Work-Life Sanity Blog

At a high school reunion recently, my older daughter had a conversation with one of her old soccer buddies whose young daughter just started playing the game.

After one of the first games, the mom said to her daughter, “I noticed that when the other team had the ball you didn’t try to get the ball away from them. Why not?” Her daughter was surprised by the question, and responded that when another girl had the ball – it was her turn with the ball – and “you’re just not supposed to take stuff away from other people. It’s not nice, Mommy!” The daughter also shared that she was very surprised that during the game people pushed each other. She said, “People aren’t supposed to push other people.”

The mom seized the opportunity to have a great conversation with her daughter about how to be effective in different contexts: different rules apply. In soccer you’re supposed to take the ball from a player on the other team if you possibly can. And pushing (within certain limits) is also part of the game. If your team is not using these strategies, you’re not going to be effective at playing the game.

Off the soccer field, in the world of adults, how does this play out? In so many ways. I see people understating their accomplishments, impacts, and results on their resumes because “you’re not supposed to brag,” or for fear of even being accused of overstating the case. The job market is just another playing field where the competition is fierce, people play to win, and if your resume is lukewarm, you’re not going to make the cut.

Or perhaps you’re now in a staff position in the organization where you did your fellowship. Are you making the transition fully into being part of the staff or is there still part of you that’s following the rules of the fellowship, where you were more of a student than an expert in your own right, more of an underling than a voting member of the A-Team?

Another example is the consultant who subcontracts out pieces of large projects with only a very minimal signed agreement with her subs. She chooses to apply her rules for friendship (“trust, trust, trust”) to the business arena where trust is commonly reinforced and spelled out by a strong and detailed contract that protects both parties. Without a contract, when a dispute arises with a sub, or the sub takes the client with her at the end of a project, the consultant is shocked and outraged by this “bad behavior.” The consultant is playing by the rules of personal friendship. The sub is playing by the rules of business: if there’s not a non-compete clause, she can walk away with the client. From her perspective, she’s the one who earned the client’s trust and did the work. It may not be “nice,” but in the marketplace, that’s how some people play the game.

How might this apply to you in your life? Is there some part of your life where you are playing by rules that do not apply? Are you holding others to a standard of behavior that is not universally accepted in that environment? When disputes or bad feelings arise, this is one dynamic to check for. Sometimes a short round of effectiveness coaching can help you to identify and engage with the appropriate set of rules.

Do you have a story to tell about learning how to be effective in a given context? Share it in the comments below, or email it to me at sharon@stcoach.com. When you email, let me know whether it’s OK for me to tell your story in a later post or newsletter. I will change some of the specifics to preserve your anonymity. I can run it by you before publishing it, if you’d like.

I recently read a compelling article about password hacking:”Hacked!” by James Fallows in The Atlantic.

The link to this article was sent by a friend whose address book had been hacked.  All his contacts received an email that basically said, “I was robbed in London — please send money.”  You’ve probably received one of these yourself.

The article is sobering and instructive.  Take a look.  It recommends using long strings of characters as passwords, strings you can remember because they mean something to you, but not easily hackable strings like your address.  It also recommends using unique passwords for each of your essential accounts, to limit your exposure in case one of your passwords gets compromised.  See quoted section at the end of this post.

I started playing with what I might use as long strings of letters that mean something to me.  And I came up with an idea I’d like to share.

Why not use affirmations, mantras, and other personally-useful phrases as passwords?

Why not pepper yourself, throughout your day, with messages that are positive, validating, grounding, and/or amusing?

Here are some examples, just to get your imagination rolling:

• Remember to breathe (remember2breathe!)
• Take it a step at a time
• Perfection is not an option
• LightenUpSweetie
• ILoveMyChowHound
• iknowhowtodothis

It’s oddly integrating to get a personal message (from yourself) in the midst of doing something else. It can actually bring some balance into your day and reduce stress.  It does this by reminding you that you are more than your work and bringing your awareness to your body for a moment, or in some other way interrupting your habitual stress-enhancing thought patterns.  By “habitual stress-enhancing thought patterns,” I mean the ones that sounds something like this: “I’ll never get this done in time!  I should be doing this faster!  I should be doing this better!” For some people it also sounds like this: “I’m a fraud.  It’s only a matter of time til everyone figures it out.” You probably know what yours sound like.

Stress is bad because it feels terrible and it’s not good for our bodies.  It’s also bad because when we’re stressed we can’t do our best work.  Under stress, we are just not as effective as when we’re not stressed.

