Sharon Lewis

I recently read that creativity can soar when given constraints. Is this an oxymoron? Not!

Think about how you would feel if given a sheet of paper and asked to “draw something”. Now think about how you feel when you are given a sheet of paper and asked to draw a picture of your dream-house.  The constraints provide direction and allow you to draw with a purpose. This simple exercise did wonders for my own sketch!

I had a tough day with one of my clients recently and found myself grateful for constraints that I was able to exemplify for his consideration.

The client is an entrepreneur in the wealth creation space and has established a professional networking group of respectable size. It is time to take this networking group to another level of professional or industry association. The members in the group are all involved in the elder-care industry; on both a personal and professional level, each member wants to ensure that they are doing what is best as we move through what I call the era of the aging tsunami.

The entrepreneur has lots of ideas on how the group can be strengthened as a professional association for its membership base, as well as conceptual ideas on partnership options that would be able to provide innovative service offerings and revenue streams for all involved. To move forward in creating the vision necessitates the creation of a more disciplined, structured approach; to draw this picture necessitates an evaluation of the member needs, the consumer segments, the marketplace offerings and the opportunities which the gaps present.

Similar to our target audience who is trying to decide how to best meet the needs of their aging loved ones, this entrepreneur created a 6-person strategic advisory board for himself. Each of us is wise and committed to elder-care issues. Yet, each member of our team has a truly unique voice. Together we represent a strong set of resources.

So here is where it gets a little bit sticky. The entrepreneur has been working with a blank sheet of paper. “All options are viable at this early stage of development”, he says. Yes, this is the core philosophy behind good brainstorming. And, it is a lot of fun—up to a point. To move forward, the entrepreneur must be willing to work with this advisory board to define constraints around the direction he will take.

It is like deciding that you want to go on a diet and eat healthy. What does eating healthy mean? My father never had a problem with his weight and was power walking long before it was in-vogue. Eating a big salad was as comfortable for him as was eating the two bakery black and white cookies for dessert. So what did healthy eating mean to my father? When asked to give up the cookies, he would substitute 3-4 pieces of fruit, usually apples, oranges and bananas.  And, always eaten at one sitting. On the surface, this fruit salad would appear to be healthy eating. However, would a dietitian approve of four pieces of fruit for dessert…. At every meal? Was my father truly satisfied by all this fruit or was he actually eating more sugar in the four pieces of fruit than he would have been eating in one bakery black and white cookie. The Weight Watchers program addresses this dilemma by telling us how and what to eat; they give the participants defined food categories and portion sizes. Creativity and compliance can soar when given constraints.

Fast forward to our discussion around the challenge of defining a new entity that will simplify the coordination of life-stage planning and care delivery to the senior.  How does a family do this? Is there a place where they can turn for one-stop advice on meeting the varied needs of an aging loved one? And what are the price points for this myriad of services? Cash, time, emotions and accuracy of the information – in a situation that is always emotional and time sensitive.

On a very regular basis, I have been sending the client advisory team articles and websites describing programs that strive to simplify the coordination of life-stage planning and care delivery to the senior. The options range from — AARP programming to disease specific support offerings to grassroots entities—and much more. Overwhelming amounts of information are available; the challenge is in helping the consumer to recognize, and to define the core elements of their own situation so that they can turn to the appropriate resource for additional supports. Isn’t this a variation on defining some constraints to accommodate the answer?

When you rely on personal referrals for your elder-care journey, how do you know that the referral has had a similar elder care experience or that the senior citizen had a similar health condition or financial situation? 

Dealing with my own family situation at one point, I confided in a friend who spoke in generic terms about how everything would work out and “this, too shall pass”. Anxious for assistance and simultaneously scared to put “labels” on the situation at hand, the generic nature of my friend’s response infuriated me. I had no doubt in her desire to help me; it was obvious that she too was scared and did not want to overstep any undefined boundaries in the friendship. Instinct took over. I found myself getting pretty specific in defining the resources that I required. I then took it a step further and defined the people in her own network that I wanted her to call – on my behalf. My friend was now empowered and a series of phone calls, emails and text messages soon followed — all critical to my resolution of the situation. By better defining what I needed, I had empowered my friend to help me solve the problem. And, she was as excited as I was when the puzzle starting making sense.

Creativity can soar when given constraints. Not quite the oxymoron that these words initially convey!

Guest Blogger @AARPNY. Tweets all mine.

Guest Blogger @AARPNY. Tweets all mine.

This is my inaugural blog for @AARPNY and so I open with a question from which many of my future posts will follow.  A simple question … yet so difficult: “What do you do?” Does this question fill you with pride or make you recoil in frustration? Aaargh.

Why is the answer to this question so important? Because we are defined by our professional persona.  More often than not, we are seen to be as good as our “last deal” or “our last title” or “How did you impact the P&L?” or “Describe the measureable outcomes of the initiative”.

 “What do you do” is not so easy to answer when you are experimenting with lots of different industries and different roles. How do you distill a multi-dimensional experiment in a 30 or 60 second elevator pitch and expect the recipient to “get it?”

Sometimes I feel like I am acting, when in fact I am genuinely trying to convey that what I do has little to do with who I am or who I am trying to become.

I began my career with an MBA in an executive training program at a major financial institution; the world was filled with possibility and I believed I had a clear direction of how best to proceed. I desired to create marketing strategies that fuel the acquisition of new customers and the retention of existing clients, and quickly gained experience in the art of market research, the management of external advertising agencies and the navigation of internal resources to ensure the financial approvals, the sales training and the customer servicing capabilities. It has been a great ride thus far and I am proud of my accomplishments across a broad breadth of industries.

Recently, I have been looking to find new opportunities to apply my skill set. …..some of which are an easier transition to explain than others. Heck, I hope to have another 30 years of active work ahead of me. I want to feel like a pioneer again!

With this in mind, I started to do more volunteer work across a number of different organizations with similar themes: What’s Next, Staying Brain-Sharp and Family Care-giving issues. Lots of media coverage can be found on these subjects, including the timely and relevant AARP resources at Life Reimagined, Brain Health and Family Caregiving.  

Similar to the foundations of a good marketing strategy: I am trying to formalize a game-plan for myself. Why?…because we learn who we are –in practice, not in theory—by testing reality, trying new activities, reaching out to new groups……We express interest. We test. We interpret and we incorporate..….No amount of self-reflection can substitute for the direct experience we need to acquire so that we can evaluate the options.  We need to create opportunities with those around us and we need to acknowledge that “new” can be a little bit scary.

Throughout my posts, I will share with you some of my life experiences that motivated me to seek change, along with some articles and peer-related stories that are impacting my own thinking. Being a “people person”, I invite you to join me on my quest to redefine my professional career, and hope you will take a moment to share your own observations. Together we can all reach our dreams.

What do you do and what do you hope to become?

Guest Blogger @AARPNY. Tweets all mine.