Extraordinary E-Book

Michael Dauphinee

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 242

Beschreibung

The world sold you a map to success, and you followed it—only to find that the world's version of extraordinary is the trap of the ordinary. Your to-do list keeps growing, you haven't been to the gym in weeks, and your spouse wants more time with you. You're doing your best, but you're exhausted and unfulfilled. How did you get here, and where are you going? Michael Dauphinee understands that you don't need a map with a final destination; you need your own direction. In Extraordinary, Michael provides four points on a compass that help you discover and live out your God-given calling. - Identity: Instead of telling yourself what not to be, embrace who you are and utilize your natural strengths. - Permission: Don't limit yourself. Share your ideas and pursue your aspirations without needing approval from others. - Courage: Overcome your fear of failure and close the gap between wishing and doing. - Generosity: Don't tie your hope to your resilience. Anchor to something bigger than yourself. It's not too late to live an extraordinary life. Unleash the power of your true north, dream again, and live in the direction of you.

Leseprobe

In Extraordinary, Michael exhibits a unique style of captivating readers with real-life stories, allowing them to see themselves through this lens. He creatively assists readers to understand, digest, and utilize their strengths and foster meaningful, trusting relationships. Michael truly cares about people and encourages us to reflect on our own paths to success.

—Dwight Powery, national site director, Year Up

Mike’s understanding of strengths and his practical, insightful focus on personal development provide a fantastic roadmap to those looking to add courage and clarity to their arsenal. I highly recommended adding Extraordinary to your reading list.

—Nate Spees, CEO of Grizzly Inc. and host of CreativeMornings, San Diego

Michael Dauphinee is making a massive impact through his uncanny ability to speak to the heart with an authentic voice. His words resonate with a refreshing approach and resounding relevance in a world that desperately needs to hear what he has to say.

—Damon Goddard, founder and director of AMPD Golf Performance

Working with Michael has been a life-changing experience. He has alternately nudged, challenged, and supported me through both big transitions and everyday leadership challenges. I have found his positive approach, impressive business experience, and strategic savviness to be the perfect blend for understanding the challenges executives face and coaching them to thrive in any circumstance.

—Angela Titus, CEO of Cause Way

Mike and his team helped us at a time when 78 percent of our staff had changed, and we were not performing as a team. In an industry that focuses on weaknesses, Mike helped us focus on our strengths so we could support each other. We reprioritized and reorganized, and the team became engaged in making a difference. Today, the organization is thriving and has made record improvements to the bottom-line metrics.

—Curt Towne, former plant manager of Jefferson North Assembly Plant, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles

Michael Dauphinee is a gem. Exceptionally bright, articulate, winsome, and passionate.

—Alan Hirsch, author of The Forgotten Ways books

BroadStreet Publishing® Group, LLC

Savage, Minnesota, USA

BroadStreetPublishing.com

EXTRAORDINARY

the world sold you a map

what you need is a compass

Copyright © 2018 Michael Dauphinee

978-1-4245-5688-5 (softcover)

978-1-4245-5690-8 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Stock or custom editions of BroadStreet Publishing titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, ministry, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email info@ broadstreetpublishing.com.

Cover design by Chris Garborg at garborgdesign.com

Interior by Katherine Lloyd at theDESKonline.com

Printed in the United States of America

18 19 20 21 22 5 4 3 2 1

For my relatives by blood and my family by choice, I borrowed your belief until I could find my own. None of this is possible without you. Thank you, and may your lives be extraordinary!

Contents

Foreword by Paul Allen

1   Extraordinary

2   Navigation

Part 1: IDENTITY

Where Are You?

3   Defining Identity: The Questions

4   Talent

5   Purpose

6   Passion

7   North Star / Compass

Part 2: PERMISSION

Where Are You Going?

8   Defining Permission

9   Authority

10 Vision

11 Power of Permission

12 Permission to Poke the Universe

Part 3: COURAGE

How Will You Get There?

13 Defining Courage

14 The Formula

15 Common Courage

Part 4: GENEROSITY

How Do We Keep from Getting Lost?

16 Defining Generosity

17 Multiplication

18 Moments

Part 5: THE DIRECTION OF YOU

19 Follow the Relationship

About the Author

Foreword

By Paul Allen

I had my “Steve Jobs moment” in the summer of 2016. The moment came while I was on stage, speaking for two hours about the global strengths movement inspired by Don Clifton, the father of strengths psychology. The audience included many of the world’s top strengths coaches from twenty-four countries. These were people who care deeply about helping others discover and develop their innate talents, creating fulfilling strengths-based lives. My friend Mike Dauphinee was in the audience.

