iSTARTUP

We are 3D ~ It's Time to Show It

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Your 3D Resume

May 9, 2012

Gone is the traditional one-dimensional, experienced focused resume, and in its place is a three-dimensional preview of a whole person. At the center of the 3D Resume™ is an individual’s passion and purpose. Essential to this approach is who the person is today, taking into account experience, talent, skill, interests, values, networks, genuine relationships, and ongoing interests. When the majority of CEOs say that they hire people because of their values and passion, our 3D Resume model truly helps job seekers, businesses, communities, non-profits, and individuals find the alignment so both the employee and the employer can succeed.

The 3D Resume™ is a whole new way of looking at yourself from a career perspective.

Come ‘on back: Feb 14th to Get into the Flow with iSTARTUP

February 8, 2012

ACTIVITY: YOUR PASSION METER

Be Inspired

Discover Your Passions

Increase Your FLOW of Professional Relationships in a meaningful and accessible way

Increase Your FLOW of Knowledge to increase your likelihood of personal and professional fulfillment

Increase Your FLOW of Job Opportunities aligned with what you love doing, your passions
Increase your overall awareness levels resulting in an increase in relationship building, increase in innovative thinking, higher clarity for decision making, an overall increase in mental and physical health and well – being…and the list goes on.Comment below as to what your thoughts are as to the benefits of increasing your general awareness levels and being more in flow with yourself, others, knowledge and opportunities.

… so come on back, Valentine’s Day to become a member of iSTARTUP (plus we are offering a free trial, so come ‘on back)

Email us in the meantime if you want to be more involved or if you would like an email reminder
janice.caillet [at] iSTARTUP [dot] com

When Passion is Really at the Heart of Everything…

January 27, 2012

I have never been a big fan of using extreme words such as ‘everything’. I contemplated for quite a while before using the word ‘everything’ in the title — and as you can see the right side of my brain, my more creative and imaginative side, won out. The left side of my brain, the more logical and practical side, is still pouting but when all is said and done with this post, they will come together and be friends once more.

What is passion and why would it be at the heart of…
dare I say it again, EVERYTHING.

“Passion is an intense emotion, compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire for something”, according to the post on Wikipedia (1). And, according to Robert J. Vallerand in his work published in Canadian Psychology 2008, Vol. 49 (2) entitled:

“On the psychology of passion:
In search of what makes people’s lives most worth living,”

Vallerand’s definition is more interesting to me and very much aligned to what we are creating at iSTARTUP:

“Passion is defined as a strong inclination toward an activity that people like, find important and in which they invest time and energy.”

Vallerand focuses his research on passion connected to an activity as opposed to where the majority of empirical research in psychology had focused its attention prior to the 1990′s — in romantic passion. Although romantic passion can certainly be an activity, in this post ‘passion’ is focused entirely on activities other than romance. Sorry if your search results brought you here under false pretense.

Why is passion so important? I believe and Vallerand concurs that one of the reasons why passion is so important is that it occurs in us to satisfy our basic psychological needs. I would use the word ‘instinct’ — that passion is a driver for some of our basic human instincts.

Yes, we are animals at the end of the day and we do have instincts. I believe when we disconnect from our basic instincts, bad things happen — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and no acceptance. So, if passion helps us satisfy some of our basic instincts, what are they? Back to our friend Vallerand who outlines the following:

Passion drives us to engage in various activities throughout our life in the hope of satisfying the basic psychological needs (instincts) of:

- Autonomy: a desire to feel a sense of personal initiative
- Competence: a desire to interact effectively with the environment
- Relatedness: a desire to feel connected to significant others

So, being passionate for an activity satisfies our basic needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. No wonder it feels good! And, no wonder why it is key to know what your passions are so you can feel good about the activities you do — especially the activities we spend the most time doing as humans, work!

Work, I hate that word. Yes, there are times during the day when I need to work. For me that means doing something I am not passionate about, such as accounting though I love creating financial models; data entry though I love data analysis, or project management systems data entry though I love face-to-face project management.

