Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

“I’d rather have been a poet.”

Alcatraz [The Rock]
"set 3" by 4PIZON on Flickr

“I was trained by British Intelligence. But in retrospect, I’d rather have been a poet, or a farmer.”
– Sean Connery in The Rock after an amazed Nicholas Cage asks him, “How did you do that?”

We can learn to do some pretty amazing things. However learning to do what is most meaningful to us, feeling it is amazing enough can be the hard part.

Ho‘ohana. Work with intention.
Nānā i ke kumu. Look to your own source, and your inner truth, and you will figure it out.

---

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Welcome to a Brexy Presidency

Brex was the name we in the Ho‘ohana Community had given to the learning initiative we embraced during all of 2008: Braver Experiments [with] Digital Learning. This was how I had introduced it about a year ago; much of this is different now, which is good ~ we did learn!

I've just joined a new social network on Ning in the past week. Have been on LinkedIn for a while now, have a Tumblr lifestream, but I'm not a Twitterer and have said no to Facebook on purpose (Yeah, you can say no. What's hard is to stop second-guessing yourself about it.) Have discovered some contextual and social construct strengths I never realized I had, but am lost within learning how to actually apply them now.

I am feeling like I am really getting behind. I'm not being facetious: Read between the lines for what I still don't do, or think about what your kids already do. Think how much longer it takes you to learn the same things... One thing the Ho‘ohana Community has taught me through all this, is not to go it alone in my learning now.

See Postscript 2 at the end of this article for more on how we Brexed it last year.

Therefore, one of the things I have been most tickled about in these historic months leading us to our Barack Obama presidency, is how they have furnished us with such a precedent-setting living laboratory for our digital learning. We have taken global surveys and hummed along to YouTube parodies, we have tweeted and flickred, and we have ourselves learned to become citizen publishers.

I was able to spend a fair amount of time online during Inauguration Day, and the geek in me thrilled to the links shared, and the immediacy of them. Here are some you might enjoy too:

• Transcript of President Obama's Inaugural Address, shared by KGMB9.com at 7:35am HT
  "Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met."
• Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, at The White House Blog - first post at 12:01pm ET, a clear "we are ready" signal about the smoothness of this transition, and a message about the work which had already been steadily done to prepare.
  "Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities: Communication... Transparency... Participation... "
• We watched, on the Flickr blog. This one was such fun: We all saw many of the same media clips on television, but the Flickr community brought us into living rooms all across the globe. In particular, I loved seeing children watching; I imagined their parents teaching, and taking up their first line of responsibility in doing their part.
  "Many of us stopped what we were doing this morning to watch history being made. Here are a selection of photographs from our Inauguration 2009 group pool."
• Starbucks Pledge5, created by Starbucks Coffee
  "Join the call for national service: What if you gave 5 hours to help your community?"
  The cynical may say this one is just a clever marketing campaign to get us in their coffeeshops, however were you this clever and timely in your business? When the email first hit my inbox, there were already over 80,000 hours pledged ~ that would be 16,000 customers listening...

Those are a mere sampling, for there were dozens to choose from! If you caught a favorite online yesterday, let us know in the comments, would you?

I am eager to see what will come next: Eager to share in imaginations far bigger than mine, but overjoyed with this new ease within which I can share in them, and continue to learn.

If the history-making aspect of this first digitally staged and commanded campaign and presidency intrigues you too, here are a few more links you might enjoy, most written immediately after his election victory:

1. Nov.04th: Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency at the Wired Blog Network
2. Nov.10th: Barack Obama’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing: How he Used Internet and Social Media to Become President-Elect at DWSmg.com
3. Nov.22nd: How Will Obama Now Use the Internet Army He Built? at Newsweek Enterprise - Technology

Postscript: I will be posting soon on the learning initiative that I have chosen for our Ho‘ohana Community in 2009. My thoughts have bounced back and forth between two different possibilities, and I have been allowing both to sit with me since the New Year, trusting that the most pressing of the two will begin to speak the loudest until I have no choice but to listen, and sure enough, it did.

Postscript 2: We kicked off Brex in February of 2008 with a series of 4 articles on Managing with Aloha Coaching. Here are the links:

• Part 1: Who is the Digital Learning Coach in your company?
• Part 2: What is Required of ME as a Digital Learner in 2008?
• Part 3: What are the changes Digital Learning requires of your organizational culture? 
• Part 4: Ready to create your Digital Learning List, tribe style?

