Being Good to Yourself, Again

Okay. If you show up and you pay attention, you are forty percent of the way there. But it gets harder. This is where you begin to make choices about how you will be a part of things that get done. This is where you choose the quality of your actions. I believe that the standard that we must apply is to choose those actions and only those actions that add value. For me that is what quality means in the context of human life, whether it is public and organizational or private and interpersonal.

That being said, it does not do much to remove the dilemma. Defining value is only a step closer to the answer and not all of the answer. Value is a construct like quality or leadership or love. We tend to know it when we see it, but each definition leaves us wanting more clarity.

We solve this dilemma by operationalizing the construct. We operationalize adding value by measuring the value added. This should be easier in the workplace than in personal relationships. I don’t know anyone that keeps track of the number of smiles that they can stimulate on faces of family members, or the number of thank you’s that they receive on a daily basis. We may not even be aware of such things let alone practicing data capture and analysis. It doesn’t matter that your relationship measures lack scientific rigor. It matters that your goals in relationships are things like creating smiles and thank you’s and the occasional, “I needed that.”

At work it is often not about what we choose to do but about what we choose not to do. When Warren Bennis was researching one of his books on leadership he was asking people what leaders did that encouraged followership. One of his interview subjects said that his leader “didn’t waste his time.” Some managers think that they add value because they keep people busy. Trust me; people know the difference between real work and busy work. Real work adds value and busy work does not. Patrick Lencioni, in his book, “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job” said that people must have a clear idea that their work matters, and that it has relevance for others. He said that they must be able to measure their contributions in a way that does not depend upon the subjective views of superiors.

So, if you are a manager avoid busy work like the plague, and if you are an individual contributor resist doing things that don’t matter to customers (the final arbiters of the worth of our work). You may then find yourself choosing behavior that adds value or at least questioning what you are doing. You may have to upgrade the ways in which you pay attention in order to define value, but that’s okay. You can’t really add value without showing up and paying attention anyway.

All right, I will concede that none of this is fish in a barrel easy. Jesse Ventura is quoted as saying something like the following:

When it comes to bringing values to life – to doing the
good, right, and appropriate thing…we're always working
at it, we're never totally there, and the challenge starts
all over again with each new tomorrow.

There is no way to argue with that. If it were easy we would all be doing it all the time. Simple does not equal easy. I think that one of the primary reasons why the overarching goal of physical medicine is to “do no harm” is because medicine has so much potential for harm running along with its huge potential for healing. We all need a sort of Hippocrates in our lives to give us some rules to follow. I have shared three that my friend offered to me with his advice to “be good to yourself.” There are two more to come. Stay tuned.

Even More on Being Good to Yourself

Okay, if you show up and bring all you have when you do, is that enough to bring out the absolute best that you can be? Not by a long shot. There is much more. If there were not more to it, life would be fairly easy. The next piece as I see it is not about what you bring to the party but how you behave when you get there. Perhaps chief among the things that are required to bring out your very best is to pay attention.

I know that sounds like something that your third grade teacher would bark at you just as you were about to dunk pretty Alice’s pigtail in the inkwell, (special points for all of you old timers that actually understand that allusion and bonus points to all who actually went to a school that had inkwell holes in the desks or better yet actual inkwells) but there is simply no better way to put it.

When I was in pilot training in the US Air Force we students were evaluated on the extent to which we were constantly gathering information from the sky around the aircraft and our instruments. The common admonition was that a good pilot has his head on a swivel and it is constantly searching for information essential to the safe and effective operation of the plane. In short, were we paying attention to what was of great importance if one were to come home alive from a mission? Granted, there was not a lot of information to get from the instrument panel in a biplane, but what was there was pretty darned important. So they tried to teach me that paying attention was a critical skill in developing a positive and lasting relationship with flying. Much later in life I learned that it is also darned important when it comes to developing human to human relationships.

By now we have all been exposed to the importance of listening as an essential relationship skill and I wish that paying attention were as simple as that. It is not. You see the demands related to paying attention in human relationships are much greater than those of a pilot in his aircraft. The key difference is that we learned that as pilots we could not trust our postural senses. That is you could not rely on your body to tell you what kind of motion was occurring because the multiple forces at work in the maneuvering of the craft could cause your body to lie to you. You could feel as if the plane were rolling over when in fact it was flying straight and level. So we learned to trust our instruments over our bodies and that learning saved many pilot’s lives and failure to learn it cost the lives of one of my classmates and his instructor pilot.

In human relationships, though, paying attention not only involves listening to words and syntax; observing body language including dress and appearance; and listening to the emotional quality in what people are saying; but it also means paying attention to one’s own thoughts and emotions at the same time. Now this is not easy. Despite the popular myth of multi-tasking, humans can only do one conscious thing at a time. Paying attention to both others and oneself simultaneously is a tall order. It is nonetheless true that paying attention as a requirement of being a successful social creature means exactly that. It serves you to, as Stephen Covey said, seek to understand if you would be understood and that takes listening to everything at once.

The good news is that it can be done because we can keep our consciousness on a swivel and sample outside and inside data alternatively just as we watched the sky and the instrument panel but not at exactly the same time. It only takes small samples of data to be paying attention if they are the right data and we alternate very quickly – at mind speed (think faster than a speeding bullet). We can sample the words and emotions of others as well as our own in incredibly small increments that can make it seem as if we are actually only doing one seamless thing. Isn’t it great being a human being?

Anyway, if Covey is right and I know that he is, a certain way that you can be good to yourself as you navigate the sometimes unfriendly skies of human relationships is to fully pay attention. It is the path to being understood and what feels better than that? In my early years of training as a counselor I was schooled in the skills of listening and self-monitoring, but I have had to practice incessantly all my life in order to barely maintain the skills. They have the shortest life of any that I know and fade quickly without rather constant practice. I guess that the urge to be the center of all things is so powerful for us Homo Sapiens that we drop the paying attention skills rather easily in favor of a more 70’s version of being good to yourself. Am I wrong?