Video Library – The Three Keys

Without Failure, Who Would You Be?

Create Safety and Learning from Failure Moments

By Camina Stevenson

For genuine football fans, this probably won’t seem like a new story. However, I would venture to guess, many haven’t heard the tale of a modern-day, football folk hero named Nicholas “Nick” Foles. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Nick possessed a natural talent for the sport but definitely wasn’t always a starting quarterback. He didn’t know he would one day grow up to defeat Tom Brady and help dismantle the New England Patriot dynasty to make Super Bowl 52 history.

As a kid, Nick just loved the sport. He practiced relentlessly, dropping, fumbling and launching hundreds of football passes day and night before earning his way onto the high school varsity team. He didn’t win any high school football championships. Nick graduated from Westlake High in 2007 and continued playing in college but ended up having to redshirt twice, once for the 2008 freshman season and again during his 2010 junior season. Despite these setbacks, he was selected by The Philadelphia Eagles as the 88th pick in round three of the 2012 NFL draft.

After four seasons, the team that drafted Nick Foles to the NFL, no longer saw his worth. He was traded to the St. Louis Rams and played one season. Foles was unhappy with the trade. His performance on the field languished to the point where Nick thought he had surely lost love for the game. He considered retiring from the NFL and giving up the sport for good but changed his mind after going on a camping trip and having a heart-to-heart with family. He turned to his personal faith and decided it wasn’t time to quit.

In 2016, Nick signed on with the Kansas City, Chiefs as a backup quarterback. When the Chiefs declined a second-year option on his contract, he departed as a free agent and through an ironic twist of fate, ended up inking a two-year deal with the first team he ever played for in the NFL: The Philadelphia Eagles. This homecoming was bittersweet. Despite his return to the Eagles and playing once again with the team he loved and had never wanted to leave, Foles found himself mostly on the sidelines as a backup to Philadelphia’s all-star, franchise quarterback, Carson Wentz.

Then, it happened. Wentz suffered a season-ending injury during the NFC playoffs and Nick Foles – The Backup, The Unlikely Hero, The Lost Quarterback – stepped in and lifted the Philadelphia Eagles to unexpected heights of superstardom and glory.

Foles made Super Bowl history as the first quarterback to ever lead the Philadelphia Eagles to a Super Bowl title and can now be celebrated as the first player to ever throw and catch a touchdown in one Super Bowl game. While being honored as the reigning Champion and Super Bowl 52 MVP, Nick was asked to reflect on his career success and his response to the crowd was simple, humble and true:

“I think the big thing is don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is a part of life. It’s a part of building character and growing. Without failure, who would you be?”

Take a moment and envision one major career accomplishment you have achieved in your life. You may not have won any Super Bowl championships, but think big. Choose an undeniably bright highlight from your own personal success story. Now how did you get there?

Whenever you imagine the string of events leading you to any defined moment of success, you will probably recognize the familiar faces of people who went out of their way to help you along the journey. But do you also glance back like Nick Foles and see the questionable decisions you made, the setbacks, the disappointments, the wrong turns and missteps, the embarrassing, humiliating falls? Do you recognize the countless number of clumsy, awkward attempts it may have taken while learning to master new sets of skills? How many times were you turned away or rejected? How many times did you fail before you could ultimately succeed? These failures, every single one of them, taught you one invaluable lesson after another to help you become the person and leader you are today.

As someone taking on a leadership role in your organization, you may already have an awareness and understanding that spectacular failure is the only true path to success. So, have you given your team members enough opportunities to fail gracefully and spectacularly on their own?

Without creating opportunities for your team members to make mistakes, where will your team be around this time next year? They will stagnate. They will lose interest or burn out. Your team members share a fundamental emotional need to work in a supportive, empathic environment where they are free to make (guided) mistakes in order to learn, expand, innovate and grow.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEAM MEMBERS TO FAIL GRACEFULLY & SUCCEED

• Encourage others to step beyond their comfort zone. This means, delegate! Know they will fail sometimes but that’s part of the progress. Coach them through the mistakes.

• Don’t be afraid to let your team members know that failure is the only path to success. We must try many times to succeed. Pushing forward and learning to be resilient will be an important lesson.

