and try to look at the issue alongside of the other person, rather than in opposition with him/her. After all, the root of the word conversation stems from “con” meaning with someone. Be present with that person and with the real issue at hand, and I guarantee you will feel relieved by the genuine, authentic you that is revealed.

If you’ve tried this or are going to try this, we would love to hear your comments below…

By guest blogger, Alexa Cole, VP of Client Services at Cole Consulting

“Be present, be exactly where you are.”

Lately I’ve been having a lot of meetings with colleagues and coffee’s to network with Bay Area consultants such as myself. It has raised the question, how do I know that my meetings are being effective and helping me achieve measurable results? I feel good when I leave with a to-do list of items to research or people to further reach out to. That is a measurable, quantitative end goal to taking an hour out of my day for a lunch with someone. However, if I don’t leave with a to-do list, only a business card or another connection with a new person, I am still enriched just the same. Down the road, I may call on that same person for guidance or help or be able to refer someone to them for useful services. I had the epiphany that I can measure a successful meeting, either in the office or out networking, by following three simple guidelines:

• Be present, be exactly where you are. When you’re meeting with someone for 15 minutes, or even for an hour, try to be present with that person completely. Resist checking your phone or answering calls. Be clear on the front end how much time you have for that person and set the parameters in the beginning. That way you’ll know when the time is up and so will they. Try to make your surroundings comfortable for you and your partner. If you have the time and space, offer to take the meeting outside so you can be present even more fully without the distractions of the office and possible interruptions.
• Honor the time. Know that your colleagues, as well as you, have a million things to do in a day and that carving out a meeting time is sacred ground. Try to take it seriously and have an agenda or at least a set of things in mind that you want to discuss and accomplish. If things start to veer off course, politely remind your partner why you are meeting and what you would like to get out of your time together.
• Follow up. Have you ever had guests over to your home and been pleasantly surprised when the following day or week you receive a card or email thanking you for your hospitality? The same thing is true for a meeting with a colleague, where saying “thank you” as a follow up email or card can make such a difference. Even if you are following up on deliverables, make sure to include a separate paragraph thanking the person for taking the time to meet with you and being present. At the same time, log their business card or the hours worked together in your Rolodex so you can keep track of your meetings’ productivity. If it’s a meeting with someone you haven’t worked with before, put his or her business card immediately in your Rolodex should you have to call on that person again down the road.

It is also helpful to assign roles to members of the meeting and lay groundwork for mutual respect.

Read more from Cole Consulting on other useful meeting tips.

It actually started years before I developed it as an intentional practice – taking on a ‘fear a year’ that is.    In some ways I think I was hard wired for this, though not with any understanding of what it really entailed.   For instance, I was afraid of telling my parents that I didn’t want to keep going back to semester after semester of college, racking up bigger and bigger loans, pouring all of my hard earned cash and quite a bit of theirs into an experience that wasn’t worth it, in my eyes at least.  So, in 1972, at the end of my junior year at UVM, after three years of battling with my parents, I just did it.  As scared as I was to disappoint them, deny them, confront them, I dropped out of college. To pursue my passion for life-long learning, emphasis on learning,  experiential learning.  My first of many ‘the road less traveled’ decisions.

It wasn’t until I was dealing with turning 40 (yikes) that I started an intentional practice of taking on a ‘fear a year.’  It was the early ‘90’s, I was wanting more from life, more from my career (right livelihood perhaps?), more from myself that I realized that since I was afraid to speak in front of large groups I should do something that forced me to speak in front of large groups.  I combined taking on that fear with a current (and life-long) passion for public education and decided to run for our local school board.  Running for office wasn’t the fear (although I did have to ‘mount a campaign’ it was not exactly heavy politics) it was the fear of public speaking.

Sure enough, four years on the Board and I was cured of that one.

By the time I was approaching my 50^th birthday the stakes became higher.  Much higher!  For my 49^th year I took on scuba diving.  May not seem like much but it was a big one for me.  I loved to snorkel.  More than half of my Men’s Group were all divers and I was definitely envious of their annual trips to exotic locations to dive together.  I tried going on one of the trips as a ‘snorkeler’ and it was fun but definitely not the same thing.   So I did it.  It felt great!  Still feels great!!

