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I know something about you, something you might not even know about yourself: You have good solid values. You intuitively know the right thing to do in most situations, and you want to be able to take pride in who you are and what you do. If you’re like almost everyone else in this world, here’s something else I know about you: You haven’t really taken the time to specify what your core values are, much less the actions you can take to do a better job of living those values. You haven’t seriously reflected upon how those values should be reflected in the goals you set and in the choices you make, nor have you thought about how you would make a decision in situations where you could honor one value but not another. Furthermore, if you’re like virtually everyone else, there is a gap (perhaps a wide gap) between what you say your values are and what the proverbial Man from Mars would observe in your attitudes and in your behaviors.
If I’ve described your situation, I have good news for you: The Twelve Core Action Values are your values.
I know that because these values are universal and eternal; they have been honored in each of the world’s major cultures for thousands of years. It doesn’t matter what your political affiliation, religious beliefs, or national heritage is: these are your values. By the time we complete this course, you will agree with that statement. Before we began, let’s define what we mean by “values,” a term that has been greatly misused in recent years. True values run much deeper than cultural traditions, political slogans, or business goals. Here’s my definition:
For this course, we will be adding the word “action” to this definition: unless values are acted upon, they are nothing more than good intentions. In recent years, we’ve seen too many examples in the worlds of business, politics, and religion of people talking a good talk about their values, but then failing to act upon them, often to the detriment of their organizations and to the people who have trusted in their leadership. Action is the distinction between good intentions and real contributions.
For each of The Twelve Core Action Values there are four cornerstones. This is how we put action into those values, making them real in our attitudes and in our behaviors. This study guide will give you practical and proven ideas and strategies for living your values. And it comes with this promise: the more conscientious you are about living these values, the more successful you will be at achieving your most important goals, and the happier and more fulfilled you will be as a human being.
Before we get started, let me warn you that this course does not prescribe an easy “silver bullet” path to instant success and infinite wealth. Quite to the contrary, the journey will be tough and demanding. It will require hard work on your part. You’ll be challenged mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You

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There’s something else you need to be ready for. What you learn through this course, if you take it seriously, might scare you. Introspection can always be frightening, and this course demands lots of introspection. The most frightening thing of all might be when the “you” of today comes face-to-face with the “you” that could be, the “you” that you are meant to be. We’ll be taking the basket off a candle that you’ve carefully kept covered up all these years, and exposing the incredible potential of that shining inner light of yours. When the “you who is” comes face-to face with the “you who could be,” it can be intimidating, so prepare yourself now to confront that fear with courage and determination. It can also be liberating and exhilarating.
The structure of this curriculum
Each of the 60 modules in this study guide will follow a consistent format. First we’ll outline our goal for that module, and illustrate it with a short story or anecdote. Then I’ll share essential ideas and actions for living that value, plus several Rules for the Journey. We’ll conclude with a take-home exercise and a suggestion for further reading. Here is an outline of the anatomy of the course – the continuum that links the process of internalizing and operationalizing your values with the achievement of your goals in the real world:
Core Values: The why that motivates personal transformation and galvanizes action toward authentic dreams and goals.
Cornerstones: The what that makes core values become real by making them actionable and observable.
Action Steps: The how of achievement – without action, even the best of values are nothing more than good intentions.
Outcomes: The where of achievement, the new destination arrived at as a result of working with and living your values.
The power of The Twelve Core Action Values curriculum lies in this structure. Philosophy backed up by action, theory reinforced by experience. While the curriculum rests on a rock-solid theoretical foundation, the emphasis from start to finish will be on practical action strategies which at the end of the day will help you be more effective in just about every facet of your life and work. This course will help you make the changes in your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are necessary for you to achieve your goals and your dreams. Here’s a preview of the course outline, including some of the benefits you will realize for each value:
Core Action Value #1, Authenticity: You will gain a greater sense of who you are, and of who you are meant to be; you will learn practical strategies to overcome the inner barriers that are holding you back, and to build the solid self-believe that is required for you to become that meant-to-be person.
Core Action Value #2, Integrity: To be considered a person of integrity is the highest honor. I’ll share specific actions you can take so that you never become your own worst enemy, but rather earn the sense of pride (and the reputation) that come from knowing that you always do the right thing.

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Core Action Value #3, Awareness: This is a foundation of both emotional intelligence and spiritual peace; you will learn disciplines that will help you enhance your ability to more accurately and objectively observe what’s going on within you and around you.
Core Action Value #4, Courage: You will learn to identify the fears that are holding you back, how to make those fears work for you and not against you, and how to confront the dragon of fear with the sword of determination.
Core Action Value #5, Perseverance: You’ll learn practical strategies to prepare for adversity, and for confronting the inevitable obstacles and setbacks with mental toughness and a positive perspective.
Core Action Value #6, Faith: Throughout history, faith has been the most powerful form of human motivation. I’ll show you how, whatever your religious beliefs happen to be, you can reinforce the power of faith in yourself, in your future, and in a power that is beyond human sight.
Core Action Value #7, Purpose: You will discover a greater sense of purpose and meaning in the work you do, and learn practical skills for being a more positive contributor and team-builder in your organization.
Core Action Value #8, Vision: I’ll share techniques for getting out of your box and re-sparking the incredible imagination you were born with; you’ll learn a formula for transforming your dreams into
memories of the future.
Core Action Value #9, Focus: These tools and techniques will help you conquer procrastination, fuel a powerful sense of urgency, and become more productive than you’ve ever been before.
Core Action Value #10, Enthusiasm: I’ll show you how to tap into energy that you never suspected you had, and with this energy become more positive, more optimistic, and happier in virtually every dimension of your life.
Core Action Value #11, Service: It is an ancient paradox that those who are most committed to serving others end up being more successful themselves; I’ll show you how this spirit of serving will help you achieve your personal and professional goals as you help others do the same.
Core Action Value #12, Leadership: To be a leader is not a job description, it is a way of looking at the world and an ongoing personal commitment to taking initiative to solve problems and create opportunities. In this final section, we’ll cover actions you can take to be a more effective leader – in your family and in your community as well as at work.
“The values within an organization derive from the people, to be sure, but it is a primary and essential responsibility of the servant leader to help guide the development of these values into a long-term framework of behavior that will benefit the organization and everyone in it… Values are fundamentally about interpersonal relationships or social architecture of culture. I think of values in an organization as having two closely interrelated aspects: organizational values and personal values.”
James A. Autry: The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team,
Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance

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Think of a rocket ship that’s been launched toward the moon. If you alter its course by just one tiny degree as it is coming off the launch pad, it will miss the moon altogether and end up in the stars. In the same way, small changes that you make as a result of participating in this course, and which you sustain over a period of time, will have a huge impact upon your future success and happiness. Five or ten years from now, you will be in a much better place – professionally, personally, financially, spiritually, and in many other ways – than you would have been otherwise.
Personal values and organizational values
Most organizations have a formal statement of values. A values statement is a powerful way of publicly stating what the organization stands for (and what it won’t stand for). Most organizational values statements include a blend of values, behaviors, and outcomes. For example, integrity is a core value; honesty and reliability are behaviors that reflect that underlying value; and trust is the outcome that’s earned by being honest and reliable.
Appreciating this continuum can help an organization’s leaders gain buy-in to its corporate values, expectations, and goals. As an example, let’s say an organization’s goal is superior customer service.
The required behaviors to achieve that goal include having people act in a positive and cheerful manner, and take a genuine interest in their customers. The underlying value that drives these behaviors is
Enthusiasm (Core Action Value #10) and its cornerstones of Attitude, Energy, Curiosity and Humor.
Beginning with the end in mind (as Stephen Covey reminds us to do in his 7 habits of highly effective people) means starting with the organization’s goal, determining the behaviors required to achieve that goal, and then linking those behaviors to the underlying personal values. People are more likely to behave in the desired manner when they see it as being central to their core values than if they’re just trying to please the boss.
“Committable core values that are truly integrated into a company’s operations can align an entire organization and serve as a guide for employees to make their own decisions.”
Tony Hsieh: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Let’s get started
Are you ready to get serious about living your values? The journey begins with Authenticity – knowing yourself and being true to the person you are meant to be. It culminates with leadership, because anyone who internalizes and operationalizes The Twelve Core Action Values will become the type of person that others look up to and wish to work with and be with – in other words, a leader. In between, you’ll pick up valuable ideas and strategies to change your life for the better, and the inspiration to put them to work. So let’s get started.

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“If people could understand their core values, they would save years of doubt, confusion, and misplaced energy as they try to find direction for their lives.”
Laurie Beth Jones: Jesus CEO
Congratulations!
By becoming a Certified Values Coach Trainer (CVC-T) for The Twelve Core Action Values, you are making a commitment that will make a difference, and in more ways than one:
Beginning with yourself, because the best way to learn something is to teach it. Being a CVC-T will help you reinforce The Twelve Core Action Values in your own life, and you might also discover strengths and skills that you never knew you had.
You will help people in your class reconnect with their values, learn new skills and strategies for being more effective in their work and in their lives, and cultivate a more positive and selfempowering perspective on themselves and on the world around them.
You’ll be making a solid contribution to your organization; when people agree upon shared values, and hold each other accountable for performing in accordance with those values, it fosters a more positive, enthusiastic, and productive workplace culture.
The essential first step to building a winning team is teaching the individual team members skills, strategies, and attitudes that are required to think and act like a winning player. The most effective way to do this is by focusing on core values.
The Twelve Core Action Values are especially important in the healthcare environment. When caregivers
(and we are all caregivers) internalize and operationalize such values as Mission and Enthusiasm,
Service and Faith, it will inevitably create a more compassionate, professional, and caring patient care environment.
Relax
You will do a wonderful job as a CVC-T. Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated or overwhelmed. See this as a continued learning experience for yourself, and as an opportunity to contribute to the learning of others, then have fun. Remember, you are not teaching so much as you are sharing. And you are helping people – perhaps including people who are helped by your efforts in ways that you never even hear about. You will probably be much more critical of yourself than anyone else in your class will be, so don’t be self-conscious, and stay focused on the material.
“Being able to forget about yourself and become genuinely interested in other people is the key to success in sales, in speaking and in life.”
Art Linkletter
This CVC-T manual is filled with ideas, information and inspiration, and lots of book excerpts and quotations. The best way to prepare yourself to share The Twelve Core Action Values with others is to immerse yourself in the material yourself. Nor is this a “motivational” program, and you do not have to

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There is no “one” right approach to being a CVC-T. Some CVC-Ts will want to more actively present the material, while others will seek to draw it out through group participation. Either approach can be effective; what’s important is that the key points be covered and considered.
You do not have to know it all, much less live it all, before you can teach it. Nobody does all of the things recommended in this curriculum, as worthy as they all are. Quite to the contrary, once you think you have it all mastered, it will be time to start all over again. This will be a learning experience for you every bit as much as it is for the members of your class. Enjoy the journey.
These are universal values! This is not controversial material. Be humble and keep learning yourself.
The Twelve Core Action Values transcend particular political or religious beliefs. Nobody can criticize you for encouraging them to be more authentic, more courageous and persevering, to become more clear about their purpose and their vision, and to be more of a leader. Besides, the ones most likely to criticize you (calling you names like “Sparky” or “Pollyanna”) are the ones who most desperately need to learn and act upon this material.
Prepare
Be prepared. Plan your work, then work your plan. The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare.
You’ve heard these and many other exhortations to “be prepared” so often because they’re true, and nowhere more so than in teaching a class or facilitating a group. The best way to be prepared is to take
The Twelve Core Action Values to heart personally, and to concentrate on the Cornerstones upon which those values are built, to achieve the results you want in your own life.
Post the mini-posters with the values and cornerstones, The Self-Empowerment Pledge, The Pickle
Pledge, and other handouts where you will see them often. The more familiar you are with this content, and the more you have seen it work in your own life, the more confident you will be teaching it to others.
Before each class review the video, the CVC-T manual, and the participant workbook sections for that session. Review every point on the handout, reminding yourself of key points that must come out in either your presentation or in the group discussion, and of stories or anecdotes you wish to share.
Be on the look-out for funny cartoons, jokes, stories, or other humorous illustrations. If you’re like most people and can’t remember a joke, make sure you write it down and file it away with your notes for the appropriate class. If you have convinced yourself that you’re not very good at telling jokes or stories, begin by rehearsing with a friendly audience – such the face in the mirror or the family dog.
Right before you start, remind yourself to be a Dionarap (your audience really will like you!) and remind yourself of why you’re doing this – to help other people gain the benefits that you are gaining from living with your values.

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Lighten Up
Here is a great paradox of education: the more serious the presentation is, the less likely it is that people will learn from it, and subsequently act upon what they have learned. When you bring humor into your presentation, you begin to break down emotional barriers that get in the way of learning and action. I was once speaking with the CEO of a company that produced corporate training videos; he told me that the only way to really reach an audience is to have “have sex with them.” He went on to say that in order to effectively convey a message, you must create a Significant Emotional eXperience. If you touch someone in the heart or tap them on the funny bone, you are more likely to reach them between the ears.
Your enthusiasm will set the tone for the class: Before every class, work to bring yourself into a positive, friendly, and cheerful mood. Jump up and down and shout, do a Lion Roar, treat yourself to a big old belly laugh, then walk into the room with a smile on your face.
When appropriate (and it often will be), begin each class with a touch of humor. Tell a relevant joke or story, or ask class members if they’ve heard a good one lately. You can almost always find a relevant cartoon, joke, or story on the internet. Never be sarcastic or offensive – humor at someone else’s expense might make people laugh, but it will be the laughter of embarrassment, not of enjoyment.
“Humor is gracious and shows respect. It shows the audience you think enough of them to want to entertain them.”
Peggy Noonan: Simply Speaking
How to Find Stories and Humor
Entertaining people with stories and humor is a learned art, and fortunately it is an art with a very steep curve. While you might never end up on late night television, with a bit of research and practice, you’ll surprise yourself at how good you can become.
Search the internet. I use Google to find facts, stories, images, and other resources for my newsletters and presentations. A story does not have to be your story for you to tell it. In recent years, hundreds of books have been written with inspiring short stories that could be used to illustrate your presentation.
Foremost among these is the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Listen to educational and motivational audiotapes while in your car, and then borrow ideas or stories to highlight your presentations. This is perfectly acceptable, since most of what you hear the speaker saying was already borrowed from somewhere else! As T.S. Eliot said:
The books you read and the movies you watch can be a great source of stories and illustrations. For example, you might talk about how Norma Rae’s life changed as she made it her mission to bring a union into the mill where she worked, or how Luke Skywalker achieved a higher level of authenticity by mastering his fears and overcoming his ego.

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Some of the best stories will come from your own experiences: they do not have to be glamorous or heroic, simply authentic.
The comic section of the daily newspaper, the humor section of the local bookstore, and the internet can be great sources to find appropriate humor. Sometimes the simplest things, like an interesting book title, can make people laugh. This one always works for me: After telling a story about how I lost a job,
I’ll say, “I once read a book entitled, How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back (pause for effect)...
My Fingerprints Are All Over the Knife?”
During your presentation, it is perfectly appropriate for you to stop and read a good passage from a book, newspaper or magazine article, or other resource – just don’t read too much, and look up every few sentences to make eye contact with the people to whom you are reading.
Keep some action-oriented activities in your bag of CVC-T tricks. For example, engaging everyone in a
Lion Roar, or having them do a group shoulder rub, can be a perfect antidote to the after-lunch sag.
Create a file on your computer: File great stories, funny cartoons, and tasteful jokes. Reviewing them the night before a presentation (on any subject) will be an invaluable exercise.
Acting and Visual Aids
Sometimes the most effective way to make a point, or to tell a story, is to act it out. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go to Hollywood and audition; just have fun, be yourself. See, for example, “the moon shot” example above, which demonstrates the effect of incremental progress toward a goal, can be
“acted out” using several chairs as “visual aids” to represent the earth and the moon (you, of course, are the space ship  ).
The introductory class
A good way to begin is by asking people to think about a rocket ship being launched to the moon. If you change its course by one degree as it is coming off the launching pad, it will miss the moon altogether and end up in the stars. In the same way, small changes made as a result of participating in this course, and maintained over time, can have a huge impact upon one’s future success and happiness.
You can have fun by actually acting this out: make one end of the room the earth, the other end the moon, and you be the rocket ship. Show how a one-degree shift in direction when you are almost all the way across the room has virtually no impact, whereas the same one-degree shift as you take you first step will put you in a very different location.

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Key Points for the Introductory Session
Character is destiny, said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and the most important determinant of character is the set of values a person lives by.
Over time, values that are adopted and enacted by people are the most important determinant of the effectiveness and success of an organization. Corporate culture tends to become a reflection of the collective embodiment of the values and character of the people who work there.
Likewise, values are the key factors that determine personal success and happiness. One of the most significant benefits of participating in this initiative is that people will crystallize, internalize and operationalize the values upon which their future success will be determined. The Twelve Core Action
Values are applicable in every dimension of life. They can help you be a more effective caregiver, a better financial manager, and a more effective and caring parent.
The Twelve Core Action Values are universal and eternal; they have been honored in every culture and in every age. Every participant in this program already believes in these values. As a CVC-T, you are not trying to change anybody, but rather to help people become more of who they really want to be.
Everyone has values, but very few people have actually crystallized those values such that they could tell somebody what they were (for example in a job interview or a conversation with their children).
More important, most people have not thought about how their values are actually reflected in their attitudes and behaviors. Thinking about how these twelve values are reflected in your attitudes and in your actions will help you become more effective as a team member and as a leader, and be more successful in pursuing your own most authentic goals.
Distinguish between values and the things you value. Your organization values excellent patient care and customer service, and you value professional excellence, but these are not values. This is important, because encouraging people to focus on core values (such as mission and enthusiasm) is the surest way of achieving the things you value (such as professional quality), both at the organizational and the individual level.
During this course, we will not only consider the most important core values, but also the 48
Cornerstones and action strategies that can make those values more real in your own attitudes and behaviors.
While each of The Twelve Core Action Values are essential, point out that there are times in every person’s life where one or two can have extraordinary leverage. For example, a person in career transition can concentrate on Core Action Values #7, Purpose and #8, Vision to chart new directions in life; somebody struggling with money troubles or wishing to improve their financial situation should concentrate on Core Action Value #9, Focus, to help them make the most of their precious resources; someone grappling with deep emotional and spiritual troubles might benefit most from Core Action
Values #3, Awareness and #6, Faith.
The Twelve Core Action Values comprise a comprehensive and systematic curriculum. All twelve values are essential to be included, and virtually nothing has been left out (especially when the 48
Cornerstones are factored in). You might ask people to think of the names of people or companies that excelled in certain values (for example vision and courage), but ended up causing great harm and/or failing because of a lack of other values (for example service or integrity).

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What makes this course so unique is the structured approach by which intangible values become actionable and observable, proceeding from Core Action Value to Performance Cornerstone to Action
Strategy, as follows:
The Twelve Core Action Values: These are universal and eternal; they have been honored in every age and in every culture, and already have total buy-in on the part of every member of your organization.
The 48 Cornerstones: These are the building blocks by which values become real, the criteria by which someone answers the question, “How do I know that I am living my values?”
Action Strategies: Without action, values are little more than good intentions. The Twelve Core
Action Values curriculum includes innovative and effective strategies for helping people achieve their most authentic dreams by living in harmony with their deepest values.
Introductions and Kickoff
Think about the best seating arrangement. Setting up the room in a U-shaped configuration with chairs and tables is optimal for encouraging people to take notes, while dispensing with tables and arranging the chairs is a circle is more conducive to audience participation.
Acknowledge the leadership of your organization for having the vision, and for caring enough to share this opportunity with people.
Consider coupling each participant with someone else as a “buddy” to share, support, and encourage each other during the process. At least for the first several sessions, either use name tags or tent cards to encourage participants to get to know each other by first name.
Ask people to go around the room and ask people to share why they are participating, what they hope to get out of this program, either personally or professionally. Make sure to tell people that it’s perfectly acceptable to pass on this one if they would prefer to keep that private. One way to get this started is to bring a “magic wand” or “pixie dust” of some sort, and ask people to imagine that you can make anything happen. That being the case, what would they make happen?
Encourage people to take notes during each session, both of points they want to remember and of action steps they will take as a result of participating. Writing things down enhances both retention and intention.
Remind people to bring their workbook, a writing pad, and a pen or pencil to each class.
Encourage participants to take the initiative in sharing this information with others, for example by posting handouts or mini-posters on the refrigerator at home, sharing what they have learned with family members over the dinner table, creating a Core Action Values bulletin board in their work unit, or other activities. Remind them that the best way to learn something, to really learn it, is to teach it to someone else.
Point out that one goal is to raise our mutual expectations of each other at work. For example, as people buy into the Core Action Values, they will hopefully become less tolerant of disempowering whining on the part of negative coworkers.
Acknowledge that while the material to be covered is simple – it’s unlikely that people will be hearing much that they haven’t already heard before – it’s not easy. This is not a quick fix for problems or a get

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“Deeply held values fuel the energy on which purpose is built. They define an enduring code of conduct – the rules of engagement in the journey to bring our vision for ourselves to life...
Values, we believe, have intrinsic worth. They provide a source of inspiration and meaning that cannot be taken away from us... A value is ultimately just a roadmap for action. Values that fail to reflect in our behavior are ultimately empty. To be meaningful, the value must influence the choices that we make in our everyday lives. Professing one set of beliefs and living by another is not just hypocritical, but also evidence of disconnection and misalignment. The more we are committed to and guided by our values, the more powerful a source of energy they become.”
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz: The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy,
Not Time, Is the Key to High-Performance and Personal Renewal
Ground Rules
In the first class, establish the ground rules. After sharing the 5-Cs below, ask the group to contribute other ground rules you should honor.
Confidentiality: People will inevitably share sensitive, personal information either in class sessions or informally with fellow participants, and it is essential that their confidentiality be strictly honored.
Courtesy: There should be no side conversations, speakers should be given full attention, cell-phones and pagers should be turned off, classes should start on time, etc.
Consideration: Participants should not bring down the rest of the group by complaining about how hard their work or their life is (except in the sense of asking for help or advice), no participant should dominate the conversation, and people should take a genuine interest in each other.
Courage: It will take courage for people to confront their fears, their problems, their negative attitudes, and their bad habits, but that courage will pay off in a big way.
Commitment: If people are really going to get the most out of this program, they must make the commitment to attend all twelve (or thirteen) sessions, to use the Participant Workbook, to tackle homework assignments in good faith, and to generally have positive expectations.
A Final Thought About Your Likely Impact
In the next year, you will be strengthening your own voice, and having a positive influence in ways that cannot even be foreseen at the starting point: 1) Your participants might well have a profound but unforeseeable influence on their families, fellow workers, community, or any number of other venues; 2)
You might feel like you are singing to the choir, but that is exactly what you should be doing. You will be amazed at the number of people whose lives are touched!
“You can orient your life around a lot of things: wants, needs, shoulds, coulds, etc. But if you are clear on your values, and you orient your life around them, your chances of experiencing fulfillment are enhanced to the extreme... Orienting around your values, then, offers a perfect pathway to unity, wholeness, centeredness.”
Thomas J. Leonard (with Byron Laursen): The Portable Coach

