The blurb for Primam Lapidem Mittat is ready!

A blurb. I still think it is a strange, funny-sounding word. If you are wondering what blurb means and what the history of blurbs is, you can read about it in Qui sine peccato est - the blurb .

Here is it, the blurb for Primam lapidem mittat. I hope it makes you (those of you who can read Swedish) want to read it!

 Hon räckte honom papperet.  

”Det är på arniakska. Varför skulle någon ge mig ett brev på arniakska?” 

Så du orsakar hellre oskyldiga människors liv än du berättar för världen vad Kendu har gjort? Tro inte att du kommer undan. Snart kommer världen att veta. Det finns ingen återvändo Leyah Londo. Du är förlorad. 

Silaz såg upp med hopdragna ögon. 

”Leyah”, sa han långsamt. ”Vad har du gjort?”  

Romanen tar oss tillbaka till Ingelrike och Arniak; två länder med ett problematiskt förflutet och en komplicerad nutid. Gisslandramat som riskerade journalisten Leyah Londos liv och förändrade allt hon trodde på är över. Men faran för hennes liv är kvar.  Kommer hotet från Ingelrike eller Arniak? Eller kanske från henne själv? 

Primam Lapidem Mittat är uppföljaren till Qui sine peccato est. Det är ännu en av Annika Rosendahls kärleksfyllda äventyrsromaner om livets viktiga frågor.

Working for money - or fun?

If you had all the money you wanted, would you still work?

Most people say no. For many, the main reason for working is to earn money. To put food on the table and pay for different activities for the kids and themselves.

A lot of people assume work is by definition different from fun. Just listen to these words and notice what you associate with them.

Work week vs Weekend

I hate Mondays vs Thank God it's Friday!

 Not to mention the expression work-life balance.  As if they are two different things on each side of a scale. While in reality they are connected. (Everything is.)

Picture: dimitrisvetsikas1969 on Pixabay

We can take a lesson from bears. They fish to get food, to survive. Just like we work to get food, to survive. But they also have fun and they for sure do not think about fishing as something separate from life. 

Picture: Skeeze on Pixabay

If you  - like most people - work for the money:  Make sure it is not only for the money. 

Have fun. 

 Be a bear.

The power of a simple problem statement

Do you ever tell people that you cannot do something because "you don't have time?"

Do you ever choose to not do what you really want, for the same reason?

People often ask me how I find the time to have a full time interesting and demanding job, be a mother of three lovely kids and write novels. Partly it is because I do not see lack of time as a given, but as problem that can be solved. After reading this post, I hope you will do the same!

I am currently participating in an on-line course from Institute for Personal Leadership (IPL) about Driving Strategic Impact. To drive strategic impact, it is important to have a structured problem solving process. Some of the tools we learn are useful also in our everday life, like the simple yet powerful  problem statement. There are three guidelines to follow when formulating a problem statement. In this post I will apply these guidelines to the common "I don't have time" problem.

Photo: Tero Vesalainen, Pixabay

Guideline 1: 

Phrase the problem as a question (despite that it is commonly referred to as a statement).

How can I find more time?

That is a good start isn't it? Suddenly our minds start looking for a solution since we are not just stating a fact, we are asking ourselves a question.

Guideline 2: 

Phrase the question so it guides action.

Our first version of the question does not give much guidance. (Unless you believe in finding that 8th day in the week.) A question that gives guidance can be: 

How can I use the time I have the way I want?

Guideline 3: 

Use the right granularity.

If we look into using the time the way we want to, we should specify a level of detail that will be helpful. Are we looking at our entire lifespan? This year? The vacation or the work week?

Most people will have an increased satisfaction in life if they use the time the way they want every regular week. My suggestion is therefore to phrase the problem as follows:

How can I use each week the way I want to?

I can guarantee you will have a bigger chance of doing what you want with your time if you use this problem statement, rather than the standard "I don´t have time" statement.


Let's take another,  more business like, example.  The perceived problem can be that we do not sell enough. To create a good problem statement, we will first turn it into a question.

How can we sell more?

This formulation does not give us much guidance. We can increase sales in different ways. Do we want to focus on developing new products to increase our sales, or should we stick to the products we have, but increase our marketing and sales efforts? There are many different alternatives to choose from. Let's select one approach and state the problem statement in a way that provides guidance:

How can we increase sales based on our current product portfolio?

To support us even more, we can increase the level of detail:

How can we increase sales this year in our main markets, based on our current product portfolio?

Now we have two problem statements that fulfill the 3 guidelines taught in the course Driving Strategic Impact. I hope you see that these statements trigger thoughts about how solve the problems.

A correctly formulated problem statement is useful, but the real gain is when you formulate it together with others, ensuring you have a common understanding of what you want to achieve. 

Then this simple tool becomes very powerful.

Good luck!

The Beauty of art part 12: The answers

Oh yes, you were right. The painter is indeed the Spaniard (Catalan) Salvador Dali. Even more of you would have recognized the artist if I would have chosen this very famous painting of his: The persistence of memory:

This painting is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I saw his work for the first time. I more or less stumbled upon Dali's painting when visiting this museum together with a colleague during a business trip. I still remember that the shop in the museum sold watches that looked like they were melting. I considered buying one but decided not to, something I regretted later on.

The painting that was part of the Beauty of Art part 12, is called Raphaelesque Head Exploding. It is in the Scottish gallery of modern art, in Edinburgh Scotland.

Dali was a gifted painter already as a child and he moved to Madrid to study art at Academia de San Fernando. Like so many other artists I have written about in the Beauty of Art series, he went to Paris to develop his art even more. The genre Dali and others created is called surrealism.

