Hello Blue Tiger Leadership Clients, Family, Friends, and Fans,

Here are a few articles from the Harvard Business Review that feel relevant to our clients', colleagues', and our own experiences. There are learning points for leaders of teams, members of teams, and individual contributors, alike. TLI Registration

We hope you will find just one small, actionable item that you can do each day to give yourself, and your team, a way to stay emotionally connected and as healthy as possible in all ways physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

• Is Your Team Solving Problems, or Just Identifying Them?  – Some of us are on, or have developed, teams that are excellent at spotting potential problems. While skepticism and critical thinking are valuable skills, their overuse may be demotivating, or may actually prevent the problems from being addressed once identified.
• Your Burnout is Unique. Your Recovery Will Be, Too – Many of us are feeling some form of fatigue and/or burnout - they're not the same. Once again, this article offers ways to consider how individual team members and leaders alike can find ways to address the burnout they may be feeling right now.
• Your Video Bird Photo Dose of Upliftment – Did you know there is a Bird Photographer of the Year award? Here are some images submitted by finalists. We're pretty sure there's something in here for everyone.

Enjoy!

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

The Blue Tiger Leadership Team

May You Be Well –

Are you grappling a bit with this new normal? Blue Tiger Tips are here, to help you navigate this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) and ever shifting environment.

We hope you will find just one small, actionable item that you can do each day to give yourself, and your team, a way to stay emotionally connected and as healthy as possible in all ways physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

Compassion is the Way Forward – It seems like even the easy things are difficult and the idea that we can just gut it out and push forward may be waning. Many of us have come to realize that holding our breath until we are through the tunnel is not a sustainable means of coping. It is time to learn to breath while we are still moving through the passage because it turns out we don’t really know how long it is after all. There are many different emotional reactions to driving through a tunnel without knowing where the end is; anger, frustration, grief, confusion, melancholy, fear, humor, and others. I’ve witnessed a number of different intense emotional reactions on phone calls and on Zoom lately indicating that people are stressed to a level that is nearly untenable. It is telling that every section of the “Wheel of Life” (You can take a quick visual assessment here) is impacted for each one of us to varying degrees. We need heavy doses of compassion for ourselves as well as our coworkers right now.

For Yourself: Do you have a daily practice that helps you build tiny bits of resilience into each day? A 2-minute meditation practice, an afternoon walk, a delicious piece of candy, a morning journaling exercise, an hour on your calendar just for you? It’s imperative that we create the spaces that feed our joy, nourish the positive brain chemistry, and keep our batteries from becoming depleted.

For Your Coworkers: Are you recognizing emotions coming up in conversations, or maybe a larger sense of being disengaged, or checked-out? A compassionate action would be to offer a pause in a conversation and ask, “what might be most helpful to you right now?” It might be a reschedule of this planned conversation, a discussion about a more flexible work arrangement, or just a moment to acknowledge that things are really difficult and there are no easy answers. People are juggling more than we can even comprehend in any given moment right now, just a small compassionate pause can go a long, long way to connect and ground in the now.

Practice Letting Go -  I’d bet that most of us would agree that there is so much out of our control right now. Yet, I would posit that this is probably more of a truth all the time than we allow ourselves the power to recognize.  Most of life runs outside of our real control, but we fool ourselves into thinking that we do have jurisdiction over much more because that feels safer, more satisfying, and powerful. It causes me to wonder what would shift, alter, re-organize if we were to lean into the idea that now is no different than always, it’s just much more apparent. If most of what goes on day to day is out of my control, where could I center myself in a place of choice that gives me clarity and leaves me feeling empowered? Where are the areas that I have small choices to make? I can choose whether to have coffee or tea in the morning; I have control over whether I get up for that walk I promised myself; I get to decide where my boundaries are for working on the weekends, etc.

I can’t control if a loved one gets sick, yet I can choose how I’d like to respond after the initial emotions wash over me. Allowing myself the space to have that wave of emotions actually becomes a piece of what I can control – it’s normal and healthy to have emotions and if I let them work through me rather than trying to “control” them by blocking it, I will be in a much better position to respond with clarity rather than react.