For my 50^th year it was really big.  A 25 year marriage that wasn’t working anymore.  We had been in couples counseling for months, tried a few big ‘relationship jump starts’ and had gone through many, many, many hours of processing all to no avail before we realized that it was over except we both were too scared to call it.  So, after three ‘heaven sent’, painful-to-the-max but loaded with the same message experiences within a six month period, we decided to separate.  In doing so, I realized that one of the fears I hadn’t even let myself consider until I was knee deep into it was that I had never lived alone before.  In my whole life!  Not a reason to stay married when a marriage isn’t working (and lots and lots and lots of work and effort to try to get it to work didn’t work), but so, so easy to do given all of the givens.

Last year, 2011, my fear was that I couldn’t take three weeks in a row on a vacation.  I had never, ever done that, in my entire adult life.  And for the past 18 years I’ve been self-employed as an Executive Coach and Organizational Development Consultant which seemed to make it even more impossible to even consider doing.  But I knew that this was the fear I needed to take on and besides, I would find an excuse no matter what my job. Boy am I glad I tackled that one, as it proved to be one of the best experiences of my life!

The idea was to go to Italy with my lovely second wife Lisa where we spent three weeks in Northern Tuscany, in a sweet farmhouse in the Chianti region, just slowing down.  Disconnecting from technology (mostly), matching our rhythms to the sun and the weather, taking time to just stroll, wander, read, wonder, write, read, hike, eat, cook, sit, do Tai Chi, stroll some more, do some yoga, hang out and just be.  For three weeks.  Not  the somewhat recently discovered exorbitant  practice of taking TWO weeks in a row instead of the usual and customary one week.  Three weeks is to two weeks as two weeks was to one.  Geometrically, exponentially, vastly different.  Viva la difference!

A fear a year.  I highly recommend it.

For instance, would you be willing to respond to one of the following questions?

• Who was your most impactful teacher, and why?

• What is the single most important thing we could be talking about today?

• What was the best present you were ever given?

or, feel free to visit our latest post, below…

The Women’s Movement aimed at shattering sexism, specifically by breaking through the glass ceiling, among many other worthy targets.  Women do earn more than they did pre-feminism.  There are more women executives now than ever before. And yet, when you dig into the lives of women executives (or women in general I imagine) you find ample evidence that the glass ceiling is more secure, and more difficult to penetrate, than ever.   For those of you looking for some good advice on how to pierce that barrier, I recommend “Knowing Your Value: Women, Money and Getting What You’re Worth.”  Author Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe, takes an in-depth look at how women today achieve their deserved recognition and financial worth. As pointed out on Amazon (where you can go to buy the book) “it’s no secret that women have long been overlooked and under-compensated, and while great strides have made in recent decades, the value placed on women versus their male counterparts is still consistently unbalanced.”

Before we move to the point I want to make as hinted to by the title of this blog, let’s consider that while compensation is important, in oh-so-many ways (survival, recognition, self worth, organizational influence, etc.), it’s not what we’re going to hear eulogized at our funerals.  If you are a working (outside the home) mom and you’re interested in that kind of fullfillment, and I’m hoping you are, take a look at “The Working Mother’s Manifesto: This is How We Do It”.  This piece opens the door on the ‘less is more’ theory by recognizing that a) money not only isn’t everything, it’s not even close, and, b) when you’re willing to negotiate getting less money (for less time worked) you can get more of what you really want, time for yourself and time to spend with the people you love.   This is where Carol Evans, the author, and CEO of Working Mother magazine, encourages working mothers (and fathers) to ask their organizations for what they need to attain a healthy balance between work and family.

So, that last parenthentical phrase “(and fathers)” is where I’m heading.  Yes, we had a Women’s Movement, and much progress was made, certainly not as much as we’d have liked, especially when it comes to equity in compensation, but progress nontheless.   What’s been missing is a movement of equal size and weight for men.  About men.  By men.

Now I’m going to say something that many of you will rail against.  You may even curse, and moan, and some of you will want to throw things and some of you will definitely want to stop reading.  Please don’t!  Bear with me a minute.  Here it comes…

Men are the oppressed gender.  There, I’ve said it.  Ok, please put down whatever it was you were about to toss in my direction.  You may even want to take a deep breath. Let’s take a look.  Together.

When it comes to what really, really matters in life, what are we talking about?  Yes, money and the attending  comfort and security that it brings are huge.  But let’s face it, how many eulegies have you heard that focused on how much money that person had?  Or that even mentioned money?  I’m guessing none, or at least very, very few.

