It is not uncommon for our family to receive solicitations from organizations asking for help in doing good. Donate here, give to this cause, make a difference in these lives. Not going to lie; most of these get recycled with no action taken. However, on one occasion, it was our daughter Jenna who intercepted the catalog from a group called World Vision.

My family completed our holiday tradition this past weekend. We gathered as a group and gave back by handing out Thanksgiving Meal kits at a local charity. We then broke bread as a family celebrating relationships and then headed to the grocery store to check the items off a secret Santa list.

Change and personal growth are the keys to life. There is no stagnation you are either growing or atrophying. Don’t overcomplicate what it takes to grow. Start with a simple process.

In part one, I focused mostly on the personal impacts of moving, so in part two, I will talk about what I learned about getting work done. I learned a lot about executing and bringing a large project to life. In no particular order, here are five things that you can apply in life or on the job.

Having experienced the reality of barely surviving (more truth than hyperbole in that statement) the stress, discomfort, lack of control, and fatigue of moving. I on fully on board with the research that concludes the physical, mental and emotional demands of moving lead it to being one of the most stressful events in your life.

If you are actively engaged in living, you will encounter problems. However, especially in the workplace, some people choose to live life as if one of the definitions of success is never letting anyone know you have encountered a problem. Success looks like being so buttoned up and so over-prepared that things appear always to be going as planned. There is a better way.

We all receive feedback continuously. Everything from projects we are working on to teams we are a part of to the apps we use involves feedback loops.

Since feedback loops are everywhere, it is not whether or not they exist that dictates the effectiveness of the feedback, but how we choose to engage in the loop and react to the feedback that dictates if we move closer to or further from achieving a new future state with better outcomes. Meaning YOU own if the feedback becomes a tool or a weapon.

So, although the process exists for a reason, and there may be parts of the process that are necessary because they enable you to follow the rules/laws, or they keep you/others safe or enable success today. The goal of your job is ALWAYS BIGGER than the process. I guarantee it. How can I do that? Because if the BIGGER thing didn’t exist, there would be no need for the process. The process exists to achieve the thing, not the other way around.

I know I have a problem because the microwave says :01

Great people, teams, and businesses are great because of the things they achieve. They achieve greatness by always growing, always moving forward, and always pushing past mediocrity. Replacing comfort and contentment with healthy amounts of discomfort and stress. This requires team members to speak boldly, candidly but always with positive intentions.

In life you will enter into dark places, all people do. Living life trying to avoid dark times is not helpful. Figuring out how to leave the dark place as quickly as possible having learned the intended lesson is a much healthier approach. Here are thoughts on how to achieve that.

Change is hard but a requirement for long term sustainable success. It goes against human nature and business nature so you must be willing to be persistent in a respectful way as you challenge the status quo knowing what got you to here won’t get you to there.

According to a book I was recently reading, Your Oxygen Mask First, most leaders who are chasing after their version of greatness suffer from a pretty severe tendency to neglect themselves. This apparently has adverse effects on a leader’s ability to achieve the greatness they are chasing. Put me on that list. I am probably an all-star in that endeavor, maybe even a future hall of famer.

Its important to freely share information because The concepts that information is still held firmly under lock and key and that the flow of information is something to be closely controlled are radically and irresponsibly flawed ideas. In a world full of information that is free and easy to come by, context has replaced content as the key driver of value in information. We must stop living like ostriches with our heads in the sand, shocked that people know “secrets” and instead share information and context freely. It is for the greater good to do so. Allow others the professional courtesy of being treated like an adult who can be trusted and allow others to trust you.

Let me share a brief personal story with a broadly applicable life lesson. Our youngest daughter is adopted. She joined her forever family at the age of 6.

The world has evolved into a real-world Wanka Factory (think of Willie Wonka and his chocolate factory with the room made of edible goodies where Gene Wilder encouraged us to live in a world of pure imagination).

Have you ever considered why do you participate in travel sports…really? I spend time with a Mindset coach and executive coach talking about the travel sports landscape and how to improve the chances of the experience being positive for your family and young athlete.

Last week I shared how the not being a jerk principle is about healthy conflict not about avoiding being a jerk. I have been reading bestselling author and Wharton professor of organization psychology Adam Grant’s book Think Again and just got to a chapter where he draws the same conclusion. So you don’t have to take my word for it.

This guiding principle is less about avoiding being a jerk and more about creating a culture of candor and inclusivity recognizing that as we explore candor and diversity of thought sometimes you will be a jerk and the best thing to do when that happens is apologize.

If you have a job, you are in the problem-solving business. You might be on the front end of that (customer service or sales), operating in the background (marketing, product development), work in the trenches (IT, manufacturing), or find your work adjacent to those who are (HR, Learning). Still, the reason your job exists is that a need was identified, and your company felt it could meet that need. You were then hired to support solving that need either directly or indirectly.