Sunday Mālama: Know Can Do! ~ Part Two

We are trading up in our Know Can Do! study and learning plan!

The coaching technique is that we give ourselves spaced repetition with our learning, by periodically introducing seemingly new ideas which actually serve to repeat and reinforce what we have learned previously. Hopefully, the new injection reinvigorates our past learning and keeps it vibrant and relevant for us: We renew our energy for great action sequences.

For a quick review, scroll down and skim the Language of Intention box at the end of this article.

Preface: Two weeks ago I wrote Know Can Do! ~ Part One as a book review of Know Can Do! Put your Know-How into Action, a parable which teaches us "to close the knowing-doing gap, focusing on the inside as well as the outside," by Ken Blanchard, Paul J. Meyer, and Dick Ruhe. In it I asked; Can you DO all you KNOW about? Will you reliably draw on all the knowledge you may have gathered, and use it to perform magnificently when you need to? This is Part Two of my effort to turn the books we read, and the lessons we learn within them, into the keepers we are discovering are real gems, keepers which must become habitual action for us, propelling us to far greater prospects for meaningful success in our lives. The book-learning that I have combined in this particular study are Know Can Do!, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary CEO (reviewed on Talking Story), and Trade Up!

I'm up to bat at Joyful Jubilant Learning today with my contribution to our annual book forum there, A Love Affair with Books. My choice to review for JJL is Trade Up! Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out by Rayona Sharpnack.

There is a bigger story to be told about it, one I thought I would continue to tell here, at MWAC, for it fits so perfectly with the retention-for-action lesson we have set our sights on learning recently (as in the Preface Box above): "People should learn Less More, and not More Less"—Know Can Do!

I start my JJL ALAWB review this way:

Just like people, books can come to us in a number of different ways. Sometimes, you get both books and people at the same time. Throw in a three-day immersion retreat type of conference with the author and about twenty other women, and that was my story with Trade Up! Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out by Rayona Sharpnack.

When I start my coaching work with new clients, I ask them about people they consider to be their mentors: Knowing who they are and why they are esteemed as a mentor will provide me with significant clues to the present-day state of my prospective client's thinking. Invariably, much conversation also ensues about the kind of relationship they thrive in with a coach or mentor.

In one of these conversations about a year ago Rayona Sharpnack's name came up...

...more, and the book review itself, at JJL.

Trade Up! to “Meet yourself in a new place.”

It would turn out that I would eventually meet Rayona Sharpnack, author of Trade Up!

Just last month I attended a three-day immersion workshop based on her coaching for "trading up" via "context shifting." Rayona did not pussy-foot around with giving me her expectations in a pre-session coaching call about a month beforehand: She told me that within her course, I would be challenged to "forge a new future for Hawai‘i and the world." Exactly 28 days later she wrote down her challenge again in her inscription when signing my book. It was day one of the workshop.

Most immersion/retreat type workshops tout this common goal: They intend to have you walk into their event as a certain kind of person, and then experience a transformational experience with them, one from which you will then walk away as a new person, and one of their newly converted evangelists. Rayona Sharpnack's Institute for Women's Leadership doesn't state this with blatant bravado and certainty, however they do willingly share endorsements mentioning the possibility. If the ranks of their Alumni groups, and the excitement of the twenty women taking the course with me are and were any indication, it appears their success rate may be pretty high.

This made me all the more intrigued: Excitement just after a workshop or seminar is not unusual, in fact, if the presenters are worth their salt at all, it is the norm. Immersion retreats can add to learning comprehension and retention probability because they shut out life's competing distractions. But what would happen weeks, and months later?

Second, is there a larger knowing-doing gap with Trade Up! if you don't have the benefit of the workshop? This also would seem rather normal (admittedly that is also the case with my own Managing with Aloha book versus workshop retention). How can the book alone be just as effective?

You can probably tell where I was going with my mental gymnastics: Seemed to me that Trade Up! would be a good candidate to weave into our Know Can Do! study as our spaced repetition* candidate number two.

So what is Trading Up?

I ask you to click over to Joyful Jubilant Learning for my book review of Trade Up!, for that's where you will find the run-down of those "5 Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out." (Right click and open in a new window to keep the articles side by side).

Here on MWAC we'll focus on the learning retention we can achieve with Trade Up! as another of our triggers.

Within Trade Up!, we asked to shift a present context we may have into a new one which will help us achieve a break-through project of some kind. Your takeaways therefore, can be:

1. A new context (a paradigm shift) that excites you, and makes you feel like you have "met yourself in a new place" and can now be the true author of your own life's story. This is where you have traded up to.
   Spaced repetition: A direct hit with green light thinking and positive expectancy.
2. The newly learned awareness that you can continue to shift more of your older contexts into new ones fairly easily once you recall the methodology, i.e. the "five steps" the book outlines. You can keep trading up as much as you wish to (and feel ready to step into), answering the question of, "How good are you willing to have life be?"
   Therefore, Trading Up can add sequential and consequential progression to our spaced repetition.
3. Action propulsion: A break-through project which helps you to keep wearing the new context you have now crafted for yourself, getting you accustomed to that "new place" you have met yourself in.
   I.E. A sort of trial run (or WOW Project) in which you will live that new life, playing out the scenarios of what it is like.
   