I use all my best efforts to minimize the amount of ‘work’ (non-passionate activities) I do on a daily basis in order to concentrate on passionate activities. When I succeed and I end up doing more activities in which I am passionate, this is when people comment the most on how amazed they are in seeing how much ‘work’ I can accomplish in a day. When I hear this, I smile.

So yes, Passion is really at the heart of everything. Empirical research as well as our more intuitive friends agree, see list below. Now my left and right brains are happily in harmony again.

- Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success (3:33 Ted Talk)

- Cultivating Employee Work Passion: The New Rules of Engagement by Scott Blanchard (.pdf and 1 hour video)

- FLOW with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (19:00 Ted Talk)

- HeartMath founder Doc Childre has written a new booklet, The State of Ease – it’s available for free – to help recreate flow in our daily lives and maintain coherent alignment between our heart, mind and emotions. We invite and encourage you to read The State of Ease.

- Passion and Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders by John Coleman, Daniel Gulati, W. O. Segovia , Harvard Business Press Books
Book, HBR Blog, Facebook page with good links

Wishing you much love, joy and of course — PASSION.

~ Janice Caillet
Founder & Chief Catalyst
iSTARTUP

5 steps forward, 2 backward, 3 forward, 1 backward…

January 18, 2012

This is the typical journey of a startup. And, at iSTARTUP — we are a startup and we are on that journey.

5 Steps Forward
For over a year we have been talking to many individuals and companies about our mission: to re-purpose vacant public school buildings to be centers of personal and professional innovation. We have put together an amazing coalition of organizations to assist us in this effort (see our Biz Plan, click on link above).

2 Steps Backward
We have had several meetings with people in and around the inner workings of the City of Boston to find out how we could lease one of the several vacant public school buildings. It has been an enlightening and difficult process, but we were getting more informed and unfortunately loosing hope that obtaining a building would ever be possible. Then,

2 Steps Forward
Low and behold a miracle, the City of Boston posted 3 RFP’s for three vacant school buildings — one of which we have had our eye on — The Dickerman School. Wow, perhaps our dreams will come true.

1 Step Backward
In looking at the criteria for the RFP, our organization, iSTARTUP, would not meet the criteria listed (for example: need to have been in business for more than 3 years). Therefore, we are looking for a nonprofit to take the lead on the RFP and we can come in to provide the services for the Center: workshops, coworking and startup incubation services.

If you know of someone who can help — please get in touch with Janice Caillet at your earliest convenience: Janice [.] Caillet [@] iSTARTUP.cc or 617.874.6923. The RFPs are due January 30th. Time is running out for this amazing opportunity.

It is time for a few steps forward — for this we need your assistance.

Fill in the Blank: ‘I want to startup _____ !’

December 29, 2011 — 2 Comments

Challenge yourself.
Fill-in the blank: ‘I want to startup ______’.

Take on something big ~ for you, for your life, for the people and the world around you. You are worthy of a big challenge, so go for it.

I offer you two words of advice:
One: DO NOT make it a New Year’s Resolution
Two: DO NOT go at it alone

This is a challenge I am asking you to take in the beginning of the New Year, yet please DO NOT make it a New Year’s Resolution. According to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman,

“Eighty-eight percent of all New Year resolutions end in failure.”

This challenge, your challenge, is too great to be thrown into the clamor of other New Year’s resolutions. The Washington Times has a list of the most common ones: stop smoking, drink less and get more exercise — to name just a few. I challenge you to something greater, something more worthy of your presence here on this planet.

Even though Richard Wiseman’s research pointed to such a high failure rate for New Year’s resolutions, he did offer some advice to increase your odds of achieving this annual conviction which we believe in as well:

“The chances of success are greater
when people channel their energy.”

Therefore, if you focused on one challenge ~ what will it be for you?

Another insight into ”making it easier to succeed at our annual ritual of self-improvement”, which we wholeheartedly believe in, is echoed in the Wall Street Journal article ‘Blame it on the Brain‘. The writer suggests how the latest neuroscience research gives us insight into why resolutions fail and why some succeed.

“Self-awareness” is key and
is noted in the article as the first ‘trick’ for success.

At iSTARTUP, we do not see self-awareness as a ‘trick’ but more as a way of seeing clearly who you are, your emotional state at differing times, personal preferences, distinct passions in life, competencies and identifying any personal barriers that might be getting in your way.

