Outside the Lines
your monthly splash
of creativity and wisdom

read in 16 countries

August stretches ahead of us, and in this part of the world it's summer. Long evenings, BBQs, the smell of cut grass, the sound of a beer being opened. It's a sweet time.

Here's a haiku from Evelyn Lang that captures something of the moment:

perfect summer sky -
one blue crayon
missing from the box

Thank you for reading Outside the Lines. As ever, please forward it (in its entirety please, using the link at the end of the newsletter) to anyone else you think might be interested. This community grows with your help. As a thank you, I'll donate 10 cents for every subscriber to Nature Conservancy Canada.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Principal, Box of Crayons

New rhythms, old ruts
My wife is away for two weeks, visiting her family in Nova Scotia, while I'm working at home writing a book. Her absence is making more apparent the unconscious rhythms of our life together - the responsibilities each of us carries, how we each fill the space, how we use each other in part to define who and what we are. With her away, I find I'm a little lost. There's certain aimlessness to what I do... something that (unfortunately) I can fill by doing all the extra chores that now fall to me.

This particular home-and-away combination is somewhat unusual for us - normally I'm the one who travels for business, while she stays at home. A number of years ago, I was living in London but doing a great deal of work on a large corporate merger in the US. I would spend three weeks "on" working long hours and living in a hotel, then one week "off", back in the UK. But the point stays the same. Each time I arrived back home, I had to rediscover the art of living with someone. I also had to stop dropping the towels on the bathroom floor and expecting room service would be ready and willing to deliver at a moment's notice!

We all have such rhythms in our lives, habits and patterns of behaviour and thought. They can be very useful. In their book, The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz talk about "positive rituals" as one of the keys to managing your energy more effectively. They claim that each of us has only a limited amount of conscious will and discipline - which is, for instance, one of the reasons why New Year's Resolutions inevitably fail. You proclaim "this time it will be different!", swear to start exercising more, eating less, communicating more, sulking less, drinking more, smoking less... or whatever. But after two weeks, your self-will is well and truly exhausted and your old habits are still in place.

Positive rituals, Leohr and Schwartz claim, preserve our energy by not drawing upon that limited amount of self-discipline. If it's a ritual, you just do it without having to think about it. Different sources claim it takes between one and six months to "bed in" a ritual. In my experience, it can vary. On the one hand, it took me less than a month to start doing yoga regularly, while on the other I've never quite cracked consistently writing in my journal. Establishing positive rituals is one of the roles that coaching can play - an external source of support and accountability to help you adopt the positive changes you want to make.

On the other hand, it can be easy for rituals to become ruts, and a familiar habits can be an excuse to take it easy and play small. The comfortable rut is, above all else, comfortable. Before you know it, you look around and go "wow" - I've been doing it this way for years. (It = the way you exercise, the way you eat, the way you communicate, the way you think about and act at work, the way you think about and act in your life outside work, the way you raise your kids, the way you watch the TV, the clothes you wear, the haircut you have, the people you hang out with, the beer you drink... yep, pretty much everything you can think of!).

Even worse, you never get around to saying "wow" but cruise through your life in a way that is mindless - that is, not mindful. It's not that you have to change everything or for that matter anything. It's that you should actively choose the way you live your life, not live it out of habit. As you become aware of your habits, questions to ask are "what do I get from this habit?" and "by having this habit, what am I missing out on?"

Action:
Where are you in a comfortable rhythm? Which rhythms are serving you? Which rhythms are limiting your impact?

Pick a positive ritual to adopt. It might be small - going to bed half an hour earlier than usual. It might be large - changing the way you work. Give it at least a month - and then decide what you want to do with it.

Pick a rhythm to break. It might be small - change the way you drive to work. It might be large - change the way you communicate with your partner. Test out the new way of working. Give it two weeks - and then decide to keep it going or not.

I'm running a workshop on how to use a business model to reinvigorate your business in Rochester NY on Thursday September 2nd. If you're in the area, I hope you'll be able to attend. It's highly relevant for all coaches and for any small business owner. Please contact me if you'd like me to run this session for your coaching group.

Coaching is Dead! Long Live Coaching!
(Eleven ways to reinvent your coaching practice for greater success)

Are you struggling to build your practice? Do you feel like you're fishing in the same river as all the other coaches?

One reason may be that you're using an outdated business model. The right model can open up new ways of working with new people - and revitalize your business.

I will share the basics of a business model - and show you eleven levers you can use to differentiate and grow your own practice. Recent participants of this workshop said it was "real, fun and timely" and "in less than one hour of well-designed brainstorming, I uncovered ideas for developing my business that were under my nose." 95% of the participants said they would recommend it to a friend.

Details:
Thursday 2nd September, 5:15pm - 7:00pm
Brighton Town Hall, Downstairs Meeting Room
2300 Elmwood Avenue
Rochester, NY 14618

Cost: $5 visitor fee (funds go to the Rochester Chapter)

Sources of wisdom
As a coach, I often use the metaphor of a "gremlin" to describe the negative self-talk that goes on in everyone's head - the voices that go "you can't do this, shouldn't do this, you don't know what you're doing, you're faking it and you're about to be found out, who are you to expect that" and so on. These voices sound familiar? Yep, welcome to being human. The source for this particular metaphor is Richard Carson's book Taming Your Gremlin.

Recently I've come across two other books that play in the same arena. The War of Art is by Steven Pressfield, who you will probably best know as the author of Bagger Vance. He writes on resistance and the difference between taking a professional and an amateur's approach to overcoming it. It's short, easy to read and compelling. The other book is Miss Remarkable and Her Career by Joanna Rubin Dranger. It's a Swedish graphic novel (!), and tells of one woman's journey to make friends with her demons. It's brilliant, witty, and right on the money.

Behind the Gremlin lies a bigger concept - that of the Shadow. Jung first gave us this term and defined it as "the person you would rather not be." He also believed that the key step to becoming an adult was to integrate (rather than deny) your shadow side. In his words again, "the gold is in the dark." If you're interested in learning more, a great place to start is Debbie Ford's The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.

""You have to honour failure because failure is just the negative space around success." Randy Nelson, Head of Pixar University






Creativity Camp
I'm lucky enough to be presenting at the Creativity Camp on October 27th. Ian Hardy runs this experiential workshop with a range of amazing guests to help unleash your creativity. It will be held at the gorgeous Drake Hotel in Toronto. You can find out more at www.creativitycamp.ca. Hold the date, and stay tuned for further details.





Brand new
What do you stand for? And who cares? What are the secrets to a great brand for you and your business? Learn about the "Brand Onion" and the three mistakes people make with branding in my recently published article in Choice magazine. You can download it free here.

I'll be presenting a workshop on branding - The Branding Point. The Fusion of Passion (Yours) and Desire (Theirs) - with Rosemary Davies-Janes at the ICF International Conference in Quebec City, November 4 - 6. I'd love to see you there! Information about the ICF Conference is at www.coachfederation.org. Subscribe to Choice at www.choice-online.com

Michael Bungay Stanier is a certified coach, consultant, trainer and speaker. He works with people, teams and organizations to have more impact and have more fun. You can find out all about it at www.boxofcrayons.biz or you can just contact him directly at Michael@BoxOfCrayons.biz or +1 (416) 532-1322.

Outside the Lines is distributed on the 2nd Thursday of every month. Subscribe at www.boxofcrayons.biz. Your contact information is never traded, never rented, never sold. All writing (c) Box of Crayons 2004. Box of Crayons is a registered trading name of Maida CC Inc.