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The greatest triumph in life is to successfully become the person you are meant to be; the greatest tragedy is to successfully pretend to be someone else because you think it’s what other people expect of you, or because you think you’ll make more money or attain higher status. When Herb Kelleher, former
CEO of Southwest Airlines and one of America’s most successful business leaders, was asked for the secret of success in business, he simply replied, “Be yourself.” Over the past decade, this has increasingly been a theme of books about leadership, professional success, and personal happiness: you will be happier and more successful by striving to be yourself than you will by trying to be happy and successful.
“The power that resides in you is new in nature – and none but you know what that is which you can do – nor do you until you have tried.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ice-Breaker Exercise
Have your participants all line up in one corner of the room. Tell them that you want them each to walk across the room. After the first person has done so, probably in a very normal walking style, inform the group that each subsequent walker must traverse the room in a style that is different from everything that’s already been done – they can crawl, walk on their hands, dance, or anything else – so long as what they do is original and unique. Point out that while doing the duck-walk (or whatever) might not be their own authentic signature march, it does point out that:
 To be authentic means to refrain from automaton conformance, which requires courage.
 To be authentic is to be creative.
 To be authentic is a lot more fun than simply going along and doing what everyone else is doing.
Authenticity is the foundational value
Authenticity is Core Action Value #1 because it is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
Somebody who is diligent at applying the other eleven Core Action Values, but who is not authentic, will simply become more successful at being a fake. The greatest triumph of the human spirit is to become the person you are meant to be; one of the greatest tragedies is to be successful at pretending to be somebody else.
Achieving authenticity is a lifelong process in which questions are usually more important than answers; in fact, anybody searching for the one right “answer” will probably be disappointed.
Authenticity is a process of personal growth and periodic self-reinvention. It requires work and discipline, getting out of your comfort zone, and humility coupled with self-belief.
Authenticity is not a state of being nearly so much as it is a state of becoming, of striving toward the genuine human being that you are truly meant to be. One of the most stressful conditions is acting out of authenticity, pretending to be somebody you’re not, or giving in to impulses that reflect poorly on the real you. It is in those situations you are most likely to regret something you have done or said, or to exclaim that you just weren’t being yourself. Authenticity does not mean always doing your own thing,

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“Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.”
Anna Quinlin: 1999 Commencement Address at Mount Holyoke College
When he was asked by one of his students what the highest form of wisdom was, Socrates simply replied, “Know yourself.” Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, and is essential to effective decision-making, personal and career success, and genuine authenticity. Self-awareness is difficult in part because “you” are a moving target. We all grow and develop, and occasionally backslide.
We all have different moods, and experiences that shape our sense of being. It is sometimes difficult to know who is the real “you.” In this case, questions are often more important that answers.
The first step to knowing who you really are is to know who you are not (but might think you are)
One reason that question, “who are you?” is so difficult to answer is that there are so many different facets to the complex human being that is “you.” Each of these facets is a dimension of you – of your personality, your character, your understanding of yourself – but none of them are the real you. The first step to self-awareness is recognizing these individual, and changeable, facets so as not to confuse your outer identity with your inner humanity. Following are some of the characteristics that are easy to confuse with being the real you, instead of simply being symptoms of the real you:
You are not the roles you play. You might be a nurse and you might be a parent, but these are roles you play – they are not you. It is especially important to distinguish yourself from your job description.
One of the reasons that job loss is so devastating for so many people is that they have allowed their personal identities to become too thoroughly intertwined with their business card.
You are not your stuff. You are not your paycheck or your possessions. This should be self-evident, but unfortunately one of the first and most influential criteria by which people judge others is the title on their business card and the size of their bank account. You can inoculate yourself against being so judged by having as good an answer for “who are you?” as you have for “what do you do?”
You are not your thoughts. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a leading psychologist. In his book The
Evolving Self, he says that the human mind will automatically gravitate toward negative, frightening, and depressing thoughts unless it is consciously directed into positive channels. Many people cheat themselves by assuming that their negative and self-limiting thoughts are an accurate reflection upon their real abilities and potential.
You are not your emotions. Although it might not feel like it, you are precisely the same human being when you’re sitting on the beach watching a beautiful sunset and when you’re in the middle of a frazzled, stressed-out, raging temper tantrum. Emotions are like the weather: you’ll have pleasant ones and you’ll have unpleasant ones, they will come and they will go, and no matter what emotional state

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Page 16 of 176 you are in now, you know it will change. But the solid ground underneath that weather – the bedrock of you – does not change. Recognizing this constancy is the first step in taking control of your emotions, instead of allowing them to control you.
You are not your moods. It’s easy to get stuck on a yo-yo that careens between elation and joy on the one hand, and anxiety and depression on the other. You are not your moods, but your moods might be trying to tell you something. For example, chronic anxiety might be trying to tell you that you are unprepared, that you’ve gotten yourself over-committed, or that you’re on the wrong path in life. To a greater extent than we often care to admit, the mood we are in is the result of a choice we have made; as
Abraham Lincoln said, most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
“That’s one of the peculiar things about bad moods – we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true. And the strange thing is that we usually don’t have the vaguest suspicion that we’re being conned by our misery and self-doubt.”
(emphasis in original)
David D. Burns, M.D.: The Feeling Good Handbook
You are not what other people think of you. One critical barrier to achieving authenticity is excessive worry about the opinions of other people. Although it is quite natural to be concerned about what other people think of you, just remember – their opinion of you probably says a lot more about them than it does about you. And also…
You are not your past. The past is simply that which you choose to remember – any history teacher will tell you that. In his book The Soul’s Code, psychologist James Hillman shares research showing that people we consider to be geniuses often make up their own past by creating memories of things that never happened – a past that, while it never really happened, is more supportive of where they want to be in the future than the factual past would have been. For example, a virtuoso violinist
“remembers” having awakened in the middle of every night with a driving desire to practice, though it never really happened that way.
Many of us are held back by negative memories, such as being told by a teacher that, “You’ll never amount to a hill of beans.” That is a negative and constraining memory. On the other hand, recalling the teacher having said, “You have so much potential, and I just know you’re going to do great things once you tap into it,” creates a very different mindset, even though the essential message is the same.
Remember this: the truth is more important than the facts. The fact might be that the teacher humiliated you with the former statement, but in all likelihood the truth is that he or she intended to help you raise your sites and standards. By rewriting the past to make it more truthful even if less factual, you can avoid a great deal of pain and lay the foundation for a much more magnificent future.
Discover and develop your strengths and your passions
Self-awareness includes recognizing and acknowledging your weaknesses. More important, it means knowing which ones should be worked on, and which ones should simply be accepted. Suggest that people apply the classic Serenity Prayer to themselves. Have the courage to change what they can, the serenity to accept what they cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. One benefit of selfawareness is that it enables one to turn a weakness into a strength. For example, someone with

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Page 17 of 176 attention deficit disorder is not likely to make a very good accountant – their impulsivity and short attention span will set them up to fail. Those same characteristics, however, can be desirable qualities for people in many entrepreneurial and sales-oriented professions.
Ironically, it’s more difficult for many people to know, and accept, what their real strengths are than it is for them to know their weaknesses. When asked about their strengths, many people have difficulty being very specific. For example, being “a people person” (one common response to the question, “what are your strengths?”) is not really a strength, it is a vague generality that is of no help in guiding one to the right path through life. On the other hand, knowing that you are a great listener (one facet of being
“a people person”) might lead you into social work, whereas knowing that you are a great motivator
(another facet of being “a people person”) might lead you into coaching – two very different paths in life.
According to the Gallup Organization, only about 20% of employees feel like their real strengths are used on the job. Point out what a waste that is for the organizations they work for, but that the real tragedy is for someone to retire at the age of 65 knowing that they spent 40 years on the job and were never called upon to use their strengths. While the organization should ideally encourage people to bring their unique strengths and talents to the job, in most cases it is up to the individual to figure out a way to do this (for example, a nurse who loves to write poetry taking it upon herself to write poems for patients and their families).
“Great managers would offer you this advice: Focus on each person’s strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don’t try to fix the weaknesses. Don’t try to perfect each person.
Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is. This radical approach is fueled by one simple insight: Each person is different. Each person has a unique set of talents, a unique pattern of behaviors, of passions, of yearnings. Each person’s pattern of talents is enduring, resistant to change. Each person, therefore, has a unique destiny.”
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman: First, Break All the Rules:
What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
A real world example
In the book Failing Forward John C. Maxwell wrote about John James Audubon, who “was unsuccessful for most of his life… He was a terrible businessman, and he didn’t belong in trade. It didn’t matter how many times he changed locations, partners or business types. Not until he understood and changed himself did he have a chance of success.” And what changes did Audubon

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Page 18 of 176 make? He decided to follow his strengths and his passion. He had always loved the outdoors, and he was an excellent hunter. Moreover, he was a talented artist who especially loved drawing birds.
When he finally stopped trying to be a businessman and let himself do what he loved and was good at, his life started to turn around. He traveled the land collecting and drawing bird specimens, which were ultimately featured in a book of one hundred color plates called Birds of America. The book made him rich and famous, and secured his place in history. Successful leaders in all walks of life acquire authenticity by building on their strengths, not by getting bogged down trying to compensate for their shortcomings.
Make time to think and reflect
One of the classic self-help books of our time is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. A book entitled
Grow Rich, Then Think would have made no sense, and probably would have had little commercial appeal, yet this is exactly how many people live their lives. They never make the time to use their creative minds because they are too busy trying to make a living.
Having a great work ethic can help you make a good living, but having a great “think ethic” can help you create a good life. One of the most important steps you can take toward authenticity is to stop filling your life with busyness and to devote time every day to thinking, prayer and reflection, and quiet meditation. Ironically, taking some time away from making a living just might be your most important step toward someday growing rich.
“The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required…
The capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best and the individual to fulfill his highest potential.”
Anthony Storr: Solitude: A Return to the Soul
Recognize your dark side
Authenticity requires total self-awareness, not just of the good and beautiful in one’s self, but also of the dark and ugly (what the pioneering psychologist C.G. Jung called “the shadow”). It is no more possible for a person to escape his or her inner shadow than it is for him to run away from the shadow cast by the sun. Through self-awareness, the dark side can actually be transmuted into a source of strength and insight. In fact, as John R. O’Neil, president of the California School of Professional Psychology, points out in The Paradox of Success: A Book of Renewal for Leaders, when you refuse to acknowledge your own inner shadow, you are turning your back on facets of yourself that could someday be cultivated into great strengths. Just as recovering addicts make the best drug and alcohol counselors,

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Page 19 of 176 so too your own weaknesses can help you be more sensitive and empathetic, and eventually become a source of great strength.
1. Keep a journal
Writing in a personal journal is a great way to get a better handle on your thoughts and emotions, to crystallize your dreams and goals, and to safely catharsize negativity. Over time, it will also help you to identify some of the key trends in your life that might not be evident to you without having a written record.
2. Talk to the “You” of the future
Have participants imagine that they are sitting in a room with the person they will be at some point in the future (e.g., the day after they retire). Have them ask that future self what regrets he or she has – what might have been done differently. Chances are that they’ll receive a thoughtful response – though they might not like what they hear (for example, “I wish you’d spent less money on self-indulgent shopping and less time watching television and had done more to save and earn so I could have a more enjoyable retirement”). This exercise can be a wonderful guide to helping to make needed changes now, and forestall future regrets.
3. 360 0 yourself
Do a 360-degree evaluation of yourself by asking family members, friends, and co-workers to share their impressions with you. Give them a questionnaire form and stamped envelope addressed to you, and ask them to anonymously answer questions like these:
 What do you think are my greatest strengths?
 What do you see me doing when I’m at my happiest?
 What is the most important change I need to make in myself?
 What do you think would be my ideal job?
 What is the most important contribution you think I can make?
Put some thought into other questions you would want people to answer. Then pay careful attention to their responses; you’ll be amazed at the insights people have that up until now might have eluded you.
Self mastery is more important than education, experience, technical qualifications, or who you know when it comes to long-term career success. Self mastery underlies the ability to manage impulsiveness and channel energy into productive directions; to build lasting and rewarding relationships with other people; and to build the foundation for a fruitful professional career and a satisfying personal life. Your future success at achieving your goals, mastering the inevitable troubles of life, and withstanding temptation is being determined right now by the work you do on self mastery and character development.

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Escape the Iron Triangle of False Personality
To achieve self mastery requires escaping the confines of the Iron Triangle of False Personality. The points of this triangle are Ego, Emotion, and Ambition. Point out that a healthy ego, positive emotions, and authentic ambitions are good things. Problems are guaranteed, however, when ego, emotions, and ambition are calling the shots instead of being effectively managed.
Ego often distorts your perceptions of yourself and of others, and leads to short term what’s-init-for-me thinking.
Emotions make us uniquely and beautifully human, but they are also notoriously fickle and often inappropriately negative; reacting to them can cause self-sabotaging behavior, resulting in you saying or doing things that you later regret.
Ambition is a valuable source of motivation and drive when it is authentic, but inauthentic ambitions (often pursued in order to satisfy ego and emotion) can create profound unhappiness and a sense of failure in life. Human beings are naturally ambitious—otherwise we would all still be hunting and gathering in the woods. Unfortunately, in our materialistic and imageconscious society, it’s easy to be driven by ambitions that are dictated by ego rather than those which please the soul. Sometimes, simply asking the question, “Why do I want this?” can help you ferret out whether an ambition is ego-driven or soul-directed.
A good example with which to illustrate the Iron Triangle of False Personality is describing what often happens when someone is fired or laid off from a job:
Ego gets squashed.
Emotions are overwhelmingly negative, including fear (of many things – poverty, loss of status, etc.), self-pity, anger, fear, hatred, envy (of those not who did not lose jobs), guilt, fear – did I mention fear?
Ambition is directed at finding another job, probably doing much the same thing with a company much like the last one, so as to escape the pain of all those negative emotions.
The person who is trapped inside the Iron Triangle of False Personality in this type of situation usually won’t be open to considering alternative new courses of action, such as changing careers, returning to school, or traveling around the world. On the other hand, stepping outside the triangle can foster a new sense of introspection and vision, perhaps leading one to a complete change of direction in life – a new direction that is more authentic, and over time one that probably offers a much higher level of reward and security.

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“To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or enhance our ability to think and plan, to pursue training for a different goal, to solve problems and the like, they define the limits of our capacity to use our innate mental abilities, and so determine how we do in life. And to the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do—or even by an optimal degree of anxiety—they propel us to accomplishment. It is in this sense that emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.”
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence
Discipline yourself to resist impulsive emotional reactions
Self mastery often entails controlling your emotional impulses and materialistic desires. The secret to this, to paraphrase the title of the book by Robert Fulghum, is something you learned in kindergarten:
Stop, look, and listen before you react.
Another way of looking at it is to not react, but rather to respond, when things happen. The former tends to be emotional, whereas the latter tends to be a more reasoned and rationale approach.
When dealing with internal conflict, ask yourself, “who’s talking?”
It is often useful to listen to your inner voice and ask the question, “Who’s talking, ego or soul?” The voice of ego is often cynical, suspicious, anxious, and self-centered; the voice of soul is trusting, cheerful, grateful, forgiving, and outer-directed.
Tough love yourself
The one person in your life who most needs tough love is you. Begin by cleaning up your act: Eradicate profanity from your commentaries, eliminate complaining from your conversations, stand up a bit straighter and walk a bit faster, and grab your inner critic by the throat and periodically give it a good shake to let it know who’s boss. Self mastery begins with honestly assessing your own attitudes and their consequences. For example, the perceived powerlessness of learned helplessness almost inevitably leads to victim syndrome (“bad things always happen to me!”), which in turn causes the “victim” to engage in blame game. This attitudinal downward spiral inevitably leads to self disempowerment.
“The biggest addiction in the world today is not to drugs or alcohol. It is to the human ego.
When you are ego driven you take yourself too seriously. There are two types of egocenteredness: self-doubt and self pride. Both are enemies of magnificence. People with selfdoubt are consumed with their own shortcomings and tend to be hard on themselves. People with false pride have a distorted image of their own importance and see themselves as the center of the universe.”
Ken Blanchard and Terry Waghorn: Mission Possible:
“If you can dream it, you can do it,” said Walt Disney. Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, added a critical dimension when he said that what the mind can conceive and believe can be achieved.
A leader must first and foremost believe in himself or herself and in the mission that has been set before the team.

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One of the chief reasons that so many people cheat themselves by settling for anemic goals and dreams is that they simply do not believe that they are capable and deserving of something much greater. This is especially tragic in the case of our young people, some of whom are afflicted with debilitating self image and self esteem problems at a very early age. Strongly encourage your participants who are parents, or who might be otherwise involved with youth programs, to share what they learn about this cornerstone with those young people.
A real world example
In 1974 it appeared that Fred Smith’s dream of building Federal Express was about to crash and burn.
He had exhausted his savings, was deep in debt, in trouble with the bank and on thin ice with his board of directors. Smith’s belief in himself and in his dream was probably the only thing that saved the company during those difficult early days. Smith’s belief also helped to define Fed Ex’s indomitable corporate culture. Art Bass, who served as the company’s president from 1975 to 1980, said: “This company should have died five or six times in its first three or four years, but Fred refused to give up…
With sheer bull and courage he pulled off a miracle” (quoted in Absolutely Positively Overnight by Robert
A. Sigafoos.)
Smith himself had said, “I just knew [the idea] was correct, but there were only a few believers at first.
The overwhelming body of opinion said it wouldn’t work.” Those same words might well have been spoken by Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Herb Kelleher of
Southwest Airlines, Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity, or anyone else whose heart harbors a big dream. Belief is the catalyst that nurtures the transformation of today’s dream into tomorrow’s reality.
All things really are possible for one who really believes (Mark 9:23).
The only real empowerment is self-empowerment
The only genuine empowerment is self empowerment, but you must believe in yourself before you can empower yourself. The most serious barriers to your success and happiness in life are often those which you impose upon yourself in the form of self limiting beliefs and self imposed ceilings on your capabilities. One of the most important steps anyone can take toward self-empowerment is to take seriously the Seven Simple Promises of The Self Empowerment Pledge that was distributed in conjunction with the introductory session.
“I commend to you the simple practice of spending one hour a day every day [on physical, spiritual, and mental exercise]—one hour a day for the rest of your life. There’s no other way that you could spend an hour that would begin to compare with the Daily Private Victory in terms of value and results. It will affect every decision, every relationship. It will greatly improve the quality, the effectiveness of every other hour of the day.”
Stephen Covey: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Build upon the four levels of The Pyramid of Self-Belief
Self belief is developed at four levels. Ask your participants to imagine a pyramid (you might sketch this out on a flipchart), with self-concept at the bottom foundation and self confidence at the top, with each level described as follows:
Level One, Self-Concept: An underlying awareness, either implicit or explicit, of your role as a human being in this universe. What do you see when you look around you: A world of scarcity and

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Page 23 of 176 risk, or a world of abundance and opportunity? Evidence for both views abounds in the world, though we tend to see what we look for. What is your concept of a higher power, and of your relationship to that higher power? Someone who believes in a God of judgmental wrath will lead a very different life than the person who believes in a God of love and mercy. Questions like these cannot be answered in an absolute sense, but rather depend largely on what you choose to see as you look around you and within you. Your self-concept will have a profound influence on your personality, and upon the results you get in life.
Level Two, Self-Image: What do you see when you look in the mirror? You will never exceed your self-image. If your self-image is that of being a victim, no matter what happens, you will always be a victim. One of the main reasons that a majority of people who “win” big in the lottery end up bankrupt in less than two years is that they still see a victim when they look in the mirror, and end up blowing all their money to establish consistency between that inner self image and the outer reality. On the other hand, if you see yourself as a winner, no matter what happens you will always find a way to prevail. The self-perceived winner who loses everything will eventually find a way to get it all back. Cultivate a positive self-image. If you look into the mirror of your heart and see a victim or a loser, that’s what you will always be. It takes an act of will, and sometimes even an act of tough love with yourself, to look in the mirror and see the winner that’s really there, but you must see it before you can achieve it.
Level Three, Self-Esteem: Do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? Do you believe that you are capable of achieving your dreams and goals, and that you deserve to enjoy the fruits of your success? Do you believe that you are worthy of the affection and respect of other people? Low self-esteem if often an insidious excuse for cowardice and laziness, and people with low self esteem tend not to get very much done. As such, we all have a sacred obligation to consciously raise our self esteem to a level that supports our authentic dreams and goals. The four essential elements of self esteem are:
Accept yourself as you are, warts and all.
Identify those warts which are not acceptable (e.g. habitual dishonesty) and begin consciously working toward eliminate them.
Avoid the negative and seek out the positive (people, places, media).
Accept complete and total responsibility for your circumstances and outcomes, and refrain from blaming other people for your problems.
Level Four: Self-Confidence: This simply means that you feel like you have what it takes in terms of skills and resources to meet the challenges of your life and to effectively pursue your dreams and goals.
Using the Pyramid for personal growth
Quite often, the best place to start on enhancing self belief is at the top of the pyramid with self confidence. For example, somebody experiencing money troubles is likely to have poor self esteem, a self image of being a victim, and a self concept of a world full of scarcity.
Self-Confidence: Begin at the top by turning off the television, getting a good book on personal finance (and reading it!), refraining from shopping therapy (!!!), then spending more time working on money management, investing, or possibly even starting a business or getting a second job to

