The last few days have been hinting at Spring here in DC, and there's a noticeable increase in energy and engagement that seems to come along with the rising temperatures. I hope you've enjoyed the first full week of March as much as I have. Other than the changing seasons, the following things have been rattling around for me of late.
I've been:
Reading - for Christmas of 2020 Liz and I got my daughter a Kindle. She's a huge bookworm and we thought this might be a way to feed her hunger for books while limiting our library trips and keeping our bookshelves from overflowing. We were wrong; she hated it! Luckily, I happened to pick up the Kindle last week and I'm really enjoying it. It's light and a great way to read in bed when others are asleep. The first book that popped out at me was Radical Candor by Kim Scott. It reminds me a lot of Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You by Francis Frei & Anne Morriss, which is a guiding book for our team at Fulcrum this year. Both books use a quadrant system to approach how we connect and communicate with other people. In her book, Scott uses the axes of "Care Personally" and "Challenge Directly" to establish a style of Radical Candor as the desired intersection of both measures. Frei and Morriss use the axes of Standards and Devotion to establish a "Justice" quadrant at their preferred quadrant. While Unleashed dives into leadership beyond just communication, the pith of both books is that people want you to bring your honest self and your honest feedback to them. In our Keller Williams culture, we call this "care" and "candor". People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care.
Watching - Speaking of my daughter, Emma, it's been a tough week for her Oral Immunotherapy Treatment. Some of you may know that she has a life threatening allergy to peanuts, and she's been microdosing for over a year to establish a tolerance that will ultimately protect her from accidental ingestion. Over the last month she's made incredible strides toward becoming "bite safe" in her exposure. While we stumbled a bit on that journey this week, the thing that really struck me is how intent and resilient she is. Watching her hold firm in this walk over the last year (plus) has been a challenge for me. I can only imagine what she's endured by summoning the courage to eat something that could theoretically kill her...on a daily basis. They say that having children decreases happiness but increases fulfillment. I don't know about that, but I'm positive that having my kids allows me to put challenges in perspective and to find inspiration that keeps me moving. Watching what they overcome is the ultimate fuel.
Thinking - The word recreation jumped out at me a few times this week. I've been very purposeful over the last two years on building a better priority and counterbalance in my work-life integration, and finding fun has been a big part of that. Almost all of the fun has been in the traditional sense of recreation - it's outside of work. Seeing the word this week hit me differently though. For some reason my brain broke it down into "re-creation". It got me thinking about how I could rebuild parts of my life and business that aren't working optimally by making them more fun. American culture has an understanding that work is supposed to be hard; for too many it's just a card punching slog. The people that are the best at what they do typically enjoy what they do more than their peers. So I'm asking myself "how can we make doing what we do more fun, so that by enjoying what we do, we do it better?" Does recreation really have to happen only outside of work?
I hope you have a fun, inspired week. Live it in your top-right quadrant.
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