Jose Bautista, resident slugger for the Toronto Blue Jays, is an athlete of late that has put in his fair share of time practicing. He has managed to rise from a relatively unknown player in the world of Major League Baseball to winning back-to-back Hank Aaron awards. His story is an example of how practice does indeed make (near) perfect but, more importantly, illustrates the enormous impact that a good coach can have on an individual’s performance.

Drafted in 2004 by the Baltimore Orioles, Bautista’s first year in the majors was less than ideal. In his rookie year he ended up on the rosters of five different clubs and was eventually sent back to the minor leagues. There he largely remained up until 2008, when he was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays. His career was off to a rather mediocre start, but from here things start to get interesting.

At the beginning of the 2009 season, Bautista started working with Jays’ batting coach Dwayne Murphy. By September of that year Bautista had made the rise from being a little-known utility player to being considered one of the league’s best power-hitters, finishing off the year with 13 homeruns. Bautista continued to work with Murphy through the off-season and ended up finishing his 2010 season with 54 homeruns, easily earning himself the Hank Aaron award.

When asked what was key to his power hitting success, Bautista is quick to credit his batting coach, Dwayne Murphy. As Bautista explains, coaches are able to see things as they are starting to happen, before a player can see it and before it can turn into a slump or a crisis. In this case, Murphy noticed that his new player was starting his swing too late and worked with Bautista to start his swing a little bit earlier in the pitch.

There is a very short period of time between the moment a pitcher releases the ball towards the plate and the batter’s decision whether to swing at the ball or not. To pull in Victor Frankl’s work from “Man’s Search for Meaning”, this critical period of time is the space between stimulus (the pitch) and response (to swing or not to swing, that is the question). As Frankl puts it, “Somewhere between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Like a batter standing at the plate, our daily lives are filled with stimuli and the space where we have the power to determine our response. As leaders, we are constantly bombarded by these kinds of situations: timely decisions that need to be made on the spot, heated moments with co-workers where you have to choose your words wisely. We can’t be successful in these situations 100% of the time but I’m sure that we can all agree that there is always room for improvement. In baseball terms, we often struggle to “keep up with the pitch” and end up hitting fewer homeruns than we would like (ever have someone “throw you a curveball”?).

Jose Bautista worked with batting coach Dwayne Murphy to become masterful at managing the space between stimulus and response and this has realized huge dividends for the all-star and his team. Finding split-second differences that can be inhibiting the full potential of an individual’s performance illustrates how minor changes can create enormous impacts. As leaders in business, we can also work to become masterful at managing this space.

Coaches, teachers, and facilitators in the world of leadership development can work with leaders to see things that those leaders might not see. They can see those moments in between stimulus and response and help a person reclaim that space to regain their capacity to choose an appropriate and effective reaction. Developing your ability to make the most of that space between stimulus and response will pay you back big in your organization, with the people you lead and in your personal life.

As bold as this statement may sound, I think that connectedness at the retreat, after the serious business was finished and we had the chance to eat, drink and dance, was most meaningful when our minds and bodies merged and, to some extent, let themselves become one with the ‘music’. Myself, being somewhat of a serious daydreamer, started building a fantasy world at the party. This happened at the very moment I started dancing. Almost in a flash, I was transported for one or two minutes back in time to the fourth grade. The team reminded me of the Tainos, the indigenous people who lived in our island La Hispaniola (today comprised by two nations: Dominican Republic and Haiti), before the Spaniards’ “discovery” in 1492, and how they were portrayed in my history book. There were pictures of some of them hunting, others fishing and others building houses, but there were also pictures of  them holding hands while gathered in a circle performing what they called AREITO.

The AREITO, as a formal ceremony, was considered the most advanced cultural expression of this group and consisted of singing songs and dancing together. Along with singing and dancing, Areitos included the narration of past anecdotes and hero stories. However, to me, the most powerful and fascinating aspect of the Areito in the Pre-Columbian culture was its incredible capacity to get tribe members connected for a clear emotional purpose. Hence, each Areito meant different things such as love, pain, war or even mystery.  And, yes, they usually drank some “be yourself” and “loosen up” beverages. Areitos had a leader who was in charge of ensuring that the ceremony achieved its purpose, just like we have Sergio Montiel, our Areito leader. In our team, this modern manifestation of “Areito” helped us, the “newcomers” at The Refinery, tune in with the cultural rhythm of the company.

I believe that our degree of “connectedness” or “bonding” to others is proportional to the memories/stories we intentionally seek out to create with them and keep fresh in our hearts and minds, despite our busy lives, time differences or geographical distance. Genuine connections forge fraternal love, the only kind that almost never grows weary, or eclipses.  Making it a priority is always, of course, contingent upon personal will. It also requires humbly acknowledging that we can only receive what we can give. This is true regardless of environment as ‘connectedness’ is just as critical to strong professional relationships as those closer to home with our friends and family.