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Page 24 of 176 increase earning. As the law of cause-and-effect will inevitably take hold (if you spend less and/or earn more, you will have more money in the bank, self confidence grows.
Self-Esteem: By taking control of your money situation, self-esteem begins to rise almost immediately – the instant you open that book on money management and read the first paragraph, you begin replacing victimhood with a sense of control over your future circumstances, and begin to respect yourself for the effort.
Self-Image: As the steps you are taking begin to have an impact on your personal finances, you will stop feeling like a victim and begin to feel more like a winner who can manage his or her own affairs.
Self-Concept: The growing sense of abundance that is created by your financial discipline will open your eyes to all sorts of opportunities to invest and to donate, enhancing your concept of the world, both physically and spiritually.
Self-belief is not arrogance
Self belief does not mean arrogance. Quite to the contrary, more often than not, arrogance is simply a way of covering up an underlying sense of inferiority and insecurity. Even worse, arrogance often underlies hubris – the pride that comes before the fall – because arrogant people are not particularly objective about what’s really going on around them, open to legitimate criticism, or willing to make needed changes in their approach to life and to other people.
“Everybody battles for success; too few people are aware of its profound impact. Success tends to breed arrogance, complacency, and isolation. Success can close a mind faster than prejudice.
Success is fragile, like a butterfly. We usually crush the life out if it in our efforts to possess it.”
Max DePree: Leadership Jazz
Overrule your inner critic
The biggest challenge to building solid self-belief is often overruling the voice of judgment, that nasty negative little inner critic that most of us carry around in the backs of our heads. Most of us put up with verbal abuse from our inner critic that we would never tolerate from anyone else – not from a boss, a relative – not from anyone. One of the key challenges of building solid self-belief is to stand up to that inner voice of negativity and pessimism, to confront the falsehoods that it wants you to believe about yourself as a way of trying to keep you firmly ensconced within the boundaries of your comfort zone.
“Remember, the subconscious mind is our servant and will work fervently to do what we program it to do. Faithfully using the power tools of positive self-talk, visualization and affirmations will provide the subconscious mind with verbal and visual instruction on the kind of person you want to become. It will work unceasingly to make it become a reality. That is its nature. Our subconscious mind can be our best friend or worst enemy, depending upon the script we give it. By itself, it is neutral.”
Curt Boudreaux: The ABC’s of Self-Esteem

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Exercise: Have people imagine that they are looking into a funhouse mirror
Have your participants imagine that they are looking into a funhouse mirror, but one that reflects their self image, not their physical body. To what extent are their weaknesses magnified and their strengths diminished in this image? (many people see something that looks like a pear perched on toothpicks, with the pear representing their self-perceived weaknesses and the toothpicks standing for selfperceived strengths). What color are the emotions being reflected? What action do they want to take upon seeing their self image – to laugh, or to scream and run away? What would the image look like if they were able to eliminate all the distortions created by ego, emotion, and ambition?
“Underneath all my work, the core idea I wanted to teach was: Your life is important. Honor it.
Fight for your highest possibilities... My experience is that most people underestimate their power to change and grow... Self-esteem creates a set of implicit expectations about what is possible and appropriate to us. These expectations tend to generate the actions that turn them into realities... To sum up a formal definition: Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness.”
Nathaniel Branden: The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
You must give yourself permission to be the authentic you. Nobody else will. In fact, many people will, with the best of intentions, seek to discourage you out of fear that you might fail (or perhaps embarrass them in some way). Quite often, however, your own permission is all you need to get started, and once you have given yourself permission, nobody else can take it away. Since self truth often means escaping from the confines of your comfort zone, it is helpful to re-spark the spirit of adventure in your life, and to remember that risk and uncertainty is and integral element of every adventure.
Give yourself time and space for reflection
Give yourself the space and time to work on what is important in your life, and to periodically escape the tyranny of the urgent. It is in those quiet spaces that authenticity is forged. It’s easy to run away from your true self, from your own authenticity; it takes courage and discipline to focus on what really matters, to become the person that you are truly meant to be, but it’s worth the effort.
“The courage to risk the disapproval of others, while at the same time going through the doubt of self-examination, is rare. When we begin to examine ourselves, we feel most insecure. It is then that we most look for approval. Finding none, many abandon the quest. This is the time for courage and perseverance.”
Laurence G. Boldt: Zen and the Art of Making A Living

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Authenticity is the first step on a journey that culminates in leadership
It takes discernment and wisdom to distinguish between authentic dreams and delusions of grandeur, but a true leader must be able to make that distinction. Authenticity is the first of The Twelve Core
Action Values for the very good reason that it is the foundation upon which all else is built. As leadership expert Warren Bennis writes in his book On Becoming a Leader, leadership is first a matter of being, then doing. Bennis writes, “No leader sets out to be a leader. People set out to live their lives, expressing themselves fully. When that expression is of value, they become leaders.” The best leaders don’t aspire to leadership for its own sake, but rather because they must lead others in order to achieve some higher end.
“Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.”
James Allen: As a Man Thinketh
Be willing to pay the price
Be willing to pay the price. If your authentic dream is to write a book, you do not have time to be watching television every night; if your authentic dream is to be independently wealthy, you do not have money for binge shopping at Wal-Mart. A part of that price is knowing when to conform. Being true to yourself does not necessarily mean always doing your own thing. In fact, abiding by common social expectations with regard to dress, language, behavior and other characteristics often gives you more freedom to be creative in the areas that really matter.
“When we are sick, we must more than ever before be ourselves and find our ‘way.’ We must realize that we are in charge of how we will view the world. We do not have to pretend to be what we are not.”
Paul Pearsall: Making Miracles
Understand the paradox of authenticity and act the part you want to play
This is the paradox of authenticity: In order to be truly authentic means to grow as a human being.
This means that there will be times you will be uncomfortable, feel out of your element, and possibly even feel like a fake (as anyone who has ever tried to act confident while giving their first public speech can attest). In other words, in order to be authentic, you must occasionally spend time doing an apprenticeship on the stage of in-authenticity. As they say in AA, though, you have to fake it until you make it.
Real world example
Mohammed Ali told the world that he was “the greatest” long before he earned the title. In fact, he started saying it even before he believed it to be true. Of course! Who was the first person he had to convince? Right! Himself. He convinced himself by acting the part. That being accomplished, the rest is history. That’s a secret that you must learn if you are to achieve your full potential as a leader and as a human being. Practice. Rehearse. Fake it till you make it. You must learn to play the part before it will be granted to you.

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Take-home exercise: Write an “I AM” declaration and combine it with the “AS IF” Principle
Give your participants this assignment: Think about who and what you want to be, then write out one or more affirmations in first person and present tense. For example:
I am a caring and compassionate parent.
I am successfully managing my finances and am on the path to being financially independent within ten years.
I am a happy and confident person who effectively manages my emotions.
Repeat these affirmations to yourself often – in your thoughts, in your journal, and even out loud in front of the bathroom mirror. Then, several times each day, ask yourself what you would be doing or saying in a given situation if that affirmation were already true. Your inner voice of intuition will most often tell you the right answer. Then, simply do what that intuitive voice tells you to do, and you will gradually act your way towards success. In this regard, Direction Deflection Questions such as the following can be a powerful tool:
Close by having people think about, or better yet write about in their journal, the fears that stand in the way of acting as if these statements were actually true.
“You may be whatever you resolve to be.”
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson

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Character is destiny; decide upon your ideal character, and then set about creating it; cultivating character is a process subject to backsliding without constant vigilance. Integrity is a matter of character, but also of competence. It is through integrity that one earns the trust and the respect of others, and this is both as a result of the kind of person they are (character) as well as the things they do and how they do those things (competence).
Integrity can require hard work and tough choices, as emphasized by Dr. M. Scott Peck in his book The
Different Drum: “Integrity is never painless. It requires that we let matters rub up against each other, that we fully experience the tension of conflicting needs, demands, and interests, that we even be emotionally torn apart by them…It does not seek to avoid conflict, but to reconcile it.”
“Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action.”
Helen Gahagan Douglas
Ice Breaker Exercise
Have your participants listen as you read to them the resume of this individual:
This man built his company from being a small corporation to number five on the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest corporation.
His company was consistently included in the Fortune magazine roster of America’s most admired corporations, and was ranked as America’s most innovative company by other CEOs.
He was one of 50 people profiles in the book Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best
Business Leaders, as well as many other books and articles on leadership excellence.
His name is on his hometown YMCA, a major business professorial chair, as well as his own family charitable foundation.
This man was inducted into the Business Hall of Fame in his home state.
This individual is on a first name basis with several US presidents, as well as many other important and powerful people in government and business.
This man may be the only corporate CEO ever to have had a toy action figure made in his image.
Ask people to guess who you are talking about. The answer is: Ken Lay, former CEO of the nowbankrupt Enron corporation. Point out that Lay, and many others like him, did a great job on eight or nine of the Core Action Values, but their failure to live with integrity brought everything else to naught.
Without integrity, even winning ends up losing.
The first cornerstone of integrity is honesty—being honest with yourself, and then with others. In this respect, integrity ties back to Core Action Value #1, Authenticity, since self-awareness is an essential ingredient of self-honesty. If you look into any situation in which a politician, a business person, or

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Be honest and tell the truth
Honesty with others begins with honesty with self. When people deceive themselves it can lead to serious, even devastating, consequences. Self-deception by both Hitler and Stalin led to gross errors and ghastly casualties on both sides of the eastern front during World War II. American auto executives during the 1970s chose the path of self-deception when the Japanese automobile industry began importing higher quality, lower cost cars. This seriously damaged the domestic auto industry and cost thousands of jobs.
When you gain something by telling a lie, you lose something far more important. When you lose something as a result of telling the truth, you gain something far more valuable.
“Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so there is no longer a split in the soul… For the person of integrity, life may not be easy but it is simple: Figure out what is right and do it. All other considerations come in second.”
Harold Kushner: Living a Life That Matters
Do not tolerate even small evils
The leader must be uncompromising when it comes to illegal or unethical behavior. One wink, one look the other way, and that seed can grow in directions entirely unanticipated and unintended, but without exception those directions will be undesirable. The world’s greatest evils all had their seed in a small evil being ignored by those who could have done something to stop it. The allies’ appeasement of Hitler when he was weak and could have been stopped culminated in the horrors of the second World War and the Holocaust. It is important that you be compassionate toward weakness, but absolutely intolerant of wrong-doing. Looking the other way at unethical or abusive behavior can be the first step down a steep and slippery slope.
“Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience, and it doesn’t preclude the necessity to train and develop people so that their competency can rise to the level of that trust.”
Stephen Covey: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Avoid people of questionable character, and seek out people of positive character
Research has shown that most people have much less inner strength and willpower than they give themselves credit for. Given this, you will be far more successful in life if you simply stay away from negative influences (including people, places, and media) rather than try to resist being influenced by them. One of the most important choices you will ever make is the people and the groups with which you associate. What sociologists call a reference group, the people or organizations you identify with can have a profound impact on your values, attitudes, and actions—often much more of an influence than we care to admit. Remember: the best way to withstand temptation is to stay away from it altogether.

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Just as important as avoiding people of poor character is actively seeking out and associating with people you admire. Because they are typically busy, these people will not usually seek you out! You will generally be surprised, however, at how willing people are to share their ideas with you, and to help you achieve your goals and become the person you really want to be.
Always do the right thing
“To see what is right and not to do it is cowardice,” wrote Confucius in The Analects. This can be expensive in the short run, but usually (almost always!) pays off in the long run. A great example is the case of Johnson & Johnson with the Tylenol poisoning crisis of 1982. The company responded by completely withdrawing Tylenol from the market, and running a massive public relations campaign telling people not to use the product. In the short run, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars. In the long run, however, the goodwill created by that action paid off in both increased market share and ability to recruit and retain outstanding people. Ultimately, doing the right thing was not an expense, it was a highly profitable investment (we will see more about this case in the next cornerstone).
Admit your mistakes, then make good on them
When Intel introduced the new Pentium processor, several users pointed out a small and rarely occurring flaw. At first, the company discounted the problem. Never did Intel’s management make a bigger mistake! A torrent of user distress and negative publicity quickly ensued. At length, the company fixed the problem and replaced the flawed processors, at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars.
In the end, the company not only made good the mistake, but turned it to their advantage; their demonstrated willingness to stand behind the product gave powerful impetus to their new “Intel Inside” campaign to establish what had been a generic part as a distinct brand with a differentiated image in the marketplace.
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
Samuel Johnson
Don’t sugarcoat the truth
Imagine that your boss has given you and your team a terribly difficult and dangerous assignment: to slay Smaug, the fire-breathing, man-eating dragon and retrieve stolen treasure from his cave (the assignment Gandalf the wizard gave to Thorin, Bilbo and crew in The Hobbit). As you depart, the boss gives you the following pep talk:
Keep your spirits up, hope for the best, and with a tremendous slice of luck you may come out one day and see… the Lonely Mountain where dear old Smaug lives, though I hope he is not expecting you.
That’s how Gandalf concluded his final instructions to Thorin and company! What a motivator, huh?
But Gandalf was not one to downplay a danger or sugarcoat the truth. Ironically, his dire warnings usually had a contrary effect: by expressing his confidence that people would succeed in meeting the most daunting of challenges, Gandalf bolstered their confidence without inducing potentially fatal cockiness. He created the sort of confident paranoia it takes to tackle a tough challenge with assuredness untainted by complacence.
“Building character strength is like building physical strength. When the test comes, if you don’t have it, no cosmetics can disguise the fact that it just isn’t there. You can’t fake it. It takes

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Stephen R. Covey et. Al: First Things First
Know when to be tactful and compassionate
Being honest does not necessarily mean blurting out whatever happens to be on your mind (“Where did you get that hideous hair-do?”). One useful guidepost, often easier said than done, is to discipline yourself to differentiate between facts and your opinions, and between fundamental principles and mere social customs.
“Freedom of choice is not a formal abstract capacity which one either ‘has’ or ‘has not’; it is, rather, a function of a person’s character structure. Some people have no freedom to choose the good because their character structure has lost the capacity to act in accordance with the good.
Some people have lost the capacity of choosing the evil, precisely because their character structure has lost the craving for evil... The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decisions, the more our heart softens-
-or better perhaps, becomes alive.”
Eric Fromm: The Heart of Man
Know when to disobey and when to tolerate disobedience
Some of America’s most innovative companies have a high tolerance for disobedience. They honor the champions who refuse to stop working on a project that has been disapproved by their superiors; set up a “skunk works” operation to continue working on it; beg, borrow, and barter for the resources they need to see it through; and then either bask in the glory of success if their risk pays off, or beg for forgiveness if it does not.
Fear-driven management violates integrity
Real leaders do not use fear, intimidation, or humiliation as “motivational” techniques to get people to perform in desired ways. This applies in the family every bit as much as in the organization. Managers who resort to fear and intimidation and humiliation to achieve their goals create an environment that invites serious breaches of integrity. People who are afraid of getting in trouble for reporting problems are less likely to do so: people who are afraid of the consequences if they don’t hit performance targets are more likely to cut corners to make it appear that they have done so. This is one of the reasons that total quality management guru W. Edwards Deming made “drive fear out of the workplace” one of his fourteen points for TQM.
One of the reasons that the call to courage shows up so frequently in the leadership literature is that fear can provoke behaviors which violate integrity. A number of years ago I read an interview with the
CEO of a large corporation who said that a part of his job was to prevent complacency by keeping “a vague sense of dread percolating throughout the organization.” In the following years, that company made national headlines for several scandals involving managers ripping off customers and falsifying accounting numbers to meet performance goals. I’m certain that the CEO never told anyone to cheat in order to hit their targets; quite to the contrary, once uncovered, he dealt with the problems firmly and aggressively and established systems to help prevent their recurrence. Yet I’m equally certain that the combination of aggressive performance expectations and the vague sense of dread he instilled could have put otherwise honest people in a position of feeling like they could not succeed except by being dishonest.

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Integrity requires courage. The so-called leader who seeks to “motivate” employees by intimidating and humiliating them is a thief who first robs people of their dignity, and eventually of their integrity.
“If you pay attention to the way you feel after you put someone down, you’ll notice that you feel worse than before the put-down. Your heart, the compassionate part of you, knows that it’s impossible to feel better at the expense of someone else. Luckily, the opposite is true—when your goal is to build people up, to make them feel better, to share in their joy, you too reap the rewards of their positive feelings.”
Richard Carlson: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff
As we have pointed out, trust is not a value, but rather something you earn by being a person of integrity. In particular this means being reliable. People will trust you to the extent that you do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, and at the quality level they deserve to expect. For the CVC-T, this is an excellent time to remind people to once again pull out The Self
Empowerment Pledge, because repeating The Seven Simple Promises on a daily basis will do a great deal to help you be more reliable.
“It is a greater compliment to be trusted than to be loved.”
George MacDonald
Do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it
“Under promise and over deliver” is often held out as a formula for excellent customer service, and it is a good one. One of the best ways to become more reliable is to make fewer promises, but to complete the ones you have made on or ahead of schedule. Note in this regard the strong interaction between
Core Action Value #9, Focus, and this one. In their book The Corporate Mystic, executive consultants
Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman take a hard line on this, and it is worth quoting from their book at some length:
“Nothing deflates commitment faster than broken agreements. One broken promise can erode trust in a moment, and can take years to straighten out. If you really want to complicate your life quickly, don’t keep your agreements. At the bottom of most corporate disasters is a small pile of broken agreements. Sometimes just one…Deadlines are a kind of agreement that is worth paying careful attention to. Deadlines are crucial to corporate life. The mystic solution to deadlines is: Never make a deadline you don’t intend to keep. People get sloppy when deadlines are extended or swept under the rug. Don’t let people in your organization waste a second trying to figure out if a deadline is real or not. If you don’t mean it, don’t do it. The rules are simple:
Don’t make agreements you don’t want to make. Keep all the agreements you make. Tell the rock-bottom truth if you find you are not going to keep an agreement. Cop to it immediately if you fail to keep an agreement.”
Develop strength before being tested; tough love yourself by eliminating bad habits
Your integrity will be tested, that is only a matter of time and you will need to be strong in order to meet that test. Since you know the test is inevitable, the time to begin preparing is immediately. You are

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Keep your promises
Learn how to say no more often so that you can finish on time with the things you’re already said yes to; saying “I’ll think about it” when someone asks you to do something is a way of buying time so that you can decide if you really have the time to keep the commitment. Do the things that you need to get done before you do the things that you want to get done. If you start to get behind, be quick to ask for help.
When you miss a deadline or break a commitment, apologize and over-compensate by giving much more than you had originally promised.
Live up to your commitments
It’s easy to live up to your commitments when times are easy. Integrity demands that you also live up to them when times are tough. After seven people were poisoned by cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago in
1982 James Burke, then head of Johnson & Johnson, immediately had Tylenol pulled from shelves across the country and initiated a publicity campaign telling people not to use the product. For the company, it was financially expensive, emotionally exhausting, and in retrospect probably a lot more than was absolutely necessary. But the J&J Credo expressed a commitment to patient safety above all else, and that was a commitment Burke was bound to honor regardless of the cost. In the short run the company took a hit to the bottom line. Over time, however, this demonstration of integrity during crisis was invaluable in cementing both customer and employee loyalty; honor and trust cannot be purchased, only earned.
Be consistent
Being consistent does not mean doing things the same all the time. Quite to the contrary, one of the joys of both life and business is being able to pleasantly surprise, and even astonish people by doing different things. Consistency does mean being predictable for things that matter. People tend not to trust someone whose behavior they cannot predict. The manager who acts like a raging tyrant one day and a long lost buddy the nest day quickly loses the trust and respect of those for whom he is responsible.
“A special word must be said on tolerance as a value. If we are to be serious about values, we must be equally serious about tolerance, and adamant about the limits to which one can impose one’s own values on others.”
John W. Gardener: On Leadership
Hold others accountable for fulfilling their promises and commitments
An important element of reliability is holding others accountable for meeting their promises and their deadlines. A tough love approach to deadline reliability both helps the people you are holding accountable to raise their sense of self efficacy and self-esteem, and to the extent that you are relying on them to meet your own deadlines, helps you be more reliable.
“I’m no longer much drawn to singular paths to wisdom. Instead, I’ve begun to embrace those people and approaches that emphasize a comprehensive, balanced, and integrated path to a complete life – practices that address the body, mind, and heart as well as the spirit. Much as I see the value of nurturing a full range of human potentials, I’ve grown more distrustful of any approach that emphasizes one set of capacities to the exclusion of others.”
Tony Schwartz: What Really Matters

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Scratch beneath the surface of any violation of integrity, and you are likely to see a combination of arrogance and hubris. Beyond that, the root of the word integrity is “integer,” which implies a united and undivided whole. In other words, we are all children of the same God and integrity requires that we not look down our nose at others because they are somehow different.
Look past uniforms and business cards
As we’ve seen, there is a tendency (which is particularly pronounced in hospitals) to judge people on the basis of where they fall on the status totem pole. In a hospital, for example, everyone knows who goes at the top of the totem pole (CEO, neurosurgeon) and who goes at the bottom (housekeeper, food service worker). One thing we can all do is be more aware of our tendency to do this, and try hard to look past what someone does or what they look like, and to see the real human being underneath.
Be open to constructive criticism and welcome the bearers of bad news
Humility can keep you out of a lot of trouble. When you are open to constructive criticism, and when you welcome those who bring you bad news or otherwise tell you things that you really would rather not hear, you can take early action to prevent what could become a damaging situation. In the field of leadership theory, “CEO disease” refers to the fact that the higher one goes in an organization, the less likely they are to be given the absolute and un-doctored truth, but instead to be told what people think they want to hear and to not be told what people will upset them. To the extent CEO’s make decisions on the basis of this flawed picture of the world, they can cause great harm to their organizations and the teams of people who work there.
“Quiet leaders are not inclined to think they are changing the world—this sounds a little too grand. Their aim is simply to do their bit… [They] are realists and don’t inflate the importance of their efforts or their likelihood of success. In fact, this is why they often by time, drill down into problems, and escalate gradually. They are genuinely modest about how much they know and their role in the scheme of things.”
Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.: Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to
Doing the Right Thing
Accept responsibility without self-defeating guilt
In my workshops, I stress the importance of not confusing adjectives and verbs with nouns: to have been part of a failing project (adjective) or to have failed at achieving a goal (verb) does not make you a failure (noun). Inc. magazine has a column in which successful CEOs discuss their biggest mistake.
Some of them are real doozies! Inc. also features a monthly obituary on a failed business. I’m pretty certain that a psychological profile would reveal that CEOs in the former column accepted responsibility without giving up on themselves or their ideas, and without guilt or loss of self-esteem, while those in the latter column succumbed to paralyzing negative emotions. In either situation, the game was won or lost in the head and in the heart of the CEO.
“The mind should be kept humble and free, so that it may remain receptive to good advice.
People soon give up counseling a man who thinks he knows everything better than anyone else.”
Richard Wilhelm and Carey F. Baynes (translators): I Ching

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Keep it simple
As your income and wealth increase, keep your life frugal and simple as you increase your commitment to charity for others. Minimizing your attachment to material things helps you maintain the humility of a person of integrity. On the other hand, obsession with material possessions is a major reason why some people violate the principles of integrity. The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if there were only one prayer, “thank you” would suffice. Keeping your life simple makes it much easier to have an attitude of gratitude.
Appreciate the vast mystery of infinite space and time
Collin Fletcher was the first man to hike solo across the Grand Canyon from end to end, and he wrote a book about it entitled The Man Who Walked Through Time. Probably the most significant thing Fletcher came to understand in the course of his trek was the paradox that before you can appreciate your true significance as a human being, you must first accept your relative insignificance in the scope of time and space. One way of maintaining your humility is to be in constant awe of the mysteries of life, and of the natural world around you.
Listen to the wisdom of Confucius
Confucius had the following to say on the difference between the superior man and the small man (were he writing today, he would no doubt say “man or woman”):
The superior man is easy to serve but difficult to please. The small man is difficult to serve but easy to please.
The superior man can see a question from all sides. The small man can see it only from his biased perspective.
The superior man works to develop the superior aspects of his character. The small man allows the inferior aspects of his character to flourish.
The superior man calls attention to the good points in others. The small man calls attention to their defects.
The superior man can influence those who are above him. The small man can influence only those below him.
The demands that the superior man makes are on himself. The demands of the small man are placed upon others.

