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Posts tagged with #Curiosity

Intentionally unproductive

My sons,

Human beings are wired for play. In our earliest years, life basically consisted of eating, sleeping, and learning through play and exploration. If you walk into homes with young infants or toddlers, you will commonly hear the sound of laughter, of bubbly little voices excited about the brand new discovery that squishing the plastic giraffe causes it to emit a squeaking sound (both of my children grew up with Sophie the giraffe teething toys).

But something strange happens in elementary schools all around the world. We begin to change the daily environment of our children from one dominated with play and exploration to one filled with learning, memorizing, and study. Once they hit middle school, daily scheduled play time (aka recess in America) gets eliminated altogether. Free play time at home after school gets replaced with extracurricular activities and more homework. Even volunteering, which used to be a self-initiated activity stemming from the goodwill of one’s heart has become a required prerequisite by our educational systems.

By the time that child graduates from college, free play, which used to consume the majority of their days, has been transformed into something that we relegate to our 3 weeks of vacation a year if we’re lucky. That child now lives in a culture that serves the god of progress and achievement, a god which happily will take any and all time that we do not fight to hold onto. They are told that excessive play is immature, and are in an environment that regularly reinforces that their only purpose in life is to make progress.

The benefits of progress

Let’s be clear - I’m not advocating for us to play constantly and to ignore our responsibilities in favor of that play. Our world is increasingly complex and requires increasingly dedicated, educated, and creative people to continue to make it better for us all. And let’s make no mistake about it - our world is infinitely better than the one previous generations lived in, across any and every measurable metric.

Average lifespans worldwide are longer. Many deadly diseases have been either eradicated or made treatable and non-fatal. More people are being educated. There is greater (although not perfect) gender equality. There is less violence and crime. The number of people in the world who have electricity has increased from 70% in 1990 to 90% in 2022.

I know there will be some that argue that the world is a more dangerous and terrible place than our past - to those I will highly recommend two books: Steven Pinker’s ~The better angels of our nature~ and the late Dr Hans Rosling’s ~Factfulness~.

On a more local scale, we have persistent access to the internet. We have a plethora of options of electric cars and carbon-zero household products. We have the ability to say goodnight to our home assistant and have her turn off all the lights, close all the garage doors, lock all the doors, lower all the shades, and turn off the bed warmer that was keeping our bed at a balmy 80 degrees for us to climb in. (Okay, maybe that last one was just princess Sam in action).

No matter how you dice it, that progress has many benefits.

The evolving conditions for progress

Unfortunately, our conveyor belt approach to equipping our children to carry on that mantle of success is in need of an update. While it is true that decades ago our assembly line approach to education produced workers skilled enough to work the machines of the day that propelled our world forward, our world has evolved, and the needs and conditions for that progress have changed.

As our world continues to move from physical and manual work to knowledge work enhanced by greater automation, the need for creativity, imagination, and ingenuity have become the new baselines for advancing our world forward. And as it turns out, creativity cannot be taught, it must be fostered and nurtured.

Intentionally unproductive

As a child, I found myself constantly bored. Whether it was sitting in a boring Canadian history class (I must have read about Vimy Ridge, the one important thing Canada did in WWI a thousand times) or sitting at home after school with no access to video games and on-demand TV/movies, I was constantly bored. I strongly believe that that boredom played a huge part in helping me achieve much of what I have accomplished in my life.

That boredom was the fertile ground that enabled my brother and I to invent games to play. It gave me the time and space to dream up worlds and explore them in my mind’s eye. It gave me impetus to read, to imagine, and to dream. It allowed my mind to wander into all sorts of places and situations.

Granted, there were down sides as well. I got myself into a lot of trouble because of that boredom (my mom and my principal were on a first name basis…), and I found myself more often then not finding creative ways to be mischievous. While running around with a can of WD-40 and a lighter lighting spiderwebs on fire and flushing out ant hills wasn’t particularly useful (or safe, really), that time of non-productivity was a launch pad for all sorts of creativity.

It turns out that our subconscious minds are much more capable than our conscious ones. It also turns out that our conscious minds are much louder than our subconscious ones, so if we’re constantly engaged, our subconscious minds have little time to be active and to make connections on our behalf.