• Remind team members that we learn about ourselves when we fail. We learn how to work together or form new strategies. We learn what works and what doesn’t. We learn humility. Most failures are simply successes in training.

• Teach team members to embrace failures rather than bolt from their inevitability. Show team members that the work environment encourages an atmosphere of rolling with the punches thus making future mistakes less painful and more of a learning experience.

• Celebrate failures as a team! Yes, seriously. Invite humor, fun and laughter whenever possible. If projects take turns for the worse, encourage team members to regroup and build upon the camaraderie and lessons learned for better outcomes down the road.

• Help your team understand that failure is a part of life and not something to be avoided. Remind yourself and your team that failure is our greatest mentor. Failure builds character and the more we fail, the more we can succeed!

Camina Stevenson devotes her daylight hours as a Social Work Specialist and Mentor/Agency Field Instructor for undergraduate and graduate students attending UNLV and USC.

Near sundown, she morphs into her more natural state of being as an autodidact, logophile, documentary photographer and digital storyteller. Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University, Long Beach and a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has served the Las Vegas community as a passionate advocate for social injustice (aka licensed social worker) since 2010.

Camina developed her love for travel at an early age having grown up on 3 continents. She has a deep affinity for laughter, music, nature, and the cosmos and feels most inspired when exploring the intricacies of the human condition or embarking on spontaneous (mis)adventures with Martine with whom she shares 1 Joaquin, 1 Nayeli, 2 Chi-Weenies and 1 Golden Doodle.

Looking for Happiness? Stop Multi-Tasking!

Focus for Greater Results and Less Stress

By Kim Price

A few years ago, I stumbled upon an app called “Track Your Happiness.” The premise of the app was quite simple; at random points throughout the day, the app would ask me to report my mood, and ask me what I was doing, allowing me to discover what makes me happy. I immediate downloaded the app and faithfully reported my emotional state throughout the day.

It turns out, the app was part of a study conducted by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University. After collecting data from over 2,200 volunteers (including me) they discovered an interesting pattern: when people reported negative emotions, they were more likely to report that they were not fully focused on the task at hand – no matter what that task is. In other words, when our minds wander, we are unhappy. And according to this study’s findings, our minds wander for approximately 46.9 percent of our waking hours.

Do we really spend nearly 50% of our day not focused on what we are doing? In their book “The One Thing,” authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan report that the typical worker is interrupted approximately every 11 minutes. Those interruptions take a real toll; according to distraction researcher Gloria Mark, it takes an average of 25 minutes to recover from those distractions and re-focus to the task at hand.

It isn’t just distractions that throw off our focus; many of us choose to multi-task our way through the workday. The problem is, according to Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and expert on divided attention, we just weren’t built to multi-task. According to Miller, “when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” But many of us are convinced that multi-tasking is effective, even rewarding, because of a dopamine feedback loop which rewards our brain for breaking our focus and searching for different external stimulation.

So, if you are in the habit of multi-tasking, or find that your day is full of distractions, how do you learn to stay focused on one task?

One simple technique you can use to help improve your focus is the Pomodoro Method. Named for the tomato-shaped timer used by Francesco Cirillo (who developed the method), the technique is quite simple. Select a task that you will work on for 25 minutes; set a timer (it doesn’t need to be a tomato), and turn off ALL distractions: turn off mail notifications, silence the phone, close the office door, close your web browser (or if you are working online, close all other tabs). Commit to focusing solely on the task for 25 minutes; at 25 minutes, give yourself a 5 minute “reward” break when you can check emails, text messages, social media, etc. After you’ve repeated this pattern 4 times, give yourself a longer reward break.

At first it won’t be easy; habits take time to form – in his book “Making Habits, Breaking Habits,” psychologist Jeremy Dean found that it takes on average 66 days, depending on the complexity of the new behavior, for a new habit to stick. So even if you fail to make it the entire 25 minutes the first few times you try, keep it up. Once this new “deep work” behavior becomes a habit, you’ll find that you are able to complete more tasks and – bonus – find yourself happier too!

Kim Price is an exceptionally gifted instructional designer and online learning content producer.

Kim fondly remembers her first computer: a TRS-80. It didn’t have any games or programs, so with the help of a BASIC programming book, she learned to write simple programs for herself. This marked the beginning of her lifetime love for computer technology!

