thelanterngroup | Behavior Matters! - Part 3

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Do you need a mini-sabbatical?

Do you need a break?

For those few of you who might have noticed, the number of blog postings on this site over the last two months has been significantly down.  This was on purpose as I realized that I needed a sabbatical of sorts from writing.

After my crazy experience of working through Hurricane Irene (see here) I was a little burned out.  I could tell because the writing ideas that had come easily (well relatively easily) to me before, were now few and far between.  There was not that burning desire of “Wow – I need to share this with people.”  In fact, it was just the opposite, whenever I came up with an idea, it was, “Who cares?”  I was burnt out on it.  It was adding stress to my life (more than what I felt was necessary) and was becoming an “issue.”

So I cut back.

Not completely, but enough that I felt like I was taking a break.  I did not post every week.  The posts that I did do were short and mostly updates.  I tweated less.

I did not take a complete sabbatical.  I still worked.  I did my day to day things.  I jumped into creating some new workshops.  I worked on developing some new business ideas with a friend.  I sold a bunch of projects for this fall/winter.

But I didn’t write.

And it felt like I had some time off.  I felt like I had a break.  Which is what I needed.

And I found out a few things.

1. The world did not end (I knew that would be the case, but still, one never really knows)

2. My readership dipped, but when I did post something, it popped back up right away

3. I want to write stuff again (now that I’ve had some reflection time

You should try it

Most of us don’t have the opportunity to take a real sabbatical.  However, I bet that each of us could find one or two things that we could take a sabbatical from.  For me it was writing this blog and keeping up on the social media stuff.  By taking a conscious break from it, I feel more motivated to do it now.

What is your mini-sabbatical going to be?  What do you need a mini-break from?  Is it new product development?  Leadership meetings?  Working on next years annual conference?   New sales?  Worrying?

And remember, the world won’t end…even if you think it might.

For your mini-sabbatical

1. you need to reduce your thinking on the topic/issue (not completely give it up)

2. You should give yourself a set amount of time to take off (I did it for two months, but I could see it working in as little as two weeks)

3. Keep a journal or log of ideas that come to you regarding your mini-sabbatical area – but don’t work on those ideas (this is to help with your motivation later)

4.  Do things so that you don’t fret too much about what you’re not doing (I did not look at the number of viewers to the blog because I knew that it would probably distress me)

5.  Remember, the min-sabbatical is supposed to rejuvenate you – if you feel it adding more stress, you need to change something about it (either how you are doing it or the fact that you are doing it at all)

Leave a note and share your ideas on this.  Let us know how it goes.

I’m grateful for being back from vacation

We just spent a wonderful week of family time together in Mexico. It was good to relax and get away for awhile. But now I am very grateful to be back at work. I feel refreshed and ready to go. Time off is a great way of recharging your batteries!

I have been very productive already this morning and probably will remain this way for a few more days!

Today I Am Grateful For: For being up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday

It is the 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning and I am down on my computer instead of sleeping because my five year old came up into bed about an hour ago because he woke up from a nightmare.  While I would like to be sleeping right now, he tends to toss and turn and kick and make funny noises when he sleeps – which makes my sleeping rather difficult.  So I tried – for an hour to fall back to sleep while beside me lay a squirmy five year old who snores.

Needless to say, I’m now down at my computer typing away.

But I’m thankful for that.  I’m thankful that my son is sleeping, nightmare free in my bed.  I’m grateful that he still is young enough to come up into our bed when he is scared.  That he is young enough to believe that his parents can stop any kind of monster.

Soon enough those days will be gone and I’ll be looking back on them with a fondness for the “good ol’ days.”

I will have forgotten that I’m tired.  I will have forgotten that my back is sore from trying to lay on my side on the edge of the bed and not fall off for an hour.  I will have forgotten all these things and remember only that my son felt safe and loved in my care.

So now I enjoy this early morning.  I might get less sleep.  I might need to take a nap later today (its ok, it is Sunday).  But I enjoy them and am grateful for these small inconveniences.  Right now he is sleeping soundly because he feels that he is protected and loved.

