Plans and Life Scripts - Part 2

Last time I gave an overview of a few books that are changing the way I think about thinking.  And things I think I’ve thunk. 

• The Sandler Success Principles: 11 Insights That Will Changethe Way You Think and Sell, by David Mattson and Bruce Seidman
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, by Margaret Heffernan

 Now that you’ve expanded and changed your attitudes, you have an opportunity to try on some new perspectives.  Beware that new perspectives often feel like trying on a new pair of shoes.  They might feel stiff.  They might prove a bit tight. They may give you a blister and send you to the Dr. Scholl’s aisle.  Often, however, they gradually form to you in such a way that you never want to take them off.  New behaviors, or even old ones, will yield differing results as the context—your attitudes—change. 

Intention is not actualization.  As my friend Kathy Kolbe, founder of the Kolbe System, relates, attempting and committing are two different things.  New behaviors cannot realize better outcomes without having the techniques necessary to actualize those outcomes.  Our attitudes block our willingness to learn and accept new techniques.  We simply cannot see ourselves doing this or that.

Still believe an old dog can’t be taught new tricks?  You’re going to fail the quiz at the end of this blog post.  Seeking to learn new things can be difficult.  Committing to learn them is the ability to permit your Adult to overrule your Child and Parent as they throw roadblocks on your road to improvement.  Kathy would caution us to understand how our instinctive construct can bring energy to the form and shape of our efforts, which is a conversation for another time.

So, how can you plan more effectively?  First, think through how others perceive your company.  Where do these thoughts and attitudes come from?  Are they true?  Do they HAVE to be true?  Can you visualize a different state for you and the company?  Are there certain prejudices you bring to the table from your Child or Parent that have limited your view?  Probably just a few dozen or so.

Next, and with a more expansive and examined view of your attitudes, what goals and actions might move your company to new possibilities?  What choices might come up and what eventual outcomes are desirable?  Can you choose the actions that would get you closest to your desired outcomes?

Finally, to achieve those outcomes, what capabilities need to be employed, improved or acquired?  Sometimes you have what you need and off you go. Sometimes you need help and then some practice to acquire the techniques necessary to get there. Utilizing the correct resources to get there is always required.  Not everything can be solved by a Magic 8 Ball—in my case, it’s not for lack of trying.

All the while, monitor yourself to prevent your willful blindness promoted by your inner Child or Adult to impede your progress.

It is amazing how synchronistic the interplay of the three books seem to be. Is it just random that I would be reading these three books at the same time?

Are you ready to start some effective planning? Time to crack that whip!

Related Posts :
Broken Promises
Plans and Life Scripts
The Planning Triad

TRANSFORMERS AREN’T JUST SPACE ROBOTS

There is a term for customers I would like to share that makes a difference in the way businesses think and how they should deal with people: aspirants. In The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services, by Ronald J. Baker and Paul Dunn, customers are not described as clients, but rather as aspirants. Individuals aspire to something. If a business is doing something other than just compliance work for people, those people are expecting something more than to be treated as basic clients. 

They want to be transformed; they want their situations to be improved (even if they were already doing well, they want better). Maybe they want to be protected, which means they want their situation to be transformed into something safer. Maybe they want to accomplish a business objective that will transform their life in a positive way, or perhaps they are trying to settle some kind of bothersome dispute. Positively or negatively, if you are involved in a dispute, it is transforming. If you assist someone in that process, you are a Transformer. With this in mind, every time you speak to a “client,” think about how you could transform them, either positively or negatively. 

What’s at stake isn’t simply doing the work. What really matters is what the work says to a person. How it is going to transform their life one way or another? Someone could easily make a bad decision based on a product that is not delivered correctly.

If you are an accountant and you simply fill out a customer’s paperwork before flinging it at them, you are depriving them of the transformation they are ultimately seeking from you. Most accountants don’t get this, and while that’s a good thing for those accountants who do, it’s very unfortunate for the customer sitting across from an accountant who just doesn’t care or understand.

I have a buddy who was saddled with an accountant who surprised him by letting him know that, oops, he owed $13,000 more than projected. As my buddy sat there shell-shocked, the accountant looked at him with a straight face and asked, “How are you going to pay this?”

When my buddy could not come up with an immediate answer, the accountant told him to give him a call when he figured it out and advised him to enjoy the rest of his day. That accountant belongs in accountant jail.

It’s essential to understand, whatever your profession, the services you provide make a difference in people’s lives. If an individual knows that you understand this, they will feel protected through the interactions they have with you and can be confident they are exactly where they should be. If you care, no one can compete with you.