DaVinci knew this. Excerpts from his recovered notebooks showed that not only did the grand master paint and create timeless works of art, but he allowed his mind to wander to all sorts of unrelated and fanciful topics. In 1485 for example, he imagined the first parachute three centuries before an actual parachute was made and deployed successfully, and he detailed out specifications for it in one of his notebooks. It was constructed in 2000 and demonstrated to work successfully at 10,000 feet! He also imagined a submarine, a helicopter, and solar power among many other things.

How did he do all this?

He had intentional unproductive time. He knew that his mind needed rest, space, and margin to do its best work, and he actively created time to daydream. He would often go for walks with nothing on his mind and nothing in his hand but a pencil and a notebook and presently realize that he had filled many pages with seemingly unrelated thoughts. In 1994, Bill Gates bought one of DaVinci’s notebooks for $30M. Other notebooks have gone for $5M or more.

Creating margin

I will never be a DaVinci or a Gates. Neither will you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the greats of our world and integrate some of their practices into our lives. It turns out there are many studies that show a plethora of benefits of having margin and allowing ourselves to daydream. A few benefits:

1. We become more creative. When we daydream, our subconscious minds make connections between seemingly unrelated topics, letting us maximize the learning and benefits we get from our experiences.
2. We can build better relationships. Something my college advisor told me that has stayed will me to this day is the truth that if you want to make connections with people, you have to make space. People don’t have crisis moments when it is convenient for you to show up for them. They don’t have breakdowns, epiphanies, or life changing events happen to them on your schedule. If you don’t have space for them, they will find someone else that does.
3. We become more interesting. By giving ourselves margin to daydream, to pursue hobbies and interests, and to explore and experience without agenda or purpose, we become more interesting! No one is interested in a cookie cutter person that just eats, sleeps, and works. People are intrigued by those who go off the beaten path and explore!

My sons, I know that there is great pressure for you to be always productive. I know you’ve been told that the stakes are high. I know that without a doubt those things were told to you with the best intentions. But they don’t tell the whole story. Be productive, yes. But also make sure you spend time to be intentionally unproductive - I guarantee you won’t regret it!

That's interesting... tell me more!

My sons,

We live in a world filled with noise. Everywhere we go we are bombarded by the constant steady stream of noise that never really seems to shut itself off. So much so that many people feel the need to take retreats to get away from it all.

Each time I’ve done this the first thing I notice, always, is how quiet it is. When I finally force myself to turn off my devices, to disconnect, and to be fully present in my surroundings, the first thing I experience is a quiet that has become all too foreign in our lives. The quiet that allows you to hear your own thoughts, that allows you to really see what’s going on around you, and that allows you to direct your musings and contemplations.

This is unfortunately an uncomfortable exercise for many of us. We have grown so accustomed to the constant pace and buzz of our world, to the little gadget in our pockets that keeps us constantly connected, and to the distractions, direction, and influence that our strongly connected world has on us that quiet contemplation about topics of our own choosing is foreign at best and can be uncomfortable and down right scary.

We are so uncomfortable with this quiet that we in fact default to generating our own noise to combat this. We post, tweet, text, and perform a myriad other noise-generating activities to help fill the silence. We identify the like-worthy and retweetable sound bytes of our lives and spew them out. We comment on others’ sound bytes and create a world filled with much conversation but little communication.

There are many unfortunate realities of this situation, but the one I want to focus on today is this: with all the talking we’re doing to fill our own silences, we’re unable to truly listen to others.

We listen in order to speak

Maybe you can relate to this: you’re in a group conversation with two or more people, and one person is speaking. And honestly, they’re speaking a little more than you’d like, and you feel that they’re somewhat long winded. You know that they’ll eventually take a breath, and you need to make sure you capitalize on that, so you’re running through what you want to say, making sure you’ve got the right counterpoints to what they’re proposing.

You’re listening, but are you internalizing what they’re saying? Are you giving what they’re saying its due regard? Or are you trying to formulate your response, your rebuttal, or your clever anecdote in retort?

Let’s face it, we’ve all done that. We’ve all laid out logically our counter argument, and have even had the pleasure of everyone else in the group nodding their heads as we counter the original argument point by point. Feels great right?

Sure. But in those conversations, while we may be speaking, and while we may even be speaking eloquently, we’re not communicating. And chances are, the person(s) we’re conversing with are doing the same, which means that none of us are really listening to one another.