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The superior man is slow in word but prompt in deed. The small man is quick to make promises but slow to keep them.
The superior man is diligent in ascertaining what is right. The small man is diligent in ascertaining what will pay.
The superior man is calm and at ease. The small man is fretful and ill at ease.
When things go wrong, the superior man seeks blame in himself. The small man seeks blame in others.
The small man thinks he is a superior man. The superior man knows he is a small man.
In the presence of a superior man, think all the time how you might equal him. In the presence of a small man, evaluate your own character to be sure you are not like him.
The superior man has the quality of wind. The small man has the quality of grass. And when the wind blows, the grass cannot help but to bend.
When you see a worthy person, strive to emulate him. When you see an unworthy person, then examine your inner self.
Effective management of resources is not simply a matter of productivity, it is also a matter of integrity.
Any resources that are wasted today will somehow diminish the potential for abundance tomorrow.
Stewardship takes place at multiple levels which are outlined below.
Personal stewardship
It is a matter of integrity to take care of your health so that you do not become a burden upon your family and society. A great many diseases, and a great deal of healthcare expense, are caused by selfinflicted illnesses. A failure to exercise, poor nutrition, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors all reflect a lack of personal stewardship. Likewise, subsidizing Wal-Mart and Target instead of saving and investing for your retirement increases the risk that you will become a financial burden upon family and/or society, and thus frugality and personal productivity become matters of integrity.
When you effectively manage your time and your money, you can avoid two of the most serious causes of integrity failure: procrastination and overwhelming debt. It is when we put off doing that which we should be doing, or when we get in over our heads financially, that we are most likely to cut corners, break promises, miss deadlines, or otherwise violate our own integrity. In this regard, it may be necessary and appropriate to seek out the help of a financial counselor, an expert in organization and time management or otherwise request the assistance you need to keep your affairs in order.
Know when to say no to opportunity
In the world of business, there are times when authenticity and integrity close the door on otherwise attractive opportunities. In The Spirit to Serve (written with Kathi Ann Brown), J. Willard Marriott Jr. describes how many other hotel companies got into the lucrative business of legalized gambling.
Marriott International, he said, was “virtually assured of success if we opted to build casino hotels,” but elected not to get into that business. Why not? One of the main reasons was that gambling, and the

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“I am mystified by the fact that the business world is apparently proud to be seen as hard and uncaring and detached from human values. Why is altruism in business seen as alien to the point where anyone claiming to be motivated by it is considered suspect? I personally don’t know how the hell anybody can survive running a successful business in the nineties without caring. I don’t know how they keep their role in the community. I don’t know how they keep their soul intact.”
Anita Roddick: Body and Soul
Don’t pay the wrong price
I’ve spoken with and read about many entrepreneurs who say that starting a company is a 24/7/365 proposition: you’re on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Of course, there are many large corporations with the same ethic; one person I spoke with said of his company,
“the attitude around here is that if you weren’t at work on Sunday, don’t bother showing up on
Monday.” The real losers in this picture are often the children. I read about one CEO who, to make the point that he was setting a good example of “family first” values for his company, bragged that he made it a priority to try and be home in time to read his young children a story before they went to bed.
Unfortunately, he’s not the only one who considers such a minimal commitment to be exemplary parenting. Many of us have a huge credibility gap when it comes to comparing what we say our priorities are and how our calendars say we actually spend our time. Success has its price, but we all need to make sure we’re not paying the wrong price, because if we do, we will someday wake up to find that we have purchased a shallow success.
Organizational stewardship
Especially in healthcare, where the rising costs of healthcare services can put medical care out of the reach of a growing number of people, it is a matter of integrity to make the best use of our organizations’ resources in order to keep costs down, and optimize resources available for caring for as many people as possible. Organizational stewardship also means creating a corporate climate and culture that foster integrity.
“Be practical as well as generous in your ideals; keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground. Courage, hard work, self-mastery and intelligent effort are all essential to a successful life. Character in the long run is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and nations alike. There are many times when the best thing for you to do is walk away from a sale.
Don’t accept business unless you can handle it properly. Don’t sell your services if you are not
100% sure that you can satisfy your customers’ needs. Never perform a service when you feel that the clients won’t receive sufficient value for their money. Lastly, never give away business just to get your foot in the door: the long-term costs may lead you to resent the client later.”
Frank K. Sonnenberg, Managing with a Conscience
Consciously structure your environment
In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell reviews the evidence and concludes that character, and the associated tendency to act with integrity, is a lot more dependent upon environment that we would like to believe. “The reason that most of us seem to have a

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Good people are more likely to do bad things when placed in a negative, stressful, or frightening environment.
The leadership implications are significant. Such seemingly unrelated environmental factors as graffiti in bathrooms, subtle sexual harassment in the lunchroom, or managerial arrogance can influence performance, and integrity, in unforeseen ways. When problems crop up, we may only see the most recent or obvious causal factors, but as Gladwell demonstrates, they may only represent “the tipping point” in which an accumulation of factors seemingly insignificant by themselves cause major changes, for better or worse. It is the leader’s obligation to consciously structure an environment which assures that they are for better.
“Society, to merit the name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of one’s own reality and on one’s ability to give himself to society – or refuse that gift.”
Thomas Merton: Thoughts in Solitude
Environmental stewardship
It’s been said that we do not own the world, but we are only borrowing it from our grandchildren. In this regard, it is well to apply the best known line of the Hippocratic Oath to the world in general: before all else, do no harm.
Take good care of the future
In The New Pioneers, Thomas Petzinger, Jr. tells the story of Ray Anderson, founder of Interface
Incorporated, a company that pioneered carpet tiles. In 1994, Anderson read Paul Hawken’s book The
Ecology of Commerce, and was stopped dead in his tracks by Hawken’s phrase, “the death of birth,” in reference to the man-made extinction of 27,000 species each year. Anderson, says Petzinger, “could see his own face on every page, the creator and builder of a company that sucked oil from the ground and spewed toxins into the air and water… Overnight, he became a man on a mission, vowing to settle for nothing less than the eventual conversion of his company into a 100 percent ‘sustainable’ enterprise … that not only turned raw materials into products but products back into raw materials. Nothing would escape – no toxic waste, no waste of any kind.”
The effort has been a win for everyone. Of course, the earth wins by not being ravaged and polluted.
Customers win because the company, in order to retain ownership of the carpet tiles, has developed an
“evergreen lease” program that provides ongoing upkeep rather than periodic wholesale replacement.
Employees win because they are being involved in a higher order cause that for many is a real source of pride and inspiration. And shareholders win, because the company is saving tens of millions of dollars by eliminating waste.
Integrity means honesty and reliability. But it also means wholeness and soundness. Real integrity is more than just a standard of personal behavior. It also requires a broader concern for our earth, and for the generations that will inhabit it in the future.
Integrity and leadership
Integrity is essential to effective leadership in the family as well as in the organization. In The New Art
of the Leader, retired Air Force General William Cohen lists integrity as the first of his eight universal

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“We judge ourselves mostly by our intentions, but others judge us mostly by our actions.”
Eric Harvey and Alexander D. Lucia: Walk the Talk
Take-Home Exercise
Encourage people in the month to come, and in the privacy of their own personal journals, to candidly and honestly write about the ways in which they might not be completely honest with themselves. This would include rationalizing away inappropriate behavior; being in denial when it comes to character flaws, self-limiting beliefs, self-sabotaging attitudes and behaviors; or running away from problems.
Emphasize that the assignment is not to fix all of these things, but simply to own up to them, to be honest with themselves.
“Defining your moral standards serves as an ethical compass that prevents you from straying off course when the winds of temptation begin howling around your ship of life. Millions of people continually crash on the rocks of bad consequences, often suffering irreparable damage, because they allowed themselves to get caught in rough waters without first making certain that they had their ethical compasses abroad. It’s imperative to understand that for any strategy or plan of action to be sound, it must begin with a solid moral foundation. Without such a foundation, anything a person tries to build is destined to crumble.”
Robert J. Ringer: Million Dollar Habits

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Awareness is essential to both professional and business success. Your level of awareness will determine the extent to which you appreciate the beauty of the world around you, perceive the opportunities for service and achievement that are always open to someone who is paying attention, and the quality of your inner actions and relationships with other people both at work and at home. In the healthcare environment, awareness profoundly influences both the quality and accuracy of diagnosis and treatment, as well as the patient’s perception of the quality of that treatment.
“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts, which he habitually fails to use.”
William James
Ice Breaker Exercise: Just sitting
Ask everyone to turn off their cell phones, beepers, etc. because you are going to give them a special gift: five minutes of uninterrupted silence. Close the curtains, turn out the lights, and tell everyone to shut their eyes, fold their hands in front of them, and sit peacefully and quietly for five minutes. Tell them not to think about anything, to not to worry about anything, and as thoughts come into their heads to just peacefully acknowledge them and then let them go.
At the end of five minutes, ask how many people had an “out-of-body experience,” by which you mean that their thoughts and/or emotions left the room – visiting some regret or memory of the past, some dream, worry, or anxiety about the future, or some as yet unfinished activity in another location. Point out that essence of awareness is to be present where you are, mentally and emotionally as well as physically.
“The first step to dealing with feelings is to recognize each feeling as it arises. The agent that does this is mindfulness. In the case of fear, for example, you bring out your mindfulness, look at your fear, and recognize it as fear. You know that fear springs from yourself and that mindfulness also springs from yourself. They are both in you, not fighting, but one taking care of the other.”
Thich Nhat Hanh: Peace is Every Step
At its most fundamental level, mindfulness simply means paying attention, and it has both an inner and an outer dimension. Inwardly, it means being acutely aware if your thoughts, attitudes, and emotions, and not allowing ego, inappropriate emotional reactions, or inauthentic and self-centered ambitions to distort your perception of reality. Outwardly, it means appreciating the beauty of the world around you, and looking past superficialities to really understand what is going on in the events and with the people in your lives.

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Mindfulness is the key to patient satisfaction and perceived quality of care
This is a key point for anybody involved in healthcare: for the most part, our patients are incapable of evaluating the technical quality of the care we give them. Their perception of whether or not they are being given quality care will be substantially determined by the extent to which we pay attention to them.
How well you pay attention will determine how successful you are in any career. The doctor or nurse who really pays attention to a patient will pick up little things, make a more discerning diagnosis, and provide more appropriate treatment than the one who simply goes through the motions. The salesperson who pays attention to the subtle clues being given by the customer rather than simply charging ahead, intent on making the sale, will sell more. Everyone wants quality – quality products, quality services, quality jobs, quality lives – but almost no one appreciates that the first step to real quality is simply being awake and paying attention.
“The most important practical lessons that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe – how to observe.”
Florence Nightingale: Notes on Nursing
Lack of mindfulness is the cause of virtually all stress and emotional anguish
When you think about the things that cause you emotional pain, you will realize that for the most part they result from having little out-of-body experiences. For the most part, when you’re feeling emotional pain your consciousness is in a different time zone and/or a different state than that currently being operated by your body.
Attention –
May I have your attention please?
A gift so thoughtlessly requested,
So carelessly given,
So rarely appreciated.
- McZen
When you are feeling anger, guilt, or regret, none of those things are actually of the present. Instead, you are emotionally reacting to something that has happened in the past. Likewise, the experience of anxiety, worry, doubt, and fear is almost never the result of something that is here and now, but rather the anticipation of something that might happen at some point in the future. Mindfulness – keeping your conscious mind in the here and now presence of your body – can help you achieve emotional equanimity and spiritual peace. When Buddhists refer to the miracle of mindfulness, or Christians talk about the peace of God that passes all understanding, they are in large part referring to the state of gratitude and grace that comes from living in the present.
“Fear is worrying about all the different tomorrows. Fear is worrying about the bad days that may or may not come, and even worrying about the good ones because you know that they can’t last. You can dream of the future, plan for it—those are good things to do—but you can’t control all the tomorrows…to be afraid is to live among all the frightening tomorrows as if they were certain to happen. To be courageous is to close off all those tomorrows and devote your attention and energy to the one today that is the only thing you ever experience with certainty.”
Joe Tye: Never Fear, Never Quit

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Learn from the past, plan for the future, but live in the present
Ironically, the more you practice the present living discipline of mindfulness, the more clearly and objectively you will be able to understand the lessons of past experiences, and the more courageously you will be able to plan for the future. Let’s look at these three dimensions of time, and how enhanced mindfulness can enhance your experience of each:
Learn from the past: Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. We get a chuckle when we hear such things, but it points out a serious problem. Anxiety and worry can interfere with learning.
When you are mindful, learning is enhanced in several ways – by reducing the emotional barriers that can cause you misperceive the nature of what is going on, by intensifying attention so as to more clearly imprint the memory for future reference, and by associating positive rather than negative emotional connotations to the experience, making it more likely that you will revisit it for the learning elements that it contains.
Plan for the future: Your attention in the present lays the foundation for your vision of the future.
Live in the present: Past and future are the bookends – it’s in the present that the real story is written.
Paying attention is the secret of success in many fields
Your attention is your most precious mental resource, which is why people say “pay” when they are asking you to give it, that precious and irreplaceable resource of your attention, to them. Your ability to pay attention substantially determines your success in many areas of your life, including:
Career Success: It is a paradox that most of us begin our careers right out of school at an age much too young to have a real sense of what our purpose and mission are, to know what work we really enjoy and brings us into a state of flow, and to have a real appreciation for our strengths and weaknesses. It is only by paying attention over time that our awareness of these things grows, allowing us—if we are paying attention—to move toward the work that is truly fulfilling.
Business Success: Several years ago, the official Microsoft position on the internet was that it was only peripheral to their business. Fortunately for the company, Bill Gates and his colleagues were paying attention. One day they realized that the internet would soon be central to their business – in fact, that it would drive a stake into the heart of their core business if they weren’t active participants in it.
Professional Success: The most capable doctors and nurses are those who pay attention to their patients—not just the words they are saying, but everything about them. By truly listening, they get the diagnosis right, and a proper diagnosis is essential for effective treatment. These capable and attentive clinicians also know that the diagnosis is more than just the disease, so they pay attention to the whole patient.
Sales Success: The essence of sales success is to ask the right questions and then to listen intently to the answers. This entails not just listening to the words being spoken, but to the prospect’s body language, facial expressions, environmental context, and a host of other factors. In other words, awareness and paying attention.

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Financial Success: Peter Lynch build Fidelity’s Magellan Fund into the world’s largest mutual fund by paying attention. As he recounts in Beating the Street and his other books, some of his most successful stock selections came simply as a result of paying attention to what people were buying, and then buying stock in the companies that were selling those products.
Personal Success: Almost all emotional pain is caused by a failure to pay attention to present reality; it is caused by anger, regret and guilt from the past, or by worry, anxiety and fear about the future.
When you live in the present and pay attention, you discover a beautiful world that is almost completely above emotional pain — the Peace of God that passes all understanding.
“We can’t become what we are destined to be by remaining who and what we are. This is both the challenge of evolution, and paradox of change. Learning to manage change suggests mastering ourselves in the process. Individually and collectively, perhaps our greater destinies will be shaped by our ability to make healthy, courageous, and wise choices. All work, as it turns out, is personal work. The quality of awareness that we bring to our daily lives is far more important than we ever knew.”
David Miln Smith and Sandra Leicester: Hug the Monster
Be Today, See Tomorrow
The secret to happiness is to keep your attention in the present. The secret to success is to keep your vision in the future. In other words, Be Today, See Tomorrow.
“You must slow down in order to listen and feel. Understanding is impossible without serenity; serenity only exists when time moves slowly. Feeling rushed? Take a deep breath before you continue. In a fierce argument? Prescribe silence so you can both reflect on what you’ve been saying. Worried about the future? Come into the present moment. These are simple – even simplistic – suggestions, but they are the first steps toward becoming aware of ourselves in the rhythmic flow of the present moment. With this awareness, through the conscious focus on the present, we can regain the mastery of the speed and rhythm of our lives.”
Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D.: Timeshifting
Pay attention to your dreams
“Lucid dreaming” is the practice of thinking about your desired dreams as you are falling asleep, actually beginning the dreaming process in an awake state, and then seeing where your dreams take you. You might find that by paying closer attention to your dreams, you have some powerful insights and some great ideas. Don’t lose them. Keep a small pad of paper (or a dictaphone) at your bedside to record these as soon as you wake up. They might seem nonsensical at first, then some days later their meaning will strike you.
“The reorganization of neural networks during REM sleep is perhaps responsible for those occasions when we solve problems in our dreams. Many artists, musicians, and scientists claim to have done some of their most creative thinking during their sleep… The sewing machine, the periodic chart of the chemical elements, and the two characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were all said to have been conceived in dreams.”
James Maas: Power Sleep

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Mindfulness, meditation and breathing
There are many books and courses on meditation, and they offer a wide variety of techniques and philosophies. One thing that virtually all of them acknowledge is the centrality, even the sacredness, of the human breath. Whether you are practicing Zen meditation or centering prayer, visualization or mindful walking, a gentle awareness of every inhalation and exhalation is central to the experience.
While it is physiologically impossible for a human to actually forget to breath, many of us (probably most of us) forget how to breathe. In the hurry and urgency of the workaday world, we fall in to sloppy breathing habits – rapid and shallow. This is, of course, and attenuated version of the breathing pattern associated with the fight or flight reflex. In effect, all day long our bodies are sending us a subtle message that danger is nearby, and we had best prepare to meet it. Is it any wonder that people are so stressed out!
“There are two major ways of practicing mindfulness of breathing. One involves the formal discipline of making a specific time in which you stop all activity, assume a special posture, and dwell for some time in a moment-to-moment awareness of the in-breath and the outbreath...
The second way of practicing using the breath is to be mindful of it from time to time during the day, or even all day long, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Full Catastrophe Living
Mindfulness means being more in the world, not escaping from the world
When they think of meditation and mindfulness, some people visualize bald headed monks in orange robes living in a far off mountain monastery. Actually, however, a true practice of mindfulness can help you be more consciously present in the everyday world around you. This has enormous implications for the quality of patient care.
The following story, told by Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen in his book Timeshifting: Creating More Time to
Enjoy Your Life captures the essence of this problem (you can also refer to my story Take Care of People,
Not Machines in the Real World Stories and Strategies section of the resources):
An eighty-year old woman told me the story of the time when she had trouble lifting her right arm. She couldn’t raise it above her shoulder without enormous pain; she found it difficult to dress or eat.
She went to see an orthopedist whom she had not previously met.
“It’s aging,” he said, barely looking up at her. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I don’t think it’s aging,” she said. “I think it’s something else.”
“I tell you it’s aging. I’ve been a specialist in joint diseases for forty years. I’ve seen plenty of such cases.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Trust me. It’s aging.”
She waved her left arm frantically in front of his face. “See this arm?” she cried. “How come I can lift it? It’s eighty years old, too!”
This doctor, Rechtschaffen says, did not really take the time to be with the patient. “To him, she had no core, no history, no soul.” He was simply treating the symptoms, and not seeing the patient. He

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“If we cherish creative thoughts of courage and calmness, we can enjoy the scenery while sitting on our coffin, riding to the gallows; or we can fill out tents with ‘ringing songs of cheer,’ while starving and freezing to death... Napoleon had everything men usually crave – glory, power, riches – yet he said at Saint Helena, ‘I have never known six happy days in my life’; while Helen
Keller – blind, deaf, dumb – declared: ‘I have found life so beautiful’.”
Dale Carnegie: How To Stop Worrying and Start Living
Manage machines, lead people
Many years ago, I was director of planning for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. One day I drove to the state capitol in Des Moines with the late Dr. Ernie Thielen, an outstanding cardiologist and a wonderful human being. We were going to make a presentation to obtain regulatory approval for a new cardiac catheterization lab. As we were driving, Dr. Thielen said, “I know we need this new machine, but it bothers me to see some of our young doctors relating more to machines than they do to patients.”
Dr. Theilen’s point is as valid for management as it is for medicine. In today’s world we simply cannot manage without our machines. But it bothers me to sit in an airport terminal and see all the executives relating to their laptop computers and cell phones, acting for all the world as if the people around them were animated pieces of furniture.
Real leaders recognize that business is first and foremost about people; it’s not about machines, no matter how sophisticated and helpful they may be. Next time you’re traveling, try keeping the laptop and cell phone in the briefcase and just talk to people. You may find it much more rewarding and enjoyable. One thing is certain: it’s a lot better training for leadership.
“In the having mode of existence what matters is not the various objects of having, but our whole attitude. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves ‘bad,’ they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization.”
Erich Fromm: To Have or To Be
In his book Leadership Is An Art, Max DePree said that the leader’s first duty is to “define reality.” This turns out to be easier said than done since we unavoidably view the world around us through the lens of our own ego, emotions, and ambitions. An important part of awareness is acknowledging the influence of these factors, and then striving to rise above them.
“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
M. Scott Peck: The Road Less Traveled

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See the world as it really is
See the world as it really is—not as it used to be, not as you fear it might become, or not as you wish it were. Recognize that things are never as good, or as bad, as they seem to be. Appreciating this can help you stay off the emotional yo-yo that results from your happiness being determined by your perception of what’s happening in the world around you.
See yourself as others see you — pay attention to the influence of ego
And just how do you do this? Well, a good first step is simply to ask. When Ed Koch was mayor of New
York City, he would walk up to people on the streets and ask, “How am I doing?” Then he would listen carefully to what they had to say. When you develop a reputation for being open to honest and constructive suggestions, you will find people increasingly willing to be open and honest with you.
Something else to remember is that there is a natural human tendency to apply a double standard in which we judge ourselves on the basis of what we intend to do, while we judge others on the basis of what they actually do.. Those others, of course, are judging themselves based on their intentions while judging us on the basis of our actions.
“The accomplished Zen cook is something of an alchemist. He or she can transform poisons into virtues. The Zen cook doesn’t do this by adding a secret ingredient but by leaving something out. The Zen cook leaves out our attachment to the self. For example, anger is considered a poison when it is self-motivated and self-centered. But take that attachment to the self out of anger, and the same emotion becomes the fierce energy of determination, which is a very positive force. Take the self-centered aspect out of greed, and it becomes the desire to help. Drop the self-orientation from ignorance, and it becomes a state of unknowing that allows new things to arise.”
Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields: Instructions to the Cook
Be aware of your vulnerabilities
In fast-changing times, it is easy to miss the point at which a great strength suddenly becomes a vulnerability, as witnessed by IBM and its mainframe computer dominance, by Xerox and its long-term leases for copiers, or AT&T and its long-distance telephone monopoly. In each case, the company’s source of dominating power became a terrible vulnerability. This often happens to entrepreneurs as their businesses grow: the very characteristics that made them so successful early in their careers cause them to be increasingly ineffective as the business grows beyond a certain point. In such cases, inner awareness can help the entrepreneur know when it is necessary to either change himself or to change his role within the company.
“We seldom change our negative feelings by concentrating on them directly. In fact, when we try to fight them or to deny them to ourselves, we often give such feelings additional power. But there is a way we can ‘bypass’ negative or ‘down’ feelings and get on with creative living. The human mind has a strong attraction to pictures or images. If we can picture clearly in our minds a result we want very much, we have a strong capability to move toward the achievement of at result.”
Thomas Fatjo and Keith Miller: With No Fear of Failure

