Unplugging All Year Round

This Friday night marks the beginning of the second annual National Day of Unplugging, but you needn't wait for the annual event to disconnect from your devices.  Here are some ways to unplug on the regular: every month, every week, or even several times a day.  (For more on the why of unplugging, see my piece on the subject from last year.) Several times a day: Many of us engage with technology during the mindless, routine activities of daily life.  For a break from this, define contexts in which you will consciously disconnect from your devices.  For example, commit to not being on your phone when you are walking to the subway or driving in your car. Or to not texting while eating.  Instead, notice your surroundings, the road in front of you, or the taste of what you are eating in a more mindful way.

Daily: There are several ways to do this.  Start your day unplugged by giving yourself a buffer of 20, 30, or 60 minutes before checking in with technology -- greeting the day before you greet your iPhone.  During the day, block out a no-technology hour or two -- perhaps the first couple of hours after you get home from work, to mark that transition into home-mode.  Or, give yourself a daily technology cut-off time, and put yourself to bed with a book rather than Twitter.

Weekly: Try a regular technology break on the weekends.  Try a six hour chunk without internet on a Saturday and see how clean your house gets, and how far your mind can wander away from your work.  The National Day of Unplugging is rooted in the Jewish tradition of Shabbat, which is another way frame a weekly unplugging -- 24 hours worth of disconnection from technology and reconnection with home, family, self and spririt.

Monthly: Can you go one day, or one weekend a month without technology?  I do this on occasion and think of it as a kind of technology cleanse.

Yearly, but in a big way: Give yourself a proper vacation from your devices if you can manage it.  A few days or a week away from technology, as this group of five neuroscientists and a reporter found when they turned off their phones and went into the Grand Canyon, will actually change your experience of the world around you.

How often do you consciously unplug?  Share your experiences in the comments.

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5 Questions for Deeper Self Awareness in Sticky Situations

Deep self-knowledge -- an awareness of our own thoughts, feelings, behavior, and motivations -- is one of the cornerstones of thoughtful leadership, yet it is often neglected.  In the rush of everyday work life, with its cascading opportunities and challenges, we can easily forget to keep our "selves" in mind.   Yet, whether you pay conscious attention to your self or not, you are the person driving everything you do. Being aware of what is driving you and how you are showing up to others is especially important in sticky situations -- whether it be a conflict with a coworker, a disagreement with your partner at home, or a misunderstanding with a friend.  We can become so reactive and responsive to the other people we are tangling with that we don't examine what's going on with our own selves.

Here are five questions to increase your self awareness when things get stressful.  To use them, you first need to acknowledge that you are in a sticky situation and decide to step outside of the mess for a minute.  Once you do that, take a deep breath and consider the following:

How is this situation exposing my limitations to  myself or others?

What underlying beliefs or values are influencing my experience of this situation?

What effect am I having on others?

What's going on in my body right now (pulse, breathing, muscle tension, how I'm sitting/standing)?

What is my role in this situation?

(update: see a great 6th question in the comments - and add your own!)

These questions matter, of course, because the only person one can truly change is oneself.  In sticky situations, our focus is often squarely on the other person -- what they are doing, saying, and thinking. By focusing on yourself for even a few minutes, you will be able to reapproach the situation with greater clarity, calm and insight.  Give it a try.

What questions do you ask yourself when you are in a sticky situation?

Pondering Purpose in the New Year

Today I've been revisiting some of my favorite perspectives on the concept of purpose.  I am particularly moved by these words by choreographer Martha Graham:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action.  And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares to other expressions.  It is simply your business to keep the channel open.”

And some questions to ponder-

• What is the unique energy or action you will contribute to the world?
• How can you more fully express it in 2011?
• How have you blocked its expression in the past?
• How will you remove these blocks this year?
• What's the possibility you create when you "keep the channel open"?

Happy New Year.

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Words to Live By: An Alternative to New Year's Resolutions

I've always found the process of setting and measuring progress on New Year's resolutions to feel forced and to be a set-up for guilt.  This year, in addition to reflecting on my year (as I do every year), I will be creating my personal Words to Live By (WTLB).  To borrow from the business world, WTLB can be thought of as a personal motto; to borrow from the spiritual world, WTLB  can be thought of as a personal mantra. Some examples of Words to Live By:

• Always be me
• Think, then speak
• Remain present
• Breathe, listen, act

WTLB help you fill in the blank, "When in doubt, _______."  They are an always-available, always-relevant personal accountability system; they help you to course-correct in the challenging moments of everyday life.