While you may develop a reputation for being a wonderful orator, you won’t be receiving any accolades for being effective.

Are you actually interested?

Perhaps the first and foremost problem is that most of the time we’re not actually interested in the other person’s views or opinions.

Now don’t get me wrong - I’m not talking about the blatant, flagrant, and offensive “dude I don’t care about what you think” type of thing that usually comes along with a “and in fact I don’t really care about you” approach to the relationship. No, this is a much more refined, polite, and often unexpressed and only faintly detected lack of care and concern about what the other is saying despite genuinely having care for the relationship and for the other person.

If we’re truly honest with ourselves, we’ll discover that for most of us, we converse with others more because we want to be heard rather than because we want to hear.

The benefits of listening

There are a lot of really great reasons we ought to listen to others. And since we live in a capitalist, self-centered world, I’ll only focus on the benefits to ourselves that we get from truly listening to others.

1. We become more empathetic. In a world full of strongly held opinions that are weakly founded and strongly adversarial, empathy is a quality that is increasingly rare but also increasingly coveted. When we truly are able to listen to others and care more about what they’re saying than what we want to say in return, we begin to tune into their needs, their wants, their desires; a process which makes us more empathetic.
2. We move in to a posture of humility and learning. By listening to others and focusing our attention simply on what they’re saying, we more readily move ourselves into a position where we can learn something. This humility, this curiosity, this willingness to accept that we in fact don’t know it all is perhaps one of the most important realizations one can make in one’s lifetime,.
3. We may learn something new. Remember that learning doesn’t always mean new knowledge. In fact, it’s probably arguable that the majority of learning we need has to do more with perspective and mindset than it does new information we were unaware of.
4. We can build deeper connection. When we take the time to really listen to people, we may in fact discover that we have more in common than we might have originally thought. These commonalities light a path towards greater connection, greater understanding, and greater shared experience.

Practice paying attention

Attention is the beginning of connection and devotion. We can’t love something, be devoted to it, desire it, and move it forward if we can’t focus your attention on it. We can’t have a deep connection with something, be it a person, cause, idea, or effort if we are constantly distracted, constantly thinking about ourselves and our situation. As such we need to have mastery over our focus and our distractability - if we are too easily distracted, we will discover presently that the things we profess to love, we love in name only.

So how do we do this? How do we move our focus from self to other? How do we get better both at the desire to understand others as well as the practice of conversing in a way that allows for that understanding?

A great friend of mine has a wonderful technique that I’ve stolen and am starting to implement in my own life. It’s a simple phrase, and when asked with the right motivation yields great results.

That’s interesting… tell me more!

Simple right? Such a simple phrase, such a simple concept. Asking someone for more. But I assure you, it’s a magical concept. A few reasons:

1. It shows a genuine interest in the other person(s). This simple phrase expresses to the other that you are interested in them, that you find something in them and in their story desirable, and who doesn’t want that? Who among us doesn’t take joy in the feeling of someone else desiring to know more about us?
2. It allows others to shine. By expressing our desire for the other person to expand on their thoughts, we allow them to have their moment, to feel like they are expressing mastery over something. We are all built with an innate desire for mastery, for attaining mastery and for being recognized for it. What a great gift it is when someone allows us the opportunity to demonstrate that!
3. It breaks barriers to connection. When we show interest in someone else, it allows them to let down their defenses and show interest in us, thereby creating a much deeper connection than we would have had otherwise! We walk around this earth constantly on the defensive. We are constantly bombarded with messages about how unsafe the world is, how much we need to protect ourselves. What a breath of fresh air it is to be able to break down those barriers by showing genuine interest in someone else! These broken down barriers eventually lead to a reciprocal interest, which as we know is the basis for connection!

And so my sons, my hope for you is that you too can incorporate this simple technique into your relationships, that you too can ask someone to tell you more about themselves, about their journey, and about their story. Ultimately life is about connection, about relationships, about fulfillment in the time, endeavors, and relations that we have, and above all things I want you both to have a rich and full life. I love you boys!

A culture of learning

My sons,

I wanted to talk a bit today about our Amazon Leadership Principle Learn and Be Curious. The description of this LP is as follows: “Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.”

But what does that mean? How does that actually apply in our regular lives?

