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Chapter Two

Your Glow Resources

You want to make Glowing a daily experience in your working life rather than something that happens occasionally. You do this by working on the three principles defined in Chapter One and developing your skills and competencies in the nine actions described there.

Stop for a moment and think—does this seem like tall an order? Too many actions for you to take right now? Possibly it does. But before you feel truly overwhelmed, remember that in building your skills and creating more value in your working life, you have three potential resources available to you. Think carefully about each of these resources and how they could be of service to you.

The Potential Resources That Make Glowing a
Daily Experience

1. Your first resource is yourself. You have within you the power to develop the personal skills and capabilities that are the foundation for a life of Glowing.
2. Your second resource is your team, your immediate colleagues— they can play a key role in supporting and enabling you and other team members to practice the nine actions that will ensure that you Glow.
3. Your third resource is the community, business, or organization in which you currently work. Even if you work completely on your own, you are a member of a wider community of people who can provide a frame for you to develop these skills and habits. If you are a member of a small business or a large organization, this can also be a crucial resource to ensure that you Glow.

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In the stories that follow, you will meet people who have been able to use these three resources for support, encouragement, and skill development. You will also meet people who are in teams or communities that have significantly narrowed their opportunities and limited their choices. These resources can provide a wonderful support to Glowing—but they can also act as a serious barrier.

So it is wise for you to understand where you stand with regard to each of these resources. Are these three potential resources supporting you to Glow, or are they barriers? Once you have figured this out, it will be clearer to you whether you need to build on their support or reduce the barriers.

To help you to do this, you can use a short diagnostic—the Glow Profile (introduced toward the end of this chapter). This profile enables you to quickly and accurately identify whether the three resources available to you (yourself; your team; and your community, business, or organization) are supporting you on the path to Glowing or reducing your opportunities. Once you know where you stand right now, you are in a better position to decide how you will focus the development of your skills and resources.

So take a closer look at these three resources to understand more deeply how they can act as a resource for you.

You as a Potential Resource:
Glowing from the Inside

Glowing every day starts with you. Your attitudes and assumptions make a difference (think back to Fred’s assumptions and how that narrowed his Glow experiences), and so do the skills and habits you choose to develop. The resources you have to make Glowing a daily experience include the following:

• Your assumptions and attitudes about your work and your colleagues
• Your capacity to be authentic and to build trust with others
• The habits you choose to develop
• The alternatives you see and the choices you make about your work
• The talents and capabilities you decide to develop
• The type of people you decide to spend your time with at work and outside of work

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So you have to think carefully about the way you look at the world, the choices you make, and the skills and habits you focus on developing. You can be your own greatest supporter—or your own worst enemy!

The way you look at the world and the actions you take have a profound impact on your capacity to Glow. My suggestion here is that you leverage your personal style by looking more closely at the aspects of your natural personality that you want to accentuate and amplify.

Your personality, style, and competencies are important resources to you. But as Frank found, being able to Glow is not simply about you as a person, isolated from others. It’s about your relationship with others and ultimately about the team and community with whom you work.

Your Team as a Potential Resource:
Glowing with Your Colleagues

Ultimately, your capacity to Glow is up to you. But you flourish because of the people you are with. They can help you feel great and energized—or they can sap your energy and creativity. Recall that Frank was able to call on the people around him to ensure that he could deliver high-quality and innovative results, whereas Fred found himself increasingly isolated.

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Your colleagues and team can give you the support, the insight, and the knowledge that will ensure that you Glow and stay ahead of the curve. They can also be the catalysts for the cold winds of the Big Freeze to blow around your ankles!

We all work in different ways, so what you think of as a “team” may not be the same as someone else’s. If you work independently, your team will be your immediate colleagues and soul mates and also your suppliers or clients. If you work in a commercial business, your team will be the project teams and task forces you work with. If you work for a not-for-profit organization, your team will be the people you serve and the others you engage with. No one works in complete isolation.