I met Mike in early 2013. Since then I’ve grown to love him like a brother. He has challenged me—more than anyone else I’ve ever met—to be courageous. Every time I’m with Mike, I’m empowered with more stories and equipped with more insights. There’s no question I want to be like Mike.

The peak moment during that keynote speech came when I mentioned Mike’s work in the inner city of Costa Rica. He was meeting and coaching “leaders” of a particularly rough neighborhood. One of them was a fifty-nine-year-old sex worker who had sold her body for many years to provide for her four children but now, as a grandmother, had left that life and wanted to help others leave it as well. Mike showed her a Surface Tablet and invited her to take the Clifton Strengths assessment. Then, through a translator, he helped her understand what her strengths were. He asked her how she felt.

“I’ve never used a computer before. I like computers.” And then, with tears streaming down her face, she said, “And your questions make me feel more human.”

This story is impossible to tell without emotion rising to the surface. In the keynote address I told the audience, “Every human being born on this planet deserves a coach like that … someone who cares … someone who sees the intrinsic value in them.”

Mike has coached nearly six thousand individuals in the last fifteen years. He works with an incredible variety of human beings: bank executives, CEOs, professional coaches, Olympic athletes, educational and nonprofit leaders in Detroit and DC, ex-prostitutes, illiterate doormen in Afghanistan, and many others. Mike sees each person as a genuinely valuable human being. He asks, “What talents does this person possess? What potential do they have? How can I help unlock that potential?”

A few weeks ago, Mike marked himself safe on Facebook after a bomb blast in Kabul. I wondered, how does he have the guts to keep going into a war zone to teach and inspire students and Afghan leaders? This book explains where Mike’s courage comes from. It also shows what his courage and generosity have brought him.

From Samir to Isaiah to Abdul to Virginia, Mike’s life is extraordinary and rich because his generosity encompasses every person he meets.

This is partly Mike’s story. But it’s also an invitation to reimagine our own story. Each point on his compass invites us to move closer to our own extraordinary life.

Mike Dauphinee is a strengths coach for the world. He wants each of us to live free, to follow our own compass, to cherish and nurture our relationships, and to live an extraordinary life. As our coach and guide, he gives us permission to be extraordinary.

—Paul Allen

Founder of Ancestry.com and CEO of Strengths, Inc.

1

EXTRAORDINARY

To be nobody but yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human can ever fight and never stop fighting.

—E. E. Cummings

“Mike, I’m tired of not being able to tell the neighbors what you do. Ricky thinks you work for the CIA. I know you travel. I know you talk to people. I just don’t think I understand what you do.” I smiled at the classic dad question. He needed fodder for his friends. And while he was proud of me, he needed to nail down the details. The funny thing was that I struggled to explain my career as much as he did. But I tried. I gave my father the high points as I walked him back through the timeline he knew but didn’t understand.

After college, a simple clicking mistake on a job site application led me to a position working as a resident counselor in drug rehab for convicted juvenile felons. Eighteen months later, when my student loans kicked in, I took a job answering phones at a call center for Hewlett Packard. In six years at HP, I saw success and promotion on the back of keeping promises more than business prowess. My realization at thirty of living a life offtrack had led me to pack up, leave San Diego, and move to Minneapolis. I spent more than a year volunteering with a small team doing leadership development for nonprofits. At a critical moment when I’d spent my savings and my student loans still called, instead of going back to corporate America I responded to a request from a director of a nonprofit in Detroit who had heard me speak. “Do you do consulting?” was a question that changed my life. I had no idea what I was doing, but that person became my first client.

One client led to another, I’d incorporated a year later, and the relational roots of my business took me from training to coaching and consulting. And after years of dealing with organizations in a variety of situations around the world, I’d been invited to meet with leaders at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NFL, the US Olympic Committee, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, United Way Worldwide, Bank of America, Microsoft, US State Department, and so many others. This string of experiences gave me opportunities to work in fragile and conflict-affected environments around the globe. I was traveling to places like Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and Honduras. Everywhere I went, the process was the same, since every place had people. Assess individuals, give them the vocabulary to describe themselves, and coach leaders to lead: This was my method everywhere I went.

Dad listened as he drove, squinting from time to time to improve his hearing. As I finished, he said nothing. Then with the slightest head nod, he said, “So you help managers learn to help their people figure out what they’re good at so they’re happier at work and don’t hate their lives.” He’d nailed it. I smiled. After a long pause, he said, “Imagine the kind of a dad I would have been if someone had done that for me.” It’s the moments you never see coming that change your life.

