Mike Robbins

Infusing Life and Business with Authenticity and Appreciation

Archives for February 2022

How to Balance Foundation and Vision

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Having both a strong foundation and a strong vision is essential for growth—whether it’s for a team, relationship, business, or anything else.

In order to thrive, we need both of these things, but finding a balance between the two can be challenging, especially these days.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities of work, parenting, and life…and in the process lose sight of why we’re doing what we’re doing and where we’re heading. And, yet, at the same time, if we put too much attention on our big vision, we can easily lose sight of the necessary actions we need to take on a regular basis to maintain stability, consistency, and success.

The Important Balance of Foundation and Vision

Taking care of the basics

To take care of ourselves, our core, and our foundation, we have to take care of the basics. If we do that, it can create the foundation that leads to something great.

For example, if we’re not eating well, sleeping well, or managing ourselves physically, it’s hard to maintain a healthy mental and emotional mindset, which then makes it hard for us to succeed.

However, when we solely focus on the day-to-day foundation and maintenance of work and life, we can often feel monotonous and stagnant. Doing this often doesn’t leave us feeling inspired or excited.

When we balance these important basics with innovation, dreams, goals and creativity, that’s where the magic happens.

I’m grateful to do work that I love and am passionate about. I also feel fortunate to have a loving family, as well as so many blessings and privileges. Even with all of this, I still find myself getting stuck in the day-to-day maintenance of my life and business much more than I’d like to admit…especially during this uncertain time of the pandemic.

I see this a lot with businesses I’ve partnered with over the past two decades. If a company focuses on their core and isn’t innovating, changing, growing, and evolving, how will it learn to adapt to change and challenges so that it doesn’t fail?

Innovation, change and disruption can be scary, but they are essential to embrace. This is often easier in the early stages, but when we start to have a little success, we can become even more risk-averse, having understandable fears of screwing up.

What Inspires Us?

When we’re doing the necessary things to maintain our lives or business, we also have to think about what inspires us. In addition to working on the foundation, it’s important to be willing to think big enough—to have a vision and a dream about what we want to create.

What inspires you personally? What excites you and the people around you?

I love doing what I’m doing, but at the same time, there are moments when I don’t want to do some things. There are parts of the job that aren’t my favorite.

I also love being married and being a dad, but there are moments when I find it incredibly challenging…not sure if I’m up for the challenge.

We all have these moments, especially these days. This is why it’s so important for us to have a strong vision – a north star we can look to when things get hard, or we bump into the inevitable walls.

While it’s essential to focus on our foundation and do the necessary things to have some semblance of order integrity in our lives, that’s not what life is all about.

So how do we balance our foundation and our vision? How can we ensure that we take care of ourselves and focus on the core, but at the same time not let that take over?

It’s important to carve out time for innovation, creativity, and dreaming.

We have to have enough groundedness to focus on the day-to-day while at the same time being able to think big.

Having a foot in both of those worlds—in the now and the future—is essential. In business, we need people on our team who can stay grounded and remind us of the realities of business (the budget, strategy, financials, etc.). We also need people who are innovative and creative.

As Mother Teresa famously said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”

There are, of course, lots of paradoxes in the balance of foundation and vision. Maintaining our core while having enough space and trust to aspire is what life is all about. And, when we’re able to do this effectively, it can propel us and those around us to new levels of success and fulfillment.

I have written five books about the importance of trust, authenticity, appreciation and more. In addition, I deliver keynotes and seminars (both in-person and virtually) to empower people, leaders and teams to grow, connect and perform their best. Finally, as an expert in teamwork, leadership and emotional intelligence, I teach techniques that allow people and organizations to be more authentic and effective. Contact me to book a call or learn more about how I can help you and your team achieve your goals today. You can also listen to my podcast here.

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Is Self-Righteousness Preventing People From Listening to You?

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How does it feel when people don’t listen to you? If you’re anything like me, it probably bugs you quite a bit. One of the reasons people may not be listening to us has to do with our self-righteousness, whether we’re aware of it or not.

As someone who has studied, written, and spoken about relationships, communication, leadership, and teamwork for over two decades, I have learned how dangerous and damaging self-righteousness is to our ability to communicate, connect, and collaborate.