Your capacity to make use of these potentially wonderful resources is dependent in part on the way you interact and on your own and your colleagues’ attitudes, skills, and habits. Indeed, your capacity to reach out to those around you to become a resource depends on a variety of things:

• Your attitudes and behavior toward your colleagues
• The extent to which your colleagues are prepared to cooperate with each other and with you
• The way your colleagues work with people outside the immediate team
• The extent to which you and your colleagues are prepared to confront important questions and issues
• Whether you can encourage your team or colleagues to support you in your vision of the future

So you have to think about what sort of team or colleagues you should be working with and whether your current team members are in fact able to support you and, if they cannot, what you need to do to gain their support.

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The key message here is that your team is crucial to you, and you can influence the extent to which team members support you by the way you behave toward them and even by choosing to remain with them over the longer term (more on this later).

Your Business as a Potential Resource:
Glowing in Your Extended Community

The third resource available to you to ensure that you Glow is the business or community that surrounds you. Even if you work independently, your extended community and networks of people can be a crucial resources.

Be it an informal support network or a large business, your extended community can be a valuable resource because it provides opportunities for Hot Spots to arise. Your extended community can also drain you of energy and enthusiasm.

Of course, you may feel that you have very little inf luence over your business or community. However, as I will show you, there are ways you can influence your wider environment—from the way you decide to interact with others and the choices you make to deciding that this is not a business or community you want to be a member of.

The reason why your extended community is such a crucial potential resource is that it is within this wider community that Hot Spots are likely to flare up, and these provide wonderful opportunities for you to Glow. As noted in Chapter One, Hot Spots are times, places, and occasions when your latent energy and that of others is suddenly ignited in the service of some greater goal. In an informal network the goal could be the creation of something exciting and new—in the way that Wikipedia and Linux are extraordinary communities that have created Hot Spots of innovation and productivity. Or this could happen in a company—in the way that the Nano car was the focus of a Hot Spot that burned for four years in the Tata Group in India.

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So where you work and the network you are part of can make a big difference in whether you Glow or not. There are some workplaces that inspire you and are natural creators of Hot Spots. There are other places where you are more likely to encounter the Big Freeze. In your workplace, whether you Glow or not is influenced by a number of things:

• Whether the role models and leaders in your extended community behave in a cooperative way
• Your day-to-day experience of your work and the habits and routines of people around you—for example, how people routinely communicate with each other, how people are selected to join the community or business, and how resources are allocated among people
• Whether your business or community has networks that extend out to well-wishers and supporters
• The extent to which the business or wider community encourages and supports you personally to widen your networks of friends and associates
• Whether you are encouraged to pursue friendships and contacts with people outside your immediate team

So you have to think carefully about the community, company, or business you join (and when to leave), the executives you work with, and the negotiations you make about the development of your skills.

You may be wondering why you should concentrate at all on the business or company you work for. Perhaps you see yourself as a very small cog in a very large wheel. You may feel that you have very little discretion over the way you work or indeed over the company you join. But the truth is, you are not powerless. Through your own will and volition, it is possible for you to change the context in which you work through the practices you support and encourage.

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Even if you feel it will be tough to change the culture or values of the place, there are actions you can take. You can leave the business or company you are in right now if you feel that you are unlikely to encounter the Hot Spots of energy that will enable you to Glow. Or you can actively move from a part of the company that is devoid of hope to one that appears to be more vibrant.

You may be working for yourself with a couple of associates or for a medium-sized business or for a multinational company that has offices in different countries. You may still be in education and wondering how to make choices about what to do and where to work, or you may be already established or, like me, thinking about how to make the most of the next decade of work. Where you are in your career or the size of the company you join is not the deciding factor when it comes your finding Hot Spots or learning how to Glow. What is important is you.

You Can Glow—It’s You That
Makes It Happen

As you go through this book, you will deepen your understanding of the three principles and the nine actions that ensure that you stay ahead of the curve. Using the Glow Profile, you will calibrate the extent to which your potential resources (you, your team, and your business or community) are able to support you in making sure you Glow every day. The profile will also help you pinpoint where you can best take action. I will be on hand to give you ideas, tips, and stories that will energize and entertain you and show you how others (including myself) have made this work.

Tips on Learning to Glow

You can significantly increase your potential to Glow. A few basic tips will help you succeed.