Certainly self-awareness is important but what about awareness of others, the world around us, etc. This type of awareness, sometimes called external awareness, is a perfect second step. Self-awareness or internal awareness first and external awareness second. Personally I believe it is interesting that recent neuroscience research has also pointed out a somewhat similar duality, MIT points to Two Distinct Neuronal Networks Mediate the Awareness of Environment and of Self, March 2011. Without getting too scientific, the bottom line is that the combination of internal and external is key. And, it is powerful for so many reasons.

Randy Emelo, CEO of Triple Creek, explains the importance of internal and external awareness in terms of leadership effectiveness. “Aware leaders are those who are tuned into themselves and their environment.” Randy also states that “Aware leaders ‘walk in the ready’ and are able to anticipate the seemingly unexpected. Because of this, they are typically prepared and able to handle rapidly changing and demanding situations.”

Randy Emelo's Chart of Awareness Leadership Domains

With or Without Awareness -- You Choose. Randy Emelo, CEO of Triple Creek

At iSTARTUP we believe this is critical success factor for everyone – not only leaders. Imagine if we all were able to ‘walk in the ready’. Imagine if we were all able to shift in times of economic crisis — gosh, perhaps we would not have been in such a crisis if we all had heightened internal and external awareness in the first place.

OK, so awareness is important.
How do I increase my internal and external awareness?
DO NOT go at it alone.
This brings us to the second piece of advice I mentioned, do not go at it alone. Here is where iSTARTUP can help. We will be launching in 2012. We will start virtually along with some workshops in the Greater Boston area in multiple rented locations until we can obtain permanent space. In the meantime, here are some interesting and perhaps even entertaining ways to increase your internal and external awareness – bit by bit.

Expanding Perception, TED Talk, Brene Brown Researcher Storyteller
The Groundhog Day Effect by Marshall Goldsmith
Fun External Awareness Test
Gratitude by Louie Schwartzberg

If you have your favorite ways in which to increase your awareness, internally or externally, please share them by posting below.

Launching iSTARTUP in 2012
Once we launch iSTARTUP, we will not only be a place for you to increase your internal and external awareness, or as we so fondly say engage in *personal and professional innovation*, we actually assist you in reaching your startup goals. Whether you are starting a healthier lifestyle or starting a company, iSTARTUP will be the place to go.

If interested, let us know ~ email Janice.Caillet@iSTARTUP.cc

Happy New Year!
Founder, Janice Caillet

A Center for Personal and Professional Innovation… why?!?

December 22, 2011

There are many centers of innovation around the world. I marvel at how beautiful some of them are ~ architecturally (image: iCon Environmental Innovation Centre in the UK).

The energy and passion that went into these buildings is palpable. I can only hope that these buildings are filled with people of energy and passion as well.

We at iSTARTUP hold dearly to the belief that centers of innovation cannot only be focused on business/professional innovation: identifying the market gap, creating the business plan, commercialization of the product or service, securing access to capital sources — to name just a few important steps to startup success.

However, we also believe having passion and specifically, Passion Alignment, is critical to the success of a startup — perhaps even more so than the above ‘business’ factors. We call this part of the process ‘Personal Innovation’ — discovering who you are at your core.

What are Passions?
Passion as a word has multiple definitions. In this context, innovation, startups or careers, I define passions as a deep heart-based emotion felt when engaged in an action. When you can honestly say to yourself ‘I really love doing this’. For some other definitions, similar to ours, please check out FLOW introduced by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and Atlantic Monthly’s article “The Value of Following Passion in a Jobless World” I think explains passion quite well.

What is Passion Alignment?
Passion Alignment is the degree to which the startup is aligned ~ a refection of or an extension of ~ the founder(s) core passions in life. We can all point to innovators/entrepreneurs/founders who so clearly have a passion for what they do: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Walt Disney and so many more. Their passion for what they do was/is so clear. How many people do you know are living their passions in life? How many successful entrepreneurs/founders of companies that you know of created their company from their core passions?