The important question here is: When you talk to customers, are you in fact talking to a client, or are you talking to an aspirant? Do you understand what this person is aspiring to be or do? In all of your dealings with aspirants, remember that what you say to them really matters. Take your words as seriously as they do. Think before you speak. Make it a transformative experience for them. Never think about the amount of trouble, hassle or time it will take to accommodate your aspirant. Embrace it. Think about what you can do to make them feel safer, confident, optimistic, and that progress is being made to meet whatever the challenge. This is the kind of stuff they don’t teach in accounting school, or engineering school, or construction school, or any other schools.

A good way to start empathizing with the aspirants around you, is by making yourself your first aspirant. Take a look within, at your own life, and examine the goals you currently have on the table. Once you’ve identified and prioritized those goals, think about the motivation behind them. Maybe one of your current goals is to become a better salsa dancer. A worthy, understandable goal.

Ask yourself: Why is this my goal?

What are you aspiring toward by wanting to achieve this goal? You’re a very hard worker. You work so hard, lately you feel as if your life has become all work and no play. Having a balance in life is vital. You feel that learning to become an amazing salsa dancer will provide a great social outlet to create the balance you’re seeking in life. Rather than crunching numbers, eating ice cream alone and watching To Catch A Predator on MSNBC on Friday nights, you think it would be better for your psyche, to hit the dance floor, get some exercise, make new friends—maybe make new, more than friends—and in general, be happier. It’s clear the goal is to salsa dance because the motivation is to improve your social life, your health, both physical and mental, and to provide variety in your day-to-day life. You deserve all of these things.

And so do your aspirants. Think of your own personal goals when working with aspirants and remember, their goals mean just as much to them as yours do to you. Don’t ever just fill out the paper work!

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Are you Growing Older...or Aging?

  

I know it was a few months ago, but I’m still thinking about Angelina Jolie’s bare leg and that crazy Sacha Baron Cohen spilling ashes all over Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet.

But the most interesting part of the Oscars for me was who won Best Supporting Actor:  Christopher Plummer.  

Guess how old he is?  

82.

And he was nominated with 82-year-old Max Von Sydow, another octogenarian (I know, big words!).

In fact, the faces were all getting older. Good ol’ Michael Douglas sure ain’t a spring chicken, is he?

I half expected all these old fogies to reenact a scene from Cocoon. (For those of you who are too young for that reference, it’s a movie where older people find the fountain of youth in their retirement community’s swimming pool in the form of…cocoons.  As I type this, I realize the movie sounds ridiculous, but try watching it without shedding a few tears.)

All those old people got me thinking about my own age.  I realized that when I go out somewhere I’m usually the oldest person there, but I don’t really feel like I’m aging.

What is aging? (Maybe you think that’s a stupid question, but how many times do I have to tell you?  There is no such thing as a stupid question!)

All of us are getting older. Five seconds ago you were younger than you are now. I’m 10 minutes older than when I started writing this blog. And I’m 15 minutes older from when I tried to start cleaning my garage. That lasted all of five minutes, and I decided it was time to blog (I swear, though, that trying to clean my garage aged me three years).

But I digress …

Let me get back to my “stupid” question …

In my mind, there is a huge difference between getting older and aging.  Getting older is the inevitable process of walking through life along the time continuum. Aging, on the other hand, is the process of ceasing to progress.

I think of aging as a trajectory.  You will always get older, but you will only start aging once your trajectory begins to decline.

Now I’ve noticed two types of older people.  There are the people that become a little more infantile about things.  These people are aging.  They start focusing not on lifelong goals, but rather on small things that shouldn’t be important.

And then there are people who are simply getting older—people like Christopher Plummer and Max Von Sydow.  At least from where I’m sitting, these people don’t really appear to be aging. Their physical appearance, of course, shows age … but their minds and their spirits do not.

The difference between aging and getting older is state of mind.  It really is a case of mind over matter.  If you are open to learning new things, you are growing older, but you are also growing.

Let me give you an example by picking on my wife for a minute …

My daughter and I are mystified because my wife hates using credit card machines at the gas station.  In fact, she has boycotted the practice of putting her credit card into a gas pump.  It confuses her, and so she has gone on strike.  Heretofore, she pays inside, where she stands in line and hands her credit card to a fellow or a lady who runs it through a clunky old machine … just like they did in the good old days.

My wife just doesn’t want to progress … when it comes to pumping gas.

(To her credit, she did learn how to use an iPhone in one day, so I think we can call it a wash and agree that she’s not aging.  She’s standing still in time. )

What about you?  Are you open to learning new things?  Setting new goals?  Or are you just focusing on petty little things and letting age sweep over you? 

