ProdPod, a Productivity Podcast

It's important for everyone to be empowering you, not just pointing out your faults. If anyone has something negative to say, ask them to re-cast the statement in the form of a question. If it does have to be stated, guide board advisers to use constructive criticism only (that is, no complaining or whining; have a solution ready to propose to the problem they are observing). If a board adviser has a problem with another and would like to address it but is not sure how, please encourage them to bring it to your attention confidentially so that it can be determined the best way toward a productive outcome. Public, positive discussions and praise are wholeheartedly welcomed and encouraged. Praise publicly, and often!

These are a few guidelines for making this a successful network of personal and professional contacts that are assisting you to move forward in your life and work. Please feel free to add to these guidelines for yourself and selectively publish appropriate guidelines to your board advisers.

In the next two episodes, we'll discuss some guidelines for running an effective Personal Advisory Board. 

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.

One of the great insights of the past twenty years is our appreciation of interdependence, the support network required of every knowledge worker to survive and thrive. As a term I first heard while reading works of Mahatma Gandhi and then Dr. Covey, it has developed into my deep understanding that the compound, mutual benefit of giving to, getting from and connecting others is a maturity we all must embrace in order to succeed. You need to be able to leverage this wisdom of the crowd in your social network. A Professional Board of Advisers (or, as I commonly will refer to it, Personal Advisory Board), is similar to that of a corporation's board of directors, in that it is a small team that you assemble of your personal and professional contacts with expertise in areas that you need assistance. Corporations and large organizations all have boards, most of them are not surprisingly required to by law, but some also have advisory boards used to help CEOs and other executives make good and better decisions. You might actually sit on one such board yourself. The reasoning behind having an advisory board is pretty simple yet brilliant. Companies are made of people and people need support and accountability. I approach this same concept when managing my personal and professional life; my interdependent world is the sum total of the people I've included in my life. In many ways, everyone has used at least a partial Personal Advisory Board in the past, when they have held family meetings, asked friends for relationship advice, sought out a mentor relationship, or gathered anyone together to help with a specific situation. My thought is to have a Personal Advisory Board that gives you the ability to reach your potential through a consistent framework. 

In the next few episodes we'll discuss what comprises your Personal Advisory Board, and how to run an effective Personal Advisory Board.

Over the past decade I have heard people talk about their rising stress levels. More information, more responsibility and the same 24 hours a day to get it all in and done, respectively. What I don't see many people doing is distinguishing the unhealthy stress from the healthy stress. Much of what positively motivates us is stress not its absence. As Barry Lenson writes in his book, Good Stress, Bad Stress [ http://goo.gl/3zDTK0 ], there are two types of psychological stressors. He characterizes them as positive or negative using some practical criteria so I thought I'd share them.