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Remember that it’s not about your personality

Perhaps you believe you don’t really have the personality that will really enable you to Glow every day. Perhaps you think you are too “introverted” or lack self-confidence or don’t have a personality that attracts interesting, creative people to work with you. The problem with these self-doubts is that they can lead you to give up hope and settle for a working life that is more like the Big Freeze than a Hot Spot of energy and excitement.

The idea that there is a Glow “personality type” is a myth. What is important is that you learn to take the nine actions on a day-to-day basis. You can take these actions in your own way; there is no one type of person who is particularity adept at Glowing. You can be an introvert or an extrovert, a thinker or a feeler, highly intuitive or judgemental . . . and still Glow.

Use all your potential resources

What’s really important are the actions and habits you—and only you— adopt. Some of these actions are big actions—like having the courage to ask igniting questions, which might not come up in your life that often. Others are day-to-day habits—like remembering to put time aside every day to have a significant conversation with one of your colleagues or taking a different route to work. Remember that of all the resources available to you, it is your will, your development, and your choices that will really make a difference.

This seems deceptively straightforward. Of course, you may be thinking, I’m the one who makes this happen. However, I have found that some people get the message about what Glowing is and where they stand and then fail to take action.

When people fail to take action, they typically concentrate on one resource but not all of them. Some fail to take action around themselves— they don’t really question their own attitudes or strive to develop new habits and skills. Or they fail to take action in their team or networks and let these fester and become places where the Big Freeze creeps in. Others still do nothing about the place in which they work.

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The marvelous thing about Glowing, of course, is that it is you who make it happen. It is your will, your choices, and your development that generate energy, happiness, and innovation. So you don’t have to wait to be asked— you don’t have to wait for someone else to start. You can start right now and get to work on the mindset and attitudes you have, the choices you make, the actions you take, and the habits you develop.

You have to explore the mindset you have. You have to think and feel your way into Glowing. In the sections that follow, I will take you through a number of thought exercises designed to help you frame your thinking about this.

Next, you have to examine the choices you make—for example, the people you choose to spend time with, the networks you choose to develop, the groups you work with, and the companies and businesses you join. For each of these choices, the Glow Profile will give you some pointers about where you are now and what you need to do.

Finally, you have to pay attention to the actions you take and the habits you develop. There are certain habits and behaviors that could make a real difference in your degree of energy, happiness and innovation—and ultimately your success. I will show you what these habits and behaviors are and the concrete actions you can take to develop them.

Yes, you can Glow if you concentrate on the way you think about the world, the choices you make, and the skills and habits you focus on developing.

Confront your pet theories about success

Finding places of high energy in which you can Glow is so wonderful and important to your success that you will want to re-create the experience again and again. Beware, though, that you don’t simply try the same thing over and over and rely on pet theories rather than really understanding what it takes to Glow every day.

Let me give you an example by recounting the tale of the tribe and the pig. A long time ago in a distant land, there was a tribe of forest dwellers. One day, during a particularly vicious electrical storm, a bolt of lightning struck a tree under which a wild pig was sheltering. The poor creature was roasted alive by the blast. The smell and taste of the roasted pork was so enticing to the people of the tribe that they rushed to devour it with great enjoyment. In fact, they enjoyed it so much that from that day on, every time there was an electrical storm, the people caught a wild pig and tethered it to a tree, waiting for lightning to strike.

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This almost certainly fictitious story nevertheless drives home the fact that when something marvelous and unexpected happens (like a roasted pig or a Hot Spot or that Glowing feeling), you tend to generalize from that single event and build a theory on it. These theories can be wrong. They can be too specific (for example, the tethering of the pig); they can fail to recognize the underlying factors (for example, that there are other ways of roasting pork); and they may rely on the recurrence of a low-probability event (that the same tree will again be struck by lightning).

Surely there have been times in your life when you have felt that you were Glowing or you experienced being in a Hot Spot. It might have been around certain people or in certain places or at certain times. So to re-create the feeling and experience, you go back over the same routes—finding the same people and hanging around in the same places. What you are overlooking is that there could be many other routes to Glowing and creating, finding, or flourishing in Hot Spots—with different people, in different places, and at different times.

Don’t simply try to replicate the context that created Hot Spots for you in the past. In this book you will learn that there are many ways to Glow and many ways to find, create, and flourish in Hot Spots.