As a life coach, when I work with a client who needs to reduce the stress in her life, we work on several big-picture fronts, making structural and other big changes that make a difference.  We also work on building some moments of balance and sanity into every day.  I think using passwords to give yourself  messages you need to hear throughout the day can be a useful practice for doing just that.

Stress reduces effectiveness.  It’s just that simple.  If you could use some help in addressing the stress in your life, consider a short burst of effectiveness coaching.  Contact me to schedule an initial no-fee consultation.

Here are Fallows’ recommendations for passwords that are less likely to be hacked:

• “Choose a long, familiar-to-you sequence of ordinary words, with spaces between them as in an ordinary sentence, which more and more sites now allow. “Lake Winnebago is deep and chilly,” for instance. Or “my favorite packer is not brett favre.” You could remember a phrase like that, but a hacker’s computer, which couldn’t tell spaces from characters, would see only one forbiddingly long password sequence.

• “Choose a shorter sequence of words that are not “real” English words. I once lived in a Ghanaian village called Assin Fosu. I can remember its name easily, but it would be hard to guess. Even harder if I added numbers or characters.

• “Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password—“V*!amYEg5M5!3R” is one I generated just now with the LastPass system, and you’re welcome to it—and then find a way to store it. Having it written down in your wallet is one, though the paper it’s on shouldn’t say “Passwords” at the top. The approach I prefer, and use for some passwords, is to entrust them to online managers like LastPass or RoboForm. Even if their corporate sites were hacked, that wouldn’t reveal all your passwords, since the programs work by storing part of the encoding information in the cloud and part on your own machine.

• “At a minimum, any step up from “password,” “123456,” or your own birthday is worthwhile.

• “Finally, use different passwords. Not hundreds of different ones, for the hundreds of different places that require logins of some kind. The guide should be: any site that matters needs its own password—one you don’t currently use for any other site, and that you have never used anywhere else.”

(Thank you, James Fallows!)

I’ve begun to use affirmative passwords and I like it.  It still surprises me when I type in a message to myself in the middle of doing something that’s not at all about me.  See how it works for you and let me know what you think.  Leave a comment or email me.

One of the patterns I sometimes see among my life coaching clients is master level isolation. When you reach a certain level of expertise in your field, you may find yourself without mentors and advisers. Your expertise may be so specialized at this point that even your peers in the field don’t seem like your peers, because your work is so completely different from theirs.  This can be an unanticipated and painful experience.

I’ve known many clients, colleagues, and friends over the years who very comfortably “grew up” in their profession supported and mentored by any number of people “ahead” of them in the field. You may have had this experience as well. These advisers and teachers may have assisted your development in many ways, including:

• providing supervision, collaboration, or individual instruction in your content area
• helping with career development: opening doors for you, suggesting next steps that you might not have thought of on your own, and so forth
• grooming you for leadership in your field
• having confidence in you, believing in you in a way that was meaningful to you

In contrast, you may now find yourself in some of the following circumstances:

• your mentors have retired, died, or moved on
• your own work has outpaced that of the people who used to be your advisers
• your own true desires are at odds with what you have been groomed for, or what your mentors think you should do, so you have some difficult decisions to make: do you disappoint them or yourself?
• you want to discuss something that’s come up in your work, and for the first time you have no one to call on — no mentor, no colleague — no one else would understand
• in some other way you feel isolated

While this is a natural and normal stage in professional life, the felt experience of it can be very disconcerting. It can feel like something is wrong. But the reality is that there’s nothing wrong here — you’re just in a new stage of your work, and this stage can feel lonely.

If you are a modest person, you may have a hard time understanding or acknowledging when you reach this level. You may never, ever feel that the term “master” applies to you. Don’t let this modesty get in the way of your addressing your needs. Find another word for it, re-frame it for yourself somehow, but find some way of alleviating your isolation.

Here are several ways to address the isolation:

a) Reach out to a broader range of people in your field. If your professional connections have been geographically or topically local, then reach out to a wider geographical, international, or topical circle.

b) Become more of a mentor for others: do more for the junior people in your field, such as doing what your mentors and advisers did for you (or what you wish they had done for you).

c) Reach out to master level people in other fields. If you don’t know any, seek out organizations that attract high level professionals from a range of disciplines.  Go to a meeting or two, and if you like the people who are there, get involved with the organization, or at least keep attending their meetings.  You’ll at least meet other people at the master level.

The bottom line most important thing to remember is this: you are always, always, always a work in progress.  If you’re suffering in some way, or even just feeling mildly uncomfortable in your life, don’t conclude that there’s something wrong or that you’re failing in some way.  Figure out what’s going on, and what you can do about it.  Get some life coaching help if you need it.  Moving from discomfort into appropriate action is enormously freeing.