The Magic is in the Process

If you find yourself reading this article, chances are you have been stumbling from one task to the other, with a fixed goal in mind and working hard to reach your objective. For a moment, sit still and breathe slower. Become conscious of what is happening inside you. Suddenly, you become aware of your own presence reading this article. Not your autopilot, but the real you. You may start noticing other experiences, such as hearing the buzz of your computer, or the laughter of a colleague, in the distance, perhaps some children passing in the street, depending on where you are, you will even hear the birds and the sound of the trees moving with the wind. Those are sounds you heard many times before, but now you become aware, you are listening to them.

The awareness of where you are and who are at this very moment, can be very powerful in your life.

You may be thinking that I should be writing this article in the self help or metaphysical section. So why are you reading this when all you were looking was for some business and career advice?

So this is how this article can help you.

Do you have a plan?
Do you have a real concise plan for your life?
Have you actually ever drawn it on a large paper or does it sit in some corner of your mind?
Is your plan a flat line with a series of A to B to C to Z, or a more complex staircase with timings and experiences and a signal at the top of the staircase that indicates your “goal"?
Is your plan something that you bring along with you to career discussions with your supervisor to indicate that you really have a plan, and you are not just simply going with the flaw?

I met some very incredible people with a very concise plan. It feels as if they have perfect control of their careers, they know where they are going, they know what they want, they know what they need to achieve, they make adjustments to their master plan with incredible discipline, and they get there, it seems a lot faster than their fellow without the plan. But when I looked closer to their lives, their lives were pretty miserable in many other ways.

I have also met some other very incredible people with another vision. They still have a plan, they are intelligent and have goals and aspirations. But they don’t have the stairway to their heaven. There is no staircase, because every day, every minute shapes their life. They live pretty much for the moment, they enjoy or dislike what they do each minute of every hour of every day. They are so focused on the very moment before them, which, for some reason, things do end up falling in place as they should. Not necessarily as per plan, but certainly in the way that they were meant to be.

Earlier in the year I learned a very powerful lesson during a meditation session with Dr. Steven Farmer, a powerful shaman who teaches you how to connect with your power animal and obtain guidance and wisdom. My power animal is the unicorn.

The unicorn teaches you that the magic is in the process.

Every time that you look at the end-result, some of that magic goes away. The creative process is most rewarding when you concentrate on the task at hand, when you don’t think about the end-result, when you don’t judge yourself about how what you are doing will look at the end. It is about giving your very best, about working with love and commitment, on that moment. Nothing can fail when done in such a way. You are meant to be successful and the result is meant to be wonderful. I am not saying work without a vision, I am only saying “let the vision become your inspiration, not your goal”

I carried my staircase to success printed on an A3 paper for many years. I had clear ideas and timings and very ambitious plans. I never reached the top of the staircase, but I felt so exhausted in trying, that it felt as if I would have climbed my own plans using only my finger nails to hold me in place.

Since I apply the principle that the magic is in the process, I found myself totally relaxed and happy. My life has since been an explosion of opportunities filled with amazing adventures that I never would have even considered in my large A3 staircase to success. Like the day I walked in the streets of Sitka in Alaska, only to find Saint Michael's church and the same tiny candles that I had found years before in a small church in Moscow near the red square. I never thought I would ever find those candles again. I gave up on my search for them years ago because I had only seen them in that church in Russia. But I found them in Sitka, Alaska. And it was never part of the plan.

The Innocence of Age

I wonder if experience comes with age, or with certain exposure to a certain subject. Let me give you an example: you are 60 years old, and you worked all your life in the same office doing the same job, let's say handling the contracts of your division. People around you will call you very experienced at what you do. Then a new 32 year old employee arrives at your office, and she has worked in at least five different countries handing very different types of contracts in very different types of working environments.

Who is more experienced? You, who had done the same type of contract deals for the last 40 years or her, who has been exposed to a bigger pot of contracts?

In many places, you will be the guru of contracts, since you’ve done your work for 40 years! The 32 year old employee will be work in progress, certainly not someone with your level of “experience” because she is only 32 right?

Well, I think is wrong. To me, she is probably as experienced as you are, because while you sat for the last 40 years doing the same job, she rapidly acquired a very large amount of experienced in a very short period of time, that it took you decades to acquire. So, though my example is quite radical, it is very possible that a younger person is a lot more experienced than an older person doing the same type of job. Now, try to demonstrate that.

I think bosses love the age technique to prevent you from moving forward too fast. In my own experience, every time I felt ready to tackle the next challenge, I was told I was too young. It seems I was always too young. Even when my first grey hair appeared, still I was a toddler to my boss. I was anxious to learn to walk, but he insisted I kept crawling.

I was too young all my life at work… until I resigned from my job. Then, out of the blue, miraculously, I grew up. The first question I was asked was: “how old are you?” and my interviewer made no effort to hide his horror. I was not too young anymore. Now I was suddenly too old to start a new career. Was I mad?, how could I start all over again at my age (despite being only in my early 30s).

So this is the innocence of age. You are too young to move forward, too young to progress, too young to ask for a pay raise, too young to be promoted, too young to handle more responsibility. But dish it all, start again from scratch, and out of the blue, you are too old. People then think you are too old to start again. You go from toddler to be elder in a few seconds. And you probably wonder how it all happened so fast.

So if you are stuck in the “age and experience” dilemma let me share with you the following:

1. You can be 17 going on 70. Our world is so interactive and rich that you can live so many more experiences so much faster than your grandparents ever did. Just sharpen your senses and be willing to experience the “experience”.

2. You are never too young to succeed. If age is holding you back, probably it is a good time to go on your own. Try the entrepreneur route. You will be able to travel at your own pace, nobody to tell you that you are still a toddler, when you know well that you already run in the Olympics!

3. You are never too old to start all over again. You actually never start from scratch, life is such a combination of lessons learnt that when you “start all over again” what you are doing is just choosing a new road with all the learning from the past.

4. If you are 70, don’t think that you know it all. If you are 17, don’t think either that the 70 year old one looking through his glasses right at you, didn’t go what you went through. You don’t have to experience every bump in the road, that 70 year old might be just what you need to experience life in a better way!

The CPR of Office Dynamics: Competition, Purpose, Reward. (October 4, 2009)

The CPR of Office Dynamics: Competition, Purpose, Reward. (October 4, 2009)
By Maria Carolina Cruz

Have you ever taken a personality and career test?. My test results indicate that I am a very non-competitive person, but I am very reward oriented, and though I can succeed at almost any task given to me, it seems I can only engage in tasks that I absolutely love. Most of the people that know me will say that I am very competitive, and they think that I can perform in many tasks regardless of the topic and result. It is nothing farther from the truth. I am absolutely non-competitive and I am definitely motivated by the subject of my efforts and the associated reward.

When I first took my personality test several years ago, the human resources advisor that helped me with the interpretation of my results highlighted that my motivation to act upon reward scored the highest in the scale of my personality traits. Her advice was simple. She said to me: in the workplace, men are not accustomed to deal with women who are reward oriented. Do not bring the subject of reward to your boss, or you will seem pushy. Male bosses are not accustomed to deal with female subordinates who talk about pay raises, bonuses and promotions. So highlight your other attributes but keep this one under control because you will not be understood.

Oh, I get it- I thought- no wonder why men make more money than women in jobs where men and women are equally qualified. Perhaps since we are little girls we are taught exactly what the HR advisor told me. It is not correct for girls to ask for more money or a deserved promotion or a bonus for a great job. No, that is just reserved for men. That is why they get all the big bucks, because they are not afraid to ask for rewards. If a man asks for a reward, his male boss will understand and most likely give it to him, but if a woman asks for the same, very likely not only will she be seen as pushy but also not get the reward she is looking for. It may all, in fact, work against her.

Well, you are who you are. I am a reward oriented woman, and it scores so high in who I am, that it is difficult to hide.
This is an example of CPR office Dynamics.
You are a boss and you have a team of three people.
C: A very competitive man,
P: A very purpose oriented cross gender individual
R: A very reward oriented woman.

Let's assume you are a very old fashioned and Machiavellian boss who thinks that “divide and conquer” is the best way to have your team performing at its peak. You assume in your limited managerial intelligence that if your team members compete one against the other, they will all do their best, trying to outperform the other, and you will end up with a team that is performing so good that you will by transitivity law perform good too.

However, here comes the big problem for you as the boss in my example:

C is not going to love it, because he does not have anybody to compete with since his colleagues are not up to for the competition.
P hates the job at hand because most likely you never thought about his-her strengths, and you have given him-her a job that absolutely does not engage him-her.
R is not very happy because most likely she is working for you day and night with the best of her abilities every day of the year, and you will never promote her, give her a bonus or a pay raise.
Then poor you, you wonder why your team is performing so badly.

This article works under the assumption that you (as the boss in this example) have a limited managerial intelligence. It does not make you a bad or limited person. In fact, you will have much other incredible intelligence, but, unless you recognise that your team is not made of clones and robots but of people with different intelligence and personalities, your success may be compromised or your success will happen at the expense of the frustration of your employees.
If you are not the boss, but the guy in the team, it is important that you are able to recognise and understand your main strengths and those of your colleagues.

If you are C. Many competitive women are called names that truly belong to the female dog animal kingdom. But we would not have Dara Torres and Serena Williams if competitive women were wiped out of the planet. Competitive people have been great change agents in our world by catalysing the process of change.

If you are P. What would be of the world without women with a purpose. Just see what the world would have missed if Zainab Salbi and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi would have not driven her purpose to a mission. Purpose oriented people have been great contributors to social causes.

If you are R. Do not make the mistake of assuming that Reward is only monetary. More responsible and complex tasks, appreciation, praising, a dinner for two, a corporate gift for your child, there are countless ways to reward a person. Reward oriented people can drive companies and businesses to the top very fast and are excellent at rewarding the good work of people around. Only have a look at Diane Von Furnstenberg and Megan Smith and all that you can learn from these women.

Have a look at your best traits and do not be afraid to show your true colors. I used to think that the political game was very hard to follow, but I do think that following the political game is the easy way. The less political you are (meaning the more you try to follow the general trend), the more you will have to challenge yourself. However, we are brave and incredible people right? We are not afraid of challenges.