First, a few thoughts about learning itself. Specifically about our relationship to learning, how we approach it, and our mindset around it.

Learning ought to be a lifelong activity and endeavor. It is something that we expect of our children. It is something that we allocate the first quarter of our lives to. It is something that successful people do all their lives because it separates us from the rest. It is the thing that allows humanity to progress, to advance, and to have made leaps and bounds from our much more primitive ancestors.

And yet once we graduate from college, the majority of us have a sharp decline in the rate of learning, the topics which we learn, and the time we spent dedicated towards bettering ourselves. We leave our climate and environment of learning and are thrown into a fast paced delivery-driven culture that more often burns out our college grads more than it teaches them.

That in turn begs the question of environment. Do we have an environment where people can learn? One that encourages the trial and error required for new neural pathways to be created? One that rewards failure as much as it rewards successes, knowing that failure is but a step on the path to progress and victory?

In a candid fireside chat in San Diego earlier this year Bill Gates suggested that there are certain conditions that which, if not met, make it incredibly difficult - even impossible - for an individual to learn: confidence, curiosity, and constant feedback. Let’s talk about each of those.

Confidence

People need confidence to learn. They need confidence to know that they can get this, that they are able to progress. They need to believe in themselves, that they are capable of change, of improvement.

Confidence is built by successes, by cheerleaders, by supporters, coaches, and mentors. The more we craft an environment where these things naturally happen and are praiseworthy the more confidence we will see among those living in it.

Curiosity

When we were young, we were curious about everything. The quintessential example is the kid that asks “why” one too many times that it sends their parents over the edge. We each have a natural curiosity about the world, a spark of joy at discovering something new, something novel, something wonderful.

And yet that curiosity gets beat out of us. It begins in adolescence when the desire to fit in (and the awkwardness of not fitting in) begins to pick up steam. And then responsibility kicks into full gear, whether from owning a home, being married, having children, having family responsibilities thrust on you, or a myriad of other things.

Slowly but surely our natural curiosity shrinks until we become caught in the rat race of the mundane.

We must craft an environment where curiosity flourishes, where people are able to explore, to try new things, to fail at things, and to share those learnings with others. We must give people the time, the physical space, and the mental headspace to venture out, to ask questions, and to stick their finger into the proverbial socket to see what happens.

Constant feedback

As leaders one of the most important things entrusted to us is the care for our people. As General Stanley McChystal puts it in his book Team of Teams, leaders must take on the role of the gardener. The gardener has no direct ability to make plants grow. However, they do have the ability to cultivate the plants, to prune as needed, to till the soil, to water and provide nutrients, and to provide an environment that is ideal for growth.

So too is it with leaders.

We need to create the right environment for our people to grow in, and need to trim and prune where necessary as well. This means providing consistent and constant feedback as people learn and grow. Without a tight feedback loop, people will be left wandering and reinforcing bad habits that should have been pruned early on.

Learning to learn

So how do we create this environment where people can flourish in their learning, and how do we create that desire for learning, that mindset for growth, that joy that comes from making progress?

A few practical things we can do.

1. Reward learning. When I was a new parent I was told that we should praise our children for the learning process, not for the accomplishment. In her book Mindset Carol Dweck argues that praising results creates a fixed mindset in our children who are hyper focused on results and not on the growth or the learning. We obtain what we measure and reward.
2. Lead by example. When I was at Microsoft, Bill Gates used to take what he called Think Week. It was a week where he would go off the grid and allow himself to learn. He would read. He would think. He would ponder. He would ruminate. And in doing so he set the example for his company that reading and learning were highly valued activities.
3. Play the long game. Learning takes time to come into fruition. As teams and leaders, valuing learning from our people means that we need to have the patience for that growth to pay off. We have to invest in our people and have the mindset of long term benefits. When we are short sighted, when we become too caught up in tactics and immediate results, we stifle our people’s ability to participate in and to value learning.

One of my lifelong mentors taught me that we don’t build teams for a reason or season, but for life. That is long game thinking. That is the type of thinking that encourages growth, fosters curiosity, and values learning. And that’s what I desire to do - to build teams for life; teams of lifelong learners who are excited to learn together and to apply our learnings to the problems of the day.