Kim’s love for technology opened the doors for her to teach in higher education; first at the College of Southern Nevada, and later at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. With over a decade teaching experience in higher education, Kim realized her passion for designing and facilitating learning experiences that make smart people even smarter. She continues to cultivate her passion for teaching and technology as a technology trainer in higher education.

Five Methods to Improve Your Leadership

Matt Zobrist from Aegis Learning

Jump-Start Your Leadership with These 5 Great Approaches

By Matt Zobrist

There you were: an outstanding worker – extremely competent, skillful, and efficient at your job. And so, your organization decided to promote you. They gave you a title, probably a pay raise, and a supervisory (policy) handbook. Maybe you got a pep talk, or a “supervisory class” consisting of being told all the possible disasters and calamities you could now be held responsible for. Then they pointed you at your team and said, “Go, lead.”

Organizations often fail to prepare new leaders for their new roles. What can you do if your organization hasn’t prepared you or provided continuing tools for your leadership development? Take the initiative and begin to develop your leadership skills and attributes anyway.
Here are Five things you can start today that will help you develop and improve your leadership skills.

1. Focus on people. Probably the best leadership advice is this: Leadership is NOT about the leader; It’s about the team, more specifically each person on the team. Good leaders focus on taking care of their people. When a leader’s focus is only on results or procedures, he or she can become a micromanager, or worse, a tyrant. Leadership is not about production or inventory or equipment or even tasks – but about people! Care about each individual team member and they will ensure that productive results follow.

2. Build Trust. Trust is built through the heart, not the head. Leaders are respected for their abilities or position, but they trusted based on the relationships they forge. Sincerity and Honesty are two key ingredients to establish trust. For example, instead of just saying “hi,” ask your team members how they are doing and then: Listen to their reply. Listening is key to helping people feel that you truly care about them. People will remember how you make them feel. Team members who trust their leader are more likely to be engaged and productive at work.

3. New Title, New Job. Remember that even though you were great as a worker, you are now a leader. Your job is not to DO that job anymore, but to motivate and train your team to become great at their jobs. Two guidelines for this: First, remember your team doesn’t have your expertise and experience, so they can’t do the job as good as you did (yet). Part of your new job is to coach and train them to get to that level. Second, if they don’t do it like you did, that doesn’t make it wrong. Be humble enough to accept that there may be other ways to do it. Allow innovation and appreciate their efforts.

4. Appreciation. Say thank you. Even when things don’t turn out right, appreciate the effort. You will be surprised at how this simple act can build trust, strengthen relationships and improve attitudes.

5. Always Improve. There is always room for improvement. Read and Study about Leadership. Read books and articles (like this one) about leadership and incorporate the advice into your leadership style. Get an App. Download apps, like the free Aegis iCoach App, to have immediate access to leadership resources, tips and ideas anywhere you go.

Leadership competencies and skills can be learned. Be committed to learning and improving your leadership skills every chance you can.

Matt Zobrist from Aegis Learning

Matt Zobrist is an energetic and dynamic facilitator, coach, presenter and speaker with Aegis Learning, LLC.

Matt has a passion for helping others develop their leadership skills. He served successfully in various leadership over the last 20 years and uses his practical, real-world experience to deliver powerful messages about leadership, team work, communication and service. His animated, high-energy style, combined with humor and personal experiences make each presentation enjoyable and memorable, as well as educational, for the audience.

Video Library – Relational Intelligence

Celebrating Leaders-Carnival Cruise Lines

Reconnecting with Rock Stars!

Truly honored and blessed to reconnect with the leadership team from Carnival Cruise Lines.

Energetic, heart filled and highly skilled, these leaders were eager to hone their skills even farther.  No amount of superlatives will be able to completely describe this group and the relationship with each of them is priceless.

Owning Our Decisions

At the end of the day, the decision was yours. Even with collaboration and using systems thinking, you made the call. The decision is part of your leadership record and legacy.

Effective leaders cannot run from their decisions. They cannot blame others. They cannot blame the economy. They cannot hedge or try to escape accountability. It was your decision.

When right on target a decision is a glorious thing. Your hard work paid off and you chose the correct course of action. Everything fell into place nicely and the return was better than anticipated. It is pretty easy to own that type of decision.