Working with Your Passion

Just back from four days on the island of O‘ahu, with the last two spent at the inaugural run of PodCamp Hawai‘i, and from the standpoint of someone who has spent much of her career in the catering and convention planning business, it was impressive.

The attendance was not huge, but this was a conference you would not describe as small - not by a long shot. It was truly testament to what can happen when passion becomes part of someone's work, in this case the work of Roxanne Darling and Shane Robinson of Bare Feet Studios. From their site:

Bare Feet Studios LLC is a small, curious, tech-savvy company based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, owned by Roxanne Darling and Shane Robinson. We participate in and advise on New Media and the Social Web to connect people and solve problems. Let us be your guide to social networking, podcasting, twitter, online marketing, and personal branding. (And we'll be happy to start by explaining all those buzz words! Your business can grow with them.)

99.9% of us think about doing something grand, but then we allow doubts to snuff out the allure of the grandness, and we shrink back and never get started.

Hard work scares us off.

Then there are the 00.1% like Roxanne and Shane who take their leaps of faith, work solely within the realm of their passion, and get the grand done.

Hard work morphs into satisfying work well done, for it was the work of our most passionate intentions.

Last post I asked you about your influence, and if you are using it. Clearly Roxanne and Shane are, and during the last two days it was inspiring to see the leverage they've created for themselves - and for the prospects of technology and social media in Hawai‘i - because they Ho‘ohana, and do their intentional work.

Best of all, I am betting that everyone who attended that conference can now more clearly see how they can make things happen too, whether their own passions are in technology, New Media and the Social Web, or something entirely different. The industry and the vision is not the defining component: Your passion is.

Passion simply means you love the work instead of dreading it: You chose it deliberately instead of getting it assigned to you by someone else. You do it on your own terms.

Read more about Ho‘ohana again, and take your own leap of faith.

If you are in Hawai‘i - or looking for a great excuse to make the trip over here! - keep tabs on the PodCamp Hawai‘i site so you can get involved at some point, for planning has already begun for the next conference. If you want to become an Influencer, you are well advised to surround yourself with people who already are. Catch the energy of their passion, and then trigger your own.

Shedding the Blinders of Age and Wisdom

… and finding my-worth marketing gurus.

I eased into the weekend with some online reading with a definite intention: I wanted to get to know a few people better who I’d impulsively (or you could say instinctively) had begun to follow on Twitter. I even said so on Friday with as much intention as I could tweet in those 140 characters:

Aloha Pō‘alima: Aloha Friday Twitter plan ~ Click on your links, read some good stuff, comment in those places, cut back my own noise here.

My instincts were pretty good; I got reacquainted with a few people, and was somewhat startled by how much they had accomplished or changed since I last visited their web pages, for new looks have popped up everywhere, and initiative is flourishing. As just one example, I love what Mark Goren is now doing with his Planting Seeds. (I wrote about Mark 15 months ago on Joyful Jubilant Learning and will need to update my links there!)

In several instances, I was very startled (though I am not sure why I should have been surprised at all) by the bravado and almost-audacity of youth.

Wisdom unfolds before my eyes in a remarkable way on Twitter. First there is this spark of brilliance. Then another tweet reveals that it wasn’t just a spark; there is a warm ember glowing there. The tweets someone shares get hotter and hotter, and as they do, I suspect I need to know this person better, and as I did over the past two days, I begin to explore and probe, from Twitter bio link to blog, to About Page, to a Hire Me statement of some kind, until I find their intentions —and more often than not, their Storefront.

What has been startling me is how young so many of my Twitter Sages are revealed to me as. Not in their content, just in their pictures. Twenty-somethings. Thirty-somethings.

What is so delightfully refreshing is that these “brash youngsters” are not allowing their age to hold them back. They know what they already have to offer the world, and so they are. Not only that: They are capitalizing on their in-born talents magnificently.

Within my own not-so-random sampling, there is not a single “internet marketer” in the bunch. If you have that statement in your bio I’m sorry, but it really rubs me the wrong way; in my consciousness, “internet marketers” have become the sharky car salesmen of the online world (with apologies to ethical car salesmen and women everywhere).

Those who have impressed me over the past two days of my focused web-reading, are all what I’d call ‘my-worth marketers’.

They know their Ho‘ohana, or at the very least they are dabbling in experimenting their way toward revealing it, and now they are busy at this new expression of the business of life. They are busy within their very intentional work, and they are contributing to our world as they do so.

