The New Golden Rule

The Professional Perfectionist's Guide to Greater Emotional Intelligence, A More Fulfilling Career, and A Better Life

Emily Golden

• Publisher: Warren Publishing, Inc
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781954614093
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Éxito personal

STEP THREE

FOLLOWING THE NEW GOLDEN RULE ROADMAP

Hindu teachings set out the world’s ages according to their most central qualities.
Truth is said to define the Golden Age.

Chapter 6

THE “HOW”

Although the world is full of suffering,
it is also full of the overcoming of it.¹⁸

–HELEN KELLER

How will you get from here to there?

Who will you be when things go wrong?

A client’s “roadmap” is the how of the work we do together. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, it includes doing values work by looking at peak experiences (those moments in life when the client feels most alive), vision work (when we ask: “What is your intended result? Where do you want to be and why?”), and thinking about what life will be like when you actualize the vision:

•What becomes possible then?

•How will you feel?

•What will your experience of yourself and life be?

From the answers to these questions, we can create and follow the plan from the future to ensure we are not indulging perceived barriers/blocks. Think of this step as standing in the future and working backward, or reverse engineering something. Designing projects from the future has us coming from possibility, not probability.

Here are some examples of specific project designs:

1.Building skills around empathy is a project one of my clients is working on. He’s gotten feedback that he can be terse. We have to look at how to measure progress, or, “How will we know you’ve moved the needle in this area?” One thing that is measurable is the amount of feedback he gets on this issue. If a month goes by and he hasn’t gotten any feedback, or it switches to positive feedback—“something is different with you”—that’s meaningful. He’ll also know something has changed when he regularly has a clearer conscience. We also might know if someone asks him for a promotion.

2.Getting a new job. It’s more than just getting a new job, however. A new role has to be in alignment with the client’s career goals and move her forward. Getting a salary increase is also a common project for many of my clients.

3.Improving communication with their team could be a project design for someone. It could involve providing feedback at work to achieve goals with greater ease, or building overall morale to reduce turnover, for example.

Next, we create a strategy to get there so that the client knows what actions need to be taken in what order. If we don’t approach project design in this concrete manner, clients get in their own way with thoughts like: I don’t know how, I’m gonna do it wrong, What if I fail? or, I’ve never done it before, so why would I think I can this time?

Once we have our milestones identified and they are time-bound (by a certain date and with a specific measure), we look at skill set:

•What skills are needed?

•Which of those skills are present already and which need to be built?

•For those to be built, where do we go to build them?

Sometimes I can help the client build the skill myself and sometimes they need outside resources.

Lastly, we plan rewards along the way. Most of my clients have a dysfunctional relationship with rewarding themselves. They are high achievers and will often tell me, “Achieving my goal is reward enough.” This, however, is a recipe for burnout. We are reward-driven creatures. Being rewarded motivates us and keeps us in action. We also need to celebrate our wins, both big and small. If we don’t celebrate along the way or celebrate once we reach our goals, what’s the point of having goals?

A reward serves as a stake in the ground for the milestone achieved. I set my first big reward when I became a coach at getting hired by four clients at a designated rate. My reward was a standing desk, which was a big investment for me at the time. To this day, I look at that desk with pride. I earned it.

A client of mine, Carlos, had a banner year last year. Yet in January, he was back to a familiar place of fear, saying things like, “What if I don’t achieve the same level of success this year? What if my run is over?”

I called him out on forgetting an important step in our process: rewarding himself. Carlos loves watches. He wanted a new high-end watch and had a story about that desire being bad or wrong. We coached around it and he finally empowered his decision to honor his accomplishments with a watch he now proudly wears every day.

I’m always listening to my clients for the things—trips or items they desire—to build in to their project plans. Most people have a weighty story about being “selfish” when they speak about rewards, but it is such a key part of building up and honoring your Golden Self. Do not try to skip it or avoid it.

Commitment to Your Vision

It’s totally predictable that my clients, who are all busy people, will become “too busy” at some point. Their commitment to the coaching will wane. So, I ask at the beginning of an engagement, “What is going to get in the way of your commitment? What’s going to happen? Are you going to get too busy? Are you going to get confronted? Are you going to decide that you are good enough now and you don’t need to continue to develop yourself? Or will you be prioritizing other people over yourself?”

Then I ask, “What do you need me to say to you, or who do you need me to be for you, when that moment inevitably arrives?” People appreciate it, because we all have predictable patterns. For me, mine is to get busy and overwhelmed: “I have so much on my plate!”