I know it is my intention to continue to progress — to continue to learn.  Just remember, if you cease to learn, you are aging.  So pledge to get better each day, like a great wine.

Today Challenge: Do everything in your power to learn something new and do something exciting.  There is no reason we shouldn’t all be Christopher Plummers. Who knows?  Maybe this time next year, I’ll be blogging about how old you look on that Oscar stage!

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Be Here Now

I went to dinner at a place called The Yard House on a busy Saturday night. I had never seen a restaurant this big, and it was packed with a huge sports bar, giant televisions, an outdoor patio, and maybe 500 or 10,000 tables on the inside.

The evening was organized chaos—poetry in motion. And most impressive of all: the waiters were incredibly helpful. I believed they were there just for me, despite all the activity and commotion. When the waiter was helping me with a Jetsons-sized menu, I felt like the only patron in the place. I do believe the food tasted better than it might have actually been because the wait staff was so incredibly helpful. They helped me handpick my order.

I was willing to forgive some of the little things that weren’t quite right because the staff was there for me. The service was a team approach. No matter which team player was up at bat, I was undoubtedly the most important customer there. At least this is how I felt.

I felt as if I was being paid attention to at that restaurant because, well, because I was. This goes to a larger point. Despite everything that was going on at the restaurant, despite all the other people my waiter had to help, my waiter focused on me in the moment. And it made all the difference.

In business, and in life, if you can’t give 100 percent to the mission at hand, then you might as well not be giving anything at all.

Now some of you might be thinking, “Hold on a second. I can multi-task. Maybe you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, but I can.”

Sure. You can do it.

Until you can’t.

Perhaps you have always been able to do three thousand things at once. But sooner or later, doing more than one thing at a time will come back to bite you in the donkey, shall we say.

Focusing, being present in the moment, is a skill. And like any other skill, it needs to be honed. The better you get at it, the more rewards you will reap. Let’s take a look at an example of someone who wasn’t in the moment.

Chase Sampson, a college junior from Nashville, flew into New York at three in the morning and didn’t sleep a wink between then and the time he had to sit in the hot seat for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He told the gracious Meredith Viera he pretty much had coffee flowing through his veins. What with his traveling, his studies, the pressure of being on national television, there was a lot to think about.

After the casual banter concluded, the first question posed to Chase was: Homeowners buy surge protectors to protect their possessions from unexpected surges of what? His choices were:

A) Electric Current 

B) Water Flow 

C) Air Pressure 

D)  Buyer’s Remorse.

For his answer—Water Flow—Chase received exactly zero dollars and 5,276,153 hits on Youtube. Now, if he had taken a moment to set everything else aside and just think about the question, he probably would have chosen the correct answer. Unless he’s Amish, and then it would be understandable. But he’s not Amish. He owned surge protectors. He wasn’t in the moment. He dropped the ball. You dropped the ball, Chase!  

Let’s look at a more intense example of someone who was in the moment. Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette faced one of the greatest challenges an athlete could face while competing in a past Winter Olympics. Hours before she was take to the ice, her mother died of a massive heart attack. Her mother was one of her greatest supporters, confidants, allies, and coaches. Their time at the Olympics was a shared experience.

Rather, than give into her grief, Joannie Rochette continued to compete even though she was devastated. Literally, hours after her mother’s passing, she got back on the ice in competition and skated flawlessly. She could not have done this had she though of her enormous sadness, the pressures of the competition, the millions of onlookers thinking about how sad she must have been.  Joannie focused on the present—on skating, on her technique, on her choreography—and it eventually landed her the bronze medal. That she was able to compete, let alone earn a medal, is beyond incredible.

Maybe you don’t have the same pressures as an Olympic athlete competing on the world stage a short time after her mother passes away, but you have got your own personal circus in town. We all do. How we deal with it is what sets us apart from the rest. If we crumble, we will not succeed. If we take whatever challenge faces us on head on, we cannot be stopped.

But you cannot face a challenge head on if you are too busy worrying about the next challenge, the challenge on the left and the right, and what you could have or should have done two challenges ago. In order to emerge victorious, you have to be able concentrate on a single goal at the time you are in the process of attaining it. Yes, you can and will focus on the other goals and challenges when the time is right; when you do, you will focus on those additional challenges as if they are the only ones who exist. No matter how many challenges you face, the only way to overcome them is one challenge at a time!

That is why, however large or small the challenge you face is, it does not matter so long as you give it your complete attention and focus. It didn’t matter to the Yard House waiters how many people were ordering food—they deal with one order at a time—and why Joannie Rochette was able to perform despite her deep personal loss:

she put one skate in front of the other.

Today’s Challenge:  Practice being in the present.  Concentrate on what you are doing here and now.

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