What we do hear, and not just at funerals but at retirement banquets, testimonial dinners, toasts at family events is how much love people had in their lives. How much love they gave and how much they were loved.  It is in this category that men are culturally at a severe disadvantage.  At least through my generation (Boomers) we were told not to cry (“be a big boy now”), not to be ‘weak’ (“suck it up”) or even talk about our feelings.  We were expected to be the bread winners (at least that’s changed generationally) and though we could help change diapers and share in the household chores it was the rare man who elected to be a stay-at-home dad while mom brought home the bacon.  Yes, many of us did break a few barriers, mostly through the requirements necessitated by being a dual income family.  But in the end we were not encouraged to go the extra mile to ensure that we’d have the time and energy to secure the kind of deep, spiritually based connections with our kids, our friends, our families, our communities that women just naturally fall into.

I’m hoping that it’s not too late.  For a Mens Movement or, better still, a Peoples Movement, where we all get to focus on the things that really matter.  Time with our loved ones (and I’m not talking just a weeks vacation a year), time to reflect, time to connect, time to feel.

Happy Holidays!

Alexa with mentor/aunt Janet. Janet and Alexa currently live on opposite coasts.

In this age we are living in, where knowledge is free and if there is ever a doubt we throw around the now household term “just google it”, I am constantly wondering: where are our mentors? Our teachers of the old crafts, the wise elders, the parents you don’t just visit on holidays but who share with you real-time skills for a better life — how to balance a check book, sew a button, grow your own food. Those that teach outside of what is taught in school curriculum and help us find our true path in life.

I answered an ad in the Burlington Free Press titled “Wanted: General Manager/Entrepreneur” to start-up and head-up an employee-owned and managed energy services company, that was to be the for-profit part of Vermont Energy Investment Corp’s (VEIC) double business plan.

After meeting with Beth and Blair, the co-founders and heads of VEIC, and hearing about their plan to kick-start the business by taking over the regional Weatherization Program (with the current mayor of Burlington’s help as the then community outreach Director), along with their 25 employees and $300,000 in state contracts, and their agreeing to include my commercial/industrial energy services business idea, I signed on.

It was like strapping myself to a 2,000 ton Titan Rocket.  From zero revenue to half a million dollars in less than a few months.  30+ employees who were all being trained to be employee-owners, in addition to working on their ‘day job’.  Providing low-income weatherization services to Chittenden/Grand Isle county residents one minute, installing the first packaged cogeneration system in VT at an Enosburg Falls Senior Living facility the next.

Talk about too much too fast!!  As quickly as we had risen in ’86, we crashed down to earth in ’88 after hearing that the funding organization for our employee-owned business decided to stop funding start-ups.  Of course that was after we spent over $50,000 of our own time and money hiring the very same Boston-based organization to train us in how to be an employee-owned and managed business.

In addition to losing a business I lost a best friend, a lot of sleep and my perspective.  I did gain a tremendous amount of understanding for what it takes to embrace incredibly different kinds of people in owning and managing a business, especially a business that was trying to succeed at all three bottom lines at the same time.

I learned that my dreams might sometimes be just that… only dreams.  No basis for reality.  I learned that seeing the world through rose colored glasses had its downside.

Lots of lessons.  Costly lessons.  I often refer to that two-year period as when I earned my MBA, the hard way.

So what did I learn? Focus on one (or two, tops) thing at a time.  If you’re going to include a friend in the business make sure that you’re committed to full, and I mean FULL transparency.  No matter how difficult that becomes.

And be prepared to fail. If you think in baseball terms, where the greatest most fantastic ball players of all time are known, and idolized, for having a lifetime hitting average of .344 (Ted Williams) or .342 (Babe Ruth) which means… You miss (fail) two out of three times.

That’s what success, dare I say greatness, looks like.  Getting it right one time out of three.

As long as you’re learning, and enjoying it, most of the time.

Talk about change management!

These thoughts came screaming to me as I sat in temple in Boca Raton, Florida, for my niece’s son’s Bar Mitzvah.  The Torah reading was about Moses and the Ten Commandments.  The visiting Rabbi offered a few interesting stories in a similar vein.  My perspective quickly jumped to applying his ruminations to my field and how the executives I coach might benefit from this common sense viewpoint.

If Moses needed help in leading his people, and a big part of that help meant delegating, of course that applies not only to executives but anyone who’s managing others, right?  Well yes, except why is it that so many managers, especially CEOs, have a hard time doing just that?  

Ego?  Perfectionism?  Control issues?  Just plain fear that they’ll screw it up?

All of the above?

Ok, you’ve come this far along your career because often times you’re the smartest person in the room and how can you possibly delegate your most critical tasks/projects/assignments to someone so wet behind the ears?

