Michele Woodward

Powerful Coaching. Powerful Results.

strengths

What’s So Great About You?

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Stone WalkwayIt’s a true fact that we tend to discount those things that come most easily.

I’ve seen it so many times – whatever you do effortlessly causes you to say things like:

“It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Anyone can do this.”

“No one needs to pay me for this – I’m having too much fun!”

And then someone calls you out, gives you a compliment, says, “Wow, you are so good at this” and you pull yourself up short and say, maybe only to yourself, “Really? Am I?”

Because plenty of us think the only work that matters has to be hard. And that anything worth having takes toil, stress and perseverance.

When things come easy, all of those learned, ingrained platitudes fall away and what are you left with?

Effortless expertise, that’s what. Also, flow. Creativity. Purpose. Accomplishment.

My heart fairly bursts when I read that last line again.

See, it’s not that I forgot that we tend to discount that which comes most easily – I can’t forget it, I say it to my clients all the time. But it certainly seems I forgot to coach myself on this subject.

Here’s how it happened: Last week I led a two-day retreat for coaches on business-building. They came from Montana, Hawaii, California, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina and the Washington, DC-area, and each dug deeply into a new framework I created for the event called “The Shoulds Map”. It was a powerful, meaningful process and every person left with a solid path forward toward success.

It was moving, resonant and inspiring. 

Afterwards, one of the participants – an executive coach with 21 years of experience – said, “You must facilitate a lot of groups. You are so good at it.”

I tilted my head to the right and looked at her as if she had just spoken to me in ancient Greek. Or maybe tongues.

Groups? Sure I do groups. What’s the big deal? I’ve always have done groups. Groups, mostly, who want to – need to – get something done. Yeah, I do groups. Sure.

But do I promote groups? Do I talk about it? Do I highlight this skill? No, not really.

I sort of take whatever group work comes my way because group facilitation is so freaking easy for me.

And, we’re supposed to sellsellsell those things that are hard, right?

Sheesh. Look at me over here not walking my talk.

So today I’m talking about my work with groups who want to/need to get stuff done because I need to claim it. Ready?

I’m so good at facilitating groups that it feels effortless.

There, I said it.

And I’ll bet that there’s something you do that you need to claim. Something that’s so easy it feels effortless. Something so easy it doesn’t even register as that valuable to you.

Whether your skill is crunching the numbers to create the kind of financial analysis that seals the deal, or innovating spectacular interior design, or educating a room full of kindergartners, owning your particular thing is a huge step toward turning things around, being a good self-advocate and becoming a really happy, successful person.

So, I went first and now it’s your turn – let me facilitate this for you: What are you going to claim today?

Holding On In A Crisis

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Distress may express itself in many ways. But if you can keep your eyes and your heart open, you will find that relief comes in unexpected forms, too.”

I scribbled this sentiment on my Facebook page after a particularly tough couple of days for some of my favorite clients.

Stuff was happening. Stuff they didn’t like, and couldn’t control. Stuff that has deep implications for what the future may hold.

I felt for them, I truly did. And as their coach, my biggest job was to challenge their assumptions. And to give them a couple of key things to focus on through their continuing trials.

Like, “you get to decide how you’re going to be in this world – who do you want to be?”

Like, “don’t let someone else’s drama affect your sense of purpose.”

Like, “do something today you can be proud of a year from now.”

Like, “you always win when you play to your strengths.”

I know that if, in the midst of chaos, you can hold on to who you are at your very best – and be it – you’re going to be fine. If, when challenged, you can hang on to your integrity, your kindness, your smarts – it all works out for the best.

And at the very least you can live with yourself a year from now.

Amazing things happens when you are true to yourself in the middle of crisis. Know what the best one is?

You draw like-minded people and useful things to you. Just when you need them most.

This sort of kismet-y serendipity becomes your regular portion when you are in alignment with who you’re meant to be in this spinning world of ours. So, sometimes it may feel like one door closes and all the windows stay shut, too. But when you’re in the right place doing the right thing something unexpected always shows up and points you to an utterly lovely house with all windows and doors wide open to you. And they’re open right at this very moment.

All you have to do is keep your eyes and heart open to the opportunities which come your way. Even the unexpected opportunities.

And there are going to be a lot of ’em.

 

[photo credit: Michele Woodward]

Obsessed?

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Back in the ’80s, a synth-pop-spiky-hair kinda band released a song called “Obsession”. Watch the video – it’s a hoot. The refrain went like this:

You are an obsession, you’re my obsession
Who do you want me to be to make you sleep with me?

Sometimes I blurt out this lyric when working with clients about their career – hey, it makes sense in the moment! – and ask them, “Who are you trying to be so you’ll be accepted? How are you contorting yourself to get approval?”