Their About Pages and their Hire Me pages may be somewhat shallow in testimony to what they have already done, but my goodness they are goldmines in what they confidently offer about what they now DO. Age is irrelevant, but wisdom is highly relevant, and it is present.

My generation (and yes, I wish I didn’t have to write it that way, but it’s an accuracy, a point of reference) was way too hung up on paying our dues and logging our past experiences, when in fact, past experience is no guaranteed predicator of what will happen in the future. We lost so much valuable time, and we took too many hits to our self-esteem.

In comparison, I am really loving what I am seeing emerge right now. I am enjoying learning from the wise young.

Thank goodness our kids are not following our example.

Some kind of squash I think…
I love the way that vegetable vines like this grow with such eager exhuberance. They reach out, latch on to something, with no hesitation, no doubt that they belong wherever they end up.

Postscript:
Karen Wallace has stimulated a thoughtful discussion at Joyful Jubilant Learning this morning with a posting called Expecting Perfection. Another way of saying this might be that I don’t expect perfection from others, not at all. I do expect initiative, and I do expect people to manifest the strengths they have to offer, and that’s what I’m cheered by this morning, that the generation of my son (21) and my daughter (24) is delivering those things already.

The Bailout Failure need NOT be Your Failure

Today I am sending my Ho‘ohana ‘Ōlelo subscribers my e-letter a day early. Actually, they will get my normal issue tomorrow as usual too, this is a preface; the first of two parts this month. I would like to share a copy with you today.

Context, and where we go from here

I’d like to start with two quotes, one for some context we are all painfully aware of now, and another about where we go from here. The context first:

“House leaders say they're reconvening Thursday instead of adjourning for the year as planned, after dealing a $700 billion financial market bailout a stunning defeat. The fate of the rescue package remained in doubt as Democrats and Republicans both said they wanted to resurrect it. They were locked in a brutal round of partisan finger-pointing over why it failed. The Senate had planned a Wednesday vote on the measure. President Bush and his economic advisers, as well as congressional leaders in both parties say it's vital to insulate ordinary Americans from the effects of Wall Street's bad bets.”
—KGMB9 News

And about where we go from here:

You see things; and you say “why?”
But I dream of things that never were, and I say “Why not?”
—George Bernard Shaw

Funny How Your Feet in Dreams Never Touch the Earth
by Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Worth repeating: I dream of things that never were, and I say “Why not?”

To President Bush and his economic advisers I say, you have a long way to go in ‘insulating’ this ordinary American, so get busy, and I have also sent that message to our Hawai‘i representatives and senators. To the rest of us I say, there is no use commiserating with the doom and gloom right now, let’s get to better work too —all of us.

In times like these I think about George Bernard Shaw’s words for the coaching I might need, so I can refuse to be a pessimist; I have to look for opportunity. I have to get out of bed every day with a positive expectancy about the world, whatever might be going on in it. I have to live my life with a positive expectation about me, and about my place in the world. I don’t want to wring my hands; I want them to be more useful than that. I want to feel more confident about my own circle of influence, and I want to know it won’t fail me. I have to know that I won’t fail me.

I am quite certain that you want those things too.

Your Ho‘ohana is your future

I’d like to repeat something from my Day One Essay this past September 1st, for the news of the day makes it more relevant than ever before:

“I believe that self-entrepreneurship of some kind one day down the pike (or to be more accurate, self-financing), is the new inevitability of our generation: In today’s economy, scores of people are finding they’ve been good working citizens and contributors to society their entire lives with very little to show for it. Their retirement dream never came true. They played the game of life following all the rules: What went wrong?

In short, what went wrong is that they followed someone else’s Ho‘ohana instead of authoring their own, something everyone will eventually have to do (and just as the leaders among you authored your self-leadership growth plan in August.)

The good news is this: It is never too late. Really.”

You may have to work a little harder right now, but it is never too late.

We are in a recession. Today’s news is depressing; it’s scary. The question is, would you rather succumb to commiserating with others on the doom and gloom, or would you rather look ahead, and very realistically do something about it?

“There is an old joke. If your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession. If you lose your job, it’s a depression. Like many jokes, this one hints at a truth. For you personally, it’s all about what happens to you. And your own economic situation depends mostly on whether you have a job.”
—Howard Dicus, in a blog post asking, How Bad Can Our economy Get?