Why is finding one’s passions so important?
Richard Branson mentioned in an article he wrote about how even though Steve Jobs had a very different style of leadership, they both created very successful companies because “I believe it comes down to our pursuing our passions: we both truly enjoyed and believed in what we were doing”

Being more specific, Richard Branson continues, “You are far more likely to be persistent, inspired and dedicated if you love what you do, and if you eventually make something you are truly proud of, that filters down to your staff and your customers.”

“Our research suggests that passion is key to achieving sustained extreme performance improvement,” noted John Hagel III and John Seely Brown in HBR, Aug 2010 article Shape Serendipity, Understand Stress, Reignite Passion.

Saul Kaplan of Business Innovation Factory says that “Passion-based organizations stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and are able to attract people and resources to their causes.”

Continuing, Saul claims that “Over all of my years as an innovation junkie, the common denominator, among the innovators I have connected with and the most successful enterprises I have observed and worked with, is passion. They started with a passion or cause and then organized around it to make it happen. Not the other way around.”

What if I do not know my passions?
“The truth is, we all have the potential for passion. Some of us are lucky enough to be already pursuing our passion as our profession. The rest of us can find or develop our passion,” Hagel & Brown, HBR.

We at iSTARTUP believe this as well. Finding your passions is a discovery process and I have been helping people go though for over 10 years. Yes, some people know early on in life what they are passionate doing — others, like me, needed a bit of assistance.

We look forward to launching our first iSTARTUP Community Center in the Boston area in 2012. You can bet that a big focus of our program will concentrate on passions. Here are just a few of our workshop titles: Discovering Your Passion (for everyone), Passion Alignment for Startup Founders, Attracting Passionate Employees, Keeping Passion Alive in Your Company, etc.

by Janice Caillet, CoFounder iSTARTUP Community Centers
Janice . Caillet @ iSTARTUP . cc

Collaboration is where we’re at

November 17, 2011

iSTARTUP Community Centers is focused on creating an aligned coalition of partners that will work hand-in-hand with us to create change cooperatively. This is one of our leading differentiating factors, and one of the main reasons why people like us so much. We love to cooperate! And, we believe that there are great companies out there doing great things and together we can collaborate to offer our members great benefits and opportunities.

From the beginning, the iSTARTUP movement has been about talking with people and finding out what they love to do, what they’re passionate about, and then finding a way to integrate those ideas into an iSTARTUP Community Center. We do not want to re-create what’s already being done by amazing people. That’s why iSTARTUP’s model is a collaborative one and focused on innovation and supporting people’s passions and ideas.

Besides, we get to work with great people and great companies that are willing to experiment with new venture that’s really not been tried before on a national scale. There is so much potential for collaborations on so many levels that it makes our work all the more exciting.

Right now, our list of committed collaborators and iSTARTUP friends is growing. Here’s a sample of the organizations that have signed on and are supporting us.

Committed collaborators

1215

Babson University

Brandeis University

Cambridge Trust

Coaching Circles

Conscious Capitalism Institute

Eli Feldman: iSTARTUP Kitchen Collaborative

Give Us Your Poor

Gordon Curtis: Executive Transition Coach

Greenway Lambert

Hey Neighbor

Innovation Nights

Invup

Kauzoom

Launch Capital

Mass Challenge

MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership

NewsIT

Possible Project

Reel Ventures

Startup America Partnership

Venture for America

YES

iSTARTUP Friends

Andre Porter: Executive Director, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Office of Small Bentley University

Boston World Partnership

Business and Entrepreneurship

Business Innovation Factory

Cambridge Innovation Center

Earthos Institute

Fifteen Foundation

Future Chefs

Harvard University Transactional Law Clinic

HBS iLab

Heyman Partners

Hult University

Keane

Latham & Watkins, LLP

Mass TLC

Mike Kinkead: Blue Ocean Strategy

O’Connor Professional Group: Addition Recovery

Simmons College

Startup Weekend Foundation

Tech Stars

Turnstone

Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Workspring

Innovation deserts?

October 11, 2011

We’ve been talking about deserts lately – not the kind with sand that stretch for miles, dry wastelands of momentary beauty. We’re talking about the essence of deserts, the symbolism, and how that analogy has transpired to represent deserts of other sorts. Like food deserts, and a recent report on fitness desserts. It’s clear that these new “deserts” are interconnected and overlapped with socio-economic issues, access, and health outcomes.

