A tool in balance coaching is the being and doing brainstorm. You brainstorm in two lists:
How am I being?
What am I doing?
The combination of the two feeds each other. E.g. you might say I’m “being proactive”, and then in doing you could list some ways to be proactive (e.g. “make a todo list at the start of each day and review it throughout”.).
I experimented with this in a group context last week and it worked pretty well. It went as follows.
Step 1: Define the end state. This needs to be something everyone can connect with. In this case, we saw great momentum on another platform in the meeting immediately before, so that was our starting point – where this team was also like that.
Step 2: Explain the concepts, with examples. People need to know what we’re doing.
Step 3: Individual brainstorm. Give people time to form their own ideas.
Step 4: Group brainstorm. Start working through everyone’s ideas and building on them. Remember there are no bad ideas in a brainstorming session! Try saying, “what I love about that idea is…” and building on it.
Step 5: Theme. Organize things into groups with 1-2 being tags, and a list of associated doings.
Step 6: Choose 1-2 themes. We each picked our top three and explained why, then chose the two most popular.
Step 7…8…9…: Experiment! Define some team experiments, try things, and iterate.
Many teams have the same fear when it comes to a new manager: they fear the process monster.
Process monster (n): a manager for whom the answer is always, always ‘process’. The process monster will add more and more processes to the team until the team collapses under the weight of them. Eventually, the monster will move to another role, and the failure of the team will be explained as ‘resistance to process’.
I’m sure you’ve encountered process monsters in the wild before. Some have enough empathy and are in the right roles to be successful, while some have the effect of strong glue: slowly grinding a team to a halt under the illusion of improving efficiency that never materializes.
There was a period, thankfully a brief one, when I was spending $100 a week on Kindle Books. I know, shocking. I was reading them too, mostly novels.
I’ve since started tracking my expenditure on books more – limiting myself to a $100 a month budget, which was helping me not purchase quite so many non-fiction books. I’d previously been buying them at about 2x the rate I was reading them, which after 3 years had added up to a 10-20 book backlog. This made me a bit more mindful, and I started using my wish list more, and only buying those non-fiction books I had an immediate need to read. This was also encouraging me to re-read novels I’d loved. It’s better to re-read a good book, than read a terrible new book.
And then I took some time off, went to Bali (where I had a pretty poor internet connection) and read… erm.. about 15 novels. In 10 days. And started having these weird ideas about moving to the countryside. I’d also spent so much time and energy consuming other people’s work, that I completely lacked creativity to create my own. And finally, I didn’t want to look back at my precious time off and say, well what did I do? I read a bunch of novels.
So with some encouragement from a friend (reaction: “You think about moving to the countryside? You ARE reading too many novels”) I decided to – quietly – ban myself from reading novels for the month. In the end, because I started on Australian time, I finished when November ended in Australia, not 11 hours later in Europe.
And it was not as hard as I thought it would be, despite the number of flights (including some long haul, and a lengthy wait in Bangkok) – easier I think because I had overdosed on novels already, and I was relaxed, and didn’t have as much need for my usual methods of “relaxing” – one of which is ingesting novels, whole. Often 2-3 over a weekend.
I watched a little more TV on my iPad, mostly on planes, but not that much more. I actually bought two magazines, which I really enjoyed and required less sneakiness during take-off and landing, although I think reading too many magazines has it’s own set of problems. I think I probably read slightly more online.
I did start to feel more creative, and I wrote a lot. And I read a lot of non-fiction, about 8 books over the course of the month. This made a significant dent in my backlog of non-fiction!
Overall, I found it really helpful. I would definitely do it again, although a couple of days before the end of the month I got excited and pre-emptively bought 7 new novels to read in December, so there was no danger of the experiment being extended!
Sometimes it’s easier to have a blanket ban than try and moderate. So if there’s something that is distracting and being done to excess, maybe a month off is the answer. It’s at most 31 days, so how bad can it be?
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