Your Video Dose of Upliftment – This entry comes from the website "The Kids Should See This." More often than not, the grown-ups would love it, too! https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/kintsugi-court-victor-solomon-video

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

Michelle, Phil, Jaclyn & the Blue Tiger Leadership Team

May You Be Well –

Hi Folks, Phil here again with a few more 'personal growth' focused tips that can easily be applied to the workplace.

New Habits – During this past week, while Blue Tiger Leadership was on vacation, I wanted to build a new habit around using some kettlebells, that I got from a friend, for working out at home.

There are tons of great books about habit-building, and I decided to use similar concepts from two of my favorites: Atomic Habits, by James Clear, and The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

From The Power of Habit (and from MIT research):
Habits work in 3-step loops: Cue, Routine, Reward.

From Atomic Habits:
To form habits you must make them Obvious, Attractive, Easy, and Satisfying.

New Habit - Start swinging kettlebells.

To cue using the kettlebells, I simply leave them out in plain sight. They sit on the corner of an all-purpose mat near where I work. I see them early in the day and walk past them multiple times. When I see them, I think, “Have I swung them yet today? If not, pick one up!”

I then engage in my routine, using them to do a basic beginner's workout that I can repeat as many times and I'm feeling up for. I spend the next hour or so noticing that my joints feel looser and I feel better. My Reward!

Leaving out my kettlebells makes them obvious, and easy. The fact that they are new to me and a novel way to exercise makes them attractive and satisfying.

Thanks to the guidance in these books, and a little bit of willpower, I've met my goal of using the kettlebells at least once per day every day since July 1st. What should I try next?

Compete or Collaborate - Or, How a stuck Brita filter provided a cool glass of reflection.

Living and working under the constraints of safe distancing and the challenges it introduces has required vastly increased problem solving for many of us. How to parent? How to be a friend/be social? What “going” to work looks like? How to keep from turning into a slug after a day in Zoom? We’ve all had many challenges to contend with and address productively as we try to solve for the new normal.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that when my second Brita filter in a row stopped letting any water pass through it, I got a little irritated. I wanted justice. I wanted them to be wrong, me to be right, and them to send me two (or more!) replacement filters. I found the customer service form on their website, and settled in to write an angry email, conveying my irritation and convincing them to send me some new filters ASAP. But a funny thing happened.

As I angrily typed, it occurred to me that a) they, being the filter manufacturers, might actually have some good tips for fixing the filter, b) I hadn’t tried solving the problem myself yet, and c) that the filter in my dispenser was my last, so even if they sent one by mail, I’d still have no filtered water until it arrived. Suddenly, the idea of being ‘right’ or 'winning' felt like shooting myself in the foot, and like it would keep me from collaborating with them, the experts, on what I really wanted - a solution that would get me filtered water right away.

I erased what I’d written and shared only the facts, asking for guidance or replacements if we couldn’t make it work. Then I hit send.

I stood up, no longer wanting to ‘win’ but to solve the problem, which I remembered I could do for/by myself. I pulled the filter out, gave it a shake, flushed it, replaced it, and sure enough, water flowed again. Two hours later, I received a response from Brita giving me the exact same advice, plus a few other things to try, along with an offer of further assistance if these didn’t work.

I’m now thinking about the places where being tired, frustrated, or skeptical that I’ll get help puts me into a competitive, win/lose mindset, and how much more I’m living my values and being productive when I'm in a collaborative, problem-solving mindset. I’m surprised to have gotten this reminder from a silly water filter— it didn’t say anything about good attitude on the box—but these days, I’ll take all the help I can get.

If you’re looking for a great resource on mindset, take a look at the book of the same name, Mindset, by Carol Dweck.

Your Biweekly Does of Upliftment – Michelle found video of a music teacher who wrote a song we feel perfectly captures the mood of the past four months.