Team Building with virtual and live participants – learnings from Event Camp Twin Cities 2011

It has been almost a month since Event Camp Twin Cites 2011 (ECTC11) and I’ve had time to reflect on what I learned about creating team building sessions in a hybrid meeting environment. I wanted to share those insights with you.

Background:

Back in late June, Ray Hanson asked me to help develop an interactive team / gaming experience for ECTC11.  We wanted to push the envelope and go out on a limb in creating a hybrid meeting experience that was different than anything that had been done before – in other words, we wanted to create a customized hybrid team building program that was interwoven throughout the entire two-day event where both live and virtual participants were working together on the same team doing real team building challenges.

To the best of our knowledge, this had not been done before.

Sure, there have been sessions before where live and virtual participants were placed on teams and worked on challenges.  Any number of technology suppliers provide the means for people to compete in a trivia challenge or earn badges where their scores or efforts get rolled up to a “team.”

 This isn’t team building – it is team gaming. 

Team gaming allows for individuals to participate and compete and even feel like they are part of a team but it doesn’t allow for a deeper, more sustained bonding and trust building that are necessary for team building.  If you want to add some energy and fun for an hour into your event, team gaming challenges are great.  If you want to help teams work better together and really get to know the people that they are on a team with, you need to do team building.

We used ECTC11 as a laboratory to try to see if this could be done in what we called “The Great Event Camp Challenge.”

What we did:

As mentioned before, team gaming for events is not too daunting – as long as you are focusing on individual participation from both live and virtual participants.  However, creating a custom team event for a hybrid audience presented some significant challenges.  We needed to look at how people engaged in the event, how they communicated with each other, how learnings were going to be processed, and how teams would work together as a team and not just as individual participants.

For the Great Event Camp Challenge, we decided to interweave the team sessions throughout the event.  We developed three different avenues for teams to participate:

  1. Team Challenges
  2. Team Badges
  3. Team Case Study

Each of the avenues provided teams with ways to earn points.  Ultimately, we had decided that we wanted this event to be competitive to help keep teams engaged and attentive.  The team with the most points won. 

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Today I’m Grateful For: Nothing on my Calendar

After being extremely busy for the last few weeks it was nice to find that I have nothing on my calendar today. Time to recharge and get all the little things done that need to be worked on…

Team Building Facilitator Resource Idea

I was looking for some team building facilitators the other day for a program in a different city. I didn’t want to have to pay to fly in facilitators to the area, so I turned to the web. Amazingly, I could not find any website that provided a list of facilitators sorted by location. Of course, this might be because I’m horrible at using the web…or it might be an opportunity for a new website.

What do you think?

Karma: A few lessons from our ordeal with Hurricane Irene

This past weekend has to be one of the strangest weekends of my life. 

FRIDAY

It started with me coming off of a grueling two-day program that had frankly, stressed me out.  That meeting ended Friday at 2:00 PM at which time I headed straight home and got ready to drive two hours to a wedding.  When I got home, I quickly changed, gave the au pair marching orders for delivering our 20-month old to the grandparents, and took off my wife and 5 year old son for the trip to Mankato where the wedding started at 5:30 PM. We were on the road by 3:30 PM.

So far so good.

Then the text from Orbitz came, “MSG: DL 848 to BOS cancelled.”

Oh oh.

See, I was supposed to be flying out to Boston along with three other facilitators on Saturday to do a program on Sunday for a client.  We had known that Hurricane Irene was closing in on the east coast, but the reports that I had seen didn’t have it near Boston until Sunday.  Apparently Delta had some different information.

I  had two main client contacts – I called them both up.  No answer – so I left messages.  I then e-mailed the clients from my i-phone with this message “Flights Cancelled.  I just received a text saying our flight is cancelled due to hurricane Irene.  I am checking on getting a different flight.”  It was about 4:30 PM.

The message came back from the client at 4:41 PM, it said, “Thanks Kurt.”

Huh?  I would have liked a little more information please.