My dad had few choices. A young family. No diploma. A terrible economy. The highest hourly rate and the potential for overtime was the only measure of a job that mattered. Choosing a position based on talent and passion was never a consideration. Providing was the priority. He worked as many jobs and hours as possible. And each night he’d collapse into his beat-up La-Z-Boy and let the TV wash the day away.

Driving to the airport that day, my father marveled as he glimpsed his alternate reality: A story where he worked for someone who wanted his best interest, and his work energized him. He came home happier. He thrived, and he balanced family with the demands of life.

Incredulous, he shared a recent realization. He now had open holidays and unlimited time off, but no kids at home to share them. His naked regret surprised me. Staring at the road, just above a whisper, he said, “What if someone had done that for me?”

There were no words. I sat in silence imagining that version of my dad’s life. It would have been extraordinary.

Extraordinary is a great word. From the implications to the phonetics, I love it. It feels good. The fantasy of my happy dad, our enjoyable lives, the carefree days of childhood, the word extraordinary captured it all and made me smile. But like a rushing roller coaster dissolving beneath you as it crests the loop, reality grabbed hold of my delight. It was a dream. The truth told me what I already knew: His life wasn’t extraordinary—or so I thought.

Dad’s life was hard. He and my mom had survived, but it wasn’t the pure joy I’d glimpsed in that breath. Staring out the pickup truck window at the endless northern Maine forest rushing by, I wondered how our lives ended up so differently. My life has often been described by my father as … well … extraordinary.

More often despite me than because of me, I’ve been able to live an incredible adventure. It has been rich and unexpected. It has been blessed and sometimes difficult. I’ve lived a story of notice. It’s not uncommon to have people tell me how exciting, encouraging, and extraordinary my journey has been. And it has. Driving to the airport that night all those years ago, the realization of all I’d experienced and all my hardworking dad had missed planted a seed. I resolved that the fruit of my life would be helping as many people as possible to live the extraordinary life my dad never lived.

Cue the dramatic music.

I’ve told that story at speeches and workshops for years. It’s my “why.” I want to coach leaders to help their teams live extraordinary lives and thereby cultivate the extraordinary in all those they impact. I’ve used my love of the Clifton Strengths Assessment to help people understand their talents so that they can have this “extraordinary” life. I’ve traveled the world and taken people with me hoping a perspective-altering experience would lead clients to an exceptional life. I’ve mixed and matched content and exercises for more than a decade trying to concoct the formula for the alchemy of extraordinary. But I have discovered something striking. I didn’t know the definition of the word extraordinary. That’s a problem for a guy who uses the word “extraordinary” as the aspiration of his life.

In today’s vernacular, “extraordinary” has become punctuation. It marks a thrilling point. For years, I’ve used the word to connote the unusual and unexpected—but always with a positive spin. I’m not the only one, and it’s easy to see how it can become aspirational. We want extraordinary accomplishments, extraordinary love stories, and extraordinary lives—but only if they’re positive, and that’s nowhere in the definition.

Extraordinary comes from the Latin extra ordinem meaning “outside of the normal course of events.”

That’s it. Normal, not normal, there’s no value judgment in there. The word is neutral.

Are you having a great hair day? “She looks extraordinary!”

Woke up with the Everest of zits on your chin? “That’s extraordinary!”

Made the impossible a reality for a client? “You’re extraordinary!”

Your boss is blind to your contribution despite the evidence of your effort: “He’s extraordinary.”

Jordan Spieth struggles on hole twelve of the Masters: “It was extraordinary!”

He shoots from the backside of media trucks, blind, onto the fairway, to come back and win The Open Championship in Scotland: “It was extraordinary.”

Much like the word “leadership,” we keep bending the definition in affirming directions. And if I’m honest with myself, that’s why I liked it. I wanted leaders to care about creating a positive reality for their people. My childhood wasn’t thriving like my current existence, so I needed a positive word. Extraordinary. But when I realized that there was nothing positive in the core definition, it felt cheap to make it an anthem. It sounded like the phrases said by people I despised: motivational speakers. (Want me to lose my mind? Call me a motivational speaker.) I hate when the glittering heroes of social media influence offer up content with the volume of cotton candy and just as much density. Words should matter, and my use of extraordinary didn’t until I realized it did. I wasn’t attributing too much to the word; I was ascribing too little.

Extraordinary: outside of the normal course of events.

To live an extraordinary life is to live outside the normal course of events.

