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Jennie Marlow

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Does Self-Reflection Improve Executive Performance?

June 28, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

self-refelctionIn an environment driven by profits and stock value, taking pause to self-reflect is unlikely to be an executive’s highest priority. It is often not until a personal crisis erupts that we’re willing to pause and assess where we are personally and examine what is needed to move forward.

When I was invited to blog on LinkedIn, I took a tour of the business blogosphere to see what the experts had to say about self-reflection. I suppose it wasn’t surprising that Harvard School of Business thinks executive self-reflection is about improving performance and that it ought to be focused on corporate objectives and whether or not one is communicating a clear vision for the company. Other experts suggested so-called self-reflective questions like: “Am I meeting expectations?” Or, “What else could I be doing that no one else can do?” And my favorite, “How do others perceive my performance?”

The irony is, after years of relentlessly pursuing company goals, a leader, whether corporate exec or entrepreneur, can feel untethered from his or her authentic self, anxious and stretched thin but unable to identify the source. When this happens, there will be little encouragement to go inward, but go inward one must or a personal crisis will be the inevitable outcome.

True self-reflection is personal, regardless of our role in the world. It takes courage and discipline to pause and take stock of ourselves. However, the most meaningful self-reflection is not an exercise in evaluating, judging or tabulating our mistakes and conquests, or in gauging how we are perceived. Instead it measures something intangible yet vitally important to our personal well-being, and that is do we feel fulfilled? And if not, why not?

If we aren’t feeling fulfilled, I guarantee that self-reflection of the personal kind will uncover the gap and that it lies in what is missing at the heart level. I don’t care how driven we are to succeed materially, life is a feeling experience, and our quality of life is measured by how fulfilled we feel. If there is a gap, it will surely be defined by the feeling experience our endeavors have failed to deliver.

Fulfillment may be a luxury of the successful. Once we are no longer fighting to survive, we cannot help but crave joy, creativity and ease from our investment of energy, indeed our life force. Perhaps this is the reason statistics prove that, at a certain point now determined to be an income of $100,000 per year, more money and status do not make us any happier.

I suspect that fulfillment is elusive simply because it doesn’t tend to rank well on our priorities list when we’re engaged in the business of running a business. We tend to treat fulfillment as something that will happen to us later, when we’ve achieved a great business goal. This is pure fallacy.

Self-reflection of the personal kind is a business necessity, in my view. Without it, we will eventually become rudderless ourselves and thereby unable to provide guidance and direction to those who count on us for leadership.

Perhaps more to the point, if we fail to attend to our fulfillment while we focus on our material performance, we will burn through our time on the Earth and arrive at life’s end without much more than all that stuff we know we cannot take with us.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Filed Under: Life, Money Tagged With: Authenticity, Awareness, Business, Self-reflection

Question Everything You Think During a Setback

June 28, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

setbackWhen a setback happens suddenly, the shock can reverberate in our thoughts and feelings for extended periods of time. The amount of time it takes to recover corresponds to the degree of loss the setback represents. Loss taps into very deep structures in the brain, and if we do not employ consciousness to navigate the emotional landscape of our loss, it can easily morph into a prolonged melodrama which we act out unconsciously.

How can you cope when your reactions to a setback are chaotic and intense?

Recognize what is happening in your brain.  The brain’s fight-or-flight response is designed to keep you from thinking straight, so don’t let it dictate your words and actions. The brain is also a story-teller who loves to embellish the tale with each telling. So, stick with the facts. Just the facts! Refrain from going into what-if scenarios of how close a call it was, or dwelling on what might have been, if only… What occurred is what happened, and nothing your Mind makes up about it is real.

Bring yourself back to the present moment. The events leading up to a big setback often play like a movie inside our heads. When you catch yourself reliving the events or trying to “rewrite the script” of what happened, bring yourself back to the present moment by breathing deeply. Notice what is happening right now: the chair in which you are sitting, whether or not it is day or night, the sounds you are hearing, etc. You cannot sense these things in any other moment than the one in which you find yourself, but also realize that, at least initially, you might have to do this exercise every few minutes until your emotions calm down.

Delay taking action. Many of us medicate our emotions through action. If we don’t take a breath and try to restore calm before we act, we can expend a lot of energy doing things that are not really constructive and which might even be counterproductive. If you need to evaluate the action you’re contemplating, ask a trusted friend who has no investment in the outcome whether or not it makes sense to take the action you want to take. On the other hand, if you are paralyzed when you know you need to act, breathe your way through it and do the best you can.

Wait out your emotional wave before making any big decisions. After a big setback, the emotional wave can have the force of a tsunami, and its power to distort your reality can be very great indeed. Wait, wait, wait and wait even longer. The dilemmas created by turbulent emotions usually resolve themselves into emotional clarity with the passage of time. Since most of the things you think when you are emotional are not altogether true, wait until your emotional wave has subsided, and don’t fall into the trap of believing that getting the decision behind you will solve anything, especially if that decision is made prematurely.

Watch for new opportunities. When we undergo a setback, opportunities emerge that didn’t exist before the setback occurred. Although we may be unable to see them right away, changing conditions often reveal choices and resources that weren’t obvious under other circumstances. Without making up a fantasy or going into denial, it’s important to have faith that we will eventually be able to change difficult things for the better with time, patience and the wisdom we always gain from meeting our challenges with willingness.

Keep in in mind that big setbacks usually represent our greatest opportunities for transformation. The key to actualizing these opportunities is simple but not easy: be willing to embrace the uncertainties that setbacks invariably magnify. Bottom line: come back to the now-moment, stay here, and wait until your clarity and calm are restored. Then, with a clear head, you can decide what, if anything, to do.

Filed Under: Creativity, Healing, Life, Love, Money Tagged With: Awareness, Emotions, Goals, Painful emotions

Are Your Goals Serving You?

June 3, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

"Attachment to your goals does not allow the flexibility that living in present time demands."                         − Spotted Eagle

I ran across this quote the other day, and it really gave me pause. I'm realistic enough to know that objectives are necessary and that, without targets to drive a process, our endeavors tend to stagnate or go off track.

That said, goals are a tricky business. While they serve to focus our energy, what are we to do when striving to achieve our goals leads us to suffer? How do we know whether or not to keep going?

Human beings tend to create from a place of avoiding what we fear. When we have only the goal and the fear of not achieving it as our reason for staying the course, we must be willing to abandon our investment in the goal. We must then move with courage toward a new objective, one that is guided by essence, the feeling experience we intended the original goal to deliver. 

When a goal delivers suffering, there is an alterative to dogged attachment, and that is to refocus on whatever essence qualities are missing from the material results. Essence words I tend to focus on are: peace, freedom and sustainability. I ask myself, "Is the effort to achieve this goal destroying my peace of mind? Do I feel free to express myself authentically and act from a will that is free of fear? Given the sacrifices required, can I sustain the effort? Do I have the time, energy and resources to do what I set out to do?"

These three essences―peace, freedom and sustainability―are sure to provide me with a litmus test for whether or not to proceed. Because essence defines a trajectory and not a goal, focus on essence is what affords me the needed flexibility that living in present time very often demands.

Filed Under: Life, Money Tagged With: Essence, Fear, Goals, Intention

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