Words to Live By are:

• easy to remember; you don't need to write them down
• applicable to all aspects of your life; you don't need one set for home and another for work
• doable in the moment-to-moment; you don't need to measure your progress quarterly or annually
• descriptive of how you want to be, not things you want to do

WTLB reflect what you need to be most mindful of as you walk through this next  year of your life. The words you choose may be based on learnings from the past year -- "I need to listen more" -- or a new intention that you are creating for yourself -- "I will remember to breathe when I'm stressed."  Your WTLB are the words you think you will most need to hear, most often, at the most critical moments.

It is likely that just by thinking about it for a few minutes, you will come up with some possible WTLB.   Good luck, and have a happy New Year!

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Five Provocative Ideas about Leadership & the Brain

I'm reporting live from Boston, where about 250 neuroscientists and leadership experts are gathered for the 5th annual NeuroLeadership Summit.  The crowd is a heady mix of folks who are equal parts charismatic and nerdy, and there is a palpable excitement about this growing field.  Here are five ideas that captured my imagination on the first day of this 3-day gathering. 1.  Group brainstorming can stifle insight (Jonathan Schooler, UCSB) Conventional wisdom says that the best way to generate lots of ideas is to bring a group together and ask them to brainstorm.  Schooler's research shows that group conversation can actually disrupt creative solutions.  Once a team member projects his or her interpretation onto the situation at hand, it is very hard for the others to see outside of the construct their teammate has created.  For maximum creativity, ask people to first solve the problem on their own, and then bring them together to share their individual ideas with the group.

2.  The essence of charisma is mindfulness (Ellen Langer, Harvard) Mindfulness is nothing more than noticing new things as they occur.  Sounds simple, but we spend much of our lives in mindless autopilot, assuming that the situation in front of us (whether it be our commute, our coffee, or our colleague) is the same as every situation that's come before.  This kind of mindless state is not lost on others; it is readily perceived by children, adults, and animals alike.  Mindfulness cannot be faked.  This is why leaders register as charismatic when they are mindful: actively engaged in the present, visibly invested in the uniqueness of the person before them, curious and ready to learn.

3.  Expanding your emotional vocabulary can change how you feel (Lisa Feldman Barrett, Boston College) Changing what you think about what you are feeling can change how you experience emotion. (It's okay, read that sentence again.)  Our feelings don't just happen to us.  In fact, both the emotional and decision-making parts of the brain are involved in how we experience our feelings.  The better we are at to pinpointing and labeling our exact emotions, the better able we'll be to shift our experience of how we are feeling.  For example, rather than settling on "angry" to describe how that encounter with your coworker made you feel, try to figure out if the feeling is really "embarrassed," "inadequate," or even "sleep-deprived."  This will change your experience of the situation that made you "angry" in the first place.

4.  Sometimes the best choice is not to choose at all (Sheena Iyengar, Columbia) We are bombarded with choices everyday.  Iyengar's research shows that the more choices we have (and the less meaningful the distinction between our choices), the worse we are at making a decision that we will be happy with.  Overwhelmed with choices, we end up either not choosing anything, or making a choice we later second-guess.  Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to opt out of choosing altogether.  It's okay to decide that the time we'd spend deliberating over this widget or that one is ultimately distracting us from our end goal.  (Incidentally, this is why I don't have TV, much less cable -- too many choices.)

5. Why we get bored of our spouses, but not our kids (Ellen Langer again) Situations/jobs/people are neither inherently boring nor inherently interesting.  It's our experience of these things/people that makes them so. Attending to what's different (what's changing) is what makes the world seem engaging.  The more we notice, the more interesting the world is.  A person will complain that she is bored in her relationship with her spouse of 20 years... but the same person would never say that after 20 years of parenthood, she is bored with her kids. This is because we expect our children to change. Our spouses - not so much.

There are many more thoughts from the day captured on my Twitter stream from the conference. Signing off for tonight.

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