Category Archives: Life Experiences

Life Experiences

Life Isn’t About Being Measured

2 Comments

Woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep.  I wanted to since it’s Sunday morning and a good day for sleeping in.  However, my mind was racing and I could stop the mental chatter.  I’ m hoping channeling some of the racing thoughts into writing will help settle me down.

I have been replaying some comments made by a friend about success.  He was referring to who was ‘most’ successful amongst our colleagues.  The two people he name were for sure the guys who sold the most work and made the most money.  In many ways that may seem like the obvious measure of success.  Those seem like common success measures.  I think about clients who put together performance measures and often sales and revenue are fairly high on the list if not the list.

I get that for a company to stay in business sales and revenue are important but I don’t think they are a very useful measure of success.  We talk about vision meaning something noble or a reason to rally and stay together through highs and lows.  I do think that selling for someone who is passionate about connecting to people and understanding their needs and wants can be noble.  I can also believe that making significant revenue can pull people together.  Still I am not sure sales and revenue measure success.

I guess I believe success is much more personal.  I have gotten to know people who by the above standard of success should see themselves as very successful but don’t.  We’ve all heard the statement – “money can’t buy success” and I imagine some of us have wished we could test that statement ourselves.  Having had times of pretty good revenue and times of none, I do get it’s not about the cash flow.  Sure having some does help my ego but money isn’t sustaining or for that matter meaningful. Also selling has only been noble for me when I truly believed in the product and of course then never really felt like I was selling at all.

You may be wondering why is this keeping me up?  I think because there have been too many times in my life when success was measured generally and I watched or worse found myself trying to measure up only to discover later I had lost my ‘real’ direction.

Take tennis – I was very good.  For a long time I never lost and soon I thought winning was the measure of success.  However, winning soon became something that kept me in a very tight box.  I wasn’t willing to try new shots or a different serve.  I became fearful of losing and soon tennis was not the game I loved.

Take cancer – I am considered to have been successful at cancer.  Sure I am alive so that is a definite success.  But am I more successful then someone who died? No  Cancer more then anything else taught me that it’s not about how anyone including me measures a life tomorrow.    It’s only about how I choice to live today.

We are too easily convinced that there is some way to measure if we are doing well or succeeding in life.  May be it is sells and revenue, may be it’s how long we live, may be it’s if we’re married or how well our children do, may be it’s the number of times we win or the kind things we do.

Then again may be we are not here to meet performance measures.

Life Experiences

What Am I Really Crying About?

1 Comment

I have been traveling.  Taking a road trip from Seattle to Montana.  It seems when I am driving I am less inclined to pull out my computer at night or for that matter anytime.  Anyway I am behind on blog posting.  The trip was excellent.  I was able to ride with the top down most of the way and the temperature was a mild with blue skies overhead.

Basically, I moved to Montana over a year ago; however  kept a place in Seattle where our company is headquartered.  Slowly, I have scaled down the office in Seattle and finally made the call to bring both vehicles to Montana.  I find myself dealing with more transition and loss with this trip than I did after selling the house and moving most of my personal life.  This might reflect the fact that I never enjoyed living in Seattle.  Wasn’t able to find and maintain the right level of connection for me.  I had lots of friends and yet it never seemed easy to connect and do things together.  Now my work  – that was different.  Thrive! was started in Seattle and thrived there – as did I.  So maybe the process of scaling down the office is a bit more of a loss for me than the personal move.

It is not like I won’t be back.  We have a number of clients there which we will continue to work with, and as a result, will be traveling out that way quite regularly. So what makes this so hard?  Office space is rented, the VW Bug was the last real asset to be moved. Plus, we are shifting our business focus – instead of an independent consulting firm we are aligning ourselves as Table Group Consulting Partners.

I would have thought driving a huge moving truck would have been the catalyst for dealing with any loss or dislocation issues.  Instead, it seems driving the convertible VW Bug brought up much more grief, as did letting go of our business independence.  Seattle was never my home personally, but it was where I found my passion in terms of work and career.

