Imagine sitting with your professional team and feeling amazing. You are about to launch a new project and everyone around you is SO excited!
They can’t wait to spread the news, and most of all, are excited about what you have created.
You feel supported, inspired, and grateful. You know they have your back.
And the one thing you all share is the desire to GROW. Everyone there wants to grow the reach of your work, and help you get in front of a larger audience.
Soak that in for a moment. Doesn’t it feel delicious?
But you may also be feeling, “well, that’s great Nikól, but HOW do I make that happen for me?”
Perhaps you feel insecure around your ability to form really solid professional relationships that last. Perhaps you have been burned in the past and find yourself feeling guarded, and spending all your energy on what is going wrong. Maybe you have experienced heartbreak in your personal life, and find that bleeding over into your career.
This is SO common, which is why I wanted to reach out to you today and offer this tip for creating a team that helps you to create the impact you desire.
Drop the act of keeping score.
When you are keeping score, all your energy is on a tally of what is right and what is wrong. And keeping score places you in competition with your team, instead of partnership. It becomes about if they are measuring up, and if they are hitting specific numbers with each task. Essentially, keeping score just creates more divide, as opposed to collaboration, which is the real gas behind a successful team.
And most of all, when you are in the act of keeping score, you stop seeing the person in front of you as a human, and instead as an enemy.
Imagine you are gathering to discuss the upcoming launch of your book, except your marketing person made an error on a recent social media post. When you are in the act of keeping score, you may end up spending all your energy on calling them out and causing a very tense energy in the group. Your team may just shut down and this important meeting could unravel very quickly. And you may find yourself saying, “wait, this meeting isn’t going the way I wanted!”
When you drop the act of keeping score, something magical happens, all your attention is instead freed up to discover creative ideas, solutions, and ways to move forward.
When you drop the act of keeping score, you instead are able to expand.
To give you a fun example of how this works, I would love to invite you to the beach with my husband and I. Grab your towel!
Last weekend was a big milestone for me. I had my first full beach day in two years. It was a real celebration moment for me, and recognizing how far I have come with my healing. I had the energy to be in the hot August sun, ride my boogey board, and have quality time with the man I love. One of our favorite things to do on the beach is play games, and we pulled out the classic board game, Scrabble. As my husband was getting everything out of the box, he said, “oh, do you have a pen and a piece of paper we can write on to keep score?” I realized I didn’t and we decided to just play anyway.
It was a completely different experience for me. Typically, I will spend all this time trying to come up with a word that uses the most tiles and has the highest score. I will be watching my husband’s score and be tallying in my brain how I can get ahead. Except all of that was taken off the table and instead the whole focus of the game switched from who would win to how we could expand and use the whole board. The focus was on what we could do together, as opposed to separately.
And we ended up using almost the whole board, more than we ever have in any game we have played together.
And all because we stopped keeping score.
I use the specific words, “the act of keeping score” because it’s important to understand this is an act. It’s something put on, something that’s been learned. We’ve been taught that keeping score wins the race, and when we single people out, it creates more ease. But the truth is, keeping score only creates more divide, and robs us of our humanity. And it shuts down the opportunity to expand.
Which is what you are here to do.
The way you will create the impact you desire is with a team that supports and promotes your work. And in order to build and sustain that team, you need to place your attention on how you can expand TOGETHER, not apart.
Imagine that same meeting for the book launch and seeing the whole “board” in front of you. There are so many beautiful possibilities and you will create that together in an environment where everyone feels safe, and can step forward with creative ideas.
One free of a score board, and instead bursting with possibility and growth.