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Do not underestimate, or overestimate, a problem
Ask any Silicon Valley CEO which competitor he or she fears most, and chances are the answer will not be another technology company. Rather, it will be some kid working late nights in a garage somewhere, developing a concept that established companies have not considered or have dismissed as impossible or unmarketable. From Apple Computer in the 1970’s to Napster in the early days of this century, garage-based start-ups have seemingly come from nowhere to turn whole industries upside down. IBM underestimated both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates until it was too late. Gates and Jobs, on the other hand, did not overestimate Big Blue. They set themselves out to achieve a gargantuan challenge with unflappable confidence – confidence that was based on their superior knowledge of the real magnitude of IBM’s vulnerability.
“The most effective way to ensure the value of the future... is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present...
Eternity is not a given quantity of time: It transcends time. Eternity is the qualitative significance of time.”
Rollo May: Man’s Search for Himself
Be aware of the difference between intuition and gut feel
People often talk about “trusting their gut” and “trusting their intuition” as if these were the same things, but that could not be further from the truth. Gut feel is an inner-directed emotional reaction that says more about you than about the person or even you are reacting to. When you have a gut reaction to someone you’ve just met for the first time, chances are that you’re not even reacting to that person, but rather to somebody that person happens to remind you of.
Intuition, on the other hand, is outer-directed and substantially non-emotional. It often feels like a gut reaction because a long simmering of facts and figures, observations and conversations, questions and answers suddenly erupt forth in an epiphany, and a hah moment of enlightenment.
Genuine objectivity is having the humility to distrust gut reactions, the courage to trust intuition, and the wisdom to know the difference (with apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr).
“Rather than specifying to the universe what the situation means and what is required for it to be fixed, the Buddhist approach is one of openness, and attitude of ‘don’t know.’ ‘Don’t know’ allows for stillness, and stillness for wisdom. From this perspective, hope is not at all a future wish, but a depth of understanding that can transform past and future as well as lead to conscious action that shapes future events.”
Joan Borysenko: Fire in the Soul
Watch for signs of trouble
When we aren’t paying attention, we often miss the little signs that can warn of big trouble down the road: the scowl of a valued assistant when given one too many scut work assignments; the slight dip in sales during a quarter when they had been forecast to increase; the body language of a child upon whom a well-intentioned lecture is having an unintended effect. Awareness of small trouble, and the courage to deal with it immediately, can often stave off big trouble later.
“Shall I tell you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to know that you know it and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it. That is knowledge.”
Confucius

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Avoid making decisions or judgments based on labels, stereotypes, and first impressions
Despite all kinds of biblical admonitions against it, we humans are a judging race, and are quick to judge other people in the basis of superficial labels, stereotypes, and first impressions. Not only is this unfair to the person you’ve just met, it can often lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. If you’re first impression of somebody is that they are untrustworthy, and you react in a way that conveys this, you’re likely to end up with a relationship in which neither of you can trust the other. One way of dealing with this is to use descriptions instead of labels. So, for example, instead of saying that somebody is lazy (a label) you might say that they have a hard time meeting deadlines (description). Notice that in many cases a label implies an irremediable character flaw, whereas a description is more suggestive of a problem amenable to correction.
“These are days in which paradox rules. That means that the development of intuition is important simply because there are so many things in today’s world that cannot be figured out on a rational basis. It may be difficult for the busy executive to find time for solitude and tuning in to his his/her inner knowing, and that is to be expected. But as with anything else of importance, you must make time for it.”
Ken Blanchard and Terry Waghorn: Mission Possible: Becoming a
World-Class Organization While There’s Still Time
Look below the surface
One technique developed in Japanese quality management was called the five why’s. This approach discourages superficial answers to complex questions. When you ask why something is the way it is, you’ll often get a superficial answer. If you stop there, it can lead to serious problems. For example, back in the 1970’s the following exchange took place in Detroit:
Question: Why are Japanese carmakers taking market share?
Response: Because they have government and cheap labor.
For quite a few years, the major automakers shot themselves in the foot by stopping at this level of questioning. Eventually, however, they got around to asking the next why:
Question: Why are so many people buying these cars (and putting their lives and the lives of their family members in a car built by cheap labor)?
Response: Because not only are they cheaper, they are safer and more luxurious than comparable American cars.
It was this burrowing down process that finally forced Detroit to face up to, and take ownership for its own problems with cost and quality.
“Never take anything for granted. Most of the world operates in a very limited way. Sometimes you must think creatively for others in order to overcome obstacles you face together.”
Robert J. Petro: The Book of Secrets
Empathy is the ability to identify with or vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another person—to put yourself in their shoes. Empathy differs from sympathy in that it is understanding, without necessarily feeling sorry for the other person.

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“It is easy to be mindless in America, because dreaming of and living for a better tomorrow is the
American way. America has always been the place where people come to chase their dreams.
The problem is... we plan for or worry about the future, and before we know it, our live is over and we realize that we were too busy being preoccupied with what had already happened or what we wanted to happen that we forgot to enjoy what was actually happening in each and every moment.”
Barbara DeAngelis: Real Moments
Social radar — the essence of emotional intelligence
Empathy is what Daniel Goleman calls “social radar,” and he says this is one of the most important elements of emotional intelligence. Because this is such an important point, it is useful to quote at some length from Goleman’s book Working With Emotional Intelligence:
Sensing what others feel without they’re saying so captures the essence of empathy. Others rarely tell us in words what they feel; instead they tell us in their tone of voice, facial expression, or other non-verbal ways. The ability to sense these subtle communications builds on more basic competencies, particularly self-awareness and self-control. Without the ability to sense our own feelings—or to keep them from swamping us—we will be hopelessly out of touch with the moods of others. Empathy is our social radar…at the very least, empathy requires being able to read another’s emotions; at a higher level, it entails sensing and responding to a person’s unspoken concerns or feelings. At the highest levels, empathy is understanding the issues or concerns that lie behind another’s feelings.
This subject can lend itself to some interesting group discussions. For example, have several participants repeat the same sentence in a different tone of voice. Then discuss the role of body language, facial expression, tone of voice, environmental context, and other factors in how we interpret what we heard. It will be clear that the words themselves are actually a small part of how we interpret the meaning. The greater our capacity for empathy, the more accurately we will be able to interpret the true meaning of communication.
Learn to really listen
The essential skill for empathy is listening—not just hearing the words, but really listening for the meaning behind the words, and if possible even the background factors that create that meaning. In their book Creativity in Business, Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers state that in many cases “good listening is the basis of creativity.” By really listening, asking questions to clarify meaning, you can show the other person that you understand, you care, and for that moment you have your ego under control and are trying to see the world from their perspective. Listen without needing to respond or try to fix the problem being described. Often, all the other person wants is to be listened to, not to have their problems (or their lives) somehow fixed. When we jump in with an easy solution to a difficult problem, we often convey the message that we really have not been listening.
“When I care for appropriate others, devotion, trust, hope, and courage stand out all the more clearly.”
Milton Mayeroff: On Caring

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Walk in other’s shoes
Eric Harvey is president of The Walk the Talk company, a corporate consulting and training business located in Dallas. He and his colleague Steve Ventura have written a series of books that go right to the heart of this issue. One of them is entitled Walk Awhile in My Shoes. One half of the book is a message from managers to employees. The other half is a message from employees to managers. Each section concludes with an identical request:
Remember that I’m Human. Before you judge me or decide how you’ll deal with me, walk awhile in my shoes. If you do, I think you’ll find with more understanding we can meet in the middle and walk the rest of the way together.
Empathy, sympathy and commiseration
Empathy means being able to see a situation from the perspective of the other person, to understand their feelings. It does not necessarily mean feeling sorry for that person (sympathy), much less agreeing with them that they should be feeling sorry for themselves (commiseration). While there are certainly times when sympathy and commiseration are appropriate (for example, after some sort of personal tragedy), these can often be profoundly counterproductive.
As we have already learned, commiseration can be an insidious way of simply validating and enabling their victimhood, when what they probably most need is a pat on the back, or perhaps a boot to the bottom, and to be steered back to the work they need to do to deal with their problems. Nearly 800 years ago, the Persian poet Rumi gave some good advice for all of us: “Pray for a tough instructor to hear and act and stay within you.”
The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, and by this he meant that to really fulfill your potential as a human being you must take time to reflect upon what you want, where you are going, and who you are becoming.
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own pace like the ticking of a clock during a thunderstorm.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Losing yourself to find yourself
Remember when we talked about the Iron Triangle of False Personality, the three points of which are ego, emotion, and ambition? Giving yourself the time and the space for reflection is essential to breaking out of this trap. That’s what the ancient spiritual paradox of losing yourself to finding yourself is all about: rising above ego and what’s in it for me thinking in order to reach a higher level of being and of concern.
One way of looking at it is that there is a constant clash within each of us between Ego and Soul. Ego strives for recognition where as Soul strives for love; Ego desires things where as Soul desires beauty;
Ego wants to have fun where as Soul wants to make a contribution. Any time you are conflicted about trying to make a decision, listen to the voices inside your head and ask—who’s talking, Ego or Soul? As
Joseph Campbell wrote in his book The Power of Myth: “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of

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“It is my belief that each personality does already have a quiet center within, which is never disturbed, and is unmoved, like the mathematical point in the very center of a wheel or axle which remains stationary. What we need to do is to find this quiet center within us and retreat into it periodically for rest, recuperation, and renewed vigor.”
Maxwell Maltz: Psycho-Cybernetics
The power of silence and solitude
We are all familiar with financial poverty, at least as a concept, and most of us experience time poverty on a daily basis. We are much less aware of the problem of silence poverty. Think about it. When is the last time you were in a place that was completely free of the sights and sounds of human civilization noise machine? No television or radio, no passing trucks or ambulance sirens, no crying children or airplanes overhead?
Winston Churchill once said that any person who wants to change the world must first spend time alone in the desert, and he could well have said the same thing about any person who wants to make a change in themselves. Time spent alone in a quiet place for prayer, meditation, and reflection is profoundly good for your soul.
“Few of us can fully appreciate the terrible conspiracy of noise there is about us, noise that denies us the silence and solitude we need for this cultivation of the inner garden. It would not be hard to believe that the archenemy of God has conspired to surround us at every conceivable point in our lives with the interfering noises of civilization that, when left unmuffled, usually drown out the voice of God. He who walks with God will tell you plainly, God does not ordinarily shout to make Himself heard. As Elijah discovered, God tends to whisper in the garden.”
Gordon MacDonald: Ordering Your Private World
Take time for periodic strategic laziness
Try to imagine using a hammer to push a nail into a board without ever letting the hammer swing back.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, wouldn’t it? That’s a pretty good metaphor for the person who is always pushing, pushing, and never taking time to recoil and rebuild energy. It is often in moments of
“strategic laziness” that we have our greatest ideas, our most profound insights, and where in times of trouble we find the courage to go out and swing the hammer one more time.
“High achievers usually must spend a great deal of time alone... Most really creative pursuits require solitude and silence. It is in such an environment that true genius can flourish.”
John R. Noe: Peak Performance Principles for High Achievers
Letting go
Earlier we commented that it’s better to be a three legged coyote than a four legged fur coat. In other words, there are times when our success, happiness, and equanimity depend upon us leaving some part of us behind, even if the separation is painful. This is often what so called mid-life crisis is all about; it’s been said that the first half of life is spent trying to gather things, while the second half is trying to get rid of them (did you hear about the aborigine who bought a new boomerang? Spend the rest of his life trying to throw away the old one!). Giving yourself time and space for reflection can help you

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“Letting go is a central theme in spiritual practice, as we see the preciousness and brevity of life.
When letting go is called for, if we have not learned to do so, we suffer greatly, and when we get to the end of our life, we may have what is called a crash course. Sooner or later we have to learn to let go and allow the changing mystery of life to move through us without our fearing it, without holding and grasping.
Jack Kornfield: A Path With Heart
The power of prayer
Prayer can be an important form of reflection, especially when it is prayer for guidance rather than a prayer of petition.
“Since most of what we learn and hear urges us to hustle, chase, and cram, it takes courage to stop for leisure – and especially to stop for prayer. But what’s more wasteful – to push hard until we drop, dead tired, or to be quiet and perhaps touch the depth of life?”
Dan Postema: Space for God
Success is not always “more”
Some of history’s most celebrated conquerors ended their lives in failure because they lacked wisdom and self-restraint. Alexander the Great died soon after his men rebelled against his demand that they gain him yet one more conquered enemy; Hannibal took his own life after having seen his army destroyed and his city conquered, the result of having overstayed his welcome in Italy; Julius Caesar was cut down on the Senate steps by his friends, largely the victim of his overweening ambition;
Napoleon died a bitter and lonely man in a barren exile, having fallen from his perch atop Europe after slipping on the banana peel of his insatiable lust for acquisition.
When John L. Lewis was asked what labor wanted, he thundered, “More!” If your definition of success is simply “more” than what you have now, you are setting yourself up for dismal ending with a lot less.
One of the benefits of awareness is that it helps you distinguish between authentic ambition, which is a positive attribute, and self-centered delusions of grandeur, which often come before the fall.
“The process toward success starts when you potentialize, which means opening yourself to the possibility of God placing in your consciousness a dream, or desire, an idea, an awareness, an opportunity, a challenge. Every achiever I have met says, ‘My life turned around when I began to believe in me.’”
Robert H. Schuller.: Power Thoughts
Take-Home Exercise:
Ask people in the month to come to talk half as much as they usually do and to listen and observe twice as much as they usually do, and to monitor the impact of this behavioral change on the acuity of their awareness and perception.
“All contemplative disciplines share love of stillness, silence, and attention. They lead us out of destructive emotions like envy, jealousy, and hatred and into clear thinking and loving kindness. They lead us out of fantasy and into reality, and thus they confer on us wisdom...
Contemplative practices appeal because they offer a practical method for collecting our scattered

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Philip Zaleski and Paul Kaufman: Gifts of the Spirit

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Courage, said Winston Churchill, is the most important of all human virtues because without it, none of the other virtues are possible. Theologian Paul Tillich stated that courage is all of the other virtues, at the point where they are tested. It takes courage to see your life as an adventure, because by definition an adventure entails uncertainty and risk (as well as the likelihood of discomfort!). Courage is essential to living a life that is filled with meaning and achievement. One of the most important services a leader
(whether as a manager or as a parent) can provide is to equip people with the skills and confidence to overcome uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.
“To be courageous... requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all.”
John F. Kennedy: Profiles in Courage
Ice Breaker Exercise: The Lion Roar
As participants to think about the fears standing in the way of achieving their most authentic goals and dreams and from becoming the people they were meant to be. Give them several minutes to think about those fears, and ask them to actually visualize them as an angry, hungry lion that is prowling the turf between where they are now and where they would ideally like to be after fulfillment of their most authentic dreams and goals. Now comes the fun part! First, demonstrate the Lion Roar, then lead the entire group in doing it. As they do it, have them visualize their courage chasing off the lion of fear, leaving a clear path between where they are now and the fulfillment of their dreams. The basic steps are:
Hold your hands up over your head and say, “take a big stretch.”
Flex your arms and make a fist with each hand, thrust out your chest, and say, “take a deep breath.”
Jump up in the air, come down in a crouching position with your arms flexed at your waist, and at the top of your lungs give a Loud Roar.
After you’ve demonstrated, ask people if they couldn’t just feel the courage come up from out of the ground through your feet and into your body. Tell them not to worry if they didn’t, because in a moment they will  . Then have them stand up and do it together. Here’s the best part – if people really internalize this, it can come in handy in many types of situations: getting the attention of rowdy children, teaching patients how to confront their own fears, staying awake in boring meetings, and much more. Once internalized, in fact, the Lion Hunt Dance does not even need to be done physically – you can stoke up your courage and attentiveness just by visualizing yourself doing it!
Dr. M. Scott Peck, author of the book The Road Less Traveled, said that the absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is brain damage! What he meant by that is that humans are hardwired for fear. This is true at multiple levels. At a physical level, we retain vestiges of our caveman heritage, including the fight or flight reflex. At an intellectual level, we know that bad things do indeed happen to

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Page 55 of 176 good people, and possibly could happen to us. At an emotional level, fear almost always underlies other negative emotions (for example, anger usually includes the fear of being hurt; guilt usually includes the fear of being inadequate). And at a spiritual level, humans are the only species that know that life on earth terminates in death, which is certainly a frightening prospect.
“He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure. His every thought is allied with power, and all difficulties are bravely met and wisely overcome... Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force.”
James Allen: As A Man Thinketh
Courage means standing up to fear, not eliminating it
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather summoning up the strength and determination to stand up to your fear and do what you have to do anyway. One other point: we often think of courage in terms of physical prowess, as on the battlefield or playing field. Most of us are more in need of moral courage than physical courage. Our fears are not of physical violence, but rather have to do with such things as relationships, work, finances, and spirituality. Standing up to these doubts and fears is no less courageous in its own way than confronting a physical enemy.
Understand the difference between anxiety and fear
We tend to use the terms anxiety and fear interchangeably, but it is important to understand the difference. Anxiety is a general sense of dread that has no specific object. Fear, on the other hand, has an object – the something that you are afraid of. Here is another way of looking at it: anxiety is chronic, while fear is acute; anxiety is the black cloud, fear is the fierce storm. Here’s the problem: anxiety – that black cloud of dread – is one of the most painful of human emotions, precisely because it has no object, and thus there is little we can do about it. After all, you can’t fight what you can’t see.
Therefore, as Paul Tillich put it, anxiety strives to become fear, because since fear has an object, at least conceptually there is something you can do about it.
The higher your anxiety level, the more likely it is you will look around and find things to be afraid of – even if your fear is irrational. Hence the well known acronym of F…E…A…R… – Fantasized Experience
Appearing Real (it can also represent a Fabulous Excuse for Avoiding Responsibility).
As a way of illustrating this point, ask people to imagine taking a late night walk through a safe suburban neighborhood, and then to imagine taking that same late night walk through an inner city ghetto. In each situation, ask them to consider their likely reaction to hearing heavy footsteps come up from behind. Chances are, they will be more frightened in the second setting, because their anxiety has already put them on high alert. While this might be an appropriate reaction if you are walking through a ghetto, high anxiety in the workplace can cause you to see threats, insults, and enemies where there are in fact none (only fantasized experiences appearing real). Ironically, reacting to these fantasized experiences as though they are real can bring about those things which you fear.
“Historically, bravery is thought of in the physical sense. Today, bravery most often applies to the courage to follow your dreams and convictions. It is tempting to sacrifice aspirations and principles on the altar of expediency. Sticking to your goal and your principles is just as scary as physical dangers.”
Randy Pennington and Marc Bockmon: On My Honor, I Will

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The dangers of anxiety
In his study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon explored the differences between capable and inept military commanders. The primary distinction was this: Competent commanders were able to manage their anxiety; incompetent commanders were driven by their anxiety into either paralysis or panic. When you are full of anxiety, three bad things happen at a cognitive level:
Bad Thing #1: Your memories are distorted; when filled with anxiety, all your past failures loom large in your mind, and seem certain to be repeated, while past successes feel like distant anomalies that were the result of luck that has now deserted you.
Bad Thing #2: Your perception of the current reality is distorted; the high-anxiety person always sees “the enemy” as being bigger and stronger than it really is, and sees his or her own forces as being smaller and weaker than they really are.
Bad Thing #3: When filled with anxiety, you do not perceive the opportunities for audacious action that would not only solve the problem at hand, but bring a stunning turnaround, because you can’t see through the prison bars of dread.
As a result of these cognitive distortions, one of two reactions are likely – paralysis or panic. In the field of military history, the British failure to fortify Singapore in the early days of World War II, even though they should have known that the Japanese would attack down the Bataan peninsula, was an example;
Robert E. Lee’s authorization of Picket’s charge during the battle of Gettysburg was an example of the latter. In the world of business, Detroit’s lethargic reaction to the invasion of low-cost, high-quality
Japanese cars in the seventies was an example of paralysis; ATT’s rushed (and ultimately failed) attempt to enter the personal computer business during the eighties was an example of panic. The tragic irony is that by reacting with paralysis or panic, we often bring about the very situation that we most want to not happen.
Fear can be a prison more confining than any iron bars
There is a great cartoon in which a man is standing in jail clutching the two iron bars in front of him.
The only thing is, there are only two bars—he could gain his freedom by going to the left or the right, but all he can see is the bars in front of him. Fear can be a prison in exactly the same way. For example, somebody who has lost a job might only be able to see the fears – of losing the house, not finding another job, what other people might think. By fixating on the fears, that person might never see the opportunities to go back to school, start a business, travel, or achieve a major change in lifestyle.
In his book Worry: Controlling It and Using It Wisely, Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. wrote that fear is the greatest learning disability of all. People who are afraid of looking stupid refrain from asking good questions; people who are afraid of failing refrain from trying new approaches; people who are afraid of rejection fail to reach out and make connection. They are confined by their fear in a prison of ignorance. The first essential step to escaping the prison of fear is realizing that there are only two bars, and that freedom lies in going around them.
Don’t live in needless fear
“Buckle Up! It makes it harder for the aliens to suck you out of your car!”
Seen on a bumper sticker

