Critical Chance

Category: Perspective

  • Relationships: A Simple Way to Stand Out

    Written by David Tillem on May 17th, 2018

10 minute read

    Relationships: A Simple Way to Stand Out

     

    We are in a period of time where people all over the world PERCEIVE that they are the most connected they have ever been.

     

    This is only partially true.  

     

    Facebook lets you see that your old roommate from college just had a baby, but did you write them a letter to congratulate them? Did you even send a text? Social media gives us the feeling that we are connected but, when it’s not backed by actions, it’s really just smoke and mirrors.  Dating apps are another great example, they can give us the same feeling.  Maybe you are going out on lots of dates, but are you really making connections?

     

     

    Social Media gives us an excuse to not reach out. You saw it on Instagram and double tapped it for the heart. So while we may be staying up to date on important moments, we’re not deepening our relationships.

     

     

    Relationships ebb and flow. I get it. But if you’re like me, you have friends, acquaintances, colleagues, sports team mates, relatives, etc. in your life that you have at one point been close with but eventually drifted apart.

     

    Why is that?

     

    You moved to different cities, you graduated, you changed teams, you got in a fight… whatever the reason, they moved on and you moved on. Were those people important to you? Valuable to your network? Did they make you laugh? Give you confidence? Push you to be better? How did you let these relationships slip away you ask yourself?

     

    They may be gone for now, but not gone for good. In modern terms, these relationships are just a few clicks away from being rekindled.

     

    Yes, the answer is that simple.

     

    What are we waiting for?

     

    Making a phone call isn’t hard. Clearly, it’s something else that is stopping us from reaching out to that old friend. This is where the perception pivot comes into play (to read more about perception pivots click here).

     

    Our mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario. Essentially, the same reason you don’t walk up to the pretty girl at the bar is a different version of the same reason you don’t just call a friend you haven’t spoken to in 5 years out of the blue. Rejection.

     

    But, the truth is, people are ALWAYS happy to hear from you. Always. What’s more flattering than getting a call from someone you haven’t heard from in a while? Who doesn’t love to be called and asked for career advice? Or catch up about old college memories?

     

    Imagine the scenario where your old co worker from your last firm calls you and you chat for 30 minutes and catch up. You go home, tell your significant other about it. Do you say, “ugh, you’ll never believe it, some guy that I worked with years ago called and talked my ear off, couldn’t get him off the phone. What a waste of time.”

     

    OR do you think it goes more like, “Honey, I had a guy that I used to work with reach out. Really great to catch up with him. Turns out he’s working at a competitor of one of my clients. So awesome to hear from him – might even get some business out of it!”

     

    Likely the conversation would be somewhere in between those two scenarios, but you get the point.

     

    Beyond the benefits of networking and generally being “in the know”, why should you put yourself intentionally in seemingly tough and awkward positions?

     

    Robert Waldinger,  a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School recently concluded one of the world’s longest studies of adult life. A key conclusion gleans why relationships are so critical.

     

    Those who kept warm relationships lived longer and happier, and the loners often died earlier. Loneliness kills and on long time horizons, it’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.” **

     

     

    We can’t all live in the same place, stay at the same job, have the same interests forever but, if you care about a relationship, don’t let too much time go between interactions. Friendships don’t take a long time to start fizzling out.

     

    I know I am over simplifying it. If it was that easy, everyone would do it, right? Take some baby steps.

     

    Make note of birthdays on your list of people you want to catch up with and, on that day, shoot them a text or give them a call. Talk about an easy in.

     

    Keep up with someone’s LinkedIn updates. A congratulatory call when an old friend gets a promotion is a normal and positive reason to call someone… but NO ONE EVER DOES IT. You will stand out amongst your peers, if you do these things.

    A Simple Framework

     

    1. Make a list

    • People you haven’t spoken to in a while that you that you care about

    2. Tackle the list one by one

    • Go down the list and just start calling people (texting counts, but use it as a tool to set something up)
    • ie: Text someone to organize a time to talk or meet for a coffee

    Download our simple spreadsheet here.

     

    So you might ask yourself, why don’t people do it? I think there are a couple of reasons.

     

    Number one, inertia/laziness/selfishness.

     

    Get over it. Just reach out. Once you do it the first time, and you realize how fulfilling it is, you will want to do it over and over again. Not only will it feel good, but it helps ensure the network you worked so hard at creating remain healthy and strong.

     

    You can feed your selfish side by remembering that staying in touch with smart and successful people will likely help you down the road. Not only that, people will start to look to you as the person that knows what everyone is up to.

     

    It starts out hard with that first awkward conversation but quickly becomes easier and more natural.

     

    It’s an upward spiral effect, and it’s all driven by you taking action.

     

     

    Why else do people not do it?

     

    Fear.

     

    What would I say? We haven’t spoke in so long… again, this is a bogus excuse.  You will likely be the only person calling them out of the blue to catch up and they will be excited that you called.

     

    The usual, “How’s work?”, “How are things?”, “Girlfriend?”, “Boyfriend?”, “Where are you living?” Those types of questions are OK. Remember, you haven’t spoken in a while. Even if the conversation never gets past those surface level topics, it was still worth having. If this is someone you care to maintain a relationship with, it IS worth doing. The next call will be easier.

     

    When I ask people why they don’t keep in touch with their high school friends, their college friends, their old co workers, the answer is almost always, “I don’t know… but I really should“.  

     

    Let’s change that.

     

    I challenge you to go out and make one phone call a week to a friend, old colleague, aunt or uncle that you haven’t kept up with and see how he or she is doing. Make a physical list of people, and keep it wherever you may be most inclined to make these calls.

     

    For me, when I lived in NYC, I wouldn’t take the bus or train to and from work. I walked the thirty minutes, and every day on my way home, I called SOMEBODY.  My mom, old college friends, friends from my hometown etc. Sure, I find value in listening to podcasts and music when walking or driving around, but I have never gotten more out of listening to music than I have strengthening a relationship.

     

    This is the 21st century. We no longer need to write a letter and wait weeks for a response. There is really no good excuse for good relationships to shrivel up and disappear.

     

    Connections matter. A lot. Let’s treat them with the amount of importance they deserve. Make the call.

     

    *Special thanks to David Tillem for this guest post!

  • Perception pivots and why they matter

     

    Written on February 8th, 2018

12 minute read

    Perception pivots and why they matter

    You should always focus on valuable realities; a familiar statement I tell Googlers attending my happiness course.

    There are 11 billion pieces of information communicated to us every single second.

     

    Crazy, right? If you look around, there are 11 billion things your brain can focus on. What do you think your brain can actually process (per second)?

    Here is where the really optimistic people shine. Some will shout out, “one-thousand” or even “ten-thousand,” but the answer is actually 40 bits per second. You don’t have to be a math expert to know that 40 is a really, really small slice of 11 billion. That’s the equivalent of choosing 58 people on the entire planet!

    Whatever you focus on, is the reality that you live in; and everybody focuses on something different. This is pretty nuts, and what we’re finding is people are quite literally living in different realities. If you’re a Stranger Things fan, we’re having the same thought; the upside down is being played out in real time! Well, not quite that dramatic, but directionally it’s actually correct.

    There’s an important group of people, who we call, “Positive Geniuses.” They focus on the right pieces of information in their environment, leading them to faster solutions, higher levels of creativity, productivity… the list goes on. They’re using perception to their advantage.

    There are two specific ways you can train your mind to become more like a “Positive Genius,” and I decided to try them out myself for 30 days.

    Daily Gratitudes – there’s a lot that you’re grateful for, so take the time to recognize it

    • Write down 3 things you’re grateful for each day, it can be really abstract or really simple
    • IE: Good music, cute puppies, and the opportunity to learn something new everyday
    • This rewires your brain to look for the positive things in your environment (the better 40 bits)

    Reframing Challenges – multiple realities exist and we need to select the most valuable reality

    • Choose something you’re struggling with and write down three ways you currently view the task; then, contrast it by writing down three alternate yet equally true ways to see that same problem
    • IE: I have a lot of work to catch up on, but I also have a lot of responsibility and control in my job
    • This forces you to view situations in multiple ways and, by doing so, you recognize new factors in your environment you typically miss (a different 40 bits)

    Would I start seeing the positive details in my environment? Could I be missing the most important 40 bits? Will it have any measurable impact on my performance at work or at home?

