Level Up Your Thinking, Thrive as a Team, and Stop Worrying About Perfection
Hi Folks! Connor and Nick here from Healthy Living With Nick and Connor. Thanks again for being on our email list, it means a lot, and we are excited to share our weekly email with you. We hope you enjoy it! Here is what we hope you take away from this one:
Where do you do your best thinking? Think about this, apply what you come up with, and blast through your problems.
Learning how to work and thrive as a team may just be one of the most important things you work on to improve the relationships in your life.
You are never going to be 100% ready for everything you do in life. Stop worrying about perfection and start doing the things you want to do.
Starter Mindset Tip: Where Do You Do YOUR Best Thinking
Do you ever think about where you do your best thinking, where you seem to figure out a lot of your problems? This comes down to awareness. If you never think about where or when you do your best thinking or best problem solving, you are missing out on an amazing opportunity to optimize how you think, operate, and work. Maybe you seem to have a lot of your breakthroughs in the shower, or out for a walk, or while you are exercising, or out in nature. Maybe your breakthroughs always seem to happen at a specific time in your day. Start keeping track of when and where you do your best work and your best thinking and start prioritizing that time to work through whatever it is you are working through. What we can almost guarantee is that you are not getting any breakthroughs while you are looking at your phone, watching TV, or scrolling through your emails. Give your mind the chance to wander, take mental breaks throughout your day, step away from your work regularly, and you never know, you may just start solving all of your life’s problems.
Health Recipe: How to Work and Thrive as a Team
Timing: Short and long moments to work together
Level of Difficulty: Easy to hard
Serving Size: Build and grow as a team through little moments all the time
Spiciness: Mild to spicy
INGREDIENTS
You, your teammates, and an open mind
REASONING AND BENEFITS
This recipe was inspired by the book “The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups,” by Daniel Coyle. Being a part of a team is something that happens throughout your life in different ways, but one thing is for sure, you will be a part of a team. Our minds often jump to sports when we hear the word team, but a team can be anything. You and your partner are a team, your family is a team, your friends are a team, your co-workers are a team. Teams are everywhere, so it is important to make sure your teams are as strong as they can be. Coyle does a great job explaining how the best teams in the world function. The feelings of home, family, and warmth were the overarching themes in all successful teams (especially when the team you are working on is your family). A family feel is built by making people feel safe, by giving everyone on the team a voice, by being clear with expectations, by actively listening to each other, and by creating systems of communication to work through problems together. Communication is absolutely key, especially when it is hard. Being vulnerable is hard, talking about your weaknesses is hard, talking about your mistakes is hard, talking about your failures is hard. Stop hiding from these conversations. Like all things in life, gravitate to things that are hard because that is where growth and mutual trust happens, this is where you grow together as a team. This will allow you to use each other's strengths to help each other, and you can work on each other's weaknesses together. “You have priorities, whether you name them or not. If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.” (Coyle, p. 209).
INSTRUCTIONS
The number one job is to take care of eachother when you are on a team. Do this by making your team feel like a family.
Encourage everyone on your team to speak up. Everyone has a voice.
Communication is key. Make sure everyone knows their roles. Talk about each person's skills and why they are important to the team's success.
Frame every challenge as a time to learn and grow as a team together.
Before a project, an event, or something challenging, talk about expectations. Talk about how you want to handle it TOGETHER. Talk about how you may fail, and put plans in place to avoid that failure. Get on the same page before the challenge.
After the project, event, or challenge, talk about it again! Talk about how you performed, what went right, what went wrong, and how you can improve next time. Without these conversations, how will you and your team ever improve?
PRO TIP: Make everyone feel important by sharing your weaknesses and asking for input from your team. No more hiding your weaknesses, lay it all out there, be vulnerable, and grow together.
* Fail early, fail often, learn from your failure together.
** There is a Japanese concept called kaizen. This means continual improvement. Continually improve all of the teams in your life.
*** Constantly ask yourself, “what is the most important question I should be asking myself right now to make this team better?”
Dessert Quote:
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” — Lorne Michales, Saturday Night Live
Now we want to hear from YOU! Please let us know what you think of today’s newsletter, and send us an example of how you applied the health recipe to your life! We would love to share how you introduced this week’s recipe into your life’s unique menu. Thanks and have a great Sunday!
Sources:
Learn more about building a team:
Coyle, D. (2018b). The culture code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. Random House.
