The Value of Recognition

Volunteers give more than the general public will ever recognize. They make the choice to give their time and effort to make our community better, without any promise of reward or payment. If you’ve tried to organize any group of prospective volunteers you know that the ones who show up and give it their best are incredibly valuable. This is why it’s so important to have a way to recognize them and bring attention their efforts. By celebrating their hard work, hopefully you can inspire someone in the audience to step forward and join in.

The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medals were intended to be just such a reward,  “to honour significant contributions and achievements by Canadians”. Unfortunately, the meaning and significance of these medals have been diminished by a few poorly chosen nominations. At every level of government, there have been questionable nominations made, and each bad nomination detracts from from the real value of the award. Our own mayor Joe Fontana made two of these poor decisions: first, he nominated a former municipal politician who was found guilty of corruption, and then Mayor Joe nominated his own current city council.

It’s obvious why the first choice was a bad one: anyone who has been convicted of betraying the public trust is hardly a positive example to hold up to the rest of the community. But the second choice, the one to nominate his fellow council members who currently sit as our municipal leaders, is also a lapse in judgement.

When you are elected to office, you take on an obligation to encourage others at the expense of your own accolades. You don’t get medals, because there are other people who need the encouragement more than you do. As a leader, you know that there is always another volunteer who needs to hear that their efforts are appreciated, and their sacrifice is worth it. You put your own ego last.

Finding Success when it’s Hiding

Last weekend I went off to another giant political convention. My experience at my first convention last year had such a positive and transformative effect on me that my amazingly supportive wife encouraged me to go to this one.

And, truth be told, I was very excited for the convention, mostly because of the people I was going to be able to see.  I knew from Twitter and Facebook that a lot of my friends from across the province would be there, and I assumed it would be easy to find them and talk to them at the event. I also thought it would be a great opportunity to sell some copies of my books, so I loaded up by suitcases with fiction and off I went to Toronto.

Looking back on the situation, I can see that I set 2 difficult conditions for a successful experience, which is at least 1 condition too many. The reality of a convention is that people are rushing around and are caught up in the pull of various sudden opportunities and activities. You might bump into everyone you’re hoping to see, but it’s unlikely to happen by sheer happenstance.  Another reality of conventioneering is that you are too busy and tired to want to carry more stuff around with you. I certainly didn’t want to carry around the satchel full of increasingly heavy books for the whole weekend, so I wasn’t surprised when my chums didn’t want to either.

Tacked on top of my overly ambitious agenda was the sudden appearance of a raging throat infection, making itself known as I arrived in Toronto. My plans had to shift, and I was faced with a choice on how to respond to that. I could

A) get upset, beat myself up for failing to meet my goals, and mope for the whole weekend

B) Do the best that I could to participate in the weekend, while trying to take care of myself, and consider that a victory.

So I dug out my travel kit full of advil, cough syrup, muscle relaxants and away I went. Knowing that I wanted to experience the hospitality suites, if only to say that I had, I ate well, drank an extra coffee later in the day, and soldiered my way through the night. I had a blast.

The rest of the weekend was a sweaty, tired blur, that was punctuated by a countless number of kind gestures from the friends around me. They kept me in good spirits and well hydrated throughout those 2 days, and it made me realize how lucky I am to have these people in my life.

So, when I came home after this illness-infused journey, I took stock of it all. I didn’t meet my original success conditions, true, but in facing a challenging situation and finding a way to continue on despite it, I found a different set of successes to appreciate. And that’s the real lesson I took away from it all: sometimes you have to root around in the big pile of unintended outcomes to find the success, but it’s in there somewhere. Oh, and I have some pretty awesome friends and family.

 

 

Potential vs. Capacity

You’re in the middle of a long procession of tasks. Behind you are a pile of finished jobs, and in front of you are even more, and you find yourself standing completely still. You want to keep at it and move on to the next job, but your body refuses to comply. No matter how angry you get at yourself,  or how you try to goad or bribe yourself into action, you’re stay still.

It’s like you’re sitting in your car on an icy road. The engine is running, you have a destination, and you want to get there, but when you mash down on the accelerator, your tires spin uselessly. Congratulations, you’ve discovered the limit of your conscious effort!

You see, it takes a mental effort to perform complex cognitive tasks, or to exercise your self-control. And there is only so much energy that you have available for these tasks-when your mental battery runs dry, you lose the ability to push ahead. It’s not a figurative battery-heavy thinking causes your blood sugar levels to drop, and in that state, your self-control and complex problem-solving skills are severely hampered. It’s a psychological concept called “ego depletion”.

Here’s an easy test of the limits of your concentration: start running at a pace that’s faster than you normally run (this requires conscious effort) and as you’re running, try to multiply 657 X 383 in your head. You won’t be able to do both. Most people will slow down immediately, and a few will actually stop running for a moment when they start puzzling out the math question.

This limited capacity for mental effort is why you can find yourself over-committed and overwhelmed with a series of tasks that, on their own, you could easily handle. But when you try to manage them all at the same time, you run out of mental energy. It’s why I didn’t write this post yesterday, for example-too many challenges eating up all of my available processing ability.

So how do you work with this restricted capacity, when you’re always going to be presented with more challenges and opportunities than you can simultaneously handle? Practice. With repetition, even the most complicated tasks can eventually become routine, and routine tasks don’t use up your mental effort.

Remember, you have great potential, but limited capacity-make the most out of it.