I agree and disagree. It may depend mostly on whether you have a job, but not entirely. It depends on how you define job, and how you define work: Our Ho'ohana Language of Intention: Are we talking about the same thing?

We can work together as the Ho'ohana Community

Back on September 1st, I asked you to work with me on getting a new Ho'ohana Statement of positive expectancy in front of you, for I know this: Your Ho'ohana is your future AND our future.

Because the last day of the month happened to fall on a Tuesday, today is our wrap-up on Managing with Aloha Coaching. Please take a look at it, and think about the opportunity that is in front of you today, an opportunity you need to consider whatever happens when the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes this Thursday.

Here's the link: Finalizing your Ho'ohana Statement into Workable Form

What I write on MWAC is free for you, always has been. I am not trying to sell you; I am trying to help you and serve you as best I know how.

What can YOU be doing to "work better" right now?

We Ho'ohana together, Kākou.

~Rosa

More from George Bernard Shaw in the Talking Story Archives:

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.”

Ho‘ohana; Your Intentional Work

Preface: I was asked if I would submit an essay on Ho‘ohana for a community-based newspaper which is seeking to redefine the Aloha-based living within that community. The editor has read Managing with Aloha, and in particular our work with Ho‘ohana this month resonated strongly. I was thrilled to do so, and I thought you might want to read a copy of my submission as well for another dose of in-progress coaching with our current month’s study. All of this is likely to sound familiar to you, but as we have learned before, “spaced repetition” can help where-ever you might be with your self-paced self-coaching!

Ho‘ohana; Your Intentional Work

Our value for this month is very dear to my heart. When asked to choose only one value representative of the entire Managing with Aloha movement I choose this one, second only to the value of Aloha itself. This month, I’d like to talk story with you about Ho‘ohana, the value of intentional work.

Hana is the word for ‘work’ in Hawaiian, primarily as a noun. Ho‘o is a prefix of causation, roughly meaning, “to make it happen.” Thus ho‘o turns hana into a very intentional verb, one begging action directed toward the work you do —whatever that work may be, make it happen. I define ‘work’ broadly; it is a word much bigger than ‘task’ or ‘job.’ There are collections of tasks and jobs in the work you do which you would describe as your Ho‘ohana.

This is the connection I feel exists between Aloha and Ho‘ohana, a connection where one strengthens the other;

ALOHA is about you living with authenticity in a world populated with other people. We human beings were not meant to live alone; we thrive in each other’s company. Your Aloha celebrates everything which makes you, YOU. As a very intuitive 17-year old told me once, “I get that; Aloha is me keeping it real.” I loved hearing him; he knew his ‘real’ is good stuff!

HO‘OHANA is about you making your living in our world in the way that gives you daily direction and intention, and leaves you with a feeling of personal fulfillment every day —not just when you have accomplished large goals. Ho‘ohana is not about your job or career, though they may be included within it. Ho‘ohana is about best-possible livelihood in total.

Think of WORK as something you want to get done. With this new definition in mind, Ho‘ohana then includes your work with all your finances, with your church, with your children’s school, with your neighborhood association, and more. Ho‘ohana includes the work you do within your job, within your hobbies, within your studies, and within each of your other values.

Kitten at work found on Flickr by anzaq78.
Note in regard to my Preface:
Photo only included here on Talking Story.

When a person chooses to incorporate Aloha and Ho‘ohana into their working lives, there is no more “going through the motions,” no more “paying my dues” or “earning my stripes,” and no more “biding my time.” All your attentions are somehow connected to your work —even if it is work within a job which is currently temporary for you; Ho‘ohana is work-in-progress. You no longer call it work; you call it “my Ho‘ohana.”

I find that it is very helpful to think about Ho‘ohana work in the context of your ATTENTION and your INTENTION. Together, the partnership of attention/intention is powerful. For instance, if you have read this far, this article is part of your chosen attentions; what is the personal connection for you? What do you intend to get out of it? Are you just reading, or are you reading with Ho‘ohana, and the intention to ‘work it’ until you get something useful out of it? Do you just nalu it (go with the flow) or do you reflect, talk story about Ho‘ohana with a friend or your family so it becomes a new word in your vocabulary, and then try to apply it somehow?

Here is my suggestion: Use the month between this issue and the next one to redefine the word ‘work’ and make it yours: Do so by enlarging it to all of your life’s work. Make any work you do truly yours, and truly worthwhile, with the new language of intention that is Ho‘ohana. You will be living the Hawaiian value of intentional and worthwhile work.

