Next to my desk sits a pie-size piece of concrete. An impression of my daughter’s hand is in the middle of the pie. The concrete, when it was wet, embodied empathy. It molded perfectly to shape and size of my daughter’s hand.

Empathy is our commitment to accurately comprehend another’s inner, unseen reality. Our authentic curiosity and inquiry make it possible for people to impress upon us their ideas, feelings, perspectives, and experiences. As we listen and seek to understand, we create models in our minds that represent another person’s inner world. Our models can mirror this reality with remarkable accuracy.

Empathy promotes exceptional and effective work—it infuses what we do with unmistakable human-centered elements. This kind of work combats our inclination to relate with others, even the people we serve, on terms that meet our needs.

Much like the handprint, empathic work molds to the needs of others. This is why, for example, the relative comfort of your chair is a direct commentary on the chair manufacturer’s degree of empathy for its customers. If you’re not comfortable, they clearly didn’t prioritize you in their design process. Avoid this mistake in your projects.

Make sure your 3Ms—messages, materials, and messengers—represent the actual needs of the people you serve. People intuitively respond to empathy. Projects that embody empathy cultivate engaging environments that change lives. They prioritize the needs of the people they’re intended to serve, not its practitioners.

Paths form where we walk. As depicted in this photo by Dutch photographer Jan-Dirk van der Burg, repeated travel over a piece of ground creates a path.

Our brain follows this rule as well. A substance produced in our brain called, myelin, is the brain’s version of packed earth. How does this happen? Neural sequences that fire together wire together. In other words, actions—what we do—form these myelin paths.

Knowing a little more about myelin can shape how you cultivate engagement and empathy, especially with youth:

1. Like a trail in our brain, myelin creates highly efficient pathways by coating neural sequences that we use. This process is called myelination.

2. The speed increase in signal transmission between neurons that result through myelination are like the difference between walking and traveling by jet.

3. Myelin allows our brains to regulate itself the same way we regulate speed in traffic by feathering the gas and break pedals to avoid getting into an accident.

4. Myelin is essential for inhibition: the ability to avoid or stop behaviors with negative consequences.

5. Lower rates of myelination in youth, especially males, helps explain the lack of inhibition that characterizes adolescence.

6. Overuse of alcohol and other drugs inhibits, and in some cases stalls, myelin production. Such substances are the equivalent of fencing off the path in the photo above. Eventually the path vanishes into its surrounding environment.

7. The adolescent brain is hyper-vulnerable to the use of drugs, including alcohol. During these years the brain is actively producing myelin that will expand the function and efficiency of the brain. Alcohol and other substances inhibit this process in adolescence than later in life.

A highly-accessible book on this topic is, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. For a deeper dive, read this article about the relationship between myelination, alcohol use, and addictions. It’s fairly complex, but the research findings are truly stunning.

Research on myelin is a burgeoning new frontier, offering incredible insights about human behavior and relationships. I’m eager to see what new findings appear in the next few years.

In this short video I demonstrate an innovative, highly effective approach to engaging young people.

I’ve been testing The Single Sheet for several years with a variety of age groups and messages. I’ve also helped organizations implement this method to increase engagement with their own messages. I recently filmed one of my presentations to demonstrate The Single Sheet in action. This video features highlights from that presentation.

The Single Sheet process engages people at a deeper level with a wide range of important messages. During this presentation we discuss the prevention message, “Avoid the use of alcohol.”

Know that the students’ thoughtful, insightful comments you see here are spontaneous. I didn’t prompt them to say anything.

Post this link to your organization’s website and Facebook page and help broaden the conversation about the how we can better engage people.

I’m grateful to my friend, a courageous educator, Heather Johnson, for furnishing her classroom, and to the students who participated!

I was out running yesterday when I came upon an enormous oak tree that was actively dropping acorns. I gathered a few in my hand and noticed for the first time the enormous contrast between a single, simple acorn and an elaborate, ancient oak tree.

Simplifying the complex is a form of art that oak trees practice each year. In the course of a lifetime their ever-growing branches house generations of birds, squirrels, and tree forts. But each year they still produce simple, elegant acorns.

Too often the way we communicate about a topic mirrors the complexity of our knowledge of the topic. As our knowledge grows we need the discipline to refine the complexity of our knowledge into its essential, most defining elements.

This is how our knowledge grows more complex, according to George Loewenstein, behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University: we want to know more about what we already know. Through learning more about a topic we discover gaps in our knowledge. These gaps spike our curiosity and motivate us toward deeper understanding. In time, as we fill these gaps, our knowledge grows more elaborate and nuanced–like an oak tree.

The resulting depth and complexity makes us a resource to others. Your physician, for example, is a resource to the degree that she seeks to fill gaps in her knowledge base. But her inability to communicate her topic in relevant terms prevents her from engaging her patients, a shortcoming that renders her less of a resource.

The simplest, most refined presentation will draw people to your message and to you, the messenger. This discipline makes you and your message more accessible and engaging.

As you grow into a tree remember to ask yourself, “Am I still making acorns?”

I had a uniquely challenging experience recently while teaching a weekend class at the University of Oregon entitled, Personalized Prevention. I assumed the students would be professionals from the field of prevention and was looking forward to two days of high-energy interaction.*

But on arrival the students didn’t quite match my expectations. I discovered that most of the class was comprised of incoming freshman baseball players, students who had been in high school a mere 10 weeks prior. And why were they there? They just needed the credit.

You would struggle to find a group of people less interested in this topic. I had to completely remodel my approach if I had any hope for making this topic relevant.

