We all want life to be more Juicy… So why aren’t people and enterprises Juicier?
JUICY — Richly interesting, engaging, compelling, fulfilling, tempting, appealing, seductive, tasty, colorful, rewarding, fascinating, brimming with life.
Juicy is biting into a ripe, rich peach and having the sweet juice run down your arm.
Love, laughter, and warm conversations with close friends are juicy.
Fun, creativity, and deeply felt experiences are juicy.
Doing the work that feeds your soul and utilizes the best of what you can contribute to life is juicy.
In a late-night discussion over a couple glasses of exceptionally good single malt scotch, my good friend Dr. Fred Mitouer and I discussed the question, “Why don’t people choose a juicy life when they have the opportunity?”
Before I share our discussion insights, let me introduce Fred to you. People from around the world come to him and his global network of practitioners to discover how, through his unique bodywork therapy, one can release the life restricting limits of past wounds and old stories that hold them in a prison where the doors are locked from the inside.
In the breakthrough work Fred calls Somatic Agency, people can discover their own uniquely authentic power and create personal agency that allows them to live more flourishing, juicy lives.
Why don’t people choose a juicy life when they have the opportunity?
Here are a few of our answers to that sticky question…
It requires the discomfort of vulnerability
Sometimes people must admit their life, as it is, is not authentic to them anymore. “They must drop their security gates,” as Fred put it. That’s hard to do because they must be vulnerable and willing to give something up that they once held valuable (or were told by others they should hold valuable).
Several years back, while attending Fred’s transformation workshop, an older woman told me she was unhappy in her life and wasn’t sure what to do. Because I had just shared stories of creating visions for my clients, she asked me to lead her in a guided vision exercise for herself. She loved the exercise and became quite excited when she talked about her wonderful future picture of high creativity and adventures.
Then she suddenly stopped talking and looked at me, startled.
She said it hit her that her husband was not any part of her future vision. Shortly thereafter, she went back home and made the decision to get a divorce. Then she began to step into the juicy life she envisioned and now says she is the happiest she has ever been.
The challenge of self-empowerment is that you must allow yourself to be open and vulnerable to big change if you wish to hold the juicy, full-agency life you desire and deserve.
It is scary
Once people are vulnerable and admit they need a change, they are often afraid of passing through the change process.
Whether great or small, we who have reached adulthood have wounds and traumas or dysfunctional concepts of ourselves that no longer serve us. These things keep us from living more fulsome, juicy lives.
In his books, Fred tells many stories of clients who are so identified with their past wounds, old stories of victimhood or dysfunctional concepts of self that they are only able to let them go once they realize that holding onto them is more painful than the scary notion of going through a transformation. It’s hard to let go of a wound that has bent and shaped your life for years.
To go through a transformation means a person needs to go through the wound, and not try to ignore it or float above it or wallow in it. “Go through” means facing it, feeling it, understanding it and then emerging out the other side where a new life can grow. My friend from the workshop had to do this to claim the life she wanted.
If you have ever done that, you know how scary it can be because the old ego structures, no matter how dysfunctional, don’t disassemble easily.
Success gets in the way
Sometimes a person goes to work one day and discovers their story of success is keeping them from living the juicy life they want.
Success is not the same as fulfillment. Only fulfillment is juicy for the human spirit.
A top leader in a mega-corporation asked to have a beer with me after our planning session. He wanted perspective on a decision that was tormenting him.
He said he was burned out and longing to leave his job back East to go to his ranch in Oregon, but he couldn’t allow himself to leave his position. As he said, it was not a matter of money, he was fully vested and had plenty of money in the bank. It was that he had worked his entire life to get to where he was, and his position gave him his self-identity. The title and prestige were his goal but now they felt hollow.
He was yearning and torn but he couldn’t allow himself to go where he really wanted. It took him several years before he dropped his old story of what counted for success and walked into the fulfilling, juicy life he really wanted.
It means letting go of some of our favorite attachments
Too often we find ourselves hanging on to secondary gratifications, like possessions, money, awards, and titles.
We like our things, sometimes to the point of losing sight of why we want them, and they become our all-consuming focus. It’s often very hard to let go of these gratifications.
The primary things that make life juicy are often non-material. Things like love, relationships, fresh experiences, or opportunities for creative self-expression.
A simple exercise is to keep asking yourself “Why? Why? Why?” you want something (money, big houses, status) until you land on the essential reason. After repeatedly answering the Why questions, you will find yourself coming to the core answer of primary importance…“So that I can step into my authentic life, feel fulfilled, at peace and experience being fully human, fully who I am meant to be.”
Why not drop into this primary authenticity first and avoid spending time approximating life (no cigar) chasing after secondary gratifications?
Here comes a bit of irony — Sometimes we find that many of our favorite secondary wants actually come easily to us when we live and work from our authentic, juicy self…yeah, go figure!
Being juicy is sometimes risky
Everyone wants to be seen as juicy and be with those they to whom they are attracted for their juiciness.
Sometimes esteem for juicy people can turn into adoration, projecting more good things on them than there really are. Then when the adored and admired don’t live up to the projected expectation, they are rejected…the hero becomes the bum.
Sometimes people envy juicy people and can build up comparative resentments toward them. They feel “lesser” when they compare their lives to the lucky, juicy people. Then the juicy one is pushed off the pedestal. When this happens, it’s painful for everyone.
