Everyday you get to make new decisions.

You get to choose whether yesterday’s – or last year’s – decision is still valid for the time being and can be used given all the new insights you have.

We hold on too close for past decisions that don’t serve us anymore.

We grow and we flourish and yet some of our decisions don’t grow with us.

You have the right, and the responsibility, to tell your former self you made the best decision at that time. Thank you. But now I know better and I need to change. It doesn’t matter how much time or money we spent on this, we paid for learning.

The hardest ones are the emotional things that keep us from doing things our way, in today’s world. So don’t cover your eyes because your heart is aching. You’re actually being kind to it by letting all these non-needed decisions go.

It’s impossible to learn something if you think you already know it.
If you find yourself responding to every question asked, commenting on all conversation topics, or talking about your experiences without a breathing moment, you’re manifesting ignorance more than anything else.

When we pretend to know what we think we know, we ignore anything that will contradict our beliefs. When we strive to give others the impression that we know-it-all, we portray the image of being better, more important and smarter. We also shut off incoming signals from outside sources that can greatly educate us, leaving us less smarter than what we thought we were.

There’s nothing more powerful than a leader who says eloquently “I don’t know.”
This is the ultimate wisdom from those who know.
It opens mind, ears and attention to what might be the answer. It grounds the person and connects with others who are eager to explore the question together.
Are you open for knowledge?

Organizations pay heavily for a big desk and a washed wall paint, yet little attention is paid for hallway interaction. How many ideas have sprung from the corner where the water cooler existed to host so many conversations with hidden opportunities of intra-departments idea collaboration? This is where creative ideas from different corners of the office floor emerge.

The situation of intra-disciplinary (or intra-departmentally) collaboration worsened is when we moved our work remotely and didn’t design for such interaction. Those non-essential conversations that don’t usually fall nicely into our over-crowded meeting schedules are the essence of creative ideas.

Some of us moved back into offices after long months of silo survival work. Others chose a hybrid situation, and some decided to move entirely online. Yet the question remains: How to design spaces that promote inter-department impromptu conversations? How to have more chance encounters and welcome serendipity into our manicured meeting schedules?

There are many ideas on this subject. Some with proven track record and others that don’t fit every situation. Back to you:

What have you done to design randomness into your daily work life?
How are you creating chance encounters with your team members?
What norms are you building to nurture a culture of innovation?
What have you done to create such spaces of loosely fit connections?

For some people, work is life.

For others, they work is in the way of living life.

And then there are all who fall in the spectrum between those two.

Regardless of where you are and how much you love your job, there’s great value in finding experiences that help you detach from work and become more involved and absorbed in your non-work life.

Typically these experiences involve learning new things (i.e.g a new language), seeking out intellectual challenges (e.g., playing chess), doing things to challenge ourselves (e.g., competing in triathlons), or simply doing things to broaden our horizons (e.g., taking a class in a field different from our job).

The more varied experiences you get involved in, the more you broaden your view and create the conditions to sharpen your systems thinking and analogy making skills. Not only that, but getting involved in outside experiences help us in two ways:

First, they force us to devote our mental and intellectual resources to something other than work. Doing so enables us to achieve some level of detachment from it.

Second, they can be highly reinforcing. They allow us to feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. This can add to our satisfaction on the job or compensate for it should we find ourselves not in the ideal work environment.

How many outside experiences are you involved in that help you detach from work at a psychological level?

Surrealists are on to something. They can put aside their rational mind temporarily to create something imaginative and powerful. The canvas would be just a mirror for what emerged out of that process.

We experience similar surreal moments that sometimes stretch into a process, like doodling during a boring meeting or looking out the window and imagining building the “Death Star” with Vader.

We keep forgetting that daydreaming gives us a direct access to our creative mind. We conclude that we must have drifted apart or we don’t feel like working. While in fact we’re in the middle of working and about to arrive to an epiphany that solves a problem for us. If we just continue this daydream for a few more minutes.

I had the pleasure of speaking with my friend Ismet (Izzy) Mamnoon who is a successful teacher coach and an amazing organization facilitator with projects around the globe. Her unique point of view is letting daydream be part of her process to feed into her creative thoughts. I talked with her and a bunch of other intrapreneurs on what makes their process unique and created The Creative Senses Challenge. Join the others and get inspired on finding ways to engage your full senses at work.  

Here’s a snippet of our conversation on my linkedin page.

In Tony Robbins’ legendary in-person events, every ninety minutes the music cranks up and everyone gets on their feet to jump and dance. His assertion is that when you stay in your peak state, have a longer experience, and involve your full body, you can see new possibilities and perceive problems differently. This, in essence, levels you up to have a stronger will and have more faith in your exponential abilities. 

What if your body has different ideas than your head?

How would you allow it to communicate with you?

What do you think it will say?

In one of his blog posts, I read this note:

“Working with a ruler is pretty straightforward. Just about anyone can extend a line, or fix something straight if it breaks. It’s on the line or it’s not.

But curves? Curves are complex and hard to get right.

It turns out that humans bring curves with them, wherever we go.”

Seth Godin

Which triggered my research mode into what I instinctively knew about curves.

Most offices and schools have no traces of curves. Instead, they prefer the rulers. The straight lines. The cubes.
Ofcourse cost is one of the reasons. But what about perception? Could it be that we needed to stay in a straight line to be considered professional? Does it have something to do with the industrial economy and the factory production mentality? Do we crave structure because we’re afraid of being more imaginative? More creative? More curvy?

Research shows that curvilinear movements offer more flexible thoughts. (read: heightened creativity). What’s more, in her book “Joyful”, Ingrid Fetell Lee explains how curves made people more likely to believe that racial categories were socially constructed and elastic, rather than biological and fixed, and less likely to make discriminatory judgements about others based on stereotypes. (read: curves makes one less judgmental. Perhaps less racist)

Brining work and play together can start with incorporating playful curves into your workspace. Curvy room dividers, circular furnishing, round carpets or a flowing art design is a good start. It may be enough to be in a place where you can simply look at curves in order to think more flexibly.

Look around you, what curves do you see?