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When Randall Patrick McMurphy is committed to a mental institution in Ken Kesey’s masterful novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he quickly grasps a reality that has alluded the mental health professionals who work there: many of the inmates aren’t crazy at all, they’re just afraid, and they have given up their freedom in exchange for the illusion that the things they fear can be kept outside the cage door. But as Chief Bromden proves by his escape, you can only gain freedom by facing your fears bravely, and that once you do, you will realize how little you truly did have to fear.
Needless fear is the hidden crippler of our time. Its paralyzing effects prevent people from pursuing their dreams and goals, and as a result it is responsible for massive and unnecessary poverty – of body and soul. Faith is the antidote to needless fear. Having faith that the dragons of your imagination will be slain before they become real is often the most important step in the long march toward the realization of your dreams.
“In a notebook, list the many choices that are available to that can change presently upsetting experiences into positive ones...in every situation there are at least 30 ways to change your point of view.”
Susan Jeffers: Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway
Confront and dismiss irrational fears
One cause of needless fear is the irrational fears that many of us harbor, often from long-forgotten childhood experiences. I recently saw a bumper sticker that read: Buckle Up! It makes it harder for the
aliens to suck you out of your car. While you might not be afraid of being sucked out of your car by alien invaders, chances are that you have other irrational fears. Perhaps you don’t swim in the ocean for fear of sharks, even though your chances of being struck by lightning are far greater than your chances of being eaten by a shark. Or maybe the mere thought of picking up a perfectly harmless garter snake causes you to shake in your shoes.
Most of us also have irrational fears that might on the surface seem perfectly rational: fear of poverty in the land of plenty, fear of poor health in the age of medical miracles, fear of death at a time when historical longevity records are being shattered. Some of these irrational fears can be perfectly harmless
(after all, most of us don’t pay any sort of penalty for avoiding swimming in the ocean or picking up snakes), but others can be terribly confining. The person who is terrified of rejection will never ask; the person who is terrified of failure will never try.
The first step to conquering irrational fears is simply to identify them and to shine the cold light of rational thought upon them. The second step is often to find the humor in them (“can you imagine, I used to keep the windows up on a hot day for fear of being sucked out the window by alien invaders”).
The third step is often to confront the fear head-on – going for that swim or picking up that snake. Of course, some fears really are warranted – make sure that it’s a garter snake and not a coral snake, and that there’s a lifeguard on the beach.
“We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship. Even concerns about real dangers, when blown out of proportion, do demonstrable harm.”
Barry Glassner: The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the
Wrong Things

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Give fear a name and it becomes just a problem
If you give fear a name, it becomes just a problem, and it’s easier to solve a problem than it is to conquer fear. Ask your participants to think about the things they fear, and the consequences of giving in to those fears. For example:
Fear of rejection can lead to isolation and loneliness (and for the person in sales, can lead to poverty as well!).
Fear of failure prevents people from trying new ideas and approaches, which is particularly unfortunate because learning from our failures is often the most important step toward ultimate success.
Fear of poverty prevents people from taking risks that could enhance their financial well-being, and makes it difficult for them to enjoy what they do have, since they are afraid of losing it (or not being able to replace it if they use it).
Fear of commitment could be the iron bars standing between you and the group or the cause with which you’d like to be involved, or preventing you from having rewarding personal relationships.
Fear of success can be the most damaging of all, because people tend to avoid that which they fear. People who fear the consequences of success (such as higher expectations, envy on the part of family or friends, or not feeling deserving of its fruits) often, without meaning to, subconsciously engage in self-sabotaging behaviors that snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Another aspect of giving fear a name is to precisely quantify those fears. For example, if you are only vaguely aware of your financial situation, it’s difficult to counteract an inner voice that screams, “My
God! We’re headed for the poor house!” every time you see a bill in the mailbox. The first step for overcoming fear of poverty is to precisely quantify every dimension of your financial life – how much you owe, how much you make, how much you are spending, the cash value of all of your assets, etc.
Read any book on personal finance and the first recommendation will likely be to keep a journal that documents every penny which comes into and goes out of your life (for example, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin). One of the chief benefits of this approach is that you are giving fear a name – a precise and understandable name – that helps you transform that fear into a mere problem to be solved.
“The fear of success is not getting what we want because we don’t feel we deserve it, aren’t entitled to it… The roots of fear of success come from low self-esteem, and low self-esteem comes from not knowing what you want out of life.”
James Arkebauer: Ultrapreneuring
Listen for what fear might be trying to tell you
Point out that a state of chronic anxiety or acute fear might simply be trying to tell you something, including one of the four possibilities:
You are not ready for some potential future event. You’re more likely to be afraid of taking a test for which you haven’t studied than one for which you are well-prepared; the well-informed salesperson will make more calls (and more successful calls) than the one who hasn’t done any homework.

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You’re on the wrong path in life. The fear that is associated with loss of a job, or more broadly with mid-life crisis, is often a not-so-gentle prod to evaluate whether it’s not time for a major life change. You’ve probably heard the saying that it’s a shame to let a good crisis go to waste; the existential crisis that provokes soul-shaking fear is often a call to change paths.
Fear can be a call to action. In fact, the more acute the fear, the higher your anxiety, the more imperative it is that you do whatever it is you fear to do. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, do the thing you fear and the death of the fear is certain. Or more recently, to quote the title of a book by Susan Jeffers, feel the fear and do it anyway.
Fear can be a call to faith. The greatest of fears (e.g. fear of dying) cannot be conquered, they must be confronted by faith. You might have seen the plaque sometimes sold in gift shops that says: fear knocked on the door, but when faith answered there was no one there.
Discussion: W. Edwards Deming was the guru of total quality management. One of his fourteen point for TQM was, “drive fear out of the workplace.” There are some very good reasons for this, and it’s especially important in the health care arena. These are just some of the reasons for making the commitment to drive fear out of the workplace:
Someone who is frightened of being chewed out is less likely to confront a quality problem (for example, patients have actually died because a nurse administered an improper medication rather than face the wrath of the attending doctor by disturbing his sleep for a clarification).
Frightened people are not particularly creative.
Because fear is contagious, a high-anxiety environment can actually impair patient outcomes by causing iatrogenic anxiety.
Fear is no fun, and can diminish the quality of the workplace experience.
Remind people that fear is a natural and hardwired human condition (the absence of fear is brain damage!) – you cannot drive fear out of the workplace. Thus is becomes imperative to recognize fear
(and its precursor, anxiety) and to transform and channel it into a productive source of energy that catalyzes productive action.
Since it is not possible to completely drive fear out of the workplace, it’s important to make sure that people are at least afraid of the right things. If people are more afraid of the boss than they are of the competition, the competition will eventually win. If people are more afraid of losing their jobs than they are of losing customers, they are likely to behave in ways that cause them to lose customers – and thus eventually to lose their jobs.
“Often the bravest warriors were originally the greatest cowards. The more fear you confront and conquer, the greater courage you will possess.”
Chin-Ning Chu: Thick Face, Black Heart

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Ask questions that guide you from fear to action
Fear is simply emotional energy that left unmanaged can lead to panic or paralysis. Once it has been diagnosed and understood, however, that same energy can galvanize effective action. In the book Worry mentioned above, Dr. Hallowell describes the performance/anxiety curve, which shows that “as anxiety increases, performance improves, up to a point. Beyond that point, as anxiety continues to increase, performance declines” (emphasis in original). Here’s something you might do: ask participants to think about their biggest worries or fears, then to construct questions that will help guide positive action. For example:
The fear: “I am afraid of losing my job.”
Great question: “What classes can I take to enhance my skills and thus be more valuable to my employer?”
The fear: “I am afraid of running out of money.”
Great question: “What spending patterns have gotten me into this predicament, and how can I quickly change them?”
The fear: “My kids are misbehaving; I’m afraid they’ll get into trouble.”
Great question: “What can I control and what must I try to accept with equanimity; what can I do now to make sure that if they do get into trouble, that it at least becomes a positive learning experience for them?”
“Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present... When there is complete attention there is no fear. But the actual fact of inattention breeds fear; fear arises when there is an avoidance of the fact, a flight; then the very escape itself is fear.”
J. Krishnamurti: On Fear
Help people cope with the fear of uncertainty
There is a common perception that people fear change (nobody likes change but a wet baby, right?).
Actually, people do not fear change, they fear the uncertainty that goes with change. This is a crucial point to understand if you are a manager or a parent, because if you truly believe that people fear change, you will be reluctant to initiate change. On the other hand, if you understand that people love change – so long as it’s a positive change – you’ll know that your primary job is to equip them to deal with the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies change, and then to move ahead with it.
Promote a spirit of optimism that no matter what happens, regardless of the short-term difficulties, everything will work out for the best. One way of doing this is to encourage people to replace
expectation, which is the anticipation of a specific outcome and the associated impression that any alternative outcome is undesirable, with expectancy, which implies an acceptance that great things often come in surprising packages, and reminds us to be open to the blessings of the unexpected.
“Just as fire transforms the energy of a dead tree into warmth, light, and protection, so our fears ignite us to take action, and keep us moving when we are exhausted.”
Art Mortell: The Courage to Fail
Transcend attachments to gain freedom
The attachments in our lives often cause us pain, and prevent us from pursuing our dreams and

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a three legged coyote than a four legged fur coat, because most of us recognize the pain caused by the traps we have allowed ourselves to fall into. Unlike the coyote, we are often unwilling to go through the pain of chewing off a paw to escape. By its very nature, an attachment causes fear – the fear of losing that to which you are attached. The more attached you are to your house, the more you will fear losing it; the more attached you are to the high opinions of other people, the more you will worry about what other people think of you. These are the two great attachments, freedom from which brings the two great freedoms:
Detachment from possessions gives you freedom of movement – both geographically and professionally.
The corporate vice president who decides his real calling in life is to be a kindergarten teacher might well have to give up the big house and new car to achieve this professional freedom, and might have to relocate in order to find that job.
Detachment from the opinions of others gives you freedom of conscience.
If that same corporate vice president cares excessively about what other people might think about the perceived loss of status, he is unlikely to follow his heart into the classroom.
Channel fear outward, don’t allow it to metastasize inward
In his role as chairman of the Intel Corporation, Andrew Grove was a very successful business man. In his book Only The Paranoid Survive, Grove not only acknowledges that there will always be fear in the workplace, he says that this can be a healthy thing – if it is properly channeled. People should be, he says, afraid of losing a customer to the competition, of falling behind in technology, or of not recruiting and retaining the best employees. It is the manager’s job to make sure people are afraid of the right things. For example, if people within an organization are more afraid of the boss than they are of the competition, the competition is certain to win. This can be a great discussion question: what are the most prevalent fears in our organization, and how can we channel them into productive and constructive directions?
“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win.”
William Shakespeare
Don’t project your emotions onto others
One of the most dangerous mistakes you can make is to assume that your inner emotional map is an accurate projection of the outer landscape. If you are in a state of high anxiety and from that jump to the conclusion that the world is a hostile and threatening place, you will make bad decisions and engage in self-sabotaging behaviors. If you allow feelings of low self-esteem to deceive you into believing that other people see you as being inferior and inadequate, you will consistently cheat yourself by settling for anemic dreams and accomplishments. Here’s a simple formula: if a certain emotion makes you feel good about yourself and other people, you can probably rely upon it as being accurate; if it doesn’t, you probably can’t.
“Any fact facing us, however difficult, even seemingly hopeless, is not so important as our attitude toward that fact. How you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You may permit a fact to overwhelm you mentally before you start to deal with it actually. On the other hand, a confident and optimistic thought pattern can modify or overcome the fact altogether.”
Norman Vincent Peale: The Power of Positive Thinking

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Don’t look too far ahead in times of trouble
Winston Churchill once remarked that the chain of destiny was forged one link at a time, while
Abraham Lincoln said that the good thing about the future was that it comes only one day at a time.
I’ve spoken with many successful entrepreneurs who have said much the same thing: if they had appreciated how risky and difficult the endeavor would be at the outset, they might have settled for a
“real job” instead. Sometimes it’s best to not know the full extent of the difficulties that lie ahead; part of the art of leadership is knowing when such full disclosure would be counterproductive.
“Doubt is torture. If we give ourselves fully to something, it will be clearer when it might be appropriate to quit. It is a constant test of perseverance... Don’t listen to doubt. It leads no place but to pain and negativity.”
Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones
“Do the thing you fear,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “and the death of the fear is certain.” Or in the words of Og Mandino, “action turns the lion of terror into an ant of equanimity.” One of the most exciting fields in health and psychology is psychoneuroimmunology, which has to do with body-mindspirit connection. It explains the physiological basis for why simply moving, taking action, is often the surest way to conquer fear or other negative emotions. No matter what your fear is, when you take action you are saying to yourself, and to the rest of the world, that you are not a victim, and that you are determined to exert control over your circumstances, or at least how you react to them. The physical symptoms of terror and exhilaration are identical; by taking action (such as the Lion Roar), your body sends a message to your mind that everything is under control, that this is the exciting part of the adventure, where you’re not sure just what is about to confront you, but that you know you shall prevail over it.
“In the presence of danger [real or perceived] man often finds salvation in action. To dull emotion he must do something; to remain immobile, to stagnate in mind or body, is to surrender without terms. Whereas movement, work of any kind, helps to deliver him from those feelings which are traitors to his better nature.”
Lord Moran: The Anatomy of Courage
Use research to understand your fears, and to reduce uncertainty and risk
Fear is often based on ignorance – the proverbial fear of the unknown. One of the reasons Planetree is such a powerful patient care philosophy is that it encourages the patient to shine a light on the fear of ignorance by becoming a partner in their own care; as is often the case, when a light pierces the shadows the monsters hiding there in the darkness become smaller and more docile. Furthermore, for the person anticipating a change of some sort, research, whether at the library or through networking with other people, can reduce the level of uncertainty and risk.
“Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.”
Eddie Rickenbacker
Escape the Comfort Zone cycle of anxiety  depression

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In his book Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, Robert Gerzon says that we all need to have a comfort zone, but that it “can become a living hell if we can’t move beyond it. Having a comfort zone is healthy; being imprisoned in one is not.” Gerzon describes the comfort zone is bounded on one side by a wall of toxic anxiety, and on the other side by a wall of depression. While in the comfort zone, people have a natural tendency to want to reach toward goals, and to grow. This, however, creates anxiety. If they give in to that anxiety and quit, they don’t just return to the comfort zone, though – they overshoot and hit the wall of depression because they feel like they have failed.
The only escape is to break through the wall of anxiety and do that which you are afraid to do in order to achieve your goal. Should you be unable to break through that wall of anxiety, however, it is important to quickly move past depression and into contemplative introspection, trying to understand the lessons and the personal growth opportunities of that apparent failure. “Ideally,” Gerzon says, “our comfort zone is always expanding into our growth zone. Comfort zones are never static. If we are not expanding our comfort zone it begins to contract. We start to lose sight of our true goals, which now lie behind the wall of Toxic Anxiety.”
“Action is the single most effective antidote to depression, anxiety, stress, fear, worry, guilt, and, of course, immobility. It is virtually impossible to be depressed and active at the same time.
Even if you wanted to, you would find it difficult to keep on moping, complaining, lolling around and wallowing in self-pity if you got active and did something. Anything! Just doing is such an important part of being a fully functioning person.”
Wayne Dyer: Pulling Your Own Strings
Pay attention to language, mental images, and metaphors
Without even thinking about it, we often create fear simply by the words we choose to use, the mental images we store in our minds, or the metaphors with which we seek to understand and describe the world around us. For example:
Many common phrases conjure up subconscious images of death and violence. For example,
My head is killing me or he sure got cut off at the knees are comments any of us might make. At a subconscious level, however, we don’t just hear the words, we also mentally see the associated pictures. These images are naturally quite frightening, and by repeating such phrases, you can unwittingly stir up a high level of otherwise inexplicable anxiety.
In the course of a lifetime, the average American will witness thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of murders, rapes, and other acts of violence enacted on television and in movies.
These images are all stored in the subconscious mind, often to be recalled at times of high anxiety (or in our nightmares). This mental data bank of violent imagery can cause people to see the world as a threatening and hostile place, and overlook the opportunities for service, advancement and friendship that are always all around.
It is natural for us to use metaphors as a way of simplifying and describing the world around us.
For example, saying that someone is a real gem does not really mean that they are a pretty piece of rock; rather, it is a metaphor intended to convey a whole range of meanings concerning that person’s value. Many of the metaphors that we choose, however, have the unintended consequence of painting a picture of a very hostile and dangerous world. For example, saying something like if I lose my job, I don’t have a safety net is a horribly frightening metaphor. The

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One way to more effectively manage anxiety and fear is to be more deliberate and positive in our choice of language, of the images we allow into our minds, and of the metaphors that we choose to understand and describe the world around us. For example:
Replace subjective and judgmental phrases (“my head is killing me”) with an accurate description (“there is a painful pounding in the region of my temples…”) coupled with a prescription (“…so I think I’ll take an aspirin”).
Put yourself on a violence diet when it comes to watching TV and going to the movies; that includes (especially!) the “news,” which is really the tragi-tainment industry (turning tragedy into entertainment to sell ads).
Replace threatening metaphors (“I don’t have a safety net”) with more empowering ones (“I’m a freight train who’s never deterred by seeing a little snow on the tracks”).
Keep moving, have fun, have faith
One of the surest defenses against the paralyzing effect of toxic anxiety and the panicking effect of acute fear is simply to keep moving. Whether it’s a walk around the block or picking up the phone to call someone for help, with movement you re-exert a sense of control over your situation. And it’s not just physical movement – emotional and spiritual movement are also important. For example, it’s hard to be frightened when you’re laughing, which is one good reason to laugh every day, even if you have to make yourself do it.
Keep your pen moving
That’s the advice of Natalie Goldberg, best-selling author on the art of writing. The way to overcome self-doubt is to keep writing. That turns out to be pretty good advice even for the non-writer. Writing about your worries and fears in a journal can be a safe way to diagnose, express, and catharsize them.
One effective method is to write about the things that are bothering you, then to close the covers of your journal and command that they stay closed after you leave the room. Here’s another – take a great inspirational book, find a quote that has particular relevance for your current situation, and simply transcribe it onto paper (why do you think that there are so many great quotes sprinkled throughout this CVC-T Manual  ).
“The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him, not the storm without.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dare most when times are darkest
About 2,500 years ago the Chinese warrior Wu Ch’i wrote that on the battlefield those who are determined to die with glory will live, while those who merely hope to escape with their lives will die.
That was a paradox Lee Iacocca well understood: Desperate times call for daring measures, pursued with energetic and courageous determination.
Some of the greatest success stories in business are where one company invested during a depression when everyone else was cutting back. Likewise, in sports the most admired hero’s are those who found a way to come from behind and win. Truly, it is often in the most anxiety-provoking times of difficulty that we can find the greatest opportunities, if we but have the courage to dare and to do.

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In the 1980s, the Chrysler corporation slumped into what medical doctors would call a persistent vegetative state, and most industry observers were certain the only thing to do was pull the plug. But the story of how Lee Iacocca rescued Chrysler vividly illustrates what a daring attitude in dark times can accomplish. At considerable risk to his own career, Iacocca took on the challenge of reviving
Chrysler. His bravura shocked the company back to life and electrified the American public. A less dramatic performance would certainly have failed, but by daring greatly during the dark days, Iacocca created an American legend.
“There is a precipice on either side of you – a precipice of caution and a precipice of overdaring.”
Winston Churchill
Fear breeds in isolation, while connection inspires courage. When he was asked for his opinion of the most important development in the entire field of healthcare during twentieth century, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop simply said that it was the support group, because through that forum millions of people have taken charge of their own health and well-being.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up.”
Ecclesiastes 3:9-10
Fear and courage are both contagious
“Don’t let the troops see you sweat.” General Colin Powell wrote that in his autobiography. Wise leaders (and parents) know when to disguise their fear (and remember, it’s often just a fantasy anyway) in order to give courage to others. As Mark Twain put it, be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be, because nobody else can tell the difference. And here’s perhaps the greatest benefit – the person who is most likely to be affected by your show of courage, as much as that show might feel like a fake – is you.
Fake it till you make it. Act like you’re brave. When you read about acts of great courage, chances are the person whose courage you so admire was scared stiff, but was acting brave.
Caring is the root of courage
Caring is the root of courage because if you care enough about something, you will find the courage to do what needs to be done. Fear excludes and creates enemies. Courage includes and creates friends.
“Fear wants to keep out anyone who’s different, who makes you feel the least bit uncomfortable, anyone who challenges your established opinions and assumptions. At the same time that your fear is excluding them, their fear is excluding you. Pretty soon, they’re not just different, they’re worse. And of course, you’re not just different to them, you’re worse too. And it’s not a very big step from being worse to being wrong. And from being wrong it’s not a very big step to being an enemy.”
Joe Tye: Never Fear, Never Quit
Foster a support group environment in the workplace
If you have ever attended a support group meeting of any kind, you know that most people leave the meeting in a better frame of mind than when they came. Their problems were not solved, but they

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“The first step to dealing with feelings is to recognize each feeling as it arises. The agent that does this is mindfulness. In the case of fear, for example, you bring out your mindfulness, look at your fear, and recognize it as fear. You know that fear springs from yourself and that mindfulness also springs from yourself. They are both in you, not fighting, but one taking care of the other.”
Thich Nhat Hanh: Peace is Every Step
Study history, literature, and biography for distant mentors
You do not have to know somebody to have them be your mentor. For that matter, they don’t even have to be alive. The more you read about some great person’s life and work, the more likely it is you’ll know how they would respond to any question you might ask them.
Connect spiritually
Our greatest fears and anxieties have to do with things over which we have no control, matters that are by definition questions of faith, such as the meaning of life and the reason for death. Hence, anxiety can be the catalyst for deeper study and introspection on spiritual questions, as well as a chance to question potentially harmful religious assumptions (for example, assuming that you are destined for hell because of things you said or did as a child).
“The path of awakening and loving is a path without end. We cannot measure the worth of a single loving action or the impact of a single caring gesture. We cannot know the results of a single meditation or evaluate the learning we will derive by meeting a single difficulty with open heartedness. When we connect with the precious richness of living, caring, and connectedness, results fade in importance. We can only trust that the landscape we paint will be colored by our love and care.”
Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman: Soul Food
Take-Home Exercise
Give fear a name and it becomes just a problem. Ask people to take some time over the next month to think about their most confining fears. What name would they give to those fears? What is the problem that underlies them? Knowing what the problem is, what action steps can they take to solve the problem? For example:
The fear is worry that you are running out of money.
The problem is you are spending more than you are earning.
The solution is to spend less than you are earning by reducing your spending and/or increasing your earning power.
The first step to solving the problem might be to go to the library and check out a book of advice on how to get out of debt and manage your money more effectively.