Learn and be curious

My sons,

One of the most beautiful things about the human race is that we have infinite potential. Throughout the ages we have faced seemingly insurmountable problems, only to have those problems solved and conquered. Time and again the next generation of our species is able to push the limits of what is currently believed to be possible and launch us into yet another age of hyper growth.

The reason we are able to accomplish so much as a species is because of the men and women who have an insatiable curiosity and propensity for learning, for experimenting, for getting a grasp on the current limitations of thought and then pushing beyond. These men and women change our world because they are curious, because they refuse to accept the status quo, and because they deeply believe that there is more.

Arguably the most important of DaVinci’s 7 principles, curiosità is defined as

an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for learning.

It is the foundation of progress and advancement, and is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of what it means to be human. It is a trait found in every meaningfully influential person in human history, and is at the core of being able to empower people.

What does it mean to be insatiably curious?

One of the worst sayings in our recent history is this: curiosity killed the cat. It didn’t. Stagnation did. Laziness did. Stubbornness did. An inability to adapt to the changing environment did. Curiosity is the life blood that sustains us, that pushes us to be better, to learn, to discover the boundaries, and to push through.

Being curious means to wonder, to go about one’s day and have questions pop into consciousness. Most of us do this without thinking about it. “Why did that rude driver cut me off?” “How do they make this tea taste so good?” “I wonder what my manager thinks of my performance right now?” These are harmless (and unimportant) questions that often don’t lead to anything other than a brief pause of consideration.

Being insatiably curious means one continues down the rabbit hole to ask question after question until clarity finally dawns. It means one asks bigger and broader questions until the underlying themes emerge. It means one is unwilling to accept unsatisfying answers and instead puts in the hard work to discover the truth.

And that, is the definition of learning.

What does it mean to learn?

At Amazon, one of our most important leadership principles is the principle to learn and be curious. It is one of the most important because without learning we cannot make progress. It is also one of the hardest to measure, as learning often begins with an internal shift in mindset, in approach, in perspective.

When we are unwilling to accept unsatisfying answers and are unhappy with our limited cursory understanding of a given topic, we begin to dig. We pull on threads. We follow trails. We ask questions. We seek experts.

We do all this so that we can update our mental models. Our brains create models that we apply to every action and interaction that we have. These models are used to frame the way we understand the world, the way we interpret information. As we learn, we refine these models and sharpen our focus to see our surroundings more clearly.

How to instill curiosity and inspire learning

To be quite honest, I don’t know the answer to this one. I suspect there is no one size that fits all, as what inspires each of us is different. So in an attempt to start the conversation here, I will share a few things that have inspired me over the years and attempt to draw some conclusions from them.

As Luke Burgis describes in his best selling book Wanting, much of what we desire is actually a mimetic (aka copied) desire and not a self-initiated one. We are not as original as we believe ourselves to be, and instead inherit many of our desires from the models that we have in our lives.

Something I have been very blessed to have in my life is a number of great models who have modeled curiosity, learning, and deep thinking to me. My father instilled this in me at an early age, and I often remember him at his desk reading, studying, learning. My older brother continued this model for me into my teenage rebellious years, and as an adult I have had the distinct pleasure of being mentored by several lifelong learners.

I have also had the great advantage of resources. Never in our world’s history has access to information and knowledge been so easy! Public libraries, 2-day shipping on practically every book still in print (and many not), access to podcasts, docents, and other experts are all things that are widely available to many.

While it is true that there is an overwhelming abundance of noise in our environment, with a little effort one can distinguish the signals of learning amidst the noise and can discover the voices of the truly curious. Fostering curiosity and learning therefore must consist of providing both motive and opportunity. It is our job to lead by example, to demonstrate curiosity and learning in all that we do, and to create an environment in which those we lead can have that curiosity encouraged and explored.

A cursory study into the great minds of our era will uncover their insatiable curiosity applied to a variety of topics. Einstein. DaVinci. Edison. Gates. All of these intellectual giants applied their significant mental prowess across a vast array of topics and subjects and as a result were able to draw across a wide range of learnings as they slowly but surely changed our world.

Let us follow in their footsteps and inspire (and be inspired by) others to be curious, to learn, and to slowly but surely change our world.