The harder decisions to own are the clunkers. The ones that don’t work out so well or the choice that just did not pan out. Those are hard to swallow and to have your name attached.

Effective leaders own decisions that are both good and bad. With good decisions, the leader will share credit with the team, those that provided valuable input and any stakeholder that gave clues about outcomes or consequences.

When the decision is a poor choice you are on your own buddy. Can’t blame the data or any person. It is all you.

With bad decisions, there are a couple of additional decision points that come into play. The poorest choice is to defend and continue to cheerlead for a bad decision. This is simply digging a bigger hole and drawing more attention and potentially, criticism to a bad decision.

The effective leader must admit the mistake and work diligently to fix it. Simply say that you made a mistake, you are sorry and you will get it fixed. Use plenty of personal pronouns to make sure the ownership of the decision is clear. You may not get beaten up for a bad decision but you will certainly loose credibility if you try to run from it.

When looking at a poor decision, first check and see if you gave yourself enough time to analyze and diagnose the situation and all of the potential impacts. This is the most common reason for poor decisions. Then, retrace the system thinking and seek a different and wider scope of input that focuses on why the first decision failed and that the issue still exists. Never compound a poor decision with a rash or arbitrary fix that is simply designed to save face.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

What is Showing Up?

Unlocking a Heart for Leadership

This is a multi-part series of excerpts from Unlocking a Heart for Leadership, a soon to be released book by Tim Schneider.  This book and series examines the powerful methods to add heart based (affective/feeling) approaches to your leadership and life.  An unlocked heart is the third facet of full leadership and personal realization.  

What is Showing Up?

“What you resist persists” Rick Warren

One more quick self-check to see if your heart needs to be unlocked. Quick but complicated to get our heads around.

Look at and spend some time thinking about what is showing up in your life. Is it really what you want and desire or are there elements of dissatisfaction or evenly some deeply rooted pieces where you are not living as you desire?

To be specific, examine who is in your life. Are you pulling great people around you or are you a bug light for toxic and negative humans? Are the relationships you have mutually supportive and caring or is it one way only? These are tough questions but necessary as you move forward to unlock your emotional power.

Take a moment and reflect on your last three or four thoughts. Were they positive, upbeat and encouraging or were they dark and negative? What is the ratio of good thoughts to negative or bad thoughts? This one is a pretty good sign that there are some unresolved issues blocking the emotions that drive your thought patterns.

Another very specific view is about obstacles you are facing. Have you done everything right in an area but the results are not coming? Are you working very hard and have very little to show for it? Have you been passed over for a promotion? Turned down for a loan needed to go into business for yourself? Are you wondering what is holding that back and preventing that success?

Weather consciously known to you or not, yes answers to the above reveal some unresolved issues you are carrying in your heart and emotional composition. Most common among those are:

1. Unrepaired relationships

2. Ungrieved loss

3. Motivations for your actions that are not rooted in good intention

4. Projections to the world that are not what you want or hope (negative perceptions by others)

Have you ever watched news accounts of crime victims reaching out and connecting with the perpetrators of their pain? Although grotesque to think about, these are perfect examples of why relationships, even the most fleeting, need to have some closure, questions answered and some point of clearing.

Unrepaired relationships pull consciously and subconsciously on all of us. Blocking someone out of your life is not repair and simply serves to bury the hurt and block deeper into our subconscious, making it harder to heal. As we all suffer disconnect with others, the heart healthy works to repair while the emotionally unpowered seek to bury the disconnect and simply forget. Quick little note here: you won’t really forget. It may move away from the top of your mind but never out of your subconscious thoughts and emotional composition. As we move through the tools and practices in this book, you will have a pathway to repair these relationships, or at minimum, attempt to repair them. This is an area that we will not sugarcoat in any form. This is difficult and some relationships have decades of estrangement.

Another hard examination is the ungrieved losses in our lives. Very personally, this one weighed on me for many years and there are still a couple of losses that need some grieving time. It wasn’t until years after I lost my dad and mom, did I fully mourn their loss and clear that heart blockage. There is a likelihood that you too are carrying some ungrieved losses in your life. They don’t need to be a death and could come in the form of a lost marriage, failed business or even a missed opportunity.