To live an extraordinary life is to live outside the normal course of events. It’s about living beyond the circumstances. It’s an experience that transcends a trail or route. If I was going to advocate that people spend their essence in search of a life extraordinary, I needed to challenge them to reach for more than just positive feelings. It was about living above the transactional reality. Extraordinary life includes moments of pain, joy, success, failure, and everything in between, but we can use them as memorials more than guideposts.

We can’t live on autopilot. Events are to be navigated, leveraged, and even stood on, but they’re never to be bound to. I was trying to create a capacity for excitement and adventure in people by calling them to the extraordinary, but I was underselling the reality. I want you to live extraordinary lives not because you’ll feel happy, significant, or adventurous. To live an extraordinary life is to live freely. It’s living unbound from the courses others promote. It’s finding the resolve to reframe reality, creating art from the mud of failure, and seeing events as things to be shaped, not surrendered to. It turns out my father lived an extraordinary life.

To live an extraordinary life is to live freely.

My dad was born in the small logging town of Patten, Maine. My grandmother had my father, the oldest of her three sons, just fifty days after her sixteenth birthday. “Man of the house” by age six, my father learned the realities of hard work. He spent many of his young years on the local dairy and potato farms that occupied any non-forested land around town. The story of a rural single mother of three boys in the 1940s and ’50s could have ended with abandonment and despair, but it didn’t. They often moved from rental to rental, but they always stayed together.

Introverted, fatherless, and one and a half times the size of every other boy in grade school, my dad was often the target of bullies. The threats reached the point where the teachers would let him out of school to get a head start as he ran home. When he was fifteen, my grandmother feared for him enough that she pulled him from school and put him on a bus out of town. She didn’t know what was out there, but it had to be better than the life he was living. He got to Maryland and The Job Corp. The only white guy on a thirty-man crew, he worked the grounds at Camp David. A twist of fate and a crash course in etiquette landed him at a White House dinner escorting Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughter and provided him a focus on table manners that I eventually learned to loathe throughout my whole childhood.

Choosing Navy enlistment over the Army draft, Dad was stationed in San Diego when not off the coast of Vietnam. He met (and later married) my mother after my great-aunt promised him Sunday dinner if he’d take her out. After the Navy, he found himself with a wife, two little boys, no driver’s license, no high school diploma, and the worst inflation in US history. Dad took a job in a bagel shop and rode a bicycle in the dark to work every night. Believing they’d have a better chance in a small town, my parents packed their lives into a U-Haul (after my dad secured a driver’s license) and drove the 3,445 miles back to my dad’s hometown.

The population of Patten, Maine, in September 1975 was less than my mother’s high school graduating class. While better in the long term, those early years in Maine were anything but easy. He got a job at the local plywood mill; then the mill burned down. He managed to get a house—the sewer pipe froze and broke in the middle of winter. While waiting for the mill to be rebuilt, he created multiple side businesses: welding, construction, making picnic tables. Years later he got the “good job” at the paper mill, but he then had to commute forty-five minutes each way, which required a car. He had multiple car accidents over the years due to weather, fatigue, or a combination of both. Looking back, I marvel at what a person can endure.

Sitting on a plane the other day, I thought of my dad at thirty-four years old. I don’t know how he did it. He worked all the time. He would lie in the snow for hours welding on log trucks on some desolate backwoods road for a few hundred dollars. The winter of no toilet, my brothers and I would use a bucket that he’d have to haul deep into the woods late at night since there was no money to fix the septic line. He did whatever it took, physically and emotionally. I often wonder if I’m that strong.

Even as I write this, I marvel at how I missed the “extraordinary” in my dad’s life all these years.

Somehow, we never had to move. My dad never left. He got his GED when I was in first grade and, before retiring, obtained certificates as a Class One welder who could calculate pressures and formulas in his head. His side jobs created a thriving and sought-after contractor business due to his quality and standards. He never cheated on my mother. He never drank. He never left. And the characters that ran him out of town as a boy now describe him as one of the most honorable men they know. I never realized it, but his life has been one lived "outside the normal course of events.” Extraordinary.

It would have been normal for my young grandmother to abandon her child. My dad’s torment should have made him an alcoholic. My parents should have split up. They should never have had children who earned college degrees, started their own businesses, and lived lives wanting to impact the world. But they did, no matter what the circumstance.