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It takes an act of courage to transform the fear into a problem by giving it a name; perseverance is required to take the sustained action that will be necessary to solve that problem. That is why
Perseverance is Core Action Value #5. Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision – and perseverance is making that decision every day, day after day, even when (especially when) the going gets tough.
“New solutions and fresh ways of seeing a problem do not typically come from worrying, especially chronic worry. Instead of coming up with solutions to these potential problems, worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger itself, immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread associated with it while staying in the same rut of thought.”
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence

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In the last session we pointed out that fear is a reaction, but courage is a decision. Perseverance is the commitment to make that decision (to act with courage each and every day), despite the obstacles and setbacks that inevitably come our way. Very often, the difference between the people who achieve their dreams in life and those who do not is simply this: the achievers didn’t quit when the going got tough, and the others did. The greatest tragedy about this is that, as Thomas Edison once noted, people would be appalled if they knew how close they were to success when they finally quit.
A good way of illustrating this point is asking participants to imagine that they are running a hundred yard dash, and asking when it is that their legs begin to ache and their lungs start burning (at least back in high school when they were in better shape!) – at the fifth yard or the ninety-fifth yard? That’s a good metaphor for life – the more painful it is to keep running, the closer you probably are to your goal.
The only problem with that metaphor, of course, is that in life we don’t know if we’re running a hundred yard dash or a marathon, all we do know is that if we quit, we have to start again at the beginning of another race.
In their book Built to Last, James Collins and Jerry Porras identified common characteristics of
“visionary companies,” the organizations that tend to dominate their fields year after year. One of the common elements was this: today’s visionary companies had a rough start. During their first several years, they fumbled around and often fell on their faces. By contrast, many of the also-ran companies discussed in the book had a fast start, but fell on their face later, when the inevitable difficulties hit them. There is a lesson in this book for all of us. Adversity is not necessarily a bad thing, no matter how bad it may feel when it hits. If we, like the visionary companies in their study, can learn from our setbacks and through adversity cultivate the strength for meeting ever-greater challenges, then we, too, can be “built to last.”
“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.”
Henry Ward Beecher
Icebreaker exercise
Ask people for names of historical figures they admire, such as Abraham Lincoln or Florence
Nightingale. You might have to prompt the discussion by suggesting categories – great presidents, war heroes, entrepreneurs, humanitarians, etc. Ask people to think about why they admire these people, then point out that we admire our heroes not so much for what they accomplished, but rather for the obstacles through which they persevered en route to that accomplishment. If it had been easy, if anyone could have done it, why would we honor them?
“Good habits… are a safeguard against underachieving. They prevent laziness. They prevent floundering. They prevent listlessness. Good habits create organization and discipline in our lives. It’s virtually impossible to achieve success without having good habits, virtually impossible to reach your full potential. And in times of stress, when you are being severely tested, good habits become even more important. They become the rock, the standard of behavior that we must stick with so that we don’t get off track.”

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Rick Pitino: Success is a Choice
Every successful athletic coach knows this truth: spectacular success is always preceded by unspectacular preparation. No football team ever won a game because of the pre-game pep rally – victory is always founded upon a solid base of discipline and preparation. Probably the most important step toward being prepared for what the future might bring is to prepare yourself – to build strong character by internalizing and operationalizing The Twelve Core Action Values, to get the education and develop the skills that will be required for you to achieve your goals, and then to develop the habits that will keep you moving confidently forward in the direction of your goals, no matter what the world throws at you.
Obstacles are not optional
The bigger the dream, the greater the challenge. The more you want to accomplish in your life, the more barriers and obstacles you will have to overcome. It is easy to slip into a victim mindset when the world seems to be conspiring to prevent you from achieving your goals and realizing your dreams. One way to avoid falling into the trap of victim thinking is to routinely remind yourself that obstacles and setbacks are just an inevitable part of life, and that the bigger your dreams, the more likely it is you will be challenged along the way. Once you’ve internalized the fact that, yes indeed, bad things do happen to good people, and yes, life is difficult, it becomes much easier to take the inevitable opposition, obstacles, and setbacks in stride and not seek blame elsewhere or to feel like a victim yourself.
“Remember, if you have a problem, it’s your problem. Solve it. Don’t blame other people. Don’t burden people with your complaints. Ninety percent of the people you meet don’t care about your troubles. The other 10 percent are glad you have them.”
Lou Holtz: Winning Every Day
Prepare yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually
Think of the last time the roof fell in on your world, or the bottom dropped out from under it. It was exhausting, wasn’t it? Depending upon the nature of the setback, you might have been wiped out physically, intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually. Mention problems like the death of a loved one, bankruptcy, a child in trouble, the loss of a job – and watch nods of agreement as people think about being knocked flat by such occurrences. Knowing that sooner or later bad things will happen, it makes sense to prepare now, doesn’t it? And to prepare at four levels – physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
If you are in shape physically, you’re more likely to fight off anxiety and depression, and to have the energy you need to cope with a tough situation creatively and effectively.
If you are prepared intellectually, you will have more creative ideas and a higher level of confidence for dealing with any situation. For example, at some point or another, everybody has money troubles. You can prepare now by working to stay on top of your finances, reading good books on financial management, and finding out how other people have dealt with the types of problems you might anticipate someday having yourself.
Times of adversity and difficulty are emotionally draining, and even more so if emotions flare out of control (for example, temper tantrums, panic attacks, or deep blue funks). One of the best ways of

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As mentioned earlier with Authenticity, one way of preparing yourself spiritually for life’s sucker punches is reaffirming your nurturing beliefs and questioning those which are harmful. For many people, a regular habit of praying to be given the strength if (more likely when) disaster strikes is a helpful way of preparing themselves to persevere through it.
“One door closes, another door opens. It’s all about action. When something ends – a job, a relationship, one’s good health – you just don’t stand by and wait for something good to happen.
You can’t depend on luck or anybody else to pull you out of the situation. You must use your own efforts to push a new door open, kick it open if you have to, using that setback as an inspiration to move ahead and make a new beginning for yourself.”
Arthur Pine: One Door Closes, Another Door Opens
It takes physical stamina to overcome adversity
Remember the ancient Samurai paradox: When your body is strong, it will bend to your commands, but when it is weak, you must give in to its demands. One of the surest ways to make sure that you have the strength to deal with adversity when it comes is taking care of your body. Encourage people to think about their habits in the following categories:
Sleep: Many Americans are chronically sleep deprived. While we can usually make it through the day on half-an-hour less sleep than we need, over time we pay a significant price. Ask your audience if they know what the first mental capacity is to disappear when you are sleep deprived – it is not concentration, attention, humor, or anything else they are likely to guess. It is creativity. And when is it that you most need to be creative? When you’ve run up against the wall, when things are falling apart, and what you’ve always done is no longer working. The solution, of course, is to turn off the television, close the briefcase, and go to bed a little bit earlier, so you can wake up alert and refreshed to tackle old problems in new ways.
Diet: You obviously don’t have time for a lecture on proper nutrition, but you can encourage people to pay attention to what they eat and drink. For example, excessive caffeine can contribute to anxiety, excessive alcohol contributes to depression, and excessive sugar can sap your energy. Also, since so many of our foods are processed, many people can benefit from taking additional vitamin and mineral supplements.
Exercise: Exercise has both immediate and long term benefits for perseverance. Over time, good physical conditioning will help ensure that you have the stamina you need to deal with the troubles of your life. And when these troubles erupt, going for a walk or a run or a bike ride or otherwise physical exercise stimulates endorphins that help you fight off anxiety, depression, and other negative emotions.
Breathing: Taking a deep breath when a perceived crisis erupts is often the best way to prevent yourself from reacting in a way that you will soon regret. Over time, cultivating a habit of periodic meditative breathing can give you a new perspective and greater sense of awareness that will help you keep adversity in a more positive perspective, and deal with it more effectively. You might also mention that there is a strong correlation between smoking and depression – not to mention premature cessation of breathing.

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Hydration: Many Americans are chronically dehydrated, both because they don’t drink enough water and because the things they do drink (coffee, soda pop, alcohol) have dehydrating properties. Point out that every thought, every emotion, is at a physiological level the result of a chemical reaction in the brain. In this respect, the human brain is much like the battery in a car. And like the car battery, when it dries out, the chemical reactions are faulty or non-existent. Sometimes the simplest cure for moderate anxiety or depression, or even a headache, is simply to drink some crystal clear water.
Habits: One of the most important ways to assure that you have the stamina for dealing with adversity is cultivating good physical habits ahead of time: smiling and laughing more, sitting up straight and standing tall and proud, walking a little bit faster between appointments, can all help you feel better about yourself, and enhance your ability to deal with adversity. Here is an extremely exciting point:
Recent neurological research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even in adulthood, your physical actions can bring about physiological changes in the brain. Thus, for example, putting on a brave face can actually rewire your brain to be more courageous; walking a little bit faster can actually give you more energy.
“If you want to be successful in a particular field of endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities. I haven’t met anyone [who is successful] what hasn’t been able to describe years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. There’s no way to get around that.”
George Lucas
Prepare for the worst but expect the best
Since we often tend to get what we expect out of life, it is important to remember that even as you prepare for the worst, you should expect the best. Quite often, the mere act of preparing for something forestalls its actual occurrence (this is vividly the case when it comes to financial management).
It is also important to note that worrying about something is not the same as preparing for it – quite to the contrary, worry is often our best excuse for not putting the time into active preparation.
“You must train constantly... Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”
Miyamoto Musashi: A Book of Five Rings
Avoid analysis paralysis
Sometimes, preparation can become an end in itself, and we end up in a ready-aim-aim-aim-aim mode.
You will hear people say that they are waiting “to get their ducks all lined up” before they take action.
Of course, the only way you can line up a flock of ducks is to wait until they are all dead. Tom Peters was the co-author (along with Bob Waterman) of the best-selling business book of all time, In Search of
Excellence. That book defined eight qualities of the companies that Peters and Waterman defined as excellent. Today, Peters says that only one of those eight criteria has really stood the test of time – a bias for action. There is a time, in other words, when you need to stop preparing and to start doing.
“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”
Samuel Smiles

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One of the most memorable opening lines of any novel was that of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles
Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Here’s a great question for your group:
What do we have today? The best of times or the worst of times? The answer is “yes.” Some people make the case that in healthcare today we have the worst of times, what with managed care and budget cuts and all of that. But from the perspective of what we’re here to do as caregivers, there is no doubt that it is the best of times – that the technology, the medicines, and the practices we have today make possible the kind of medical miracles that not very long ago would have been considered absolutely impossible. Point out that no matter what is going on in the world around you, a case can always be made that things were never worse, a case can always be made that things were never better, and which case you choose to make is one of your most important decisions, and one you make on a daily basis.
“What looks like loss may be the very event which is subsequently responsible for helping to produce the major achievements of your life.”
Skully Blotnick
Thank God ahead of time for your troubles
Thank God Ahead of Time is the title of a book by Father Michael Crosby, but it is also a great philosophy for life. This can actually be helpful in two ways. First, even the most tragic adversity usually brings some benefit in its wake (ask your participants what people always say two years after having gone through the traumatic experience of losing a job and they will respond – it was the best thing that ever could have happened).
This can apply to something even as devastating as a diagnosis of cancer. While nobody is glad to have the disease, many people have found blessings in it. Essentially, it boils down to the choice of being a victim, or accepting the circumstance and then looking for the blessing within. Quite often, when you begin looking for the silver lining in the black cloud, what you often find is a silver cloud that has a black lining.
The second way this philosophy is helpful is being grateful for future blessings that have not yet arrived.
For the alcoholic who is trying to gain sobriety, the parent struggling though the terrible two’s or the terrible teens, the entrepreneur starting a new business, Thank God Ahead of Time can provide a measure of strength and courage for dealing with the problems of today, knowing that blessings will come tomorrow.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – The Serenity Prayer
Reinhold Niebuhr
Reach out to help someone with a bigger problem
One of the best ways to maintain a positive perspective on your problems is to reach out and help someone who has a problem even bigger than yours. This is, for example, a guiding principle of
Alcoholics Anonymous. The best way, and in many cases the only way, the recovering alcoholic can remain sober is through a commitment to helping other people gain and retain sobriety. As we

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“You can change the world if you care enough.”
Marian Wright Edelman
Ask great questions during times of adversity
Adversity often presents a fork in the road; taking the right turn can depend upon asking the right questions. After losing a job, for example, questions such as why me or how will I make ends meet tend to create a pessimistic victim mindset. On the other hand, questions like should I go back to school or how could I raise the money to start my own business can lead to answers that position you to be in a very different place at some point down the road.
Real world example: three great questions for adversity
In their book Hope Is Not A Method, about the restructuring of the U.S. Army after Vietnam, Gordon R.
Sullivan and Michael V. Harper describe a situation in which a battalion commander whose troop was under heavy attack would periodically retreat into his tent to ask himself these three questions: 1)
What’s happening? 2) What’s not happening; 3) What can I do about it?
Think about the biggest problem you’re facing right now, then ask yourself those three questions about it. Chances are that, the more you think about it, the more you’ll realize that, however bad it may seem right now, a lot more could be happening (your business might be failing but your family is still intact); what really is happening might actually not be nearly as bad as it seems (your business might seem like it’s failing, but help is available if you ask for it); and there is a lot more you can do about it than seems obvious at first glance (such as asking for that help).
“Every business will always have problems… A good business has interesting problems, a bad business has boring ones. Good management is the art of making the problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them…
Good problems energize. Bad problems enervate.”
Paul Hawken: Growing a Business
Anything can look like a failure in the middle
Anything can look like a failure in the middle – it’s only a failure, though, if you quit. Soichiro Honda, the man who founded the car company bearing his name, once said that success is 90% failure and
10% introspection – analyzing the failure to see why it happened and what could be done better the next time around. The first time a band plays together and it sounds horrible, we don’t call it failure, we call it rehearsal. Give yourself permission for a bit of rehearsal in your life – anything can look like a failure if you quit before the stage performance.
“The concentration of will and awareness in sport is heightened, we believe, because it takes place in the midst of winning and losing, amid dramatic ups and downs. The participant who perseveres in a sport has to learn the poignant lesson – at some level at least – that there is an interior grace that transcends the world’s uncertain results. Sport can teach us the ancient wisdom that by losing our lives we gain them.”
Michael Murphy and Rhea A. White: In the Zone

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Train your doubt
Train your doubt. That was advice given by the German poet Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet. Don’t let doubt torment you, and don’t let it paralyze you, but also don’t ignore it. Rather, teach it to ask
Questions that will resolve your skepticism. When the voice of doubt says, “it will never work,” force it to answer Questions like, “why won’t it work, and what needs to be changed so that it will work?”
Having your doubt work for you and not against you is a key element of perseverance.
“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over gain, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.”
Anne Sullivan
Transform despair into determination
Prevention is the best defense, but when despair strikes anyway, the best strategy is to transform it into the energy for determination. Many very successful, very creative people have stood on despair’s doorstep, perhaps for a very long time, and returned more determined to become the person they were truly meant to be and to pursue their most authentic dreams. Og Mandino, Buckminster Fuller, Billy
Joel, Harold Hughes, and Robert Fulghum are among those who were actually on the brink of suicide when they turned around and realized that they had important work remaining to be done. As Robert
Fulghum wrote about his experience: “Death isn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t less life, but more life – life with meaning” (emphasis in original). Great leaders recognize that despair is an emotional wasteland, and are quick to transform it into determination by investing the situation with meaning and with commitment to prevail against all odds.
When Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was first trapped in and then crushed by Antarctic ice in
1916, one of his most daunting challenges was to maintain the morale of his twenty-eight crew members during their 634-day ordeal. In Leading at the Edge, leadership consultant Dennis N.T.
Perkins and his co-authors describe some of the strategies that Shackleton used to hold his team together and bring them all home alive:
Shackleton kept his men busy, knowing that idleness can foster a sense of lost control, which in turn leads to despair.
He was quick to defuse conflict, and used every excuse to hold a party or celebration of some sort.
He made sure his men understood that he had no doubt whatsoever they would all survive, and set a personal example of courage and self-sacrifice in doing the things that were necessary for that to occur.
He encouraged creative thinking to solve what appeared to be intractable problems, and when inaction would have been a fatal choice, he was willing to take what otherwise would have seemed unthinkable risks.
Shackleton knew that a leader’s first duty during tough times is to maintain hope and optimism, and to stave off despair, no matter how desperate the situation might seem. In retrospect, one can speculate on how frequently members of the crew were tempted to quit before the breakthrough that led to their rescue. Shackleton himself later wrote: “I have marveled often at the thin line that divides success from failure and the sudden turn that leads from apparently certain disaster to comparative safety.”

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Hope often saves an apparently lost cause
I love to read stories about entrepreneurial near-death experiences. Many start-up companies hit one or (more often) a whole series of crisis points. These are not just crises of business and money – they are also crises of confidence and conscience. Mike and Lynette Richards are graduates of an entrepreneurship class that I once taught, but I learned more from them than they learned from me.
They started a company called Candleworks, which gained national recognition for the fact that most of its workforce is drawn from the ranks of people who are homeless, addicted, and/or disabled.
In his book Light One Candle, Mike speaks of these unavoidable crises as tests. In every business, Mike says, there are many levels of success and challenge; the greater the success, the bigger the challenges.
Before you are allowed to graduate to each progressively higher level of success, with its commensurately bigger challenges, you must pass a test. Often, he says, the entrepreneur is not really facing a crisis, but rather taking a test to see if he or she is really prepared for the next level of success.
And you thought you experienced test anxiety in school! Whether the test you are facing is in school, at work, or in life, make hope your secret weapon. Research by Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Learned
Optimism, shows that hope – the expectation of success – is the single-best predictor of success. So stand unconquered for another day, prepare yourself for the test you know will be coming, and fire up your hope. As Beowulf said in a much older story, fate often saves a doomed warrior when his courage endures.
Your trajectory is more important than where you are at any point in time
During times of trouble, we often think of life as being more like a snap shot than a motion picture, and implicitly assume that things will never get better. If your life has generally been improving over the past ten or twenty years, but you’re going through a rough spot now, there’s no reason to assume the upward trend will not resume, so long as you don’t quit and give in to self-pity and victim-itis. However, you also must be honest with yourself. If things have been steadily deteriorating for years and now you are in a crisis, it’s a safe bet that things won’t change unless you change.
Remember how at the outset we used the rocket ship illustration to show how a small change in direction can, if sustained over time, result in a huge alteration of the ultimate destination? This is a good place to remind your participants that times of difficulty and adversity are often where the greatest opportunity lies to alter your trajectory – to make those changes for which you simply cannot find the courage or motivation when things are going great.
“The hundred mile journey begins with a single step.”
Lao Tzu: Tao te Ching
“The hundred mile journey is still halfway at ninety.”
Yuanwu (in Thomas Cleary: Zen Lessons)
You’ve gotta be strong! I will survive! These popular songs recognize an important truth: it takes a certain amount of toughness to persevere through the obstacles and achieve your goals in life. This does not mean being unkind. Some of the kindest people in the history of the world – Jesus, Florence
Nightingale, Mother Teresa – knew when to be tough, even in love. In many cases, the one person in your life who most needs tough love is you yourself.

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“Tough times don’t last; tough people do.”
Robert Schuller
Live by the 3 Ps of Perseverance — Purpose, Passion, and Patience
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn spent many years of anonymous toil as a lonely ranger fighting the forces of evil. As heir to the throne of Gondor, Aragorn believed it was his destiny to become king. Yet for nearly four decades he subjected himself to harsh privations and lethal dangers as he worked and fought to protect his future subjects from the enemy. What gave him the stamina to persevere through his trials? He practiced the 3 P’s of Perseverance: Purpose, Passion and Patience.
Purpose: Because of his lineage, Aragorn could have lived comfortably in the elf haven of Rivendell and would hardly have been criticized for his choice. He was, however, driven by a higher purpose. When the board of Apple Computer called on Steve Jobs to return to the company he helped to start in order to save it from going under, few would have blamed him for declining. After all, the Apple board had sent him packing not many years earlier. He had since proved his entrepreneurial mettle with several new ventures, and had more money than he would ever be able to reasonably spend. Why should he take on the headaches of trying to save the company that had spurned him? Like Aragorn, Jobs had always been driven by a higher purpose than simply making money or even selling computers; he was out to change the world, and someone with that sense of purpose simply does not quit in the face of adversity.
Passion: Whether he was battling orcs intent on despoiling his kingdom or singing to the hobbits about legends of the elder days, Aragorn ran at full throttle in the pursuit of his “impossible” dreams of a magical kingdom. In this, he resembled the builder of our world’s Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney, whose absolute enthusiasm was so contagious that one “impossible” dream after another was transformed into reality by the members of his team. The day before Walt died of lung cancer, as he lay on his back in a hospital bed, he visualized an image of the not-yet-begun Walt Disney World in Orlando on the ceiling of his room. That’s passion!
Patience: Aragorn tempered his passion with patience. He knew the road to the throne would be a long one strewn with hurdles, but he had learned to labor and to wait through the arduous and anonymous years of preparation. Like most other “overnight successes,” Anita Roddick worked through many long and difficult years to build The Body Shop from a small cosmetics shop in England into a worldwide beauty products empire – one that is known for its social and environmental conscience. Had she not been willing to patiently spend the requisite time on every step of the ladder – creating and testing new products, refining the franchising strategy and operation, evolving promotional strategies – she would never have created this unique worldwide business.
“Any definite chief aim that is deliberately fixed in the mind and held there, with the determination to realize it, finally saturates the entire subconscious mind until it automatically influences the physical action of the body toward the attainment of that purpose.”
Napoleon Hill: Law of Success

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Don’t whine, make excuses, blame others, or be a victim
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA college basketball coach, said that you will inevitably lose games, but you’re never a loser until you start blaming somebody else for your loss. Whenever you complain, make excuses, blame other people, or otherwise act like a victim you are saying to the world, and to yourself, that (poor me!) there’s nothing you can do to deal with your predicament. Any time you find yourself operating in this mode, go back and re-read the Seven Simple Promises of The Self-
Empowerment Pledge.
“If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, where everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.”
Solon (ancient Greek senator)
Change your self-talk
One of the most important things you can do to increase your mental and emotional toughness is change the way you talk to yourself. Almost everybody experiences negative self talk. As Robert Gerzon notes in Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, we are able to abuse ourselves at a rate of four hundred words per minute! Most of this self talk is a replaying of ancient tapes, not an accurate reflection of your abilities or the reality of your situation. One of the most powerful ways of changing your self image, boosting your self esteem, and overcoming self-imposed limitations is simply talking to yourself in a more nurturing and empowering way.
Get the help you need, including counseling if necessary
Toughness does not mean going it on your own, Lone Ranger style. Sometimes it requires mental toughness to admit to yourself that you need help, including possible professional counseling (which in some cases may also include medication and/or therapy) to get you back on an even keel so you can pursue your goals. It is a sign of strength, not of weakness, to ask for help.
“I see so many men and women fail in this life waiting for somebody to motivate them. Nobody can motivate you. You have to motivate yourself. You’ve got to be excited about life, pumped up about life.”
A.L. Williams: All You Can Do Is All You Can Do But All You
Can Do Is Enough!
Be tough with yourself, not on yourself
Be tough on yourself by having high standards and expectations, but do not be tough on yourself by beating yourself up if you do not always live up to those standards and expectations.
“Managing stress does not mean managing your life so that you avoid change and challenge. It means controlling your emotional response to change and challenge so that you do not succumb to fear and anger. The strategies of emotional control – humor, motivation, attitude, exercise, diet, breath control, visualization – give you the tools to control your emotional response.”
James E. Loehr and Peter J. McLaughlin: Mentally Tough
Don’t quit before you even start
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People usually quit emotionally before they quit physically. For example, most business failures, once you scrape away the standard excuses of inadequate cash flow, excessive government regulation, unfair competition, inadequate employees and the like are ultimately emotional failures — loss of courage, faith, or energy, or all three at once. Write about what you can do to prevent such an emotional collapse from derailing you in the march toward your dreams and goals”
People often fail by quitting before they even start by not being willing to do what it takes to achieve the goals they say that they want to achieve. What is the price you may have to pay to achieve your dreams and goals? Write about the sacrifices you are willing to make in order to achieve your dreams and become the person you truly want to be:
Understand the distinction between quitting and adapting. If something is not working, or if you’re stuck in a job you hate, it may be to stop beating your head against the wall and do something that will work for you. As they say in AA, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Write about an area of your life in which stopping what you’re doing and trying a different approach could in the long run be the most effective way to persevere.
“Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they may have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.”
Norman Cousins: Anatomy of an Illness
Don’t wait for the rescue party
From the time of its victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 until the last days of World War II, the
German army was unit-for-unit one of the world’s most effective fighting forces. One of the key reasons for this is that leaders at every level were trained and expected to make decisions and take actions appropriate to a situation, without waiting for direction or approval from superiors. The punishment for failure to act (waiting for the rescue party) was greater than that for taking action that turned out poorly.
Contrast that with the culture that evolved in many American corporations in the second half of the 20 th
Century, where the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Law, Dilbert Disease, learned helplessness, and a CYA mentality created bureaucratic and disempowering organizations. Fortunately, that is changing rapidly, and none too soon. The world is simply moving too fast, and is far too competitive, for managers at any level to sit in their cubicles waiting for direction or approval from above (the rescue party) before taking initiative.
Know when to yield and when to advance
One of the things that makes leadership more art than science is knowing when to yield and when to advance. When I’m speaking about Never Fear, Never Quit, I distinguish between stopping and quitting.
If something isn’t working and likely is not going to work, the best thing is to stop and try something else. Quitting means giving up on the dream – stopping means finding another way to pursue the dream.
For the person who feels totally burned out on the job and dreads even getting out of bed in the morning, the smart thing might be to stop – to find another line of work that can be performed with greater enthusiasm and a sense of meaning, even if it entails a temporary financial or status setback.
Quitting, on the other hand, is giving up emotionally, giving in to the paralysis of anxiety and despair.