Needless to say, I was working the phone and e-mail.  I contacted Delta and instead of waiting for 42 to 54 minutes on hold, I had them give me a call back when my time was set.  Over the course of the next 40 minutes I traded more e-mails with both clients.  The meeting was still on – it seems like none of the participants were having any problems in getting into Boston (even though they were coming from around the world – Europe, Brazil, China, India and the U.S.).  They must NOT have been flying Delta. I contacted my team of guys who were flying out there with me.  I got a hold of two of them who were offering to help however they could.

So it was now about 5:20 PM and we were almost at the church.   Then I got this text from our Au Pair, “Sitting outside Grandma and Grandpa’s for 45 minutes – no one is home to take baby.”

Oh oh.

I now had another crisis on hand.  Quickly texted back that we’d try to find the grandparents, gave a few unsuccessful calls to their home and cell phones when I received my call back from Delta service (it had been in the 42 to 54 minute range).  The Delta rep searched for another option into Boston and came up with nothing available that could get us in either directly or through a connection.  All the flights were either full or cancelled.

It was 5:33 the wedding was starting.  I sat down in the pew and for the next 40 minutes tried to concentrate on the ceremonies.  Luckily there was no cell phone service in the church so I wasn’t tempted to check e-mails every minute.

Once outside the church I scanned the e-mail and text barrage.  A couple more e-mails from the client stating that the meeting was still happening.   A few more from my facilitators wondering what they could do to help.  A text from the Au Pair that she had gone home to feed the baby because our 20-month old had been hungry and thirsty.

I thought about pulling my hair out at this point but I’m bald – so that didn’t help.

At this point, my wife came outside and we discussed what we should do.  We were prepared to go home to relieve the Au Pair.  We tried calling the grandparents again.  And I was thinking through various options for being able to work the program in Boston – I thought of maybe trying to rent a car to drive out to Boston, finding other facilitators in Boston who could conduct it, try to figure out a teleportation device that could beam us there directly. I was getting a little desperate.

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Changing Behavior – The Real Reason Motivation is Important

I’m a pragmatist.

This means that while theory is nice, what is really important is what happens in real life.

Most of the time when clients hire us, they hire us because we can impact the bottom line through changing the behavior of their employees.  Most of them don’t care about the theory behind that change no matter how wonderful it is (e.g., The Four Drive Theory of Employee Motivation) – what they want is results.

Which gets me to the point of this post – if we are really about changing behavior, why do we care about motivation?

Think about it – motivation in and of itself does not change anything.  You can be motivated and pumped up and rearing to go and still not accomplish anything.  I’ve been motivated for years to loose weight – yet up until a few months ago, I haven’t done anything about it.  In their book, “Change Anything” Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan and Switzler (the guys from Vital Smart who wrote Crucial Conversations and Influencer) talk about how motivation is just one aspect that is required to achieve personal change.  Indeed, they talk about the fact that if all we have is motivation, no matter how much it is, we are most likely headed for failure.

To drive change we also need to have the skills, tools and knowledge necessary to achieve that change.  We need to have a social network that supports us in our change efforts and isn’t trying (actively or passively) to derail that change.   We also need an environment that helps us and doesn’t hinder us.  In other words, motivation by itself is not enough.

Yet…

Motivation is vital to this whole equation.  It is the impetus to get us off our butts and start doing something.  It is the pressure that is applied to us throughout the change process – the pressure to continue and not quit when it gets tough.  It is the internal drive and fortitude to keep going and keep pushing oneself.  Without motivation, no change would happen.

And that my friends, is the reason that motivation is important.

A Manifesto I Can Live By

This is called the Holstee Manifesto – I like it.  Please visit their page if you do to…http://shop.holstee.com/collections/designed-x-holstee/products/holstee-manifesto-poster

 

Why did you fail to reach a goal?

We wanted to find out why people don’t reach their goals.  Please think about a specific goal you had that you did not achieve (i.e., loosing weight, achieving sales goal, stop procrastinating, etc…) and fill in up to three reasons why.

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