Completing the Year Powerfully

Each December, lots of people do an end-of-year completion exercise. It’s a chance to take stock of what they accomplished over the past year. There’s a lot of power in doing this. When we take a step back from the day-to-day, we can see all the places where we’ve moved the needle. We get to say, “I did all that” and feel the satisfaction that comes from this.

Yet, it occurs to me that the typical way of doing this exercise does not do justice to what we’ve really done. Asking the question, “What have I accomplished” masks something much more accurate and even, profound. It ignores the others with whom we are linked. While our actions stemmed from a stand we took, what escapes our notice is how that stand does not arise out of thin air nor occur in isolation. Stands arise out of our interconnectedness and, when made public, out of the quality of listening our relationships give us. Often, others join with us in our stand because we are standing for the possibility of something that has resonance for them, too. Such as our stand to shift our diet to eat in a healthy way.

That’s why, to take full stock of the past year, I invite people to look beyond the fiction called, “what I accomplished,” and look at the question, “what did we accomplish?” This gives us a clearer, truer and more expansive picture.

That “we” picture has to factor in how everything we did involved in some way the give and take of working together: e.g. our agreeing on a goal, setting a plan, finding the resources, meeting, working through differences of opinion, and making mid-stream adjustments.

Part of what makes the accomplishments meaningful is to consider what this took from you in your interactions with others that you may not have known you had. E.g. the ability to enroll people via a presentation you gave. Offer the benefit of your advice or grant someone the generosity of your listening. How you completed a difficult negotiation. Or how you made and fulfilled an “impossible” promise to someone. Perhaps it was the way you hashed out some fundamental differences, or allowed yourself to be a beginner and ask for support. But again, you had to work together with others to coordinate your actions to get things done.

To round out the picture of your year even further, look at the outcomes that may not have been your most prized priorities but which were still important to others. Own how you supported others to make their accomplishments real. These are your accomplishments as well.

Then look and see where you are today as a consequence of what you’ve accomplished. Are you standing in a new, more satisfying place within your network, your organization, perhaps your industry?

The “we” way of looking can open enormous space: once you’ve looked back, you can also look forward and begin imagining ‘what new possibilities, such as new goals and projects, might be possible in the coming year because of who I - and we - have become?’

I welcome you to be in touch about how to use this completion process or to let me know how it went for you!

Announcing "Fierce Partners"

The moment has arrived. I sit, I think, I write. Composing my first official blog post could feel like a solitary act acted out in my basement office. But I'm not alone in this. People too numerous to mention - teachers, friends, work colleagues, coaches, clients, people across the world like Felix the Honolulu tour bus driver, etc etc have all played some part in this creation. This post, and this blog in general, is all about the fierce partnership that characterizes much of the best of what we are up to; that goes hand in hand with who we are, working together.



Working together has fascinated me from my very first job in high school working in my father's private label paper plate factory. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes one to make a paper plate! We had Carl, the plant superintendent; Lidia and a good dozen other Spanish-speaking machine operators; Heinz the mechanic; Ramon the warehouse foreman; Luis and Juan the fork-shift drivers; Mickey, among others, in the warehouse; and various and sundry other characterss, all participating to make those plates for the ShopRites, Pathmarks, and Star Markets, of the world. This was sweaty, gritty, mind-numbing work. The fruits of our labors came together to produce something tangible. Working there, you learned what it took to thread 2000 lb. spools of kraft paper through lines of paper presses so they could stamp out stacks of white and pastel-colored plates which got packaged, boxed up and shipped out in trailers or rail cars for placement on a supermarket shelf near you.



I am not glorifying what we did back there in the day, especially when you consider the vast number of trees that were cut down or the mega-tons of toxins the paper mills spewed into the air and rivers to make the paper we used, and how those plates were part of a throw-away lifestyle that clogged our landfills.



Thankfully, we know better now and are much more mindful of our impact on the environment. Thankfully, too, it's highly unlikely that we go to work in an environment which values us for our hands and little else. On the other hand, we may wish that we, too, in concert with others, produced something tangible, that we could see and touch at the end of our day, and feel pride in.



What we do and how we do what we do consumes much of our lives. To what end do you devote this huge chunk of your self? What's the experience like for you working with others? How is that turning out, as in, how satisfying is it? What, that's crucial to what you care about, depends on how well you and others work together? It's to these questions, among others, that I dedicate this blog.



Help me get this rolling. I welcome you to share what you have to say to the above questions, or anything else that got stirred up here so far.








Thank you for being here and welcome aboard!