Salvador became famous during his lifetime and he could dedicate his life to creating art. He was also lucky in love, finding the love of his life in Gala. She left her husband to be with Dali and they never parted. To him she was a soul mate and a muse.

Dali had tragedies in his life as well. The biggest blow was when his mother died in cancer when Dali was only 16.

"I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul."
To me that is a beautiful description of a mother.

When it comes to your feelings regarding the painting, you mention "a visual description of having a hole in your head" ;) you like the colors and the way it has been painted and you mention that it resembles the building Pantheon. This is indeed the case,  the skull section is based upon the inside of the dome of the Pantheon building. Salvador admired the old renaissance masters like Da Vinci and Raphael.

To me, Dali's paintings are of the kind I can watch really long, and always find something new in them.  Most of his paintings I would not like to have (reproductions of) in my home, but the painting of the exploding head has a serenity to it that I could enjoy also in a home, not just in a museum,

I will conclude with a quote from Dali, one that fits him, or at least the image he wanted to convey of himself, well:

"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali"

The Beauty of Art part 12

Welcome to the Beauty of art part 12!

Please let me know

• What the name of the painting is
• Who the painter is
• How the painting makes you feel

Your answers will come in a later blog post!

See you at the top of the ladder of impact

Do you ever tell your partner to do someting -  put the laundry in the laundry basket, buy vegetables on the way home, walk the dog -  just to find a dirty sock on the couch, end up with a dinner without vegetables and a dog who desperately needs to pee?

Do you ever send a mail to a colleague asking him/her to do something, just to notice days later that nothing has been done?

If this happens, do you blame the other person rather than yourself?

I currently have the privilege to attend an on-line course from Institute for Personal Leadership (IPL) about Driving Strategic Impact. In the first lesson we learned that there are four levels of impact.

Level number one: Generate robust insight and recommendations.

Such recommendations can be:

"Put the laundry in the laundry basket."

"Contact our colleagues on the other site and set-up a collaboration to get this important task done."

If you stop at this level, the outcome is likely to disappoint you. Maybe there is no reaction at all. Instead of considering your child disrespectful and your colleague selfish, increase your level of impact.

Level number two: Ensure your insights and recommendations are understood.

Talk to your child and explain that the magic of laundry transforming into clean and folded clothes, only work for clothes that are in the laundry basket. (Not for lonely socks on the floor or crumpled up t-shirts in the foot end of the bed.)

Stop mailing your colleague and start talking to her/him. Explain that the colleagues on the other site have knowledge that is needed for handling the assignment really well.

A lot of people stop at level two and rush on to their next task. If you really want to be the type of person who makes things happen (rather than just being busy), you should go for the next level of impact.

Level number three: Ensure action is taken based on your recommendations.

Make sure it is possible to act on your recommendations. Possible and easy.

If I would ask each family member to bring their laundry all the way down to the laundry machine in the basement, I doubt they would. So I ensure we have laundry baskets close to each bedroom. It becomes easy to do the task and then it gets done.

If you facilitate the first meeting between the colleagues who will benefit from working together, you will have increased the chances of the collaboration working out well.

The fourth level of impact is the most overlooked one.

Level four: Check if your recommendations delivered the desired impact.

This step is the one that really puts your ideas and recommendations to the test. My examples are simple and the outcome is likely to be close to what was intended. But for more complex societal problems; like providing health care and a good educational system, it is not a given that the ideas give the wanted impact. In fact, it is rather uncommon. We often hear politicians talk about all the great things they will do. And then they move on to their next task, without ensuring the right action is taken. We end up with a lot of nice words but few desired results.

Kaboompics

I dare you to move beyond step two, all the way to step four! Then you  will become one of those who really make a difference.

See you on the top of the ladder!

Tragic things will happen - and it will be OK

When I was five two cats and a dog came into our family. My brother and I were thrilled. I was so happy to have Randi, Videmiss and Ludde in our lives that I told all about it at day care. A girl looked at me and said:

"I am not allowed to have pets. My mother does not want me to become sad when they die."

Now I am a mother myself, in addition to being a dog and cat owner. When pets have died I have coped with not only my own grief, but with my children´s as well. And yes, it hurts. It cuts deep into my mother-heart to see their pain.

Image from Freestockpro

The mother who denied her child years of joy with a pet to protect her from the pain when the pet would die, is not the only one reasoning this way. Maybe you also want to avoid pain, and above all, shield your kids from pain?

• Do you stop yourself from falling in love to avoid the pain of rejection?
• Do you choose the career you think will be safe for you, rather than the one that excites you?
• Do you avoid the really big and interesting assignments at work because you are afraid to fail?
• Do you hold back friendship and love to more easily cope with a possible loss of your friend or lover?
• And... Do you teach your children to do the same, to protect them?

Those of you who follow this blog, know that we have lost two fantastic pets (Only life knows its length, So much love, so much pain) in just two years. This has of course impacted our family.

When our 13 year old middle son wrote a letter to his future self for an assignment in school, he wrote a truly profound sentence. A sentence that shows that having pets not only gives years of joy and friendship. It also gives life lessons that many grown-ups I know have not yet learned. He wrote to his future self:

"Tragic things will happen - and it will be OK."

Tragic things will - inevitably - happen. You may be able to protect your child from the loss of a pet by not having a pet. But what about the loss of a grandparent? The loss of a job? The loss of yourself, of a friend, of a lover? 

You cannot protect your child, or yourself from pain. And you don't have to. Because even though tragic things will happen, it will be OK.

When you truly understand what this means, you will be able to love and live life to its fullest.