Believe it or not, this is often a very fruitful discussion.

Because so many people are obsessed with their jobs, and will do anything – anything! – to stay in them. Especially, (I am going to use the dreaded phrase) “in this economy”.

But obsession is obsession and implies a certain single-minded focus which is not always healthy. Kinda stalker-ish, if you want to know the truth. And when you’re obsessed, your judgment might not be clear. You might make compromising decisions.

You might put your integrity on the shelf in pursuit of your preoccupation.

You might forget who you are as you bend yourself to someone else’s desires.

You lose yourself.

“Michele, it’s hard to get a job out there,” you say. And I know it is. But one of the central tenets of a real career strategy is to be yourself.

Hard as that may be.

And if you attract a job while not being yourself, it’s probably not going to be that satisfying. Like a meaningless hook-up at an ’80s dance club.

Know your strengths. Understand your values. Serve your priorities. Say “yes” when you mean “yes”, and “no” when you mean “no.” Honor your integrity.

And when you do, you will take the right job, and keep the right job.

You will excel. On your terms.

Which is the best possible outcome of a career strategy.

Inside And Out

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Do you know yourself? Inside and out?

Do you know what you like? What you’re good at? What’s important to you?

And, more importantly, do you love that about yourself?

I had the opportunity to talk about all these issues recently when I was interviewed by Cath Duncan, a wonderful South African writer and coach, who does frequent calls with authors and thinkers on a range of ideas. She also has a great thing: The Bottom-Line Book Club. Cath summarizes the best books in self-help and personal growth, culling out the really important, useful stuff – so you don’t have to read the entire book! Brilliant.

Cath wanted to understand how to make a framework for goal-setting and came to me since I’m a framework kinda gal. Now, I could have talked with Cath for hours – she’s just that warm, curious and kind. And I think the interview was powerful and purposeful. You can listen to it: here.

My bottom-line is pretty simple. Making decisions becomes easy when you know your strengths, your values, your priorities and your preferences. And planning becomes effortless when you love them.

What do I mean? Well, let me ask you this: How much time do you spend beating yourself up because you’re not like someone else? Not tall enough, not thin enough, not rich enough, not organized enough? How often do you operate under a should, as in “I should really…”? Are you a person who believes that there is something inherently wrong with the way you approach things because it’s so different from the way your friends and family would do it?

And how’s that working for you?

If you’re unhappy, and maybe stuck, then your path out and through is a path toward self-love – a healthy appreciation and understanding of who you are and what you bring to the world. When you are there, you’ll find that self-doubt, self-criticism and self-loathing goes out the window, leaving only healthy, happy you.

So how do you do it? How do you come to know and love yourself?

You start with the facts about yourself. I often suggest clients take an assessment like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (I am a certified practitioner), and the StrengthsFinder 2.0. Take old performance reviews and look for repeating ideas and themes. Ask your closest friends and associates to tell you what they see as your strengths. And, take all this data and see what it tells you about…you.

There’s an old joke that goes: “There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think the world can be divided into two groups of people, and those who don’t.” Of course, I’m in the “don’t” pile. I believe the world can be divided into three kinds of people.

In my mind, there are three ways people take in information and interact in the world. There are people who come from the heart, leading with their emotions and their feelings, and there are people who come from their minds, leading with their thoughts and their intellect. And some people come from their bodies, leading with a physicality, in search of a tactile connection with the world.

I know a woman who is so physically oriented that she needs – needs – three periods of intense exercise every day to be her best self. The only problem was that her need for physicality felt different from people around her. She felt other. Tension and stress ensued. It was only when she realized that being physical was as integral to her happiness as breathing that she dropped the should, and began seeing her ultimate self expression in testing her physical limits.

While we thinking people want to test our intellectual limits. Finding, creating, understanding that concept – that is mother’s milk to a person who relies on her intellect. While those who come from the heart test the limits of their emotions. They feel – deeply, fully, compassionately – and, therefore, they are.

And, it’s all good.

The eminent psychologist Carl Jung held that at some point of our life, we become integrated – we know when it’s appropriate to come from our minds, or our hearts, or our bodies. We draw on each of these as needed to attend to the task at hand, certainly. But mostly, we draw on them to derive the most possible happiness from each and every moment.

All I know is that when I am clear on who I am, what I value, what I’d like to have, how I’d like to be, how I come from my head but also listen to my heart – and love every bit of it – then there is no shame. There is no stuck. There is only happy movement forward, in what can’t help but be the absolute right direction.

To Know, Know, Know You

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Want to get to know me?

I’m an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — my preference is to be an Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judger (that last one means I like to decide, and decide now, thank you very much).