For after all, as foundational as it gets, what is more important than your own life? I love the notion that living with the value of Ho‘ohana is like saying, “Thank you for the gift of my great life.” Don’t you?

------

Rosa Say is a workplace Aloha coach, and the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai‘i’s Universal Values to the Art of Business. You can learn more about her and the Hawaiian values we share as a community at www.ManagingWithAloha.com.

“Help! I can’t come up with my Ho‘ohana.”

I was in the Honolulu International Airport one evening waiting for my flight back home when a young man walked up to me and said, “Excuse me; aren’t you the one who wrote Managing with Aloha?”

I looked up from the newspaper I was reading and smiled at him, but before I could say anything, he sat down in the chair next to me and said, “I can’t come up with my Ho‘ohana.”

It’s something I get asked about all the time. If you have been trying to come up with your Ho‘ohana too, be sure you check in with MWAC for this week’s Tuesday Coaching installment: Writing a Ho‘ohana Draft part 2: Enjoy the How-To of your Values.

The draft we are working on this month is a personal one, and that’s usually my first tip: Start with the personal, and the professional will fall into place for you where it should. If you try to articulate your Ho‘ohana only for a particular job or career, you rarely will get the full picture - you are much more complex than that - a good thing! You have more capacity to be explored, and your job is just part of it, even when you have a job you absolutely adore.

I did... and I am not in that job anymore. I love my work now just as much (much more), because exploring my Ho‘ohana personally - selfishly even - helped me discover more of what I could learn to offer others. Those new ‘offerings’ have made my life so much richer, a true win-win proposition.

Conversely, if you now struggle to love, or even like the job you have right now, working on Ho‘ohana personally helps you focus on the elements that are strictly under your own control, opening up windows that frame what you can do about it. 9 times out of 10, frustration in a job can come from factors that are outside your scope of influence - at least that’s what we tend to think. It’s a natural self-protective mechanism to shift blame and fiercely protect our self-worth; in a way, it’s healthy. However focusing on others is not what Ho‘ohana is all about; you have to focus inward and on you.

So if you feel like that young man I met in the airport, please be sure to check in with MWAC today. If you have not visited MWAC before, you may want to start with the mid-month recap I did here on Talking Story first; there is a deliberate Language of Intention I use with the words ‘work’ and ‘job.’

And don't let the whole date thing stop you just because we are in the last two weeks of the month: Everything on MWAC is designed for self-coaching and self-paced progression. You can start it at any time (and go back to it at any time :) Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Here is some extra-credit reading about this bit - “you are much more complex than that - a good thing! You have more capacity to be explored...” -

Palena ‘ole: Discover your 4-Fold Capacity.

MY MANA‘O (what I believe to be true) ~ ~ ~ ALOHA is about you living with authenticity in a world populated with other people. We human beings were not meant to live alone, we thrive in each other’s company. Aloha celebrates everything that makes you YOU. HO‘OHANA is about you making your living in our world in the way that gives you daily direction and intention and leaves you with a feeling of personal fulfillment every day —not just when you have accomplished large goals.

To Ho‘ohana, Change Your Assumptions

One of the managers who used to work with me at the Hualalai Resort sent me an email yesterday that looked like this (the link inserts are mine if you want to see more context):

Rosa, I was reading JJL, and you wrote this in a comment there;

“I have not achieved the Tim Ferriss 4-hr Workweek (yet!) but SLC/HP alone only gets about 5 hours of my weekday, and maybe another 3 per weekend day.”

Really? Has life changed that much for you?

I laughed, then called her back on the telephone. It had been a while since we’d spoken.

When we worked together, I arrived at work between 6:30 and 7am each morning, and I left about 12 hours later. I had a true weekend off about once a month. At home my laptop was on constantly, but I was rarely online except to dial into the resort’s network and check my email, queuing up my responses in drafts so I could send them all out first thing Monday mornings. The rest of the time I used my laptop to pour over financial spreadsheets and other work-related documents. Being “off” mostly meant I didn’t have to answer my cell phone and feel guilty about it.

I would tell everyone I loved my job – and I did, for I didn’t know any other life but that one.

Today life is dramatically different. What I wrote in my JJL comment is true; if I give more time to my business than that 5 and 3, well, it’s a business that I won’t want to have (SLC/HP is short for Say Leadership Coaching and Ho‘ohana Publishing). I’ll reinvent it to suit my needs. SLC/HP has been in a state of constant fine-tuning the entire five years it has now been in existence. I have been self-employed since 2003.