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

Michelle, Phil, Jaclyn & the Blue Tiger Leadership Team

May You Be Well –

Team Culture – When we think of team culture, we sometimes think it’s about how many free lunches we have together, or that time we did “team building” and went bowling. Culture is a difficult concept to nail down but at its core are the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors shared by the people on a team. It’s not the “what” we do together, it’s the “how” we do it. Team cultures are influenced by the overarching organizational culture, but it’s the smaller groups that most impact each person positively, or negatively. In a nutshell, culture is created by people. Sometimes culture isn’t really noticed until times get tough, then suddenly we notice something’s missing.

In this new normal we’re navigating, people are no closer than six feet and you can only see their eyes, or they appear on a flat digital device. This makes our culture more important than ever. That invisible connection between people on a team is what will keep them engaged from a distance. There are three important aspects to culture: mission and values, relationships built on trust, and communication.

1. Mission and Values are the invisible poles that mark the boundaries for a team. It’s helpful to revisit the mission and values to see if you’re still on the right track or if you need to make some adjustments due to current circumstances. It’s especially important in this crisis time when everyone is traversing their own personal path through a multitude of unknowns. Reminding one another where you’re headed, and why, keeps the team’s path lit. Spend a one-hour meeting interacting with your mission and values, and see what might need to shift or be adapted for these uncertain times.
2. Relationships built on trust are the hearty foundation for all team members to stand on in good times—but even more so when times get rough. Teammates and managers are still connecting around their work tasks during social distancing, however there are many new opportunities to take advantage of. One leader I’m working with has recognized that, though she had decent relationships with her direct reports and teammates, there were many times when she would prioritize the work over the relationship. She has decided to use this time to reach out in a concerted way to connect with people and take the time to ask specific questions about how they are, not just what they’re doing. This is creating more cohesive relationships in each facet of her professional life which will only serve to enhance the team culture over time. What would happen if you took the time to make just one phone call every other day to someone on your team, or in your organization? Have a few questions at the ready to spur dialogue and see what you might create.
3. Communication is key whether we’re all in one building or spread out across the world. Teams without it really aren’t teams, they are a group of individuals with the same email address. Good messaging takes some forethought and time, but it pays huge dividends. It’s all too easy to jump on a Zoom call and tell, tell, tell without ever knowing if a single person was truly listening. Real communication goes in both directions and needs the attention and engagement of every person on the team. One way to get more interaction is to ask everyone to be prepared to speak, cameras on, and try having a whiteboard or a shared google doc up so that all can participate in taking notes together. If it’s a relatively small group of 10 or less, it can also help to have everyone unmuted, so interacting is easy and doesn’t include the pause to look for the unmute button, or “hey, Dan, you’re on mute” types of delays in natural conversational speaking. The team can create ground rules together around these things and we’ve witnessed some teams become better versions of themselves through this process.

Neural Networks – We are spending an inordinate amount of time in front of our screens and devices lately and I’ve found it fascinating to notice time shrinking and expanding in different ways. For instance, sitting down to write Tuesday’s Tips should only take me about two hours. However, if I have my phone in front of me, my email on screen, my messenger app and calendars up, invariably it will take me two days to write. Why? Because our brains are wired to focus on one thing at a time. We have been fooled into thinking that we can multi-task and what happens instead is that time shrinks. For example, I begin a stream of thought and then my email notifies me Gary just sent me something, so I switch screens to check it out. Oh, just an update for our meeting later, nothing I need to do. Okay, now where was I again? I reread my paragraph to get back in flow and out of the corner of my eye my phone blinks with a text from my mom. She’s letting me know her dog food delivery arrived. Okay… Let’s see, where was I? I begin writing again and maybe get two sentences in and my office phone rings. I turn to see who the caller ID is and realize it’s AARP calling again to remind me I now qualify. For Pete’s sake, it’s been 30 minutes and I have one paragraph written. In neuropsychological terms these are “task switching costs” and can add up to a loss of 40% of your daily productivity.