On the Kolbe Conative Strengths Index, I am a natural Fact Finder, followed closely by Quick Start. That means I will do the research but then want to get going (see “Judging” above).

The Clifton Strengths Finder indicates that my top strengths are: Strategic, Ideation, Activator, Communication, Input.

“Bunch of assessments, bunch of results. So what?” Hear this a lot from people. “Yeah, yeah. But just tell me what it is I’m supposed to do with my life.”

Look, these assessments do serve to tell me more about you — but, really… they’re designed to tell you more about you.

Because one thing I know for sure: the more you know about yourself and your innate preferences, the more clear you are. When you are clear, you make better decisions. When you make better decisions, you’re happier and more successful.

And who doesn’t want that?

Some people resist assessments because they don’t like being “put in a box” or “labelled”. These people probably have very high preference toward Perceiving and I love them for sticking to their type. (That’s a Myers-Briggs reference — Perceivers just want to keep all of their options open. In the trade we call this their P-ness, which is a little Myers-Briggs joke. OK, a stupid Myers-Briggs joke, but there you have it.)

But when I see the lightbulb go off over someone’s head when they realize they aren’t wrong and they don’t need to be fixed — that, instead, they need to play to their innate preferences and solid strengths — it’s a highlight of my work.

I’m talking about the woman who berated herself for years for having to talk to think, until she realized that’s the way she’s wired. Or the man who shifted his continual “loser” self-talk as he realized that he just liked to be flexible and keep his options open (got in touch with his P-ness, yuk, yuk). Or the woman who, for the first time, figured out why she was so frustrated working for other people — she has all the attributes of a CEO and needs to move toward that kind of role.

Accepting your preferences, strengths and talents, and then aligning your actions with what it is you do best, naturally, is the easiest and most efficient way toward success.

And when it comes down to it, knowing yourself — inside and out — and living authentically, P-ness and all (I couldn’t help myself), will make you not only successful, but happy. And you’ll do it the easy way — by just being yourself.

What’s Next?

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What do women in prison and Republican political appointees, and maybe even you and me, all have in common?

We all ask the same question: “What’s next?”

This past week I spoke to a group of women inmates at a correctional facility in Maryland about how to discover and live into their strengths. The basic point: do more of what you’re good at and that inspires you, and you’ll be living a happier life.

The difficult part is that so many of these women, and so many of the rest of us, have gotten so far from those things we love to do that we can’t even recall what they are. And when you’re battling addiction it’s hard to say you love anything more than what you’re hooked on. Most of these women know that loving crack doesn’t get you anywhere. But jail. Or death.

To reconnect with their passions, I urged them to think back to their young girlhoods. “When you were ten or eleven or twelve, how did you spend your time? What did you love then?” It’s interesting what pops out when I ask these questions — almost everyone can answer with something, and it’s usually something that unlocks a hidden passion. And when you identify a passion and a strength, you can begin to form an idea of work that can flow from that. An avid babysitter can become a childcare worker. A former athlete can work in a fitness center. An artist can work with paint.

During the question and answer period a woman raised her hand and said, “I’m a professional journalist and I’m turning 50 next week. Who’s going to hire me after I’ve been in here?” To be honest with you, she looked like a Ralph Lauren model, and I wondered what life path had brought her to jail as I considered how to answer her question.

“Well, if writing is a strength for you,” I ventured, “maybe you can write about this experience. Show people that you can write, and my guess is that you can get hired.”

“What about fear?” she asked. Heads around the room nodded in agreement. “Fear’s a big barrier,” I acknowledged. “But there’s reasonable fear and unreasonable fear. Reasonable fear is facing a charging bear, or someone with a gun in their hand. It’s real. Unreasonable fear comes from a part of you called the social self — what will people think? — and the only antidote is to focus on what’s real. Your strengths? They’re real. Your passions? Real. Focus there, rather than on your fear, and you’ll be OK.”

Tomorrow I’m going to speak to about 150 Republican political appointees here in Washington, DC, who will lose their jobs as of Inauguration Day. I imagine there’s plenty of fear for them, too, as they look into a future where politics are dominated by Democrats, and jobs are scarce. I’ll talk with them about identifying and playing to their strengths, about facing their fears, about creating a reasonable action plan grounded in what’s possible rather than what should be.

I imagine I’ll take several questions very similar to those asked of me in the jail. Maybe it’s the human condition that causes each of us, regardless of our life’s path, to ask, “What’s next?” And, truly, what’s next is unknowable. What is knowable is who you are, what you’re good at and how to live your best possible life. What I know to my very marrow is that living into your strengths — into the gifts and talents you already have — is the key to living a happier life. And finding work that matters.