I realized that though these students were not prevention specialists, they were experts on the prevention message in two respects. First, they had all heard a variety of prevention messages since middle school. Second, the entire class agreed that these messages were not very compelling or engaging. So I challenged them to craft the prevention message they wished they would have heard, one that might have made a bigger difference in their lives.

Something incredible happens when we extend to people the permission to draw from their personal experience and expertise. They engage at a deeper level. They’re more open to considering new concepts. I discovered once again how truly effective this method can be.

At the beginning of class they were ready for something forgettable. Together we crafted something memorable.

We can’t make a topic relevant to others. We can’t make them engage. As I did with this class, we can present messages in a way that others are able to engage with ease should they choose to do so.

Try this in your next presentation or meeting. Refer to The Single Sheet exercise in Own It if you want additional guidance.

Allow me to share some quotes I received from students through email:

Thank you again for all you did. That was by far one of the most interesting classes I’ve taken. You brought up many points that allowed other students and I think in ways we do not normally do. Techniques I feel that will be valuable for future learning.

I really enjoyed the class. It was very refreshing to do something different than just be lectured.

Thank you for a great class. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for the class, it really opened up my perspective.

Kindest regards,

Andrew

Comfort Zones

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

Comfort zones are soupy wallows that yield predictable, mediocre, and ineffectual work. I have mine and so do you. They produce projects and programs that fail to engage people and contribute to their lives in any lasting sense. Too often we’ll remain there until something, usually a crisis, flushes us out.

Comfort zones are different from sublime zones and it’s important that we don’t confuse the two. Sublime zones are places we go for rejuvenation: your garden, a concert, an art gallery, or the sea. Comfort zones are as rejuvenating as the DMV. Sublime zones help us grow and expand our gifts and perspectives. Comfort zones contract over time if we don’t challenge their boundaries.

We feel more alive and connected to ourselves, others, and the world we live in when we express our unique creative and relational abilities. We do this most fully not from within our comfort zone, but from its outer edges. The people who have contributed most to my life have done so at the expense of their own comfort and convenience. This is probably true for you as well.

Engaging with people to create lasting change requires that we enter new, unfamiliar waters. These waters are not wallows. They’re deep, fresh, and crystalline. Bobbing above the fathoms of our discomfort we’ll be astounded by the abilities and gifts we encounter.

This is what motivated me to write and publish Own It.  I designed the activities and strategies in this short e-book to escort us to our boundary waters.

Here’s what we’ll find when we get there:

1. We will do our most engaging, brilliant, life-changing work.

2. The zone will expand. What once caused us dread won’t be so terrifying the next time.

If you were going to do one thing today that would take you closer to the edge of your comfort zone, what would it be? Will you do it? Imagine how this action could inspire the people around you.

Thanks to all of you who have written me about Own It. (Writing it was like swinging my legs from the edge of my own comfort zone.) It’s heartening to know how this little book has helped individuals and organizations around the country.

Copy this link to share the free version of Own It with friends and colleagues: http://bit.ly/own_it_e-book.

Own It is here! This is a short manifesto that can significantly amplify engagement with your message.

Here’s how you can make the most of Own It:

1. Share this book with others. Email the link to co-workers, friends, and family members.

2. Gather a group of people from your team or organization to talk through the activities and strategies.

3. Invite me to talk with your organization. Email me here.

Click here to get the book. You can read it on a screen or download and print a paper version.

I hope you find it helpful.

Gratefully,

-Andrew

Next week I’m releasing an e-book called Own It . The goal of Own It is to help you cultivate the sort of engagement that enables others to own your message for themselves. Here’s an excerpt:

You own your own message. It’s personal to you, but how personal is it to the people you serve? Your message is most effective when you transfer ownership. Your message then becomes their message.

Own It features new exercises and strategies you can use to help others engage with and acquire your message. I hope it will encourage and challenge you professionally and personally.

Send an email to others who may like to receive Own It. They can sign up here on the site in the right column.

Organizations that thrive in the so-called Information Age will be those who understand that the best thing they have to offer people is not information, but interaction–real face-to-face interaction.

The industrialized model we inherited is built on information dissemination. It culminated in the ultimate information disseminating machine: the internet. So now what? Organizations that insist on disseminating information will go the way of the encyclopedia. They will be dinosaurs.

Organizations that thrive will do what the internet can never do. They will substitute dissemination for dialogue, information for interaction. The internet can never replicate the dynamic that takes place in a room full of people who are sharing ideas.

Make the transition. The world no longer needs you to be a reservoir of information. We need you to become something far more valuable.

“What counts is your level of engagement, not your level of accomplishment,” Sheila Hicks, internationally known fiber artist.

This is a counter-cultural statement. Our culture values and rewards accomplishments, not engagement. But engagement is a requisite for great work. We produce little if what we produce does not stem from engagement: engagement in what we are doing, engagement with others, and encouraging others to engage with us and our work.

Engagement is complete immersion and involvement in what we are doing without a view to what we may or may not accomplish. A high level of engagement is accompanied with an equally low level of concern about a final product.

Engagement is obsession with process. When you lose yourself in a conversation or a project you are fully engaged.

Here’s the irony: it’s by losing yourself in the process that you create products of the greatest value.

I’m writing a new book about engagement. I’m completely immersed in the creative process. The book is taking directions I couldn’t have ever predicted and never would have experienced if I had predetermined what this product would become.

What projects are you involved with right now? What’s your level of engagement with these projects? Are you lost in the projects or just trying to accomplish something?

I find it helpful to answer these questions for each of my projects. It helps me leave the shallows of a mind focussed on product and dive into process’ deep-end. It’s there, where I’m fully engaged, that I know I’ll surface with things of value.