by Caroline Leach | Dec 30, 2015 | Change, Learning, Work/Life
Do habits make us who we are?
Habits inform how we live our lives each day. And over time that adds up to who we are.
Habits underpin the goals we set, often at the start of a new year or season.
Whether it’s exercising more, working better or spending time with loved ones, goals are achieved bit by bit, in the smaller tasks we repeat on a regular basis.
And don’t underestimate how small changes add up. Small Move, Big Change by Caroline Arnold shows the power of “micro resolutions.”
As part of my own year-end rituals, I’m starting a new tradition. It’s called a Daily Dozen, for 12 key habits I’m committed to doing each day.
Some of them are well established, like walking 10,000 steps each day. Others are newer, like power posing for 2 minutes every morning.
The daily dozen concept came from Walter Chauncey Camp. Known as “the father of American football,” Camp devised a set of 12 exercises called the daily dozen while he worked for the U.S. military.
Here’s my daily dozen – 12 exercises for body, mind and spirit:
3 morning pages. Thank you, Julia Cameron, for the brilliant idea of writing 3 long-hand pages every morning, about anything, in a stream of consciousness.
The practice of morning pages clears your minds, helps you solve problems and sets the stage for a highly creative day. Completion time: 20 minutes.
1 power pose. Thank you, Amy Cuddy, for the research-based practice of standing in a power pose for 2 minutes. Your body language really does shape who you are and how you think about yourelf.
But why wait for a stressful situation to try power posing? Pre-emptively, I’m doing a power pose every morning. Arms stretched out, excited about what I’ll do each day and what each one will bring. Completion time: 2 minutes.
2 sets of arm weights. While I understand why weight training should be done every other day to rest tested muscles, it’s hard to remember to do something every other day. It’s easier to do something daily, because it doesn’t require a lot of thought.
So I’ll split up my arm weight regimen. One day I’ll do 2 sets of weights, followed by a different 2 sets the next day. That way it’s daily, but different each day. Completion time: 5 minutes.
2 vitamins. This one’s easy. I’ve been taking vitamins for years. It takes seconds, it’s good for me and it gives me a small sense of accomplishment. This fuels the ability to meet other goals.
Have you ever added a task to your list after you completed it, just for the satisfaction of crossing it off as done? This goal is a similar concept. Completion time: 1 minute.
1 reasonable to-do list. Too often my master list of everything that needs to be done serves as my daily to-do list. Instead, I’ll make a daily list, the night before, of my top 5 priorities for the following day.
Taking inspiration from Tony Schwartz, 1 of the 5 will be a top-of-the-day key project to devote my first focused 90 minutes. Completion time (for the list): 10 minutes.
5 fruits and veggies. This comes from Michael Pollan’s mantra to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” In my case that’s berries with breakfast, salads for lunch and fruits and veggies for snacks.
This is how I lost weight a few years ago. It is painfully true that the really hard part is not losing weight, but maintaining the new weight. Completion time: negligible.
30 active minutes. Successful weight maintenance is easier with daily exercise. That’s been a habit of mine for quite some time. And I’ve upped the ante with my green-day challenge to reach 10,000 steps every day.
It’s also fun to mix it up and try new forms of exercise. This year I’m looking forward to more stand up paddle boarding and yoga. Completion time: 30 minutes.
3 family member time. Life is full with a spouse and 2 teens in high school plus 1 rescue dog. Sometimes it feels like group texts are our most often used means of communication and connection.
So I sit in the dining room in the evenings, to connect with everyone during homework and dinner time. Besides chatting for a few minutes about everyone’s day, I can do my “homework” from the office while they do theirs. Completion time: variable.
1 blog post. Initially I considered posting daily. But this would not be sustainable with my family and work commitments. What I can do is devote 30 minutes daily to blog-related activities: ideating, reading, researching, writing, posting or publicizing. Completion time: 30 minutes.
30 minutes of reading. Reading helps you relax, focus and learn – whether it’s my daily news ritual or reading to write a blog post. A great idea in Stretch co-authored by Karie Willyerd is to read from 3 different continents, to develop a global perspective. Does The Economist count for multiple continents?
When pressed for time, I can read on my iPad while on the treadmill (see “30 active minutes” above). And reading time counts as blog time (see above) if I’m researching a post. Completion time: 30 minutes.
3 things to be grateful for. Inspired by happiness and habits guru Gretchen Rubin, I end each day by writing down 3 things I’m grateful for. The list goes at the end of my morning pages (see above), hopefully creating a continuous loop of positive thoughts and actions. Completion time: 10 minutes.
7 hours of sleep. This may contribute the most to my well being. Life often feels like a trade-off between being close to caught up on the to-do list and caught up on sleep. But I can accomplish so much more when I’m well rested.
Sleep Cycle to the rescue, here. This app wakes you up at your lightest sleep point during a 30-minute interval that you specify. And it doesn’t subtract restless time, like another tracker I tried, which makes me happier. Completion time: 7 hours.
What’s your daily dozen?
____________
This is my 50th post since launching this blog on New Year’s Day 2015.
While I didn’t hit my goal of 2 posts a week, I’m proud of maintaining this blog during a busy and transformative year.
With 2016’s theme of leaping, I’ll post and publicize twice a week for a total of 100. Game on!
by Caroline Leach | Jun 13, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning, Social Media
Speaking at the Intranet Global Forum this week at USC made me reflect on new ways to work.
At Toby Ward‘s invitation, I joined a variety of speakers including digital luminaries Shel Holtz, Dion Hinchcliffe and Aadam Zaidi.