Hopefully, that new place and new life will be a great thing, and not a case where you should have been more careful with what you'd wished for! However as early as her book's introduction, Rayona is careful to explain that "contextual thinking is not wishful thinking" and that we have to "take responsibility for our context and be accountable for changing it."

Ah, there was that word responsibility... Kuleana again! I was reading this book in the same month that Kuleana was our value study here at MWAC. Providence was conspiring again.

Trading Up! was to be much more than I'd imagined it to be... Up to now, I had only thought of "trading up" as leaving behind an okay job for a far better one. J-o-b is like kindergarten to me, in a school where r-o-l-e is after high school, c-a-r-e-e-r is college, and c-a-l-l-i-n-g is a doctorate. This is a book which expects the reader to trade up their entire l-i-f-e in a self-mastery program.

Tell me yours and I will tell you mine

Trade Up! urges you to think and be bigger than you previously felt you were. This is the MWA concept of Palena ‘ole in action: Rayona’s forte is simply not allowing you to think you are incapable of achieving whatever you want to, with the tool of "context-shifting" essentially a new language and self-talk that will ever-propel you in that direction.

Therefore, in addition to our Know Can Do! parallels of spaced repetition,* possibility thinking,* and positive expectancy* we have the Managing with Aloha Key Concept of Language of Intention. Exceptional!

In her book, Rayona shares her own context shift. She explains how the mantra of her living and working style through most of her life could be described as, "nose to the grindstone:"

"To say that I've been driven and worked hard in my life is an understatement... when I thought about [my latest poor-me story] I recognized that the sense of suffering and sacrifice, and the feeling of futility that drove me to work like a dog was nothing new —in fact, I'd been like that for as long as I could remember."

"Perhaps that was a context I was operating from, a reality that I'd been programmed to believe in rather than an objective reality itself… when I tried to capture that context in words, the expression "I'll never get anywhere in life if I don’t keep my nose to the grindstone" quickly came to mind."

She then goes on to explain how she would shift to a new context where, "It all turns out with grace and ease."

"No person or organization can radically transform their personality or culture just because it seems fitting to do so. Unless the seeds of that change aren't already inherent, the new incarnation will be unsustainable. I knew that any phrase capturing the compelling future I wanted to pledge myself to would have to resonate in my body, striking a physical and spiritual chord as it made itself known to me."

After reading Trade Up!, and in the break-through project I have set my sights on, this was the context shift I made from an old conversation between my ears to a new one:

My old context: Kuleana; Be the responsible one.

My new context: The time to be free is now; Ma‘alahi.

Those statements do not need much more explanation for those of you who have been reading MWA Coaching somewhat faithfully and have come to know me over the last year's time, or even only as a Sunday Mālama weekend-newspaper of sorts.

I am on my second, full contact reading of Rayona's book. My breakthrough project work has begun, but this is enough for now, and we will save more about it for a future edition of Sunday Mālama.

I do highly recommend Rayona's book; it is simple reading, yet powerful and persuasive. True to the wonderful new world of book publishing meets our internet 2008, there are resource links I have added to my JJL book review too: Read (and listen) to them.

Then, in the spirit of Our Know Can Do! Study, think again about the "People should learn Less More" coaching which can put your know-how into action:

• How has whatever I have shared with you about context shifting and trading up run parallel to YOUR current learning? Any common threads?
• How might these new nuggets of learning reinforce something else, functioning as spaced, and different-yet-connected repetition of knowing gems to keep for you?
• In the spirit of our value for this month, make a connection to Ho‘ohanohano, presented in Chapter 13 of Managing with Aloha. Some quick links: Our Day One Essay, the 5 Beat Rhythm, and our Mid-Point reflection.

LOTS of possibilities with our Ho‘ohanohano study and trading up: What kind of shift would you want to achieve between the manager you are perceived to be, and may prefer to be?

*Our Know Can Do, Less is More Language of Intention ~ ~ ~ Know Can Do! ~ is a parable book written for every learner who wants to improve with converting the knowledge they gain into better usefulness in their lives. Less is More ~ is the short version of the Know Can Do! coaching that "People should learn Less More, and Not More Less" Spaced Repetition ~ is the "missing link" with learning retention: it is a learning technique where you don't learn something in just one sitting. You're exposed to the information periodically over time, so that it sinks in. Trading Up! ~ is a book which teaches us to Shift the Context from which we think, behave, and interact with others. It asks the question, "How good are you willing to let your life be?" Green Light Thinking ~ is possibility thinking with positive expectancy. When ideas come up, the call for a time of green light thinking explores all the positive possibilities before the yellow (cautionary filtering) and red (negative filtering) lights come on (and into the discussion.) Contextual Leadership ~ "Once a person connects with her passion and recognizes that it cannot be created in isolation, that person becomes a true leader, connecting with and helping to transform others, drawing the like-minded to her cause."—Rayona Sharpnack

Postscript and point of clarity: I am keeping my Trade Up! study shared here on MWAC confined to  Rayona's book Trade Up! and unfortunately cannot share more about the workshop I attended. All who attended were asked to sign one of those pesky proprietary information agreements, and much as I don't care for them, feeling they are sad, short-sighted, and far from being generously given learning encouragement (it is not something I require of my MWA workshop participants), wanting to take the course I did too.
~ Rosa

Comments are open! If you have decided to invest in my Know Can Do! study I would love to hear from you!