Work equally on all three principles

As noted earlier, people who Glow pursue their working lives on the basis of three principles. They are positive, collaborative and trusting with others; they enjoy jumping across worlds to meet people different from themselves; and they are questioning and capable of creating a meaningful and inspiring vision.

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Staying ahead of the curve means working on all three principles. You will become frustrated by incapacity to really Glow if you only focus on one principle. For example, you work really hard on developing your habits around cooperation but then fail to bridge to others who are different from you. Or you work hard on widening your networks and bridge to people unlike you but then fail to find anything that ignites the latent energy in these networks.

Of course, it is only natural that you strive to develop those skills and attitudes at which you excel. So if you are warmhearted, you build cooperation, or if you are an easygoing networker, you concentrate on widening your networks. Or if you are a counterintuitive thinker, asking the igniting questions or envisioning meaningful tasks is second nature to you.

However, if you focus only on what comes most naturally, you may ignore other aspects that are just as important. The three principles work together in a cumulative, integrated way. To learn to Glow, you must make sure that you are giving each of the three principles equal focus and attention.

Find a work partner or a group to Glow with

Fred made the mistake of thinking that to stay ahead of the curve, he needed to keep his head down and work harder. Frank took the view that colleagues around him and his wider networks could support him.

The same is true for this project—the project to increase the amount of time you Glow. You could complete the Glow Profile and think about your actions completely on your own. The truth is that this is my natural course of action. I am an introvert (most writers are, by the way, even if they can put on a performance when required), so my sympathies lie with Fred. Faced with a problem (how to Glow more in my life), I am likely to hunker down and try to get through it myself.

But what I have learned over the years is that just as Glowing is about your relationships with others, learning to Glow is something you can embark on with others. So over the years I have called on a few friends for support. Sometimes it’s explicit—one of my dearest friends, Dominic, is a Buddhist, so I look to him on occasion for a moral compass when discussing issues with him. Other times it has been spending time with people who have the positive and upbeat way of living that I would like to develop in myself. I was lucky to have a close friend in Sumantra Ghoshal (now sadly passed away); he was wonderful at acting as a mirror to me and how I was behaving.

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The bottom line is that you can do this on your own, but it may be both instructive and fun to involve others. You can ask your friends and colleagues to take a look at this book and complete the profile for how they see you (and in the spirit of cooperation, you can complete the profile for them). They can help you recognize your blind spots—aspects of yourself that you are unaware of. For example, it was Sumantra who pointed out to me that most of my close friends are very similar to me in terms of education, lifestyle, and beliefs. As soon as he told me this, I realized he was right—but I had never noticed it myself; it was a real blind spot. I immediately saw that I was failing to jump across worlds because I spent too much time with people very similar to myself.

Your friends and colleagues may also identify positive aspects of yourself that you had not really recognized or had underestimated. These friends can also draw your attention to aspects of yourself that they really value but perhaps you take for granted—and of course you can do the same for them.

So talking with others would be a wonderful opportunity for both you and them to learn to Glow more. As you think about how you might best support one another, here are some ground rules you may find useful to share:

Find people who are also excited. Take the initiative—give your colleagues a copy of this book, and ask them to work with you. Try to find people who have a positive outlook, who care about you (and whom you care about), who have enough time to engage in conversation with you, and who are potentially different enough from you to bring a fresh perspective.

Make sure everyone gets equal amounts of air time. Inevitably, some colleagues will be more talkative and extroverted than others. So the temptation is for them to talk more and more and the introverts to talk less and less. Giving equal airtime is crucial if your helpmates are to stay together and flourish. It may be wise, at least the beginning, to allocate a certain amount of time to each person and stick to this time allocation.

Listen, listen, listen. You know the feeling: you are talking and you can see that the person with you is thinking of other things and is simply waiting for you to stop so that he or she can jump in. Make it clear that listening is crucial to a supportive community like this—so be conscious of this and as a group monitor how well you are at listening to one another.

Don’t get defensive. If your colleagues are working well together, they will be revealing and discussing blind spots—positive aspects of yourself you undervalued or negative things you really did not know about yourself. I recall how upset I was when a dear friend told me that I can sound harsh at times. I checked it out—“Do I sometimes sound judgmental and harsh?” I asked my sister Heather. “Of course!” she replied. I should have realized this, but I did not. I guess I thought I was being helpful. But it didn’t come across that way, and that was something I had to work on if I was to honor the principle of cooperation and learn to Glow more of the time.