I remember when I left Gabriola Island – the last place I called home.  What was calling me was creating a business, a partnership and work that I found fulfilling.  Stepping back out in the world as the person I had become after cancer and close to ten years of reinventing myself.  Our decision to start Thrive! did not come at the best of times for starting a business, post 9/11, but wet we did great.  We have never had to market and have always found work we needed and wanted over the last seven or eight years.  Sure, there were times when we were slow but we’d connect with clients and generate new leads and we found our own voice and way of working.

When the move to Montana came, we were starting the shift to align ourselves with The Table Group more.  Now, we are not creating ourselves the way we were when we started Thrive!.  Instead, we are using material created for the most part by The Table Group.  As a result get more visibility and larger pool of potential clients, but we aren’t quite like we were.

I know this is good move. Just like I know bringing the Bug over the mountains is also good. What I didn’t count on was feeling this sense of loss.  I do know now that there is something going on as we scale down Thrive! and align ourselves with The Table Group that involves letting go.  We can’t really be something new until we let go of the old.  I think the drive was part of that process.

Transitions are never predictable.  We all do the psychological adjustment to a change in our own time.  I teach this, but living it is something else all together.  Good thing I had the chance to take the drive.  Now I know I need to do the rest of the work.  I hadn’t realized what I was letting go of.  I get why I might feel like crying now.  It also makes this blogging even more important.  It seems to be the path I am using to reinvent myself.  The same way I did when we started Thrive!  I can only hope it leads to the same fulfillment and success!

Life Experiences

Cycling Through 50 & Beyond

1 Comment

I will be turning 50 in 2010.  As a way of marking the significance of the year I am planning a bike touring trip with friends in Croatia.  I have entertained the idea of a fancy bike tour in Europe for years.  Many things have stopped me from making the trip happen.  I did not want to ride alone and the last time I did any touring in Germany that was the case.  Now I have a partner and some friends who are game for riding as long as we have a sag wagon and comfy places to rest at night.  Since I am turning 50 I too think comfort and ease is a good idea.

Biking has been a part of my life since I was five and was able to take my first breakfast ride with my father and older sisters to Aunt Sarah’s Pancake House.  I was proud and thrilled to pedal my way to food and have memories of this being part of our family route throughout the first decade or so of my life.

I was not always so joyful about biking with my Dad.  Sometimes he would get us lost or take the longest route between two points possible, and as a young kid, I thought that was unnecessary.  However, my dad is turning 90 and still bikes, actual these days he rides a fancy recumbent trike.  So I am thinking something must right about his biking style.  I can only hope at 90 I am still riding.

Over the years between five and forty-five I have had a variety of biking moments.  I became a bit of a biking snob for a while, priding myself in having the best gear and using my bike as a primary means of transportation.  I had a brief desire to bike across the country, but after a few treks down the east coast, found biking on America highways not so great.  I stayed off the road on trails for awhile after that.

Throughout my biking life I have continued to take a few rides each year with my dad.  He has gotten out on his bike most every day since retirement.  On his 80th, the whole family gathered to take the big bike ride to the local ice cream parlor, instead of Aunt Sarah’s.  Following my dad’s path, the ride took considerably longer than the five mile distance between where they live and parlor – but it was his day and it was neat to have three generations of family riding along with my dad leading the way.

A few years ago I invested in a nice road bike.  In many ways I feel like I did when I was five.  I love riding these days.  May be it is the bike – it is light, sleek and fast.  Or may be it is that I am approaching 50 and no longer feel like I need to compete or ride hard.  I simply ride to enjoy the scenery, the freedom.

I sometimes get lost and often take the longest path between two points.  I am guessing I am more like my dad than I ever wanted to admit growing up.

I am about to turn 50 and can’t think of a better way to celebrate than taking a bike ride.  Of course, the tour needs to provide great food and hopefully an ice cream parlor on the big day.  My dad won’t be in Croatia, but I am fairly certain on his 90th this year we’ll be taking a ride somewhere.