When we’re able to remove our self-righteousness, it can have a positive impact on our relationships, communication, teams, and so much more.

I understand that removing self-righteousness is challenging to do, especially these days. I’ve worked with so many people, leaders, and teams that struggle with this. And while difficult, it is one of the most important things we can do to enhance our partnerships and culture.

Removing our self-righteousness doesn’t mean watering down our opinions or decreasing our passions, it means letting go of the arrogant notion that we are “Right” (with a capital R) and that anyone who disagrees with us is “wrong.”

It’s okay and often important to have strong opinions. And, it can be essential to believe in our values about life, work, and everything else.

However, understanding the difference between conviction and self-righteousness is essential.

What’s the Difference Between Conviction and Self-Righteousness?

When we’re coming from a place of conviction about something, we believe it to be true. We might even be willing to speak up about it, defend our position, and engage in healthy dialogue or debate about it with those who see things differently than we do.

But, we also have enough humility, awareness, and maturity to consider that we might be wrong—or that there might be different ways to look at it, even if we can’t see or understand them.

We’ve all had experiences when we thought we were 100 percent right about something, only to realize, upon further reflection, that we were actually wrong. As humbling as this can be, remembering this can help us from crossing the line over to self-righteousness and give us the perspective to stay in a place of healthy conviction.

When we cross over into self-righteousness, we’re no longer interested in hearing what anyone else has to say if they disagree with us or have a different perspective. We simply want to prove our point.

Look at the tenor of the political discourse in our country and our world right now. Many of us, myself included, have strong political opinions. There are serious issues that divide us.

Additionally, covid has brought about a tremendous sense of division among families, friends, and coworkers. It has brought fear into our homes and has left a sense of the unknown lingering in the air. We currently live in a paradox that divides many of us.

At a time like this, it is more important than ever to really listen to one another and come together. Sadly, this seems to have also gotten way more challenging as well.

Instead of engaging in healthy and productive debates about these things, there is so much intense self-righteousness that we seem unable to listen to one another, which is almost as scary and dangerous as any of the specific issues or challenges we’re facing.

We end up demonizing people who disagree with us, refusing to talk or listen to them—or, when we do, we make our case in such a self-righteous way that we create more separation and disconnection. Turn on cable news, or read the comments section of many news websites or blogs, and you’ll see the intensity of self-righteousness playing out right in front of you.

And this doesn’t happen just with politics; it happens right in our own lives, families, and work environments. We separate ourselves from those who don’t think like we do or hold the same ideas, opinions, or beliefs.

At work, our self-righteousness leads to disconnection, unresolved conflicts, and factions within teams and organizations. Lines get drawn between departments, offices, regions, and levels within the company, making it more challenging to make decisions, collaborate, and get things done.

And with so many of us still working remotely, this has become even more challenging to navigate.

It Takes Willingness and Maturity to Let Go of Self-Righteousness

Most of us can be self-righteous at times, and we often aren’t aware of it because we’re so focused on being right. When you and I are being self-righteous, we don’t actually think we’re being self-righteous…we just think we’re right.

It takes quite a bit of self-awareness to notice our own righteousness, and it takes willingness and maturity to let it go or to at least look at things from a different perspective.

If we want to connect with those around us in an authentic way and create an environment of openness, trust, and collaboration, we must be willing to recognize, own, and remove our self-righteousness.

How does self-righteousness show up in your work and your life? What can you do to remove it in service of your relationships, communication, and collaboration?

Portions of this article are excerpted from Bring Your Whole Self to Work, by Mike Robbins, with permission. Published by Hay House (May 2018) and available online or in bookstores.

I have written five books about the importance of trust, authenticity, appreciation, and more. In addition, I deliver keynotes and seminars (both in-person and virtually) to empower leaders and teams to grow, connect, and perform their best. Finally, as an expert in teamwork, leadership, and emotional intelligence, I teach techniques that allow people and organizations to be more authentic and effective. Find out more about how I can help you and your team achieve your goals today. You can also listen to my podcast here.

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This article was originally published on October 10, 2018, and updated for 2022.