But what about innovation deserts? What about deserts of health and well being? These deserts can be found in nearly every company, nearly every city, and in nearly every neighborhood. And what are the factors that would identify an innovation desert or a desert of health and well being? High levels of unemployment, few small to mid-size businesses, even fewer locally owned companies, lack of access to motivational education, lack of access to inspiration.

We’re wondering about these deserts because we think it’s likely that many of the urban, low-income neighborhoods where we want to establish iSTARTUP Community Centers are innovation deserts and deserts of health and well being. We think that they probably are food deserts and fitness deserts, and have the same built-in socio-economic and health outcomes that mark these areas.

We know that when a good idea is combined with other good ideas velocity increases to advance change. That’s what’s happening in Roxbury, MA, potentially the first site of an iSTARTUP Community Center in the US. And there are other organizations that are trying to tackle these “desert” issues in Roxbury around food, health outcomes, and poverty-related issues.

We think that iSTARTUP Community Centers can accelerate the shift from Roxbury being a neighborhood that is an innovation desert to one that is an innovation leader through our incubation program. And, from being a desert of health and well being to being a community passionate about transforming the iSTARTUP ‘cafeteria’* into an oasis of innovative products and services for the community.

* iSTARTUP Community Centers will have a ‘cafeteria’ as we are repurposing vacant public school buildings. Imagine this large cafeteria space transformed into an innovation center for health and well being — selling community garden produce, healthy ‘brain food’, etc. We believe the Center will be an oasis which will spread over the desert into the community — revitalizing the heart, mind, body and soul of its inhabitants creating the fertile ground necessary for real social change to occur and thrive.

We love Roxbury and Dorchester!

October 9, 2011

We’ve just passed a few milestones, one of them being in line with our top goal: identifying communities which have vacant public schools for our first site in the Greater Boston Area. We love Roxbury & Dorchester Massachusetts. Both Roxbury & Dorchester have re-gentrification projects underway. They both are close to downtown; close to community gardens and open spaces.

So next steps? We continue to move forward with talking to the City of Boston. We have met some pretty amazing people and will continue to do so — in City Hall as well as within these communities. We are reaching out to connect with as many Boston, Roxbury & Dorchester community partners as we can. Are you someone who is interested in helping us? Do you know an organization we should be talking to? Let us know!

New Ah ha Moment ~ Ultimate Goal: Giving the School Back

August 25, 2011

Yes, it struck us just recently — our ultimate goal for iSTARTUP Community Centers would be to give the school back because …

the community would need it as the population in the community would have shifted back due to the collective efforts of all our members and that of the entire community. Since we will not significantly change the school architecturally, it would not take much to turn it back into the school the community once loved.

We LOVE the fact that there is a gymnasium (how fun to work for several hours and be able to join in a pick-up basketball game or pilates class for 30 min), a cafeteria (we certainly need that), lockers (perfect place to secure files and other items you do not wish to schlep home every night), classrooms (make perfect offices), blackboards (a retro wipeboard) and the list goes on.

If you have not been following the ongoing saga of our startup journey — we have gathered an amazing team along with several business partners to revitalize vacant public school buildings to be centers of personal and professional innovation. The company is called iSTARTUP Community Centers. It will be membership based catering to people of all ages, socio-economic and educational backgrounds intentionally to break the thought habits associated with the collective consciousness of any particular group.

We will provide three basic services to our members: coworking space and services, startup incubation space and services as well as personal and professional development workshops — all in a very dynamic workplace (with gymnasium, cafe/cafeteria, library — all of the facilities of a high school or middle school) but jazzed up quite a bit using the talent of local artists. We are looking to open our first iSTARTUP Community Center before the end of this year — wish us luck — better yet, if you live in the Greater Boston Area, call the Mayor’s office, your congressman or senator so we can get the ball moving even faster.

We are psyched to have a very tangible ultimate goal — as if community and economic revitalization as well as an increase in individual, societal health and overall well-being wasn’t enough .