Three Top Whiteboard Moments
One of the benefits of spending way too much time on Zoom this year? Discovering Zoom’s whiteboard feature, which has become one of my ‘go to’ tools to use during client jam sessions.
(Note for any Zoom team members reading this newsletter: I have a laundry list of feature enhancements for the whiteboard that I’m happy to share. Call me!)
As the year draws to a close, I realized I captured a lot of whiteboards with (mostly poor) drawings and the occasional typo given the lack of spell check. (See previous comment on needed feature enhancements.) After reviewing several dozen whiteboards, three recurring themes jumped out. I’m sharing these three in my final newsletter of the year with the hope that they’re helpful for you, too.
Yes / And
Richard Rohr defines the dualistic mind as:
“essentially binary, either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, opposition, and differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid, not realizing there may be a hundred degrees between the two ends of each spectrum.”
We live in an era defined by opposition and differentiation—in politics, news, social media and more. Unfortunately, that either/or thinking now permeates how we often speak to ourselves! Here’s a great example: a client recently remarked, “It’s just a battle, Ben. Some days I’m learning and growing, and other days I’m just not engaged at all.” To which I replied, “Shift from ‘it’s a battle’ to ‘yes/and’. Yes, there are days I am learning, growing, and GSD and there are days when I am neutral (or negative) and simply want to be a human being.”
The next time you find yourself in a challenging situation, resist the urge to operate in a dualistic mind of ‘either / or’. Hit pause, pull up, and shift to ‘yes / and’.
Scarcity –– Abundance
In a year where we’ve experienced a number of restrictions on so many aspects of our lives, it’s easy to quickly vault to a scarcity mindset.
At some point this year every client has expressed a frustrating “not enough” moment. That’s when I open the whiteboard, draw a line between scarcity and abundance, and ask the client to place their dot. Next, we work out what creates scarcity (always easy) and what creates abundance (usually harder). It’s a tough conversation, but the result is always positive because it creates a recognition of what Lynne Twist refers to as being enough:
“Once we let go of scarcity, we discovery the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and that we are enough.”
Big Rocks
Big Rocks is my shorthand for goals, the three or four big items you’ll focus on for the coming year. One of my favorite things to do is to help clients identify their Big Rocks (professional, personal, or both) then build a plan to GSD and crush those Big Rocks. Many of the jam sessions I’ve had over the last 60 days have included discussions on this topic.
If you haven’t identified your Big Rocks for 2021, take a moment and do that now! If you’re looking for inspiration, take time to do a quick recap of 2020 by asking yourself three questions:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What did I learn?
Chances are the answers will generate a Big Rock or two, much the way they did for me this time last year when I identified the Big Rock of MBTMP (More Ben To More People). Publishing this newsletter is one of the specific actions I undertook to make that happen.
Thank you for reading, thank you for sharing, and thank you for your feedback and suggestions. On more than one occasion you’ve helped me set a practice to make a positive shift, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
PS: Several readers asked if they missed my November newsletter. I did not publish a newsletter last month. I did, however, add something to my website last month that you may want to check out: a template for creating your very own praise pile. If you aren't collecting all of the positive feedback you receive, download my template and start today. It's an awesome way to increase your mindset of abundance heading into the New Year!