The focus? The future of corporate intranets, spotlighting the design, governance and management of enterprise and social intranets.
My talk was a DIRECTV case study, looking at how we’re changing the way work gets done in our connected enterprise.
Today it’s more collaborative, productive and innovative. And tomorrow it should become even more so, as technologies and cultures evolve.
It started four years ago when my Communications team began working with the I.T. team to explore technologies for social collaboration.
We began with a vision – to make it easy for employees to connect, collaborate, access and share information with each other and partners, leading to greater engagement and productivity, along with better decision-making and increased innovation.
Our work was informed in part by the McKinsey & Company study, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.
Across four sectors studied, it reported that social technologies improving productivity could potentially contribute up to $1.3 trillion in value. And two-thirds of this amount lay in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises.
Those are hefty numbers. And big potential to achieve.
We embarked on our journey with a group headed by Michael Ambrozewicz on my team, and later joined by Thyda Nhek and Mani Escobar.
We have a great technical partnership with I.T. strategy leader Frank Palase and his team, along with insight from various consulting partners.
Together we could put a social collaboration platform in place, but how could we encourage people to use it? How could we achieve its full value?
We had to make it part of how people did their daily work. Not a separate site that people would visit and engage with when they had time.
It had to be a way to get important work done every day. It had to foster new ways of working, with employees creating content to share in places where teams collaborate in real time.
Senior leader involvement is a key way of doing that. If leaders are active in a social intranet, then employees will join the dialogue and the action.
In our beta phase, I launched a communications leadership blog. My purpose was to encourage the beta participants to experiment and learn. And I’d learn enough about blogging from first-hand experience so I could advise our C-suite leaders on launching and growing their own blogs.
In the next year’s annual leadership meeting, we wove social collaboration into the program.
- Our CEO talked about its importance in the context of our overall business strategy.
- Michael and Thyda manned kiosks and helped leaders set up their profile pages and get started with initial actions, like following colleagues and bookmarking key content.
- Each day I blogged for all employees about what was happening at the meeting. Our CIO jumped in with blog posts and perspectives of his own.
Blogging for me created a “flow state” experience, where time drifts away and I’m completely engaged in the art and craft of thinking and writing. It’s one of the things I wrote about in my very first post.
And it’s one of the reasons I launched this second blog, Leading Communications, earlier this year. I wanted to continue learning, sharing knowledge and engaging in dialogue.
What are we doing with our social intranet today?
First, we’re providing company news and information in real time, that employees can like, share, comment on and add their own perspectives.
Second, key teams are regularly collaborating on projects and keeping their colleagues up to date on emerging industry trends, new technologies and consumer insights.
Third, major work locations and teams use spaces to engage colleagues with relevant information and project-based resources.
And where are we going tomorrow?
First, our social intranet will sustain and build on organizational knowledge. Information is increasingly less likely to be buried in individuals’ email accounts, and more likely to be available for colleagues to access and build upon.
Second, our word-based content is becoming more visual, with photos and videos increasing in importance compared with text. People can process visual information much faster, not to mention that it’s more engaging.
And in our rapidly changing world, that provides tremendous upside. Step by step, we can all make that trillion-dollar value creation a reality.
by Caroline Leach | Apr 28, 2015 | Learning, Work/Life
New Year’s Day always seems so full of promise. Remember that feeling of being on the brink of something great?
That’s the day I launched this blog. My goal was to go on a learning journey to explore the future of corporate communications. I’d post every Tuesday and Friday. Life would be perfect.
This isn’t my first blog. Three years ago I launched a blog on our company’s social collaboration platform. My goal was to drive adoption and role model what colleagues could do with social business.
What have I learned so far from blogging?
Pursue excellence, not perfection. It’s important to write great posts, but it’s also important to publish with some level of frequency. Find the right balance, whether it’s a blog post, a work project or an exercise program. Know when to take the leap. And make the “thumb slam” I wrote about in my first post.
Do your most important work in the morning. That’s the only time you can truly control. Texts aren’t stacking up; people aren’t asking for a minute of your time. This is the best time to do what’s most important to you. For me it might be a blog post or a big work project. Getting something important done first thing makes me happier and more productive for the rest of the day.
Don’t be afraid to look silly. In launching social collaboration at work a few years ago, I felt out of my element. But I realized I could learn what I needed to know. I started an internal blog to share my learning journey and ask for help from others. Earlier this year I debated whether to post “What’s Your Theme for 2015?” It seemed too soft and self-revealing. But I gave it a thumb slam. And 2,154 views and 61 comments later, I’m glad I did. Colleagues inspired others by sharing their themes for the year – from brave to intentional and from growth to transformation and more.
No one knows all the answers. Doesn’t it always seem like everyone else but you has it all figured out? Except they don’t. And the way to figure it out is by doing it. One step at a time. Have a plan, sure, but take in feedback along the way and make adjustments as you go. Pamela Druckerman summed it up well as, “everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.”
Work and life are one in the same. No more searching for an elusive work/life “balance.” They are one in the same, and it makes life easier to approach it as one big mashup. What am I learning in one area of my life that I can apply in another? And as my HR colleague Linda Simon wisely says, “enjoy every day.”
On New Year’s Day as I was fine tuning my first post and figuring out how to point the servers with my domain name to WordPress, my husband, Kevin, made me a cake. The one that opened this post. Sweet.
And although my posts aren’t perfect and neither is my life, there’s joy in losing myself in the thinking, the writing and the learning. Sweet.
Recent Comments