When I’m not traveling (and this year my goal has been to cut way back on my business travel) I work from a home office by choice, for I absolutely love my home, and now I get to enjoy it. Yet I interact with just as many people as I did when surrounded by the hundreds working on the resort with me, in fact, probably many more. There is no doubt whatsoever that the relationships are just as intimate, just as strong, just as fulfilling.

I still get up at about 5am every morning, but because I want to and because I get to; not because I have to. In the early mornings I read and I write. I “work” in my business roughly from 9am to 2pm each day, just because I find that is my most productive time (so I also schedule most of my appointments then). After that, I take care of what I call “the assorted business of life” (chores and such) and I play. My evenings and weekends are for my family now, and days of the week are largely irrelevant: I take off when they are off, something I could never do my three decades in the hotel business.

What have I given up?
What changed?

The answer to both questions is the same: My assumptions that life had to be the way it was.

That’s one of the things that working on Ho‘ohana can do for you. You reassess. You consider your values, you take a good look at your life, and you match them up. You begin to dream again. You see possibility by shedding the biggest assumption of them all; that dreams are only dreams and not in the realm of possibility for you.

It takes time to make shift happen in your life, sure. But for the time it takes to get counted up in the doing of it, you have to start.

One of the places I was playing in recently;
my own back yard.

From the Talking Story Archives:
These first 2 links are about self-employment, but that is just one option you have with Ho‘ohana. My intent here is not about you giving up your job! Check out the 3rd link too:

• From Corporate Life to Self-Employment
• Not-so-Secret Weapon of the Self-Employed
• Why Bother with Ho‘ohana, and “Worthwhile Work” at all?

Day 15: Value your Month, Value your Life with Ho‘ohana

My talk-story today is very Ho‘ohana-directed for those of you working through my MWA value of the month program with me. If you aren’t you can skip this, or you can feel free to read quickly through this to get a sense of what I do each month in that regard (since Talking Story does amble in some different directions at times, like this past weekend.)

Value your Month, Value your Life is the tagline on Managing with Aloha Coaching (MWAC). In short, the value-aligned life is what I feel you can achieve when you adopt a value of the month self-coaching regimen, whether you choose to do so with me (and the Managing with Aloha values) or on your own --- you choose your own values and your own interpretation of them, but tag-team the organizational structure I use so you can be aligned with the temperaments of our Ho‘ohana Community. We are good people to be around, those positive-influence people your parents would be pleased you’ve become friends with :)

September 2008: 15 days down, 15 to go.

Let’s take a quick September 2008 Ho‘ohana inventory: Where are we?

Within my Day One Essay I essentially presented three goals for the month:

1. Learn about Ho‘ohana as a value, and in doing so, redefine the word “work” for yourself as the first step to making the work you do your own.

To do this, understand where your “job” fits into the picture – in some regards they are one and the same, and in others, the jobs you do are part of other concerns that just are part of the business we call life.

By now, you should have completed this part, with a new language of intention articulated in the process.

2. In the Tuesday coaching which still remains this month, we are going to write a first-draft Ho‘ohana statement of intention for you —a “working” draft!

The Tuesday Coaching Essay I have queued up for MWAC tomorrow begins this part; we will be taking a look at your personal value-alignment. The post title to look for: Writing a Ho‘ohana Draft part 1: Your Intention and Your Personal Values. (Update: posted here.)

3. Third (and where we’d actually started), I asked you to define Koho Wahi Ho‘ohana; asking you, “What is your chosen place in the Ho‘ohana Community?” and suggesting you enlist someone’s partnership in taking the Ho‘ohana journey together so you can support each other, work my Value of the Month/Tuesday Coaching program with your workplace team, or engage on MWAC in the comment boxes there.

Koho Wahi Ho‘ohana in practice!

A couple of you have gone even further, and I must take a moment to say mahalo nui to Stacy Brice and Chris Bailey in particular, for taking this month’s Ho‘ohana coaching to their own online communities and publishing platforms; thank you Stacy and Chris!

By Stacy: Why bother with worthwhile work?

By Chris: September Is A Perfect Month To Talk About Work, and Why Job Fit Is Important To Your Confidence.

