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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

What a Coyote Taught Me About Growth and Evolution

June 1, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

It’s been quite a while since my last post. I had intended to keep up a rhythm with posting, but the past few weeks have been incredibly busy ones, and before I knew it, the month had evaporated.

I’ve been working on From Solo to Soulmate, a program I’m launching soon, and wrapping up my book on the subject has been all-consuming.

The amount of work needed to get a project like this one up and running is always surprising, and like all of our labors to build something new, there are no guarantees that it will be successful. For some reason, I haven’t fretted much about failing this time. I guess you could say I’ve grown up a bit during the maelstrom of the last couple of years.

Last night, my husband spotted a coyote very close to our cabin, and we were able to watch him for quite a while as he explored the field behind us. Such encounters are rare here, although we do hear coyotes at night from time to time, especially in summer.

At one point, the coyote stopped and looked me right in the eye for almost half a minute. It was startling enough that I asked one of my guides, Spotted Eagle, about it.

He told me that Coyote represents both the creator and the jokester.

He said the thing to keep in mind about Coyote “medicine” is that it often fails to produce the result we expected. However, in failing, it always serves a much greater purpose. Coyote offers wisdom that is hidden from us, unless we fully accept what didn’t work out the way we expected. Only through acceptance are we granted access to the wisdom available from the apparent failure. He said the keys to coyote medicine are adaptability, simplicity and trust. It is Coyote who reminds us that wisdom and failure are inextricably linked in the sacred paradox that is our fulfillment.

This encounter and the teaching that followed it gave me pause to reconsider how I view all of the so-called failures that punctuate my past.

I was reminded of something Spotted Eagle loves to say: that a good education is expensive, and failure is usually the engine that drives our evolution in the direction of our eventual success.

It’s only human to resist the pain of failure. Perhaps Coyote can teach us to resist a little less so we can mine the wisdom present in all of the many things that did not turn out the way we expected or wanted.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Acceptance, Awareness, Painful emotions, Spotted Eagle, Trust

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

How to Become Aware of That Trickster, Your Unconscious

March 22, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

F_E_A_RSelf-awareness is absolutely fundamental to a life that works. That said, there is a trick to becoming conscious of what’s going on behind the scenes in that Stone Age brain of ours, especially as it relates to our out-of-power behavior patterns of which we can be strikingly unaware.

The truth is we tip in and out of clarity and power on the fulcrum of our fear of the uncertain future. Here we encounter the anxious mind, that part of our psyches that lurks in the shadows of awareness where it cannot be seen directly.

Our conscious awareness doesn’t readily track what is happening in the anxious mind, and because of this, the anxious mind can have a devastating effect on our behavior and choices. What we are conscious of while this is happening may actually be a massive projection that we have confused with objective reality.

While the conscious mind may be completely unaware of how the anxious mind is distorting our reality in this way, our behavior will always track the anxious mind perfectly, even when the conscious mind does not track the anxious mind at all. So, by observing our behavior patterns and patterns of interpretation (the story-lines made up in the mind), we are then able to indirectly track, with great accuracy, what the anxious mind is really up to.

The Stone Age brain we all carry around in our heads has an extraordinary faculty for pattern-recognition. When we use it to see ourselves acting out an unconscious pattern of behavior, suddenly we have a manifold increase in our power to change that pattern, and thus transform our lives for the better.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Awareness, Monkey mind, Uncertainty

Lessons Learned from the Fish Slapping Dance

March 8, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

Fish_Slapping_DanceHow we deal with life can look a lot like that hilarious old Monty Python sketch called, the “Fish Slapping Dance.” We can spend a lifetime dancing around our fears and issues, only playing at confronting them. Then every now and then, life pulls out a big uncertainty and gives us a good wallop.

Yes, we need to have a sense of humor about it! But more than that, in undergoing life’s surprises—when our assumptions about the future are challenged—there is so much to be gained by what we learn during the crisis.

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, said something pretty interesting back in November of 2008. He said we should never let a crisis go to waste, that during a crisis, we are often more willing to do things we would never consider when things are going great.

This is a bit of a two-edged sword, I admit. Frightened people are usually the most likely to do something reactive and, frankly, stupid. On the other hand, a crisis can create an opening for necessary changes that can happily be put off when everything is going smoothly. Let’s face it: the so-called “good times” can make us complacent.

Like in the “Fish Slapping Dance,” we all have the luxury of dancing around big problems for a while, but it’s often not until they knock us silly that we are willing to admit that a transformation is required of us.

Originally posted in 2010

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Awareness, Fear, Uncertainty

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