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Paradoxically, a failure to stop before excessive losses pile up can increase the likelihood that a catastrophic emotional melt-down will cause you to quit.
Nobody in their right mind consciously seeks out adversity, and very few of us welcome it when it arrives. It is a fact of life, however, that some amount of adversity is necessary for your growth and learning.
“Use your mistakes as a springboard into new areas of discovery; accidents can hold the key to innovation. When things fall apart, make art. Carry this spirit through to every area of your life.”
Philip Toshio Sudo: Zen Guitar
Times of difficulty are essential to build character
That which doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, but only if you plumb the experience for it’s lessons.
As Anne Morrow Lindbergh put it, you can only take the measure of a tree after it has fallen, and the same is true of a person. Abraham Lincoln told his generals that he didn’t care how many times they fell, only how many times they got up. Adversity is the valley that makes us appreciate the grandeur of the mountain tops. Or, as the Arab proverb puts it, all sunshine makes a desert.
“Every time we prevail – if even for a moment – over anxiety, fear of failure, feelings of vulnerability and inferiority, we are not left even. We are not as we were; we are ahead. With each obstacle we conquer, we grow larger.”
Walter Anderson: The Confidence Course
We learn more from failure than we do from success
We often learn more from our failures than from our successes. A great example from the world of business is the dot-com boom and bust. During the year of the dot com bubble, hordes of young entrepreneurs thought they had learned a new way of doing business in which the old rules didn’t work.
On paper, at least, many of them were worth millions, if not billions of dollars. Unfortunately for them, they simply happened to be lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time. Any
“lessons” they might have learned from their success would set them up for failure in the post-bubble world. On the other hand, some of those individuals will go on to be very successful precisely because they were able to analyze the causes of their failure and with new wisdom, know how to do it better next time.
“A person who’s trying to achieve the pleasure of success without ever experiencing the pain of rejection will never succeed long-term. In fact, this person will sabotage himself before he ever truly succeeds on a major scale.”
Anthony Robbins: Awaken the Giant Within
Adversity can open doors and identify opportunities

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One door closes, another door opens, goes the old proverb. It is often in the face of seeming adversity that the greatest opportunities open before us. Many a fired or laid off worker has started a business they never otherwise would have begun, and gone on to become highly successful. Some of the best counselors and caregivers are those who through their own adversity opened the door to helping others.
And often (relating back to building character), adversity replaces pride with humility, thereby making us more aware and perceptive.
“Keep your spirits up, don’t allow yourself to be depressed, and never for one moment doubt but that matters will finish better and more quickly than you imagine.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
Times of adversity are often when we meet the people who end up being most important in our lives
Anyone who has ever participated in a support group of any kind has seen this phenomenon: people come to their first meeting shattered, despondent, and convinced that they will never be whole again. A while later, they are filled with hope and courage, and have made many new friends. In fact, some of the greatest friendships are those forged during times of difficulty.
“There is time and hope if we combine patience and courage.”
Winston Churchill
More great benefits of adversity
 Surmounting adversity prepares you for bigger challenges and accomplishments in the future.
 Surviving adversity is a great way to build self-confidence, and to give you a more positive perspective on future adversity (if we survived that we can survive anything!).
 Adversity helps prevent hubris, arrogance, and complacency.
 When things aren’t working, it forces you to look for more creative solutions.
 What you had to fight to gain you will fight doubly hard to retain.
 Adversity keeps teaching — it provides great stories for grandchildren! Your setbacks can, if you’re committed to learning from them and teaching about them, be the source of great learning for others.
 When adversity comes it will be for a temporary visit — plan on passing through “the valley of the shadow of death,” not camping out down there!
A real world example of the constructive power of adversity
The eccentric citizens of Enterprise, Alabama dedicated a monument to an insect in 1919. The statue, the first known to depict an insect, honored the boll weevil: the one and the same bug that destroyed cotton plants in the area; and the bug that forced farmers to diversify their crops, which then resulted in incomes three times higher than realized with cotton. Adversity is a lot like a boll weevil. Some folks see it as a pest but it can contribute to our lives. There is an old warning that cautions us to be careful of what we wish for. For often riches can offer traps while adversity can foster growth and provide opportunities.
Don’t stop short of the finish line

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Both complacence and despair are mortal enemies of success. Complacence can seduce you to stop fighting before the battle is truly won; despair can induce you to stop fighting before the battle is truly lost. Do not stop short of the finish line.
“You can watch a person go about his or her daily activities for days or weeks and learn a great deal about him. However, you can watch a person under adverse circumstances for five minutes and see whether he has learned to respond or react. Actually, you can learn more about him in a few minutes under trying conditions than you can in days of just watching him involved in daily activities.”
Zig Ziglar: Top Performance
Take-home exercise
Prepare For the Worst, Expect the Best. Ask people to think about what is the worst thing that could happen in the year to come. How could they prepare themselves – physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually for that eventuality? Then ask them to think about the best possible outcome if that adverse event were actually to occur – the expect a miracle outcome? How could the event that at the time was perceived as a terrible trouble in fact turn out to be a tremendous turning point?
“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”
Booker T. Washington

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From the beginning of recorded history, faith has been the most powerful source of human motivation.
People have exerted themselves and taken risks for the sake of faith that never would have been motivated in a quest for material gain or personal power. In The Corporate Mystic, Gay Hendricks and
Kate Ludeman predict that in the years to come the most effective business leadership will be first and foremost spiritual leadership. They go on to say that leaders who think that spirituality has no place in the world of business are selling themselves, their people, and their organizations short.
In Managing on the Edge, Richard Tanner Pascale writes that: “We in the west live in a culture that separates mans spiritual life from his institutional life… The dilemma for modern Western organizations is that, like it or not, [spiritual values] play a very central role in the lives of many who work for them.”
Pascale says that the “artificial dichotomization” of work life and spiritual life deprives organizations access to higher-order values, “which are among the best-known mechanisms for reconciling one’s working life with one’s inner life,” as well as the forgoing the opportunity to create societal meaning beyond the merely monetary.
Ours has been called the age of anxiety, in no small part because of the rapid pace of change and the uncertainty which that creates. Remember the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the courage to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference?” For many people, the source of that serenity is faith. We might not be able to reduce the pace of change or eliminate the uncertainty, but one thing we can do is honor people’s individual faith, and provide an environment that strengthens it.
We have a special obligation to honor the faith of our patients in the hospital environment. There is a clear, compelling, and growing body of evidence that proves that faith and prayer can be vitally important in the healing process. Patients who pray, and those who have other people pray for them
(even if they do not know that they are being prayed for!), tend to have much better clinical outcomes, lower morbidity and mortality, fewer complications, and shorter lengths of stay.
“Faith helps mobilize a person’s defenses and assists in getting well, and optimism leads generally to better outcomes… Numerous studies in human’s show that we can die as a result of dire beliefs and a sense of overwhelming futility.”
Larry Dossey: Prayer Is Good Medicine
Gratitude is a central tenet of faith in most of the world’s spiritual traditions. People make sacrifices, they fast, they meditate, and they pray in part to express their gratitude for the blessings (past, present, and future) of their lives. Especially those of us living in America today have a great deal to be thankful for, when considered with people living in the rest of the world, or with Americans of previous generations.

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We are blessed in so many ways: unprecedented life expectancy, medical technology that is nothing short of miraculous, and living standards beyond the wildest dreams of people who lived in this country as recently as the Great Depression.
Be on the alert for taking things for granted; appreciate what you have rather than worrying about what you don’t have
What does the Lord’s Prayer say about tomorrow’s bread? That’s right – nothing. “Give us this day our daily bread.” The message is to be thankful for what you have and not resentful of what you do not have. As the great philosopher William James put it a hundred years ago, the more concerned somebody is with material acquisition, the less free their lives will be. And here’s another great paradox. Anybody who has ever stood on the edge of loss and ruin knows that at those times, you truly appreciate the little things. On the other hand, we tend to be much less appreciative when we have everything we need, and are focused on getting even more of what we want.
“Gratitude is a key element of leadership because gratitude means an open heart, a listening heart, a faith-filled heart. How could anyone be a leader without faith and gratitude in a Higher
Power or have a better future built on better ways?”
Laurie Beth Jones: Jesus, CEO
Simplicity is beautiful
Another paradox: the more complicated your life is, the more difficult it is to find the time for simple gratitude. Simplicity, on the other hand, fosters a grateful mindset. Partly because our lives have become so fragmented with many time demands, and so cluttered with many material things, we are seeing the blossoming of a movement toward simplicity. Whole series of books have been written on strategies for simplifying your life (by Elaine St. James, Sarah Ban Breathnach, Richard Foster, among others). One of the primary benefits of simplifying your life is that it does open your heart up to gratitude for what really matters.
“You may believe it would be impossible to support your lifestyle if you worked less, and at your current rate of consumerism, you might be right. But many people are finding that it’s possible to live well on less than they once thought. The solution is so basic: We don’t have to work more, we have to spend less.”
Elaine St. James: Simplify Your Work Life
Don’t worry, be happy
Worry is ingratitude to God, in advance, goes the old saying. An acute sense of gratitude is almost always coupled with optimistic expectation of future gratitude—for problems solved, wealth created, blessings delivered. This is a great time to remind people of the Thank God Ahead of Time philosophy that was covered with Core Action Value #4, Perseverance.
“Once we begin to resolve our fears, we will create miracles. Miracles are not just supernatural events such as parting waters or levitation. Miracles are any and every act of love and forgiveness. These miracles, these everyday acts of love, are occurring all around us; we just haven’t recognized them yet.”
Robert Roskind: In the Spirit of Business

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Gratitude is the platform from which hope arises
When all else fails, there is always hope. No matter how bad things seem to be, you can always hope for the best. And unlike knowing or believing, you do not have to justify hope – you just hope. If you are grateful for what’s right about your life, you are more likely to be hopeful for a brighter future than if you are bitter and resentful about what’s wrong with your life. In this sense, an attitude of gratitude can actually help shape your future; studies by Dr. Martin Seligman and others have shown that one of the most effective predictors of success, whether it’s a student taking a test or a salesperson making a sales call, is the expectation of success. In other words, hope can bring about results. Hope can bring about miracles.
“In order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”
David Ben-Gurion
Pick up a history book
Any time you find yourself feeling sorry for yourself, and having difficulty sparking a genuine sense of gratitude, pick up a history book and read about the lives of the people whose sacrifices made possible the lives we lead today – lives that they would have considered luxurious in the extreme. Read about the patriots who suffered through that horrible winter at Valley Forge; the slaves, indentured servants, and sweatshop workers on whose backs so much of this nation’s early economy was built; the pioneers who braved a harsh and unforgiving wilderness to settle the places that are now our national parks and retirement havens; the soldiers who gave their all to protect our way of life from the tyrants of Nazi
Germany and imperial Japan.
Imagine yourself taking your problem, whatever it is, to a nurse caring for dismembered young soldiers in a Civil War battlefield hospital tent, asking her to commiserate (co-miserate = be miserable together) with you because (fill in the blank: your paycheck is too small, your work is too hard, nobody appreciates you, whatever). If you are really being honest with yourself, in your mind’s eye you will see that nurse listen to your complaint for about half a second, then hand you a wad of bandaging, point to the most recent casualty to be brought in lying there moaning and bleeding on the ground, and be told to get to work.
As you open your eyes to the reality of the warm and safe room in which you are sitting far from danger and privation, you will almost certainly feel a sense of gratitude for living when and where you do. And at that point, you should take the advice of our imaginary nurse and get to work – on something worth doing.
Optimism is the spark plug for hope
In his book Learned Optimism, Dr. Seligman showed that optimistic people were more successful, more resilient, and healthier than pessimistic people, and that they were less prone to anxiety, depression, or physical illness. One of the most important differences between optimistic and pessimistic people,
Seligman found, was in how they view the problems of their life. The pessimists tend to internalize their troubles, and view them as permanent, pervasive, and personal. Optimists, on the other hand, view their troubles as being temporary, specific, and external. And whereas optimists would routinely argue with their own negative self talk, and dispute self-blaming interpretations of failure or discouragement, pessimists tend to submissively accept the most self-limiting interpretations. The good news, Seligman shows with multiple scientific studies, is that somebody can learn how to be more optimistic and that in doing so they can change the results they achieve in life.

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“Optimists consistently overestimate their ability. Optimists have a set of self-serving illusions that enable them to maintain good cheer and health in a universe essentially indifferent to their welfare… Good therapy for depression may entail bolstering a set of benign illusions.”
Martin Seligman in an interview with Omni
Carrying around a grudge against someone else is like emotional cancer; it has been likened to drinking poison yourself in order to hurt somebody else. The more you are carrying around anger, hatred, vengefulness, and other negative emotions from the past, the more difficult it will be to experience a strong sense of faith in your current world. Instead of living with gratitude and peace in the present, you are shackled to the dead weight of the past. Not only that, you contribute to the illusion that you, personally, are the center of the universe – the judge and the jury responsible for the conviction and punishment (at least in your own mind day after day after day) of those you perceive to be guilty for having harmed you in some way. Forgiveness can be the ultimate liberation, one which opens the door to a stronger and more enduring faith.
“The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world.”
Harold S. Kushner: When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Forgiveness is sometimes a choice, sometimes a gift
Whether we forgive or continue to hate is a choice, albeit sometimes a difficult choice. It is a choice to live in the present and look with joy towards the future, not to remain bound by the past, and haul the dead weight of ancient anger behind us as we trudge toward tomorrow. It is a choice to stop seeing ourselves as victims, and to take control of our emotions and circumstances. As the ancient book of
Chinese wisdom I-Ching tells us, hatred is a chain that binds us to the object of our hatred, forever preventing us to be free.
It is also true, however, that there are times when that choice, the choice to forgive, is simply too difficult. Much as we may want to, we cannot bring ourselves to forgive those who have caused us pain.
As Kurtz and Ketcham say in The Spirituality of Imperfection, in such cases forgiveness is not so much a choice as it is a gift of grace. One practical strategy for requesting this gift of grace is to actually pray for the success of the person who hurt you. At first, the prayers might not (probably will not) feel terribly sincere, but if you make yourself continue uttering them, you will eventually begin to break through the wall of ice.
“Pride is at the root of much of our unforgiveness. Because pride can prevent of from forgiving, excessive pride is often a characteristic of the unforgiving person. That person believes, ‘I’m far more superior to the person who hurt me. I don’t need him (or her), so I don’t need to forgive.’”
Goldie Bristol: When it’s Hard to Forgive
Forgiveness is superior to vengeance
In any organization, there will be disagreements, and feelings will be bruised. Small grievances may fester, and grudges can be carried for quite a long time. This sort of negative energy inhibits smooth operations and can lead to counterproductive infighting. Creating a culture of understanding and

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Jackie Pflug, author of Miles to Go Before I Sleep, was a speaker at one of our Never Fear, Never Quit conferences. Jackie had been shot in the head by a terrorist during an ill-fated hijacking, and spent years trying to regain normal functionality. Even years after the conference, people still remark upon the incredible peace and joy that Jackie exuded from the stage. The most important step she took in liberating herself emotionally from this tragic and traumatic event, she later told me, was forgiving the men who had treated her so brutally.
“Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility. Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions. If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance – it comes to be interpreted as not caring.”
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum: The Spirituality of Imperfection
To forgive does not mean to forget
Forgiveness does not mean that you condone wrong doing. Forgiveness does not mean that you will not grieve over past injuries or losses. Forgiveness does not mean that you might not be hurt again.
Forgiveness does not change the reality of the past, but rather the emotional meaning you give to the past.
“What can modern leaders infer from Lincoln’s issuance of so many pardons? Is there a lesson to be learned here? It is, in part, that by being compassionate and kind rather than malicious or vengeful, a leader will make fewer enemies for himself and his organization and will thereby create more supporters, more dedicated ‘soldiers’ to aid in the overall corporate mission. For each man Lincoln pardoned, he returned a loyal veteran to the military to carry on the struggle for preservation of the Union.”
Donald T. Phillips: Lincoln on Leadership
Genuine acceptance entails prospective forgiveness
Assume good faith and expecting the best from others, and giving them the benefit of the doubt when you don’t see it? To be a Dionarap (the word paranoid spelled backwards) means to engage in prospective forgiveness, to not be angry when bad things happen. To get the chip off your shoulder and to flow more easily through life. Even to forgive people for things they never did (how many of us waste emotional energy mentally thrashing somebody else for the things they might do). One caveat: prospective forgiveness does not mean to be stupid or naive. As Mohammed said, trust in God, but tie your camel.
“If we cannot forgive, we end up crucifying ourselves on the very cross we construct for our scapegoats. Our hate will be the hatred in ourselves that we have repressed, and that hatred of others masking our own self-hatred will continue to crucify us in their name.”
Michael H. Crosby: The Seven Last Words
Move from tolerance to respect

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In the narrowest sense of the word, tolerance means to simply put up with something you don’t particularly like – to tolerate it. Genuine toleration, however, entails real respect – the ability and the willingness to respect people despite, even because of, their differences.
“The error-embracing leader does not fear risk. He or she takes valuable lessons from mistakes, using the learning opportunities they offer, and is skeptical of reports that are too perfect and optimistic. Self-forgiveness, which is implied in accepting your own mistakes, is a key nutrient of renewal. And the self-forgiving leader can extend that tolerance to others.”
John R. O’Neil: The Paradox of Success
Forgiveness begins with yourself and ends with God
The first person we all need to forgive is our own self. Then we need to forgive parents, previous employers, friends and enemies, and any others who might may have harmed us in the past. Finally, we might need to forgive God.
In The Spirituality of Imperfection, Kurtz and Ketcham tell a story of an old man who every New Year would make two lists: one recorded the sins he had committed during the year, and the second recorded bad things that had happened to him over which he had no control. Then he would make a deal with
God: if God would forgive him for all his sins, he would forgive God for all the bad things that had happened to him which had not been his fault.
“There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done – all you need is love.”
The Beatles
Love can be considered to be an outer reflection of inner faith. Although linked in the popular mind with romance, love is actually something much deeper, more profound, and more powerful. Love and everything that goes with it—loyalty, respect, caring, supportiveness—motivates people like nothing else. In military circles, it is well known that soldiers do not fight for flag and country, they fight for the comrade with whom they share a foxhole. Love is like gravity – it brings people together.
“Good management is largely a matter of love. Or if you’re uncomfortable with that word, call it caring, because proper management involves caring for people, not manipulating them... You as a manager must trust people to do their work. You must take them at face value and let them know you believe what they say and you believe that they will do what they say they’ll do.”
James A. Autry: Love and Profit
Love is not a gushy emotion, it’s hard work
In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defined love as: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose for nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Peck goes on to emphasize that love is a relationship in which both parties evolve (note that in this regard, the definition is similar to that of transforming leadership, which we will cover in the next Core Action Value). He also says that the word
“will” means more than desire, but desire that has been translated into action. Genuine love is not something you fall into, he says, but rather a decision to make a commitment, “whether or not the loving feeling is present.”

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“The common tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love allows people all manner of selfdeception. An alcoholic man, whose wife and children are desperately in need of his attention at that very moment may be sitting in a bar with tears in his eyes, telling the bartender, ‘I really love my family…’ But because true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or…it is correct to say, ‘love is as love does.’”
M. Scott Peck: The Road Less Traveled
You increase love by giving it away
In her book A Simple Path, Mother Teresa wrote that the greatest disease in the West was not some physical illness, but rather a lack of love. “We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair and hopelessness is love.” The absence of love, she said, is a spiritual poverty that is exacerbated by our obsession with material possessions, having fun, and egoistic thinking.
Norman Vincent Peale used to play a game with himself in which he would shoot “sparks of love” at complete strangers. He may or may not have actually brightened their day (he insisted that was often the case), but one thing is certain, each time he did it he felt better himself. A hug is a great metaphor, because the only way you can get a hug is by giving one away.
Love in the workplace
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, most business leaders believed that love had no place in the workplace. Whatever they said, the reality was that business was seen as left-brain, rational, numbers-driven, and non-emotional. It is now increasingly clear that not only is this emotionally harmful for the people who work in that organization, it is also bad for business. To run a successful organization, love may not be all you need, but it is certainly something you need.
Southwest Airlines is one of the most successful corporations in American history. At Southwest, they genuinely believe in the power of love (they fly out of Love field in Dallas, their stock market ticker symbol is LUV). At a meeting that was held to discuss the very survival of Southwest during a serious downturn in the Texas economy, Colleen Barrett, then VP for People and now co-CEO, listened to the other assembled executives then said: