I’m crazy pleased to announce life(dot)next IV – which will convene this fall in one of my most favorite places in the whole world:  Austin, Texas. Due to high demand, I’m instituting an application process for the retreat. If you’d like to come, please  A P P L Y   H E R E.

And if you’d like to get up close and personal with the way these retreats work, look no further than this photo-filled testimonial.

xo,

Meg

A tension I feel keenly as a manager and an individual is between structure and flexibility.

As a product of over twelve years of parochial schooling, I’m no stranger to structure. (And lots and lots of rules. And nuns.) Academically at least, kid-me thrived in that highly logical and carefully mapped set of routines. But by nature, I’m an adult who wants every day to feel new and different, who kind of hates predictability.

How does this translate to career? I see organizations struggle with leaders who cannot seem to earn the respect or best effort of their people because they:

-fail to provide basic vision
-micromanage unimportant things
-micromanage too-important things
-are simply sleepwalking — never seeing the strengths of the team right in front of them. (That’s a huge fear for me — that I’ll have a blind spot to some talent on my team.)

Here are some easy ways to avoid these pitfalls and strike a balance between freedom and support. (Hint: they apply to you as both an individual contributor and as a leader).
Try these methods with yourself or together as a team.

If you default toward chaos, and need more structure:

• Each week, write a brief but explicit list of goals: three short term, two longer term (developing them as a group makes you all more accountable!)
• Take 10 minutes to make a skills and strengths inventory (don’t over-think it). Share the lists and name the ‘masters’ of certain skills or work areas.
• Gamify team or self improvement. Create a list of things you want to be better at. Then, build incentives (a latte!), deadlines (even arbitrary ones), and calendar appointments (so you aren’t interrupted) to encourage progress on areas needing improvement.

If you default toward routine, and need help innovating:

• Specifically schedule an hour to experiment with new ideas, brainstorm, test, flip, let yourself fumble. (Do this in a room that isn’t your office).
• Go talk to someone you don’t agree with, ask them an honest question – initiate a creative debate!
• Create micro-pauses. Build tiny breaks in your day where you take a deep breath and clear your head for 5-10 seconds. Presence yourself. Either set your phone for a recurring alert 3-4 times per day or better yet, tie the pause to some habit you already have (like turning the key in your office door).

What boundaries keep you creative? I’m curious – let me know what you think.

My amazing friend Laura asked me to write a guest post for a women’s entrepreneurship blog Women With Moxie. Once I accepted I then proceeded to panic just a wee bit wondering what advice I might possibly have to give you all. Then it came to me: spend more time on Pinterest. Enjoy!

Much of the time I do things for others that I cannot do for myself. Hah! Maybe this is typical for women, or moms, or Italian-Americans. Maybe it is just an archaic social leftover. But I often find the motivation for making a grand gesture once there is someone else counting on it, or people who will be the happy recipients of said gesture.

Perhaps my own cultural programming is why, when I learned about “hosting practice” a few years ago, it was instantly appealing to me. Here was a set of methods for working more effectively, getting things done — all strung together with a basic notion of hosting others. The idea was that you could take these methods along with traditional tenets of event planning and create extraordinary spaces that allowed people to come together in deep conversation to solve complex problems and build profound relationships with one another in a fairly short period of time.

A basic definition of host is one who receives other people. This is fascinating to me. By hosting, you are literally opening yourself up to others and inviting them into your space. If you extend that a bit – there’s also the assumption that you are inviting others into a space that is engaging, meaningful, fun.

I first practiced these methods at work, within my own software development team. But I noticed quickly that their application was universal. Soon, each time I considered planning an event, whether it was user testing, a birthday dinner, or a 4-day retreat, I was suddenly seeing everything through the considered lens of a host. For example, it became critical to think a lot about the space or “container” I was trying to create for others to inhabit. What was I inviting people into? What were the elements that might compete for space? What or who must I save space for? What could we accomplish?

These kinds of questions generated more energy. They spurred me on to plan more events, craft more invitations, and practice creating more spaces where imaginative things could happen. For me, it was like finding a tool I didn’t know I’d had all along, and being so eager to use it.

As my hosting practice deepens, it feeds me as much as it feeds the communities with whom I engage. As I create events with a thought toward others, I end up creating a space for myself to thrive as well.

It is weeks like this past week when I wonder how anyone communicates anything to anyone else on the planet.

We humans use language to give format to ideas. When I have an idea, I imagine that thought filtering down through the Rube-Goldberg device that is my mind. And as some other part of me watches the idea travel, I am struck by the effort it takes for that thought to transform into words, leave my body, and pass to some other human.

For an idea to have a life outside my own mind, I have to say it out loud, or write it down, perform it (flail wildly until someone notices). To think of communication that way- that each idea you want to share means you must consciously send it through an obstacle course in order for it to connect with another person… it’s exhausting, right? A fucking hassle, you know?

(Hey scientists, so where is the adapter that allows me to plug directly into another human and exchange ideas, feelings, and information without the need for language?)

But I have a deep love of words and semantics. And while I’ve made it my livelihood, I often feel overwhelmed by the inaccuracy of language. Its nature is <em>approximate</em>. It fails us at a most basic level. Words escape and miss their mark: their sequencing, the exact choice of them, the tone or media they are delivered in, the frame of reference of the people listening. So much is working against us, and still, we manage to connect.

So our ideas are born and we jettison them into the larger world outside ourselves. Except that the second they escape from our heads, the instant the idea is articulated in language, the instant the idea is committed to a medium, two things happen. One: the idea continues to evolve inside your head, even though you sent it out into the larger world. The “pure” form of your original idea only stays in your head for a moment until you begin editorializing and morphing and growing it. (e.g., the poem you constantly revise in your head forever and ever.) Two: now that this external idea has a life of its own, anyone who receives it will put their own spin on it. They now own a version of it, a riff on it. When they in turn spread the idea, they are now explaining it in their own words, and they are giving it new dimension, new consequence.

The really interesting thing here is that the more powerful or influential an idea is, the more people will want to share it. And the more people that share it, the more times that idea is re-articulated. And the more times that idea is re-articulated, the more it is growing, evolving, and shifting its identity. So you could say that the most spellbinding ideas are also the most changeable – those that have been the most tampered with from their first essential and pure state. They are the furthest from the original draft.

That’s really something isn’t it? To think that the ideas we are drawn to most passionately are the ones that change most profoundly.  Ideas we cull from everywhere and everyone in the world: be it novels, newscasts, or meeting notes-  those ideas change in direct proportion to the number of people listening, re-articulating and then spreading them.