The refund to this high price is focusing on one thing at a time. David Allen helped me look at my work differently years ago with his book “Getting Things Done,” but I have struggled recently spending so much time in the office. I turned back to what I know to be true about the human brain, it needs distraction free zones to be at its best. So, I turn off all notifications, shut down email, messenger, calendars, turn the office phone volume off, and turn Do Not Disturb on my cell phone – it’s exhausting just writing out all those distractions. Now, I can get into my writing flow and feel time beginning to expand! I was able to write extra Tuesday Tips material in two hours that I can keep for next time. I’m even further ahead than I expected. It’s almost magical. AND when I turn email back on, it only takes me 15 minutes to respond. Wait a minute, I have spent whole days chasing email, how can it be that I completed that in 15 minutes? Distraction free time expansion, that’s how.

I encourage you to just try it once in the next two weeks and let us know how it worked for you. I’m going to bet you’ll be surprised at how much your brain will reward you for it.

Your Biweekly Does of Upliftment – Our very own Phil Incorvia has begun creating some short tips via video segment so we are debuting his work here this week with a tip to try different methods of structuring our days.

Also, this joy-filled musical number by Jimmy Fallon, Roots and the cast of Hamilton will put a kick in your step. The movie version is coming out July 3 (on Disney +) if you haven’t had the opportunity to see it on Broadway. EXCITING!

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

May You Be Well –

RAIN – Not only are we seeing a lot of it in the Pacific Northwest lately, but I’ve also found myself using it in great depth over the last few weeks. In May 19 Tuesday Tips I discussed Radical Self-care and how to use RAIN, which stands for Recognize what is happening; Allow the experience to be there; Investigate with interest and care; Nurture with self-compassion. I don’t know if there’s ever been a more appropriate time to use this process than right now as we face multiple multi-layered crises together.

I made a commitment to listen deeper, educate myself further, and find ways to effect large scale change in the advancement of racial equity. As I started wading through the emotions of listening deeper, I bumped into some extremely unsavory realizations. First, I found that I wasn’t really listening as deeply as I could be, and I had a choice in that moment to turn away from the truly uncomfortable feelings inside. I began with Recognizing what is happening – this is the first step in my personal journey toward fully coming into realization of my white privilege. There was a strong tendency toward severe negative self-talk at first and instead I chose to Allow the experience of discomfort to be there. I didn’t fight it, or scream at it, or look away from it. I just sat there with it, me and it, side by side, in one another’s presence. As the waves of emotion subsided, I was able to then Investigate with interest and care what was in front of me. I played back the story of my upbringing with wider eyes this time, seeing what I didn’t see before. It wasn’t pleasant, much of it was ugly, but shining light on it reduced my fear of looking directly at it. I Nurtured with self-compassion and found that berating myself isn’t the way forward, it only serves to keep me stuck and bound up in my own shame and fear of doing or saying something wrong. Nurturing that tender place in me gives me the strength to participate in nurturing others’ pain.

Let me be abundantly clear, this was not, is not, and will never be a one-time event. This is a commitment to living in the world differently and giving myself the space to RAIN every time I bump into that which needs to be processed and healed.

I invite you to find just one element of your life that could use a little RAIN this week. As Brene Brown says, “Pain that is not transformed will always be transmitted.”

Empowered Storytelling – In order to create the world we want to live in, it’s important to first create that fertile inner landscape that can fuel our desires and propel us forward. One way to do that is through a writing ritual called Empowered Storytelling. Spend 5-10 minutes daily writing out a stream of consciousness about aspects of your “ideal” life, ie. joy, confidence, creativity, freedom, etc. The key is to word this in present tense not future tense. Doing this on a regular basis helps anchor into the knowing that all these things exist already inside you. They are not “out there” waiting for you to attain them once you’re changed, fixed, improved in some way. You are born with these aspects of your very own personal version of perfection even if they are sometimes obscured by clouds of fears, false ideas, or mind-numbing chatter. Writing helps us to remember them. We received this tip from John Mermin who learned it from his mentor/coach Kevin Doherty. Thanks for sharing John!!