This hope is what I want for you. I want you to know you can live freely. You can live beyond your circumstances. You can treat the trials of your life as descriptors, not directives. But how? How was my dad not overwhelmed by events? Why wasn’t I? It wasn’t because his life was on track. No one offered him a path. He had no vehicle, and he had no map. In the end, all he had was an internal compass. While he didn’t always know how we’d make it, he was still sure we would. While he may not have been able to articulate the destination, he was sure of his direction.

This is what I now offer clients who are navigating their most significant problems. I don’t bring maps to success, and I can’t build vehicles that will bring turbo growth to their business. We discover and refine a compass for their lives together. And while they may not always know where they are, they never feel lost.

Looking back on that ride with my father, my dad was right, but he was also wrong. He would have had a different life if he’d had a role and a boss that was there for him. But as I think of what he did and the compass he managed to give to me, his life couldn’t have been more extraordinary.

2

NAVIGATION

Complete freedom is not what a trail offers.

Quite the opposite; a trail is a tactful reduction of options.

—Robert Moor

I want to help you navigate in the direction of you. From our first breath to our last, each day is navigation, whether we realize it or not. Ordinary lives navigate by the normal events they experience. I want you to navigate past them. How do we do that?

The dictionary describes navigation as the process of accurately ascertaining where we are, where we want to be, and making choices about how to get there. It sounds like life. We’re navigating. We don’t talk about it in these terms, but it’s what we’re trying to do and the thing we muck up. Each section of this book is laid out by this definition: Where are we (identity), where are we going (permission), how we get there (courage), and how we keep from getting lost (generosity).

Where Are We?

Our first problem is that step one of navigation is about ascertaining where we are. And it’s not enough to have a sense of where we are; we need that sense to be accurate. People spend so much time seeking answers and resources to help them figure out where they’re going but ignore the fact that they don’t know where they are.

I spoke at a conference in Ericeira, Portugal, a few years ago at a hotel on a point jutting into the ocean. The town is the western-most point on continental Europe. A small fishing village, Ericeira had a legendary reputation as the home of the roughest and toughest fishermen in Portugal. I never understood why. As I walked around the beautiful alleys and squares, all I saw were wrinkled, smiling fishermen and homemakers greeting me. There were no wild men to be found. But the reputation of the town from time immemorial has been one of hard work and hard living. Stumbling into a map room at the resort one afternoon, I understood why.

On the walls were ancient seafaring maps and charts from the last 300 years. One of the oldest showed Portugal in all its glory, and there in the middle was the tip of the country sticking out into the ocean: Ericeira. But where the Atlantic should have been stretching outward toward Brazil and Central America, there was an open expanse covered in dragons instead. Ericeira was the home of the toughest of people because only the strong, brave, or crazy would be willing to live so close to the edge of the world where leviathan waited to devour you. They were sure they were in the shadow of mortal danger when instead they were colonizing one of the world’s greatest surf spots. The first key to navigation is understanding where we are. Without this, nothing we plan will be accurate or possible.

Too many of us are living on assumptions of self based on the opinion of others, class expectations, and histories of failures. While these stories may have been true in the past, they are not a good basis for understanding today. It’s not enough for us to say we know where we are before we start. How accurate is our understanding? Do you understand your identity?

Where Do We Want to Go?

While knowing where we are can be a challenge, we seem to excel in looking for somewhere else to be. Since our toddler days when our sight went from blurry to clear, we’ve been reaching for things. Whether lights, toy giraffes, our fathers’ beards, or anything our siblings had that we didn’t, our vision and sight have been the drive for motion. This becomes more confirmed with age; it is as valid for emotional journeys as it is for physical ones.

We see things and move toward them. Sometimes the movement is for clarity, and sometimes it’s for possession. Our vision determines our direction. But focusing on an idea as the sole priority for navigating life ignores something vital. Your vision is dependent on where you are. Your navigation plan will never be executed if it doesn’t start from where you are.

Stand too close to something, and you miss the greater context; stand too far from it, and you fail to see the flaws. And there’s a perspective-altering impact that results from different heights and elevations. If we start with a clear understanding of where we are, we can then take that into account when we start looking at the world. Others help us interpret what we see, but they can’t see for us. We have to cultivate our own vision instead of buying it from others. Are you giving yourself permission to dream?

How Do We Get There and Not Get Lost?

You may be one of the lucky ones. You may see yourself. You may have taken time to consider all the different views from your perch. You even picked a vision all your own. But how will you get there, and how do you keep from getting lost?

We get excited about our direction and satisfied with the rush of a destination, but it’s rare if it ever becomes more than a dream. Navigating isn’t about seeing a place you want to go. It’s about going there before you die. I love Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist