Category: outside resource

Become A Superhero

Do you want to become a superhero?

Last week, at my favorite cafe on Newbury Street, I sat in on a talk by Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg, an author for the book, ‘What is a Superhero?‘. I liked the definition she discussed, which comprised of four parts.

1 – Be Super. You don’t need to be from out of this world, or have an ability that is beyond natural, but her criteria covers mortals with a capability on the upper tail of the bell curve of human knowledge & skills. I would argue it doesn’t have to be physical or strength-related. This is your super-power.

2 – Be a Hero. Do selfless acts. And not just once. I guess it’s a given that you primarily use your super-power while being selfless. Superheros are usually saving lives. Does that mean you have to save lives as well? More on that in a bit.

3 – Have an Alter Ego. If you’re going around not being normal (see Be Super, above), have an identity that embraces this, which might have to do with owning your new reality, psychologically. Think about how hikers of the Appalachian Trail take on different names.

4 – Have a Uniform. A costume, not necessarily all Spandex, extends the alter ego to being accepted by others, not just yourself.

What I find interesting about points 3 & 4 is that while, yes, you don’t need them to be effective (be a hero via your super-power), it allows you to be a normal human: mortal, fallible, someone who doodles when on the phone.

About saving lives… I asked the good doctor / author if this criteria for being a hero could be massaged to improving lives. She thought of a hero as one out to do good. Ha – selflessly do good. So, use your super-power to do good unto others.

Do you want to become a superhero?

Can you do something so well so as to be considered at the top of your ‘field’? This might be easier to accomplish if you can consider yourself at the top of your field, locally. Think of this super-power as your ‘gift’. This is you creating with your gift.

Can you selflessly do good by positively affecting other people? This might be easier to accomplish if you first think about affecting locally. This is you sharing your gift.

I believe we can all become superheros by creating and sharing our gifts.

Do you want to become a superhero?

Ask yourself: How can I use my gifts to do good?

Bust A Rut

One of the biggest things I got out of reading ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne was the idea of a Secret Shifter:

Secret Shifters, such as pleasant memories, nature, or your favorite music, can change your feelings and shift your frequency in an instant.

By frequency, she’s talking about the energy you give off to attract the things you really want. If you’re not into that ‘frequency’ and ‘law of attraction’ business, that’s cool. It’s actually not as simplistic as visualizing what you want, because you have to pair that with NOT focusing on what you DON’T want, since, per this game, you’ll just attract that into your life, too. It takes a little work, but that’s not what I wanted to get into. I want to talk about the ‘feeling good’ part.

Before I get into work, and after I leave work, and in the morning if I remember to, I cue up my Secret Shifter, my theme song, Thand101. It’s awesome, I love it. It kind of sounds like a galloping horse when fully orchestrated, and I’ll hum it to myself when I’m feeling awesome, like I’m radiating bad-assery, or I’ll hum it to myself, all morose and in more of a minor key than it already is, as a sympathetic back pat as if to say, “Cheer up, ol’ chap, chin up.” Yeah, that bit comes through in a British accent. Self-talk can get weird.

Martha Beck, life coach extraordinaire, has a version of this which is more involved: ask yourself what is your favorite thing to sense with each of your five senses, then ‘sense’ them. Man, that was a clumsy way to say it. Let’s try this:

Right now, what is your favorite thing to see?
What is your favorite taste?
What is your favorite smell?
What is your favorite touch sensation?
What is your favorite sound?
Now, see that thing, taste that taste, smell that favorite smell, feel yourself touching that favorite… touch, hear that sound. Fully immerse yourself in each of these sensations.

They won’t always make sense to… sense all at once, and that’s not the point. You’ll most likely smile, and you’ll take deeper breaths, and your shoulders will slump a little, and you’ll be more present and in your body – that’s the point.

As hustlin’ and bustlin’ humans in the first world, most of us reading this, myself included, we’re often focused on the future or the past, and not in the present. That’s a pretty broad and accusatory statement, so I invite you to analyze that for yourself: are you limiting yourself with regret (past-focused) or worry (future-focused)? One way to bring you back in the present is to then bring you back into your body (vs. your head), and what better way than by sensing. Sure, the fantasy of favorite senses isn’t real, but it uses what your body does to result in a smile.

So there you have it, folks. To bust a rut, immerse yourself in a Sensory Meditation or use a Secret Shifter. This stuff works for me, and yes, the language here can be a little ‘woo-woo’, sure, but we’re not talking about reconnecting with the greater consciousness of the universe (or are we…), we’re just talking about feeling better.

Find Your Path via Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize winner of a poet. In 1992, she wrote The Summer Day. Pause after the last two lines.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You’re saying my one life is ‘wild and precious’? Hmm, waking up day to day is now colored so strikingly and ephemerally. Ponder that question. I know I am.

Art of the Possible

In one of his Google Tech Talks, Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum, uses the term ‘Scrum-but’ to describe companies that incompletely implement the software development framework. When he consults, he’ll hear, “Yeah, we do Scrum, BUT…” and then some reason why they’re not a pure Scrum shop. In my head, they’re showing Sutherland around and at some point, flash-mob-style, folks congregate around the ping-pong table and sing it a la Annie:

It’s a Scrum-but life, for us,
It’s a Scrum-but life, for us,
Our velocity’s not – so – sweet,
But our process can’t – be – beat,
It’s a Scrum-but life!

And this is the reality of it. Here you are, introducing the new kid process on the block, leading the crew with a new philosophy as a ScrumMaster, or in ScrumOfOne land, at times competing with the existing processes or priorities of life. I like how Ken Schwaber, co-founder of Scrum, discusses it in his ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum‘ book:

…the ScrumMaster has to operate within the culture of the organization.

The ScrumMaster walks a fine line between the organization’s need to make changes as quickly as possible and its limited tolerance for change.

…sometimes these changes are culturally unacceptable and the ScrumMaster must acquiesce. Remember that Scrum is the art of the possible. A dead sheepdog is a useless sheepdog.

Back in ScrumOfOne land, the organization’s culture is… us. This can make it stressful, but it doesn’t have to be!

I used to hold my personal and formal 15-minute stand-up meeting at 5:31am. Past tense. My stories are not complex enough to be broken into tasks. I haven’t invested in any Sprint Burndown chart. I don’t have a formal demo for myself. I don’t always go through and clearly describe the acceptance criteria per story. I have tried each of these things, but none have stuck thus far.

So did I beat myself up for sucking at my own ScrumOfOne?

Yes.

I’d create stories to add more rigor to my personal development system, and then implement them. Slowly, through practice, I felt more and more in control. Not all processes would stick, though. And did I bet myself up for continuing to suck?

Yes.

At some point, I stopped feeling like a putz for seemingly setting myself up to fail. At some point, Schwaber’s words sank in with the deeper appreciation of that phrase: Art of the Possible. Via finding solutions that were good enough (better than perfect), and working with myself instead of against myself (tendencies, social pressures, bow tie affinity), I understood that this system is fully mine! I don’t have to be pure Scrummin’ if I am getting stuff done while promoting the principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

So you start scrappy, but you’re getting stuff done, a la Jay-Z.

Do Courage to Gain Confidence

What is life? (Baby, don’t hurt me…)

On David DeAngelo’s ‘On Being A Man’ program, he has a guest, Dr. Paul Dobransky, M.D., where he asks this very question. His very answer is:

Life is irritable.

This response is biological (bad pun alert) in nature (sorry), in that lifeforms will purposefully interact with the environment. The environment does something to the life form, and the life form makes a decision to do something else, versus a rock, in his example, which does anything a rock does, passively. Come to think of it, rocks don’t really do; things are done unto rocks. (How embarrassing: rocks can’t even decide to rock out!) Thus, this answer evolves to:

Life makes decisions.

From here, one could say if one stops making decisions, one is dead. One could also say if one makes lots of decisions, one is more alive. And oh man, are some of those decisions not easy to make, usually because of fear. In these cases, to do what is right, even if you are afraid, requires courage. Leaning into this a little more, if you muster courage to do that thing of which you are afraid, you will gain confidence, regardless of the result. For example, if you hate public speaking, yet you speak publicly and flub epically, you just publicly spoke, and your next public speech will be much easier than the first, as would any other kind of speech, especially private speeches.

Onto the blog post title. First of all, you can’t do courage – that makes no sense. You can do courageous acts, but that just doesn’t sound as cool. So, as per Dr. Paul, to gain confidence, y’gotta do courage, which means you’re making decisions, and truly living, by definition. Let’s massage these ideas a little more.

(Explanatory side note: Once upon a time, there was a final exam for Thermodynamics, the class that gives you practical knowledge like the ability to figure out how much energy is necessary to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. I stayed up all night, studying, which was the wrong thing to do. I should’ve checked my email at 8:30 the night before, like the other kids, to read an email from the TA who felt sorry for us, which shared the focus of the test, which were the areas I studied the least, which I found out 30 minutes before the test. Wonderful. I sat with the exam and went to war, the sheet of equations given to us as weapons, and in my tired stupor, I stared at both sets of dead tree. I proclaimed that there was no choice but for everything to make sense, since it’s just cherry picking the appropriate formulas and mathematically mushing ’em together. That was my most memorable private speech and is my default blogging manner, weaving concepts into evolving themes as I validate ScrumOfOne.)

If you are proactive, then you are making decisions, truly living.
If you are courageous, then you are making hard decisions, truly living and gaining confidence.

In my last post, I commented on how doing something, anything, makes you a better person. I like the much simpler thought track in today’s post: doing something, anything, means you are alive, where the more you do, the more alive you are.

A few months back, I commented on a New York Times interview piece, where “the very act of deciding takes courage, since every action has an opportunity cost“. This expands the association of courage to not just decisions that are difficult due to fear, but to decisions in light of context: you are simultaneously deciding what NOT to do. Now, I don’t think you’d really grow your trove of confidence via decisions that are courageous in this broader sense, but the point of that post was the value of prioritization.

Back-tracking to the better accepted connotation of courage, let’s wrap this puppy up with the following:

Do you want to gain confidence?
Make those hard decisions.
Do courage.

That is life.