February 11, 2010

Dear Colleagues,

It was a pleasure to have you join Unbound Ideas and Howard Morgan for Marshall Goldsmith’s February 8 webinar. Thank you for participating in the discussion and providing feedback on the event.

We are pleased to make this session summary available to you along with several resources provided by Marshall. On the right side of this page, you’ll notice a light blue box that contains several elements. Just under Marshall’s picture, you’ll find a slide image that links to the on demand recording from this session. If you did not sign up for this access, but did attend the live session, contact Tad Furtado at (202) 422-5245 or via email to learn more about gaining access. Next you will find a list of artifacts that includes the session handout material as well as an article written by Dr. Goldsmith on being the moment of leadership. Finally , Marshall has created a MOJO evaluation piece that we strongly recommend to determine where you find MOJO and where you do not.

In addition, as an added feature we are going to leave access to this short video segment at the bottom of this section available.  The piece is taken from a longer discussion with Marshall about his book and research on MOJO.  We enjoyed our time with Marshall and hope that his genuinely decent manner and thoughtfulness translates.

As we learned during the session, Marshall’s most recent work has delved deeply into the areas of personal happiness (short-term satisfaction) and meaning in life (long-term benefit). He describes these intangibles under the rubric of Mojo, which he defines as “That positive spirit toward what you are doing now that starts on the inside and radiates to the outside.”

Mojo is a function of who you are and what you do. It’s an expression of your inner state rather than any outward circumstances, rewards or public perceptions. It also changes over time depending on who we are or become.

According to Marshall, human beings are almost programmed not to experience happiness, meaning or fulfillment in life; and it helps to remind ourselves or constantly assess the level of fulfillment we are receiving at any given time in order to determine what we need to do differently to increase our Mojo.

Marshall provided us with a grid for determining our level of happiness and meaning by assessing whether we are Surviving, Being Stimulated, Sacrificing, Sustaining, or Succeeding.

Interestingly, he also pointed out that short-term happiness has little affect on long-term success – a cautionary consideration for individuals and organizations concerned about increasing the “fun” factor in order to improve morale or performance.

Instead, the building blocks of Mojo are Personal Identity, Achievement, Reputation and Acceptance. Marshall’s definition of Identity hinged closely on the matter of authenticity. This makes complete sense since Mojo radiates from the inside. Similarly, Marshall’s definition of Achievement was also biased towards activities which contribute to our personal sense of meaning. In other words, outside activities that connect to us authentically encourage more Mojo.

This point of view has great implications for individuals in their jobs and for organizations. On the one hand, organizations need not spend a great deal of time and resources on engagement activities and can instead focus on coaching which increases Mojo. Second, individuals bear the ultimate responsibility to increase their own Mojo. Only you can determine whether you are fully present when you are engaging in an activity; and if you are not, only you can change that.

But fundamentally, Marshall recognizes that finding personal happiness and meaning is difficult for human beings because we are programmed otherwise. He left us with a mental exercise in which we worked on increasing our happiness and reducing our guilt.

During the course of his discussion, Marshall mentioned his Mojo survey and App which we encourage you to try. We are sending each registrant a copy of Mojo. If you would like more information or have other questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us or Marshall.

On behalf of Marshall and Howard, we thank you again for joining us, and look forward to the next occasion.

Warm Regards,
Unbound Ideas