Many people don’t risk going for their true juicy, authentic selves because they are afraid of their true power or fear they will be seen as an imposter and embarrass themselves.
Instead, they will “hide their light under a bushel” and hold back the very thing that makes them unique and juicy.
When they do this, they deny themselves and the world something rich and special…their one true life.
“Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and…you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.” — Anne Lamott, amazingly gifted and fearless writer.
Why aren’t enterprises juicier?
Let’s shift gears a bit and think about what keeps enterprises from being juicy.
Not surprising, since organizations are collections of people, the same things we said about what keeps individuals from living a juicy life, also keep companies from being juicy.
Plus, enterprises have the big challenge of creating a work environment within which the people inside can grow a juicy work experience.
Creating a juicy work environment may…
Require honest vulnerability. It’s not easy to be vulnerable in a corporation. It is often seen as a sign of weakness. Too bad, because it’s necessary to grow to another level. “Can we truly be transparent? Can we honestly admit to ourselves and the world we need to change?”
Demand we face the scary notion of transformation, not just make incremental improvements. 75% of company transformations fail, many because of reasons we have highlighted in this article. “Can we really make a leap into the unknown and change the way we have always done business? What will the Board think of us?”
Mean challenging what defines success. The previous 20th century metrics of success are being expanded to include regeneration, social responsibility, constant renewal, game changing innovation, brand building in the post digital age and building juicy work cultures and environments that allow us to attract the best people in a highly competitive job market. What if being juicy and fulfilling were part of our company’s new story of success? “OMG — running a business today is getting so complex, how can we do it all?”
Ask that we let go of some of our favorite attachments. What if organizations let go of the unsustainable concept of limitless growth, massive buy-backs of stocks that rob resources from future innovation, highly centralized control and the ever-expanding inequities of the compensation gap between top management and workers (average CEO pay is now over 300x the average worker, it used to be 20x)? What could dropping these previous attachments do for opening opportunities for making a more fair, attractive, and juicier work environment? “Won’t that make us less competitive? Won’t we lose C-suite talent?”
Require us to take a risky step. When we step into our authentic, juicy selves, we do the unexpected and often people don’t know how to hold us. When I stepped out of my role as a corporate leader and into the role, along with my partner/wife, as consultants in our own business, it threw people. My wife’s mother kept asking us, “When are you two going to go back to real jobs?”
The same issue arises with companies we have helped transform. One large industrial heating company staked its brand-brag on having over a million heating products. Many in the sales teams resisted transforming the company to full-service engineering-based heating systems company. They said it was too risky. Some even called it crazy.
But they were wrong. The real risky thing would have been to cling to the old product-by-product business model.
As a result of the transformation, the company accelerated its growth and profit exponentially and repositioned its brand for the future, becoming a leader in its field. “Wait, why can’t we do what we have always done? It worked before, didn’t it?”
What got you here, won’t get you there…if “there” is a juicy new future.
Take a lot of patient nurturing to grow a juicy environment. “We don’t really have time for this, do we? We’re just trying to sell stuff, aren’t we?”
Creating and nurturing something juicy takes conscious effort and timing.
For a company this means continual gardening the work environment — replenishing, refreshing, reinventing.
In a garden, if you pick the fruit too early, it won’t be ripe and sweet enough. If you wait till it drops to the ground, it’s too ripe and decaying.
Timing is recognizing when business models or products have run their course, are overripe, and need to be composted so something new, fresh, and juicy can grow instead.
Picking the fruit at the right time also means seeing when people are ready for recognition, promotion, new challenges, reassignment, or development, then acting on it without delay.
We know from our work with numerous organizations worldwide, that leaders are too slow to recognize people (or to change people out of their poor performing jobs). And too often they wait until the business model has gone over the hill and is decaying before they take action to reinvent.
“I wished I had acted sooner,” is the number one lament we hear from leaders.
We advise organizations to apply a regenerative, gardening mindset to orchestrate the healthy growth of the enterprise. View the organization as an eco-system within the larger environmental/economic eco-system. See it as a top priority to keep things as fruitful and juicy as possible over the many upward spirals of growth and development cycles of the enterprise eco-system.
A final note on the change that “Getting Juicy” requires:
As with all positive change there is — a push (“I don’t like what we have here”) and a pull (“I have a vision of a better tomorrow”) that moves things forward. Great leaders regularly orchestrate continual, natural planning processes that combine the clarity of an honest assessment “push” with the “pull” of an exciting future vision. This “push-pull” bookends the strategy and actions that keep the enterprise continuously juicy.
There is much more to creating a juicy enterprise — juicy innovation, regeneration, cultural development, strategic maneuvers in the marketplace, brand experiences, etc. But that exploration is for future articles.
A suggestion for what to do right now:
Uncover places where things are not juicy in your life or work and discover what keeps them from becoming juicier.
Then do the opposite. Reveal the things that you find juicy and explore how you might amplify them, make them richer and more frequent.
Then go to a good farmer’s market, bite into a ripe peach, and smile, while you watch the juice run down your arm.
Note — This is the second in a series of Juicy articles that are being developed into a book. We welcome your Juicy comments, questions, or suggestions.
