If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I beat the drum for vulnerability in the workplace in almost every article I write. Today I want to shift your attention from your workplace to your child’s workplace: School. I know not everyone reading this has kids, but you may someday, or maybe you’re a college student yourself. Keep reading.
High school and college are pressure cookers – far more competitive than in my day, and it was intense then. I remember feeling so alone at times at Yale. Despite my gregarious outward appearance, I longed for real connection. To feel that I was enough.
This week, a friend from Yale sent me an op-ed from my alma mater’s daily that took me right back – not just to my undergrad time, but to a few years ago when I did a session with the freshman class there, organizing them into small groups to discuss the question, “Which major experiences of your past make up who you are today?" I was taken aback by the incredible personal struggles some of these young people had already faced – and also by their ability to open up when they felt safe to do so, and to support each other. Friendships were made that day that carried through all four years.
But tragically, the op-ed my friend sent was written in response to a student’s suicide several weeks ago; a boy whom apparently no one had any idea was struggling.
In her op-ed, recent graduate Kate Calhoun wrote:
“Yalies tend to talk freely about achievement but remain silent about hardship. In this stoic culture, people easily slip through the cracks. We notice when it becomes a tragedy of the magnitude of last week’s, but there are people all over Yale who need some support, compassion and relief.
“You can’t provide this support only in the toughest moments. It’s when people are in trouble that they are least likely to feel comfortable speaking up. Openness, encouragement, and understanding need to be cultivated long before hardship hits.”
Kids today need all the help we can give them to learn that the ability to open up to others about fears, doubts, and dreams is a key survival skill and a badge of strength. Then, once they learn that it’s OK, they need help learning how to do it – not just shoulder pats, but organized, facilitated peer coaching that lets the students develop the dialogue themselves.
I’m still working with Yale on this, and hopefully with more schools soon. A group of Yale Sophomores recently took a version of the myGreenlight training, translated for their specific environment by a couple of really bright students, and with a peer-coaching and support component built in. I was so moved and inspired by the enthusiastic response to the program. So many of them pushed past their comfort zones to share intimacy and vulnerability, and finished with better relationships and the knowledge that they could be themselves, warts included, and be respected and supported all the more.
Kate closes her piece with exactly the right suggestion (in fact, the one I’ve given many times) to give anyone the power to kickstart culture change where they learn, work, or play, in the absence of a formal program or help from leaders:
“Start small. Create the type of culture in your own life that you want to see across this campus. But start immediately. People close to you might need you more than they’re able to admit right now.”
Please share your ideas on how to help our kids open up. And thanks for listening.
Relationship Roundup - news on collaboration, best uses for Google +, meetings that you’ll never forget, tips for finding balance and insight on the shift of power.
Back in mid-January, a Tweet from Niall Doherty popped up on my radar:
I asked him if he'd write us a guest blog post to report back on his "Month of Generosity" and he agreed to keep us posted on his experience. Last week Niall sent in his report on what happened when he shifted his focus from his own success to helping those around him achieve more. Here is his story.
By: Niall Doherty
While reading Never Eat Alone for the first time earlier this year, I was particularly struck by the following words...
“You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.”
Throughout the previous months I'd come to realize just how addicted I was to self-promotion. I would often get so caught up in telling my own story and sharing my own ideas (either via my blog or in-person conversation), that I'd usually fail to find out the interesting stories of others and learn from them.
Keith's words above were the nudge I needed to finally go ahead and take steps to remedy this.
And so I came up with The Month Of No Self Promo. The idea was to flip everything for the month of February. What would happen if I held back on all forms of self-promotion and instead devoted my time and energy to helping others succeed? What would happen if I resisted the urge to tell my story and instead encouraged other people to tell theirs?
I crafted a handful of rules to abide by for the month: Read more →
Virtual teams are becoming a norm of today’s modern office, so the question of how best to create quality, collaborative relationships among these teams has become a major new research subject for me. My own company has employees in LA, NY, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, and we hold regular virtual meetings for both the entire team and various work groups.
I’m writing a series of blogs on the topic for Harvard Business Review Blog Network. Check out the latest:
Enter-Prize 2.0- How much easier would it be if you had free-flowing information within your company?
Relationship Roundup - Tips for advice that aren’t useful, extreme intimacy in the workplace, the power of LinkedIn for job seekers, more on relationship marketing, and expert insight for doing business in the social era.
Relationship Roundup - Tips on diversifying your influence style, how “NO” can help clear your plate for the important, connecting in the future, and the new connected consumer.
First, an update on donations for Guatemala: Last week we asked you to help us raise $3200 so that we could fund every child from our trip. The balance as of Jan. 13, the day I'm writing this: $3367! I couldn't be more grateful.
Ready for this month's myGreenlight master's mission? John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote this week's tip to help you diversify your network to expose you to the broadest range of ideas and opportunities. These simple tips will strengthen your safety net – try it! -KF
It is no surprise that we instinctively seek out those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the unforeseen changes around us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We may be even more vulnerable to being blindsided by events and trends coming at us from new and unusual directions.
The Internet compounds this narrowing by invisibly removing subjects and people from our online searches and even our casual exploration of websites, explains Eli Pariser in his new book, The Filter Bubble. Worse yet, we tend to become more extreme and entrenched in our beliefs when we become involved in a tight-knit group that shares them.
The bottom line: the choices we make and the technology we use can progressively narrow the range of experiences we have. To counteract the potential stultifying effects of the filter bubble we will have to overcome our natural instinct to seek out the comfort of those who are most like us. Here are some suggestions:
1. Audit and re-shape your social network. With the advent of online social network platforms we have an increasing visibility into the make-up of our personal social network. Whom do we interact with most frequently? How similar are they to us?
Scan the periphery of your social network and explore those "weak ties", the people you may have met briefly and who come from very different environments. Who are some of the most diverse people on the periphery of your network that you might benefit from getting to know better? How could you use online social networks to reach out to people you have never even met but who are engaged in arenas adjacent to your own interests? Each week, resolve to introduce yourself to a friend of a friend on an online network who seems to be the most interesting and most different from you. Read more →
become a major new research subject for me. My own company has employees in LA, NY, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, and we hold regular virtual meetings for both the entire team and various work groups.