    The second exercise was most fascinating to me, and it flows into something I dub the “Perception Pivot.” We’ve all experienced it before – you learn a small fact about a situation and suddenly your option or outlook does a 180. IE: You thought the cashier was a terrible person, but suddenly you couldn’t have more compassion for them. Here’s an example that underscores this incredibly well, and it comes from my friend, Sean. At the time, he was a manager of an Apple Store.

    One Thursday, it was busier than normal and the wait was long. One woman in the iPhone repair queue was getting extremely agitated at the staff. She began acting out and screaming at employees. The other customers in line were looking at her like she was a lunatic, they tried their best to just ignore her. Eventually, she demanded a manager and Sean did his best to truly understand the situation by asking her a series of questions. After a few minutes, he found out something critical; she was a chemotherapy patient and used some of the applications on her iPhone to schedule her medical treatments. The longer she waited for her phone to be fixed, the more treatment appointments she was missing.

    I think anyone in that line, if they had known this fact, would have acted differently. Even you, feel completely different about her behavior at this point, right?

    Boom. Perception pivot.

    Back to my research, the short answer is yes; I began to have a more positive outlook everyday, I felt more satisfied at work and even found stronger meaning in my social circles with friends and family. It felt as though the exercises were working, I was certainly more grateful and saw challenges with new vantage points. But my conclusion was only anecdotal; I needed something else to show the exercise was working. And that’s when something incredible happened.

    I was meeting a friend after work who lived in downtown Ann Arbor. The building’s tenant base was predominantly graduate students and newly working 20-somethings. As I came through the lobby, I saw an older woman stacking large moving boxes; there must have been at least 4 of them, each full with belongings. She was having trouble moving them alone, and each lobby-goer passed by as if she wasn’t there.

    It was so strange. I mean, if you ran an experiment showing various situations and asked, “what doesn’t fit?” I think 10/10 test subjects would have chosen this woman. Nothing lined up, she was middle-aged, not recently graduated; moving out, not moving in; visibly upset and unhappy.

    In real life, you’re not forced to pick out things that don’t fit. In fact, we’re usually running on autopilot, deep inside our heads, there’s a lot we miss. Everyone assumes the script is always the same, but many times it’s not. Ah-ha! My perception exercise was working.

    Instead of passing her, my eyes met hers and I just began moving boxes. We didn’t say anything, I just started helping. Suddenly her individual operation evolved into a circuit formation. 10 additional boxes were transported from the lobby, to the parking lot, to the trunk of an SUV. At the car, there were two adults waiting, both in a saddened mood. After we packed the last box away, I answered their thank-yous and walked back towards the building.

    I had almost reached the entrance when I heard, “Wait a minute!” …she had followed me back inside. As I turned around, I noticed eyes held back tears. “That was really kind of you.” she said. “The two parents at the car just found out that their daughter had passed away. It was sudden. I knew her well because I am a professor at the University and she was one of my students, a great person. What you did means so much, it’s hard for me to describe. Getting help from from people in the community has been so important.”

    Boom, perception pivot.

    You should always push yourself to see how situations may be different.

    Angry at the driver who cut you off?

    • Maybe he’s driving his wife to the hospital, she’s in labor with their first-born.

    An employee comes to work late each day of the week

    • Maybe she’s taking care of an ailing parent, hasn’t been home earlier than 11pm each night

    See a stranger moving out of your apartment building?

    • Maybe she’s helping a friend who needs it more than you can imagine

    We tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, but never offer others that same chance. It leads us to miss what’s going on right in front of us because we’re stuck in our own heads. We need to constantly challenge our perceptions, everyday, in every way.

    I challenge you to pick up a positive habit this week and view your reality differently. When we become Positive Geniuses, we don’t just elevate ourselves, but instead, we lift everyone up.

    Perspective pivots matter because they help us reach our greatest potential.