How can I accelerate the journey?

Today, I randomly overheard an interview about launching your career as a UX designer and this question from the audience hit me:

"How can I accelerate my journey?"

What a fascinating question...

On one hand, you can't. There is no accelerating the journey. The journey is the journey. You are on the path and there's no cheat codes or warp drives.

On the other hand, there are so many things that we can do to ensure that the next step on our journey is the most efficient and effective.

• Seek guidance
• Listen deeply
• Trust and surrender
• Ask obvious and non-obvious questions
• Uplevel your environment
• Strive for mastery from a beginner's mind
• Remove attachment and expectations
• Learn from the past and the future

There's a massive challenge with this acceleration process though.

It often doesn't feel like we are going faster at all.

It's can feel more like taking a step backward to take 4 steps ahead. Listening, for example, is very passive. When we listen without attachment, it might be a lengthy process and probably not feel like acceleration at all. And yet, it could be the key to unlocking everything.

This is some Jedi Master level stuff. If you are trying to force acceleration, it won't happen and will actually probably slow you down. When you trust that the journey is unfolding exactly as designed, you will be more open to the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.

What is my process to answer really difficult questions?

I had a fun call with a friend this morning who has a difficult career decision coming up. I asked him what his process was for figuring out the answer. I had not thought about my own answer to this question until he asked me what I would do.

The initial response that jumped out to me and that I shared with him is one of the most powerful and under utilized tools that we have access to when creating something new.

"Who has already had to answer this question, and what can I learn from them?"

With very, very rare exception, there is almost always someone on this planet who has gone through what you are going through right now.

Whether it's starting a new company, figuring out a career move, or even working through some personal stuff, someone else has been there, done that. We have the opportunity to learn from them.

Figure out a way to get access to these people and ask them a few questions to help you on your journey. What did you come up with when you had to answer this question? What was your process like in making the decision? What would you do differently / what have you learned since?

Simple stuff, but it can be critical in your future decision making.

There are two reasons why this tactic isn't utilized more often:

1. We buy into our own story that we're so unique that no one else has ever had to deal with something like this

2. We are worried about what will happen as a result of asking

One is easy enough to overcome. Two is a bit trickier.

What if I talk to a competitor and they steal my idea, you might say. I'm sure I'll write more in the future about protecting your idea, but for now, let's just say it is incredibly rare for someone to steal another person's idea. If they've been around long enough, they've already thought through your idea at some point. And even if they're a competitor, in my experience they are still more likely to help than not.

I've discovered a few other ways to help me answer difficult questions I'll again save for another time, and yet this will always the starting point for me.

If you are fortunate enough (or crafty enough) to have access to someone who has been through a similar situation or dilemma, one of the most useful things we can do is to learn from their experience. Learn from the past to accelerate the future.

Isn't blogging dying?

Probably, yes. It certainly feels like blogging is becoming a fossil of the days of internet past.

And I kinda like it even more for that.

There's arguably much better methods of marketing online these days. There's better ways to get content distribution. There's better ROI out there for getting eyeballs to see your message.

But.

I'm not writing again for page clicks. I'm not building an audience to monetize. I'm writing consistently again for these reasons (in order):

1. To clarify and simply my own thinking and understanding of things that are important to me
2. To establish a creative outlet for asking and answers powerful questions that are fascinating to me in the moment
3. To create a historical record of my own growth and development over time (some of those original blog posts are super cringeworthy)
4. To have something to share with people when these questions come up in coaching and leadership conversations when there's a desire to dig deeper

Any other benefits from publishing these posts consistently again feels like a bonus. And, since I'm on the subject, I'll share a few other random thoughts about what I'm doing here.

• I've decided to follow a Q&A format for these posts. I love questions. So each post will be a question that I've been thinking about, that comes up in meditation or conversation, or a question that I've answered too many times ;)
• I've decided to have a mailing list for this simply for ease of use for people who want to consume this content but don't enjoy the inconsistency of my writing times (I'll send out a weekly email with a summary of all of the posts for the week)
• I am always open to new questions or topics. If there are any specific requests, send them over and if they fit roughly into the intersection of leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship I'll do my best to simply my thoughts for you.

While blogging and short to medium length content is quite what it used to be, it all depends on what you are looking to get out of it. For me, it's the perfect format for clarity, simplicity, creativity and documenting my thoughts.

Why is it so easy to break commitments?

It only took 9 days into my commitment of publishing a post every day before I broke that commitment.

I had a full day with early morning meetings until a dinner meeting late night. I didn't intentionally break my commitment. It honestly slipped my mind until the next day when I realized I hadn't wrote anything.

Once I missed that first day of writing though, it was an integrity check for me that I struggle with. At that time, my blog posts weren't public yet, as I was publishing them behind the scenes. I could very easily have written two blog posts that next day, changed the date on one and then moved on as if nothing happened.

But that didn't feel good. So I didn't. Instead I stopped writing for 11 days until I finally decided that I wanted to start posting again, not try to play catchup and hid my break of commitment, and just roll with it.

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For me in this situation, it could be said that I wasn't fully committed. It could also be that I was trying to force myself into this new behavior. Or any other number of reasons or excuses why I didn't follow through.

At the end of the day, I didn't have the right structure in place to follow through with my commitment. I didn't have a plan for what to do when I didn't write first thing in the morning. And before you know it, the day was over.

Keeping to our commitments is a matter of integrity, something that I hold in the highest regard. In this matter, it's not a big deal. The world moves irregardless of my 11 day absence.

More importantly, I allowed my "keeping commitments muscle" to get a little weaker. Time to put in more work in the gym, build the habit of publishing every day and hold my commitments to a higher standard.

How do I measure my own personal growth?

I had a magical moment of reflection a few days ago. It was an awareness I am very grateful to have had and just as easily could have missed. And it got me thinking...

As a person who spends my fair share of time focused on my own personal growth and development and working with others to do the same, how come I had to randomly stumble upon this realization?

At an immersive event in June 2018, I wrote down a list of 5 areas that currently felt out of integrity for me. Believing integrity to be one of the most important qualities in a leader and correspondingly having it very high on my list of personal values, these 5 areas did not feel good to me.

And yet, after that weekend, I did not take any action on this new information. Instead, the list got lost in the shuffle and life happened.

Fast forward to last week. I was looking for something in my old notes when I came across this list. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

Without any awareness of this happening, I resolved all 5 areas that were out of integrity. It forced me to stop and consider all of the growth that occurred, often behind the scenes, over the last year. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

And so, I'm doing a little rapid prototyping on some ideas to help me better track my growth and development over time. This way I can be more intentional about these amazing moments of reflection and ideally have something to share with you all to do the same.