Like with relationships, our losses cannot simply be buried and we cannot rely on time to heal these wounds. Time blunts some of the pain but the loss remains in our hearts and subconscious minds creating blocks to our success and our ability to capitalize on our heart and emotional power. It will become a matter of finding, acknowledging and then finally grieving these losses to move on successfully.

Your motivations and projections will be examined in detail later in this book but suffice it to say that they drive a big part of our emotional healthy and heart power. When motives are pure and positive, those types of results will follow. When motives are less than pure, the results that show up in your life will reflect that as well.

Projections are the same. You will attract exactly what you project. The unhealthy elements (and people) in our lives appear because of something we have projected to the world. We certainly don’t mean to do that but there is something buried in our emotional composition that keeps driving our projected behaviors. It could be very old or something deeply rooted in a difficult experience. Only you know and it is up to you to find out about it.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Celebrating Leaders-McCarran International Airport

Leaders with Heart, Skill and Purpose!

Bravo! Congratulations! Great job!

There are not enough superlatives to describe this group from McCarran International Airport.  Passionate, skilled and heart-filled leaders that are committed to lead the right way and move the culture of the organization forward.  They embraced all the learning (nine units), peer coaching and outside reading assignments.

Rock on Leadership Flight 1 graduates!

Leading Leaders

Leading other leaders. Some people compare it to herding cats. Some people describe the “which way did they go? I must know because I am their leader” paradox. Others will tell you that it is the most frustrating, but yet most rewarding part of the leadership equation.

Dr. Paul Hersey probably best described the phenomenon of leading other leaders in his work on Situational Leadership. Dr. Hersey clearly identified different skill sets related to managing and leading people based on their skill set and based on the particular leadership situation. His groundbreaking work identified some of the possible disconnects when leaders utilize the same skill set to manage leaders as they do when they supervise entry level workers. In his model, when leading leaders, you can no longer be directive, use a cookie cutter approach and overly define the process details and steps.

Of the additional tactics to lead leaders, fuzziness may be the most important. Although we may have perfect clarity on an end result and how it looks and feels, we must allow our emerging leaders the opportunity to add their clarity. This is an extremely important step that transfers ownership of a project or idea. If we fill in all of the details, it will always be our idea and our process. If we allow our subordinate leaders to fill in the details, the process becomes theirs. It also has great impact to stimulate their creative and systemic thinking.

A subset tactic that is closely related to fuzziness is polluting the soup. Some of you have heard this presented in just a little different way but the message is the same. Polluting the soup is leading with your idea and then requesting other suggestions and input. Sounds okay on the surface, but unfortunately, when your idea is articulated, it will greatly diminish the other input from subordinate leaders. The effective leader will utilize the greatly unappreciated skill of keeping quiet and letting the subordinate leader or leaders play the ideas and suggestions.

Prepare for the curiosity of three year olds. If you have a problem in answering questions and responding to the “why” query, you may not be ready to lead other leaders. If your response pattern includes “because I said so”, “because it has always been that way” or even “it is what it is”, you will need to change your approach. New and emerging leaders will question and challenge. Like kids, it is what they do. Brushing it off produces a future eerie silence that replicates the status quo. Answering, as best you can, produces innovative leaders that balance the possibilities with the realities.

The presentation, even subtly, of opportunities to subordinate and emerging leaders is a great way to evaluate talent and even test drive and motivation. When an opportunity is presented, do the leaders run with it or do they require pushing? Do they pick up on the clues and react without any follow-up needed? Do they personalize the project or idea? Do they continually run it back to you for validation or do they shoot for the end result? Lots of questions yet the answers become very telling about the skill set and readiness of the leader that you are guiding.

Feeding opportunities also allows you to see if any of your leaders are willing to get a little dirty. It is very telling when an emerging leader sacrifices comfort and personal vanities in order to achieve the objectives of the opportunity.

Another critical element in leading leaders is allowing them the opportunity to fail. By far and away this is the most challenging facet for many of us. To allow someone the chance to stub their toe is pretty priceless and more valuable than any other type of learning. Even with our experience and depth of knowledge, until they try it their way, they will never be satisfied. It takes a great deal of leadership maturity to allow others to fail and be there to pick them up and restore their desire to achieve.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.