I have heard people say the same about blind spots—that when negatives are brought to the surface, they can be difficult to comprehend. I guess if they were easy to comprehend, they would not be in your blind spot. So as members of a learning community, try not to become defensive when negatives surface. It is often at these difficult moments that true learning takes place.

You will find that others can be a useful resource for creating an atmosphere of learning, awareness, insight, and courage.

Forget the myth of patience

Sometimes you feel powerless, that there is nothing you can do, that life will take its course. That if you wait long enough, you will eventually Glow and find a Hot Spot. This is the myth of patience. You don’t have to wait—you can take action now that will ensure that you Glow every day of your life.

I have some sympathy for the myth of waiting. Certainly there have been times in my life when I have felt that I was working in a Big Freeze and that there was really nothing I could do. At such times, I feel overwhelmed by the negative energy and angry at my own impotence. These are times when I feel that my work and I have drifted apart, that I have lost control of what I am at work or how I work. I am a natural optimist and always believe that, despite a passing rain cloud, eventually the sun will come out. I guess that all of us feel at some time in our working life that we just have to hunker down—that sooner or later the storm will pass. One day the icicles of the Big Freeze will melt and we will feel more like Glowing.

Looking back on these times for myself and observing the lives of others, I have come to the conclusion that the “wisdom” of patience is a myth. The hard fact is that unless you act, the Big Freeze may never melt, and you may never Glow. I know this is a scary thought—and as I write it down, I imagine a world of constant Big Freeze with no respite. But it could happen. You could wait a long, long time for the Big Freeze to end. The important personal quality here is not patience. On the contrary, it is your capacity to act—consciously and deliberately to take the actions that will ensure that you Glow and find energy and innovation in your working life.

You don’t have to wait to Glow—you can take action right now to increase the probability of Hot Spots emerging in your working life.

An Introduction to the Glow Profile

As you progress through the three principles, you and your colleagues have the opportunity to complete the Glow Profile for each of the principles in turn.

The concentric circles of the Glow Profile in Figure 2.1 are divided into three segments, representing the three principles (cooperative mindset, jumping across worlds, and igniting latent energy). The inner circle correspond to you and your work; the middle circle represents your immediate colleagues or team; and the outer circle your wider community, business, or network within which you work.

You will complete the profile as you go through each of the following chapters, starting with the segment on cooperative mindset in Chapter Three,

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The Glow Profile

FIGURE 2.1 The Glow

Profile jumping across worlds in Chapter Eight, and igniting latent energy in Chapter Thirteen. For each of the three principles, you will answer a series of questions that reveal to what extent the principle is operating in your work life, in your immediate community or team, and in your wider community or business. Each of the nine segments is rated as “high” (much support for Glowing), “medium” (some support for Glowing), or “low” (limited support for Glowing).

By rating each of the nine segments, you can tell at a glance what aspects of your working life are currently helping you Glow and where you need to take immediate action. (You can download the profile and questions at http://www.hotspotsmovement.com.)

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Key Points from Chapter Two
Your Glow Resources

The context in which you operate and work can profoundly affect your capacity to Glow by becoming a supportive resource or a barrier. The principles for Glowing are played out across three parts of your working life:

• Your own insights, talents, capabilities, habits, and choices
• Your immediate community or team—with regard to attitudes, skills, and behaviors
• Your wider community, business, or organization—with regard to the norms of the community and the routine ways of day-to-day behavior

So as you learn to increase your capacity to Glow, it is important that you take into consideration these three parts of your working life.

As you increase your capability to Glow, keep these points in mind:

• It is not about your personality—anyone who takes the nine actions can learn to Glow.
• What are crucial are the everyday actions you take and habits you develop.
• Forget your pet theories and instead focus on the three principles.
• Work on all three principles, rather than concentrating on the one or two that are easiest for you. The three principles are integrated, and you have to take action on all three to get the result you want.
• Find a few supportive people to engage with who can also profile themselves, and remember to listen and not become too defensive with one another.
• Patience is a myth. Take action now!