I think that now more than ever it is easier to nurture strong ties by leveraging information and communication technologies, especially social media. I learned through Mike Bruner, our Marketing & BD ‘guy’, that we are doing a great job exposing our practice out there through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. But, if tribe connectedness is to be pursued, and that includes all our friends and partners outside the internal team at The Refinery, we need to seriously start focusing on ourselves and begin our own internal social network. Let’s harness the momentum that we all possess right now.

This online community will be like a honeycomb to bees, can you imagine the joy of honey- making? This honeycomb will be a space in the clouds where we can come together anytime to share things like pictures, songs, and just about anything that makes us unique as inherently social beings. It must be that official secret village where we all know we can continue sharing what Mark Frein got us started with. The unfolding of comedy, tragedy and romance as we experience life and growth within The Refinery.

Will you “bees” willing to Areito in the clouds? How does your workplace compare on the connectedness front?

For more information about the awards visit Enterprising Women:  http://www.enterprisingwomen.com/EWofYearAwards_2012.htm

Why is it that sometimes, we can encounter adversity and just laugh?  Other times, it can be much more of a struggle.   How do we build that resilience so that more often we laugh and learn instead of see things as failures?  How do we make sure that the “dark Mount Rushmores” in our life are not the end of the world?

For me, so much of this learning in recent years has been around the concept of self-belief.  The resilience muscles I have, built upon experiences (both good and bad!), come down to the ability to reframe difficult situations as opportunities to learn and grow, instead of failure and setback.  In my earlier years, I usually felt internally that failure through difficulty just wasn’t acceptable. With the wisdom of (some) age and experience I am beginning to understand that I will make mistakes, period. Failure won’t be the real challenge; the true challenge is to be kind to myself when failure and difficulty happen, no matter what the outside world may say.  I am also lucky enough to be surrounded by supportive colleagues that help me frame it this way, but this is not frequently the case for most of us day-to-day.  This ability to bounce back and learn from mistakes allows me to build my self-belief and makes it increasingly easier when I encounter those inevitable bumps in the road.

When I started teaching in high school, I had a bad habit of focussing on the students who weren’t engaged.  I would zero in on the one or two kids at the back who were napping, ignoring the 29 other students who were excited and engaged.  Through this lens, I could leave a lesson thinking that no one had learned anything – total failure.  Selective perception was not serving me well or, my students.  It wasn’t until I had a fellow teacher observe my lessons and give me feedback that I had a glimpse through another lens. Most of the students were having a great time! Most of the students were learning and having fun! My perception of the class environment was short-changing me into thinking that these lessons were poorly conceived and delivered. The true shared reality for nearly the whole class was the exact opposite. Luckily, I was able to shift and see the lesson through other eyes.  I am trying to make this a conscious practice in my life.  Instead of focussing on what went wrong, I am making sure that I can articulate and celebrate what went right!

It’s amazing to me that the more I believe in my own abilities and my unique self, the more I achieve success.  Even if it doesn’t always go as planned, I can see the usefulness of these experiences and use them to my advantage. This reframing shouldn’t stop at the individual level; it’s just as important and effective when dealing with your staff, your team and your family.

Has this ever happened to you?  What situations have you been able to reframe in order to see the positive?

I truly believe that the work that The Refinery does is helping to proactively shape the culture of organizations we have the opportunity to partner with. In my first week with The Refinery, I was amazed to see the amount of diversity each participant added to their groups: a published poet, a Tai Chi instructor, a state shooting champion, a rally-car driver, a marathon runner, and the list goes on.Proof-positive that diversity should not contribute to division within a team.  When each member of a team is allowed contribute their individual strengths (and the team embraces this!) the team, along with the organization as a whole, benefit immeasurably.

Recognition for a job well done is always a treat. Making this even more special is the recognition comes from a highly esteemed publication within the Leadership world, Leadership Excellence. We’d like to thank Leadership Excellence for this distinction and to our friends and partner clients for helping us do what we do best – develop leaders and leadership cultures!

We invite you to come on by for a look. In the meantime, below is brief clip showing our progression to the new space and commentary from President & CEO, Barbara Ross-Denroche, on what space means to us at The Refinery.

We have had the great fortune to work with major, internationally-focused, Canadian-owned companies. Our work with those organizations has taken us into Latin America as well as all across Canada. As we do more and more work in Latin America, we are becoming increasingly aware of needing to shift the center of gravity of the firm to some degree and add additional areas of focus for the long-term success of our firm. One of the key reasons for the expansion to Texas is to provide another office site for consulting personnel serving Latin America and the United States. We already have one employee in Katy, Texas. Much of our firm’s success can be attributed to the power of our collective and shared practice. An office site allows us to grow as a group in ways that we cannot as remote employees.

As well, in the last year we have begun to work with American companies, particularly in the natural resource and high-technology industries. Our practice excellences fit well with companies that have highly-trained functional experts (e.g., engineers, programmers, scientists) who have moved into leadership roles. We see continuing growth ahead in these industry sectors for our work. Texas is a dominant region worldwide for oil and natural gas and Austin is a major and growing center for high technology.