Your Biweekly Dose of Upliftment – Some of you may be familiar with the spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle who wrote the best-selling book The Power of Now. He has a free mini-series that I have found useful for these times that are asking us more and more to go within and uncover, discover, recover. The first one can be found here:  https://consciousmanifestation.eckharttolle.com/the_first_step_of_conscious_manifestation39077931

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

May You Be Well –

Start With Heart – It has been an enormously emotional few months and the past week…the past week witnessing the murder of George Floyd defies words. It is a tragedy of epic proportions that didn’t start this week, it started decades ago, and we have not fixed it. I am clear that saying nothing is not the option I choose and yet I also don’t know what to say. Anything I feel or think pales in comparison to the excruciating pain being experienced by Black, Indigenous, Mixed, and People of Color (BIMPOC). So, I’m going to start with heart.

I have spent years teaching that leadership begins on the inside and flows to the outside through our behaviors. I believe that vulnerability is the way to build trust as a foundation for change and our voices are the pathway to freedom. It is more important that I say something, so I’m going to stop worrying about saying it right and just say it from my heart.

I’m sorry for my ignorance and I’m committed to listening deeper and becoming further educated to effect large scale change. All of us must keep our hearts open and keep communicating no matter how difficult it feels, and especially when it feels profoundly uncomfortable inside. These unpleasant emotions often point to where something of deep importance is to be mined. I recognize that there is no knot big enough in my gut that could possibly outweigh what people of color face every single day.

I don’t know what it’s like to live as a person of color and here’s what I do know: I grew up in Michigan, was raised by a racist father and I feel a ton of shame.

I fought back hard three years ago when a dear Latinx friend mentioned my white privilege. I was in shock because that sounded like a diagnosis of cancer and I didn’t want it. I worked with conviction my whole life to NOT be that person, never realizing I don’t have to want it, that it just is. Becoming aware of my privilege, accepting that ‘diagnosis’, was my first real step toward understanding what it means. It’s up to me to continue being curious about how that affects my beliefs and choices in the world while educating myself about privilege and the history of racism in this country.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a person of color, but I do know what it’s like to have been married for 17 years to an amazing man of Latinx descent. I have learned, and been deeply impacted, from my experiences living overseas and working with people from 17 different countries. I know what it’s like to feel grief and rage simultaneously and I know the fear I’ve experienced for the past several years each time my husband leaves for work.

We must start somewhere, or we’ll never get anywhere. Many other thought leaders and voices of influence have been all too quiet. We must be willing to provide safe spaces for ourselves, and our peers, to wade into the challenging conversations and help navigate the seas of uncomfortable emotions. I fully realize I’m likely to say things wrong or show my ignorance, and that’s okay for me, and for you. We can’t get better without using our voices and taking actions in a positive direction. The intentions matter on the way to being better humans and the impacts matter even more. All of it deserves deep examination through reflection and discussion. I invite you to start with a small group of trusted friends or colleagues, talk about what you’re experiencing, read (some good resources below), be willing to stay curious and open, notice more. As Brene Brown says, “Pain that is not transformed will always be transmitted.”

“We are not responsible for the past, but we are responsible for our relationship with the past.” — Darrell Millner, emeritus professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, from the Winter 2019 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly

Resources:

I Can’t Breathe – a moving song written and sung by Devin Simpson

Nike Ad - Don't Do It – says a lot in few words

The paper on “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo - http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

The 2018 book, also by DiAngelo, “White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” - https://www.powells.com/book/-9780807047415

A regularly updated Medium Article, “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice” - https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

The Netflix film: “13th” - https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741

The 2016 Documentary: “I am Not Your Negro”, based on writing by James Baldwin (Currently available on Amazon streaming service)

“Between the World and Me”, by Ta-Nehisi Coates - https://www.powells.com/book/-9780812993547

“How to Be an Antiracist”, by Ibram X. Kendi - https://www.powells.com/book/-9780525509288

Please let us know if you find any of these to be helpful and share how you put them into practice. Also, if you have a tip to offer, let us know and we will include it in a future email or video.

We wish for you to find your special ways to thrive through this unprecedented time.

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May You Be Well –