By knowing everyone’s strengths, playing to them, calibrating them along the way and by allowing enough ‘room’ for everyone to make their own mistakes (hey, you’ve made your fair share of them, right); as long as everyone gets to learn from them.  So they don’t get repeated.

If that sums up a lesson on delegating, what kind of message was God giving Moses about integrating?  He told him to not only respect his father-in-law (one of the commandments covered this already) but to go a step further and look to his years of wisdom, and his different perspective, as inspiration and guidance for Moses as he wondered how he’d manage the exodus our to Egypt and the 40 year struggle ahead.  A father-in-law as mentor, if you will.

Last by certainly not least, Moses looked to God for guidance, advice, insight, perspective… all of the wonderful things that a good coach brings to a relationship where leadership is critical and the leader is better served not trying to do it all alone.

I base my assertion on what appears to be a generally higher level of emotional intelligence, more intuitive decision making, more effective communicating and a cohort that is better able to motivate others through both personal and organizational connection.

Ok, a gross generalization.  Call it one man’s perspective.

These observations go all the way back to my first jobs during the wild and crazy ‘60’s (the first of my six different decades) when I was in High School working nights and weekends to put away enough money for college.  Vivid memories of my absolute worst bosses – supermarket manager who ruled through complete fear and intimidation (since he had no voice box due to throat cancer he had to harshly whistle his displeasure down isle 7); A/C repair boss who ruled by totally ignoring me all the way to the late pay checks that ultimately all bounced; Macy’s department store boss who somehow managed to straddle those two opposite styles leaving me and my peers completely disconnected from our jobs and the company.  The list goes on, but let those three stand as representative of my experience with male leadership.

Ok, not what you’d call sufficient evidence for an empirically scientific hypothesis.

The 70’s and 80’s were much better, in large part because I finally was able to work for/with some amazing women.  Like the South African Montessori teacher who took me under her wing and taught me the best parts of Maria Montessori’s method and how to distinguish it from the Americanized BS that came later.  And we founded and led a parent cooperative elementary school that in addition to a solid, grounded education helped a multitude of children and families navigate the emotional roller coaster of separation, divorce, blended families and all that life in the 80’s brought with it.  And the school is still going strong some thirty-five years later.

Or how about the woman who took a chance on a thirty-something aspiring entrepreneur to head up an energy services business that she and her husband wrote the business plan for as the for-profit sister to their not-for-profit socially responsible policy producing consulting firm?  Whereas I struggled to make the for-profit business succeed (the two years of mostly sleepless nights during which I feel I earned an MBA in how NOT to run a business), and failed, she managed to build her socially responsible business into a 100 million dollar organization while serving on many low income advocacy boards along with the board of the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (the nation’s largest organization of its type).

Yes, I have had the good fortune to work with a few men who did lead with insight and humility, albeit sometimes lacking in compassion and grace.   They are out there, the exception to the rule, in my experience.

The good news is that women are making headway in the ranks of management and leadership.  As Lisa Belkin points out in her NY Times article, “Calling Mr. Mom”, women “are 50 percent of the workplace (and 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs). We receive three college degrees for every two earned by men (along with 60 percent of all master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees and 43 percent of M.B.A.’s). Working wives are coming close to bringing in nearly half the household income.

As Ms. Belkin also points out women “currently make up only 3 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s”, so at the top leadership positions there are not a lot of role models.  Hopefully that is changing.

Her article is really more about work/life balance, in particular how that looks on the home front in terms of shared family responsibilities.  Definitely worth a read.   Maybe us men folk will learn about compassion and grace in the workplace by spending more time at home navigating diapers and tears?  Can’t hurt, can it?

Is it just me or do you notice too that we live in a culture that just doesn’t seem to value contemplation and reflection?

I’m not talking about the ‘stop and smell the roses’ kind either… though I sure do appreciate it when I take the time to do that. More of a ‘stop the presses’ kind of thing.

Slow down, reframe expectations. Stop filling the void with mindless chatter. Stop the chatter altogether.

Be here now…

So much easier said than done.

Being present is the best present I can give myself. It truly is a gift, because when I fully commit to being here now, fully present, away from the distractions and ‘shoulds’ and background chatter I am so much more capable of appreciating what I have. And in that appreciation, so much more capable of giving back to those that mean so much to me.

To my friends and family, my business associates and wonderful clients, thank you for all of your support and kindness this past year.

As the fall turns the hillsides into a blaze of reds and oranges and yellows, please join me in taking some time to stop the craziness of running from one thing to another and just acknowledge how lucky we all are to be here together.

Thank you!