At MWAC we have heard from Bas, Toni, Sharon, Angela, and Roselia. Mahalo nui loa for sharing your voices there! Your generosity with commenting feeds into my own energies in a big way.

While I sincerely appreciate the private emails that come in as well, those of you who will share your comments publicly with the community doubly, triply have my gratitude, for our energies as a peer-coached community make an exponential difference.

How? Read The 20 Benefits of Peer to Peer Coaching (and the MWA Way of doing it)

Ho‘ohana with the Intention ~ Attention Mantra

As usual, we have kept in alignment with the month’s value on Joyful Jubilant Learning as well. The theme there is slightly different (it is about learning from Citizen Publishing on the Web) however there is a sub-theme there that is a Ho‘ohana direct hit:

We each have a two-fold decision to make about our personal use of the web: ATTENTION. To who, what, where, and when do I give the most valuable gift I can give someone publishing online for me? INTENTION. Why do I bother in the first place? What’s in it for me? What will be the outcome that I am intentionally pursuing?

The conversation at JJL has been rich in this regard, with general agreement that “Attention and intention are a powerful combination.” (Greg Balanko-Dickson)

Yet life can bombard us with so much: Attention and intention is a struggle for all of us.

Generally I think that indulging our innate sense of curiosity is a great thing, as is putting ourselves “out there” as we pursue degrees of separation, broadening our horizons and adding color and diversity to our lives with other interests, some which at first can seem quite off-the-wall and divergent.

Somewhat impulsively (I admit it was not originally planned this way this month!) I have imposed a 90-day experiment on myself, aimed at limiting my online consumption of inputs. I suppose I am realizing that my intentions are my reality check on my attentions – or that they need to be a bit more than they have been!

However just a few days into it (my 90-day experiment), I must tell you: It is working!!!

So my last word for Day 15 and our mid-month point is this: Think deeply about your intention with every effort you make - that is the Ho‘ohana direct hit I refer to. Think of every effort you make as part of the work you do in that new definition we had come up with at MWAC:

WORK —what I intend to do for me, myself and I. When I “work on something” I am working on something useful or important to me in some way. I work for my purpose, a purpose that is clear to me. I work on-purpose, no more “going through the motions,” no more “paying my dues” or “earning my stripes,” and no more “biding my time.” Even when I work within a job I feel stuck with (for the time being as a transitional time) I am learning as much as I can, learning which is connected with the experience, skills, or knowledge I will use in the future. More at: Our Ho‘ohana Language of Intention: Are we talking about the same thing?

We Ho‘ohana together. I will be over at MWAC tomorrow with my next Tuesday Coaching Essay. See you there.
~Rosa

Ho‘ohana is Utterly Useful

Have had some interesting off-the-blog discussions about Ho‘ohana (our value for the month of September) which have revolved around passion: Is having passion for the work you do overrated?

The talk-story started when I included this in last week’s Tuesday coaching on MWAC:

Ho‘ohana is not always passionate, and it is not always directed toward high levels of professional achievement. Ho‘ohana is more about getting personal satisfaction in your life. Every day.

I used to connect passion with Ho‘ohana very consistently (and with profession, all in one fell swoop), and wow, when it happens it’s absolutely fantastic. However I no longer start with asking you to wear your passions on your sleeve (or with gut-wrenching professional decisions); I know that can be too hard because it may be too unrealistic that way.

More at: Why Bother with Ho‘ohana, and “Worthwhile Work” at all?

Ho‘ohana may not always be passionate; but it still can be pretty intense. Anything that is important to you IS intense, right? Sometimes Ho‘ohana feels purely like hard work, but it’s the “damn, that was a great work-out” kind of hard work. Sometimes, working on your Ho‘ohana is frustrating, but at the end of the day, it is always life-affirming for the life you have deliberately chosen to lead.

An important distinction to keep in mind is that I don’t equate work with job the way that most people do. Sometimes you have your job just to finance that real work of eventually discovering your Ho‘ohana along the way, and you find that works for you.

Ho‘ohana is the grit and grime of real work that makes a difference in your life, because Ho‘ohana is working on your life. It’s satisfying. Work is not always totally pretty, and at times it gets awfully messy, but the work of Ho‘ohana should be a kind of playing in the mud fun for you. Oddly enough, when the occasional frustration gets thrown in to the mix, it actually feels a bit more real.

If you can look at it that way, Ho‘ohana is utterly useful.

USEFUL is a word that becomes more and more attractive to me every day. I think that usefulness is highly desirable.