All of these very good reasons for the relocation and expansion do not lessen my own anxiety about this move. I find myself experiencing an interesting emotional mash-up of anxiety and excitement … not unlike the feeling I get when I get ready for a challenging piece of teaching or facilitation work. I’m aware that this will certainly be difficult. I’m even aware that this may fail (or, the more personal version, I I may fail), although failure depends on what goals we/I set.

I have lived through two previous major life relocations – a move when I was young from a 40,000 person “city” in North Dakota to Berkeley, California; and a move from Minneapolis, Minnesota where I attended college to Vancouver to start my graduate studies. I would like to think that I adapt to the New – well, and quickly. As a consultant, I am constantly adapting to the New in the case of new client projects … learning as rapidly as possible, new cultures, new norms, and new expectations.

I also find myself coming to terms with my citizenship and “Americanness” in a new way. I have lived as an ex-patriot in Canada for almost two decades. I have watched, from afar, profoundly important events in American history … September 11th, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis, political changes. It is easy to stand back, analyze, and comment on these events from afar. It will be different – good, I think – to be once again on American soil. I believe living and working in Canada has made me a better American, and a better citizen of the world.

I will continue to share my journey through this change in a blog series, starting with this and finishing sometime in 2012.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the WBENC Opportunity Connection Conference. As part of the conference, an interesting line up of speakers were brought in to address the thousands of attendees, one of which was Annie Duke. She had written a book, and was speaking about how decision making in poker mirrored decision making in business and in life. If you are a poker buff, I’m happy to retell her theories about pot sizes and assessing risks, but the topics that stuck out to me the most, was the privatization and socialization of outcomes.

Annie described how people will tend to socialize the outcome of a particular hand when it doesn’t go their way; people will tend to blame bad luck, an opponent’s lucky draw, etc. In essence, it’s not their fault! Contrarily, people tend to privatize outcomes when things do go their way. They give themselves a pat on the back for a job well done, and regale anyone who will listen with the story of their heroic defeat of their opponent. It’s human nature, and we see it all the time, whether in the workplace or at the poker table! We naturally want to defend ourselves against looking bad or being blamed for something going wrong, and want to take the credit for the good things that happen.

The problem with these tendencies is that we can miss out on amazing learning opportunities when we socialize and privatize outcomes in this way. If we are focused on deflecting blame, it is much harder to see what really went wrong, and how we can prevent or improve outcomes the next time around. Similarly, if we are busy patting ourselves on the back, we may be giving ourselves undue credit for a positive outcome, and will have a hard chance repeating it in the future. The key, as with any reflective exercise, is when we are assessing our performance and the related outcomes, we need to truly reflect on the factors at hand. Where did I go right? Where did I slip up? What else was happening around me? What were other people doing? How will I know when I’m in this situation again? How can I improve the outcome for next time?

My hope, as a Vancouver Canucks fan, is that the team are considering both the external and internal influences of their loss. Obviously a lot of factors played into this team’s ultimate loss in the Championship game – injuries, referees’ calls, and the media as well as their own personal focus, resiliency, and consistency. I’ll be watching next year to find out!

What the research they found showed was that, on average (depending on the difficulty of the task), it took 66 days to form the habit, with quickest being 18 and the longest being 254. You might be starting to see why I was discouraged by this news. 254 to get used to doing sit-ups?! I guess this explains my cyclical devotion to exercise.

Why I was drawn to the title of this blog post was because we ask our participants to do this all the time. If it takes 254 days to get used to doing sit-ups, how many days does it take to get used to providing timely feedback or using a coaching approach? We are asking them to try new things out, and if it makes sense for them, ultimately change their behaviour in many ways. We are asking them to take what they learn in our programs and to make them common practice. At the same time, we are asking them to break/challenge their existing habits that they worked on for so long to form.

I am always cognisant that what we ask people to do in our work is not only tough, challenging, and out of their comfort zones while we are in-session, but it’s most difficult when they try to change their everyday habits in the workplace. If this “habit-forming” research is any indication, its takes a long term approach, incorporating regular check-ins, repetition, and support systems, to make real change happen for people and for organizations.

For real behaviour change to happen, a one-time session isn’t going to cut it for most people. The blog post also pointed out that there seemed to be groups of people that were able to form these habits quicker than others, further confirming what we already know to be true, that people learn and experience the world differently. Some people will take away something from a one-time session and make the effort to form a new outlook, behaviour, or habit. Most of us, however, need to be coached, encouraged, and reminded for a while before this is possible (remember when I trained for the Sun Run?).

It’s also a good reminder for me that that just because something comes easily or automatically for me, does not mean that it will for others, even if they give it a shot for a month or two! I’ve developed habits – whether it be packing for a business trip, managing my calendar, or writing blog posts (ok, that one is wishful thinking) – that others have not.

So what did I find hopeful in the blog post? It’s a good message to keep in mind – it takes time to develop a habit. Just because something it tough to get done on a regular basis now, doesn’t mean it will always take the same amount of time, effort, and energy. One of my biggest challenges, and I doubt I’m alone, is being patient with myself. Many this little tip will help me remember to give myself a break every once in a while.