Building confidence in others

My sons,

I love to travel. I love the feeling of waking up in a place that isn’t home, hearing sounds, seeing sights, and smelling things that are completely new and beautiful in their uniqueness. Whenever I travel, there are always three things on my list that I can’t miss that to me give me a snapshot of culture: food, architecture, and art.

Each new city I visit and each new country I step foot in, I always make sure I experience their food - both modern and traditional, from holes in the walls to fancy fine dining. I always spend a day with my camera capturing snapshots of their architecture. And I always find some way to experience their art, be it museums full of paintings and sculpture, opera houses, symphony, or local theater. I firmly believe that there is so much beauty in the vast numbers of cultures out there, and while I have been blessed to experience many, there are still more that I have yet to discover and witness.

But of all the wonders that I’ve seen, of all the sights, scenery, and marvels that I’ve been blessed to experience, there is nothing more beautiful than the human spirit. No created thing, no picturesque landscape, no natural phenomenon can quite compare to the beauty of that spark that is within all of us. There is nothing quite like the shine of that spark when it shines, nothing quite as bright as seeing the dignity, honor, and nobility of the human spirit.

Conversely, there is nothing so heart breaking as seeing that spirit stamped out, restricted, and silenced. As Al Pacino famously pronounced in his legendary speech,

“There is nothing like the sight of an amputated spirit; there is no prosthetic for that.”

So how do we ensure we combat this? How do we lift people, elevate their spirits, and enable them to be their best? We’ve been discussing what it means to empower people recently, and I would posit that empowering people is synonymous with enabling the human spirit to be its best.

An external lift

We all begin life with the same small spark, that same thread of humanity that is characteristic of our species. In the beginning, that spark is fragile. It has infinite potential, but needs nurturing, needs nourishing to be the best that it can be. It is strong but malleable.

At the start, each of us needs an external lift. We need an environment that cultivates, that nurtures, that fans that tiny spark into a bright light. Over time that spark will be much stronger and can sustain much, but each of us requires someone to lift us, to point our eyes upwards so that we can see our potential, can dream of the stars, and can have the confidence to reach out to grab them.

Whether this comes in the form of an involved parent, an inspiring mentor, an encouraging sibling, or a trusted friend, each of us needs has pivotal moments where we need someone to show up for us and to hold us up until we are able to stand on our own again.

Building confidence

As caregivers, coaches, and mentors, there are several key things we have to be aware of when we embark on this journey of building up others. First and foremost is that we have to care personally. This key element amplifies everything we do with those in our care. People look towards us for guidance, yes, but before they can gain anything from us, before they will listen to us, they need to know that we are in their corner. So if you’re reading this and the person in your care doesn’t deeply know that, then your first task is to drop everything else you’re doing and make sure that they are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that you are for them.

Constancy

Constancy is defined as the quality of being faithful and dependable. As a coach, it is incredibly important for us to be a constant for those we are coaching. Remember that for many, there is much going on in their lives that we are unaware of. Those we coach need to know that this is always a safe place for them, and that no matter what else happens outside the sphere of our time together, this time, this place, this space will be constant.

This is one of the keys to the many wonderful and successful sports programs that help underprivileged children. For many of those children, seeing their coaches week to week is the only constant in their lives, and they are able to cling to that constancy and find strength in that. They are able to lean on these men and women who become pillars for them to stabilize their lives.

This trait applies to any kind of coaching we want to do! Whether we’re talking about career coaching, youth work, or even raising confident children, our ability to build confidence in them requires us to be a constant in their lives.

Consistency

Not to be confused with constancy, consistency is about providing the same message, the same set of values and principles in all our interactions. As coaches, our message needs to be consistent. We need to show those we are coaching that we apply the same standards to everything that we do.

People need structure. We need to know that the bar is the same for everyone, and that the same standards will be applied to everyone. In order for us to be confident, we need to know that we can meet or exceed the bar, but how can we do that if we feel the bar keeps moving? As coaches, we need be consistent in our application of our standards. Yes, we can acknowledge the fact that people may be at a different skill level, but accommodating a different skill level and lowering the standards are very different things.