Busy is not a leadership competency. Being busy does not mean you are important. Prioritizing development is where power lies.

Once we have the map in place, we coach around what’s happening in the client’s life in relation to their map—particularly if there are points at which they are struggling to stay on course. We also do a number of different exercises throughout our work together. I love distinguishing cycles and patterns with clients—relationship cycles, stress, Survival Self cycles. The goal is to distill what’s predictable and how to interrupt the pattern.

I have more than five hundred exercises in my tool belt at this point and pull out the most appropriate tools based on the client.

•Area of Life: They look at major areas of life or business and rate where they are on a scale of one to five and what a five in each area looks like. From there, we create one action per category.

•Energy (not time) Management: For planning tomorrow, today

•Well-being Tracking: Done throughout the week or month (see the end of Chapter 7 for more information on how to do this).

•Fifty Accomplishments Exercise: When a client is struggling with confidence and belief in self, I challenge them to list fifty accomplishments or moments in which they felt a sense of pride, fulfillment, or wholeness.

This is the part of my process where I mess with my clients’ thinking, using the New Golden Rule. As we discussed previously in Chapter 1, Patrice was feeling undervalued at work. She knew she was being paid less than her peers, yet her performance had been stellar and she was constantly being pulled in to different projects. Patrice was fearful of asking for a salary increase because, as she said, “Maybe I’m not worth it. My boss may get upset or uncomfortable. The company is tight on funds.”

Patrice was allowing her fear to hold her back, and ultimately, the company was suffering as well because her engagement was down. What would you say to her, using the New Golden Rule?

Here is another example: Malcolm was interviewing for a new position he really wanted. However, he was spending so much time trying to package himself in the way he believed the employer wanted him to be that he was disconnected from his secret sauce—the thing that made him a stand-out candidate, which was his talent for relationship building. He was actually blocking his ability to develop a genuine relationship because he was convinced there was a “right” way to show up in interviews.

Fortunately, we ultimately discovered in our work together that if he were to get a job based on a false representation of himself, he and the employer would be shortchanged.

Emily’s Predictable Cycle
(Hint, Reader: you have one too.)

High achievers often grab on to new habits with vigor, from a place of wanting to be exceptional. We want to stand out, be recognized, be in the best shape. Thus, a particular cycle begins. I engaged in this cycle in the past (though it can still creep back in sometimes, even today, if I’m not cognizant of my thinking) in order to get what I craved in childhood, which was acceptance, attention, and my dad’s love. My cycle is a reliable process for turning everything into a burden, no matter how much I love it.

Others have their own markers along a cycle, but for me, the following sequence is how it plays out. You may see yourself in these steps, or you may have a totally different cycle. Check in with yourself as you read to see if any of this sounds familiar:

1.Commit to something new from excitement. This “thing” could be yoga, exercise, meditation, a business idea, professional development, a particular activity with kids, a house project, etc.

2.Become hyper-focused on it.

3.Spend a lot of time and energy on it.

4.Feel proud of your commitment and compare yourself to others who are not doing it quite so well or with such intensity. This is the “be better than” part of the circle.

5.Make a “mistake,” or fail to do the thing perfectly one time. Beat yourself up, create drama.

6.Try to clean up your mistakes, errors, or imperfections, and feel temporary relief.

7.Obsess over continuing to do your thing the “right way.”

8.Filter out role models who have success and joy. Surround yourself with friends who struggle and believe that to struggle is the best way to live.

9.Become exhausted, fantasize about not doing the thing anymore.

10.Become annoyed with the thing. Make the thing the problem. Gossip about the thing. Seek validation by complaining to people who will tell you how bad this thing is.

11.Disengage from the thing, all the while beating yourself up and not fully releasing it. Voilà, the thing becomes a burden.

12.Get bored, uncomfortable, look for a new thing.

13.Find a new thing. This is it! Start the cycle over again.

I encourage people to look closely at this cycle to understand its benefits and its costs. Look at the gifts of what this cycle brings: variety, excitement, engagement. Look at what it costs you as well. Interrupt the cycle by asking yourself, What would someone who is not in this kind of cycle do? For me, for example: What would Oprah do? What would Michelle Obama do?

Choose Your Words Carefully

The words you choose to think and speak create your experience of life and the experience others have of you. A few simple examples:

1.We hope to solve the problem.

•We are committed to solving the problem.

2.I have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Step One: The Archaeological Dig
• Step Two: Living the New Golden Rule
• Step Three: Following The New Golden Rule Roadmap
• A New Beginning: Silence is Golden
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Bibliography