A big part of growing, learning, and developing confidence is failing, and gaining wisdom and insight from our failures. Analyzing what went wrong and adapting our actions is a critical part of learning. Knowing that our adjustments will accomplish a better result next time is a key component of confidence. As Thomas Edison famously said,

”I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Yes, we need to support and encourage those we coach when they fail, but they need to know that we have not lowered the bar just to make them feel good. Remember that making someone feel better is just a salve for the current pain and doesn’t actually help them grow. As coaches, we need to hold the line and let them know that they have missed the mark. Be gentle, but firm. The message must be consistent.

Expect more

One of the best tools we have as coaches is setting the bar. In order to build confidence in others, we need to know what they’re capable of, and then we need to start nudging the beyond that. They need to know that we expect them to accomplish more, that we believe in them.

There’s a key nuance here though. We’ve all seen those memes and heard stories of parents, teachers, or instructors that set impossible standards that those in their care cannot reach. This is not that.

If our goal is to build confidence in others, then we first need to take the time to really understand their current capabilities. Not only that, but we need them to know that we truly understand where they’re at. To coach someone well, we need to earn their trust, and they will never trust us if they don’t believe we care enough to really know them and to know where they’re at.

Only when we’ve demonstrated that we care, that we understand, and that we are constant and consistent can we begin to raise the bar.

As coaches and mentors, we have the great privilege to help others grow and to confidently push the boundaries of their capabilities. We also have the great responsibility to be thoughtful of those in our care. Our words have the power to encourage, to lift, and to build confidence, but they also have the power to destroy and to tear down. Let us learn to build others up together!

Empowerment

My sons,

In our culture today empowerment has become a buzzword. Whether we’re talking about empowering women to learn and raise their communities out of poverty, empowering young children and students to reach for a better life, or empowering young employees to speak their mind for change, empowerment it seems is everywhere. And rightly so! Empowering others is a great thing. But what does it actually look like? What does it consist of?

In its formative years, empowerment tended to look like someone in a position of power - a manager, a parent, a mentor - simply expressing that they want the individual to feel empowered. I’ve heard many times in my career phrases like “I want to empower you to make this decision”, or “you should feel empowered to make changes here”.

Sounds great, but utterly ineffectual.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos baked into the company culture the belief that good intentions, while noble and good, are alone insufficient. The intention needs to be there, yes, but that can’t be where it stops. There needs to be more - a follow up, a plan of action, a concrete mechanism that we can turn to that ensures the good intention happens.

What does feeling empowered look like?

For any individual to feel empowered, there are a few key conditions which need to be met. The individual must be in an environment or culture that is conducive to them taking action, making mistakes, and adjusting accordingly. They must have an internal confidence that allows them to strike out and act. They must have a curiosity and a desire to learn so that they can internalize the feedback that comes from their actions in order to change, evolve, and grow.

When people feel empowered, their eyes light up. They hold their heads higher. They stand up straighter. They maneuver within their environment without fear. They are focused on the future because they know that they can impact that future. They have hope because tomorrow is not determined for them; rather, it is dependent on them.

Let’s look a bit deeper at these conditions.

An empowered environment and culture

Whether we’re looking at a workplace culture, a family environment, or a group of close friends, an environment of empowerment is a life giving place that allows us to flourish and grow. Cultures that support empowerment do not place arbitrary restrictions and requirements on classes or groups of people dwelling in that environment.

This means that there are no criteria that exist that don’t provably impact the decision making process. For example, ethnicity, gender, and tenure at a company have no direct correlation to the strength of one’s ideas for a new product launch. Age, birth order, or position in a family tree have no correlation to the validity of one’s understanding of education. Religion, belief systems, or cultural background have no correlation to one’s ability to drive. A culture of empowerment does not have restrictions like these.

While these traits may appear to be correlated, empowering cultures dive one level deeper to determine what’s actually impactful. It used to be the case that tenure was a strict requirement for many things. However many empowering environments have recognized that tenure itself is not a key requirement. Tenure typically is correlated with experience, with wisdom, with knowledge, and with understanding, but it is not a strong correlation such that in many environments tenure has been removed as a criteria.

Environments that foster empowerment are ones where requirements are strongly correlated to the thing the requirements are applied to. It is our job as leaders and managers to regularly reevaluate our requirements to ensure the environment we build fosters the culture we want to have.

A few quick thoughts on how we can do that (more on this next time!):

1. Have believable people that you regularly get feedback from. Make sure that these people know that their feedback should be honest, is valued, and will not cause retribution. And make sure they have the context from which to provide that feedback.
2. Be transparent about the evaluation process. Share what people are being evaluated on. Provide them the details. Be honest. Stack ranks happen - let’s stop pretending they don’t. Treat people like adults and accept responsibility for when things aren’t fair.
3. Give credit where it’s due. A good rule of thumb is for each piece of recognition you receive make sure you’re giving at least 5 times as much credit to others. None of us are self-made, so if you believe you deserve that credit and no one else does, you’re wrong.

Internal confidence

People need confidence to learn. They need confidence to know that they can get this, that they are able to progress. They need to believe in themselves, that they are capable of change, of improvement.

It is not enough to put someone in an environment that is an empowering one. It is not enough to give them resources, to encourage them to speak out, and to create a safe space for them to do so. They have to believe that they can, and that they have something meaningful to offer. And we have to enable them to have belief.

The moment a person stops believing that things happen to them and starts believing that things can happen because of them, they begin to see the world in a different light. They begin to believe that they can shape their stars, that they can chart their own course, and that they can make the world better. It is that moment that Melinda Gates calls the moment of lift.

In her book with the same title, Melinda describes the moment of lift as

“a moment that captures grace. Something happens to relieve us, to release us from pain, from burden. It is extrinsic. We cannot lift ourselves. We must be lifted.”

Beautiful.

It is that powerful grace that has the ability to set us on a different course and to truly lift us out of our current circumstances. To truly empower people we must lift them up. We must move them into a place where they begin to believe in themselves. We must help them to see that when the tides of circumstance loom overhead that they can stand against them.

A few thoughts on how we can help build confidence in others (again, more on this in a future post!):

1. Be specific about praise. Saying “great job!” is absolutely useless. Tell them why. What was great? What did they do that was great? Why was it “great” and not “good”?
2. Hold people accountable. When someone makes a mistake, let them know you hold them responsible. When we are honest in our accountability, people will know that we are also honest in our praise.
3. Be generous with your time. Chances are people who you give feedback to don’t fully understand it. Take the time to explain it to them thoroughly. Remember that just because you’ve been thinking about it from many angles for a long time doesn’t mean that they have the same context. Be patient and walk them through it. Make sure they really get it before you move on.

Curiosity and learning

An unfortunate reality of our world is that our education systems are broken. They incentivize the wrong things. They promote memorization, short term recall, and specific application of a concept to a specialized problem space. This in turn creates a culture where we dread learning, mostly because we have an inaccurate understanding of it.

Learning ought to be a lifelong activity and endeavor. It is something that we expect of our children. It is something that we allocate the first quarter of our lives to. It is something that successful people do all their lives.

As children, we are born with an innate sense of curiosity. From a young age we are curious about everything and anything under the sun. We stick things in our mouths, we put our chubby little fingers into wall sockets, and we’re mesmerized by anything new. We want to be like our older siblings, our parents, our role models. We want to progress forward. We are curios and want to learn.

And yet as we have gotten older, we’ve lost touch with that curiosity and have lost the sense of wonderment and joy at learning new things. Instead we prefer to fill our time with meaningless trifles such as celebrity gossip and the vast amounts of time-wasting things all around us. We’ve lost the ability to be in awe of things, to marvel at things, to be amazed by things, and to be infinitely curious about them.

So how do we spark curiosity in ourselves and in others? A few thoughts (and again, more next time!):

1. Build in time to slow down. Whether it’s meditation, going for a walk, or just simply dedicating time to sit and enjoy your morning cup of coffee, slowing down allows our minds to wander and wonder.
2. Don’t answer a question, even if you know the answer. Whether we’re talking about employees, children, or students, sometimes the best thing we can do for someone is to not give them the answer even if we’ve got it. Let them stew on it. Let them consider what they know. Let them surprise themselves (and maybe even you!) with their thoughts.
3. Put yourself in awe-inspiring places. Whether you’re taking the time to travel and see things or you’re surrounding yourself with some awesome people, know that your environment and your surroundings slowly but surely impact not just how you think, but what you think about.

By instilling a curiosity in people, lifting them so that they have the confidence to act on that curiosity, and putting them in an environment that values, supports, and encourages those bold and brave behaviors, we can create the necessary conditions for creating more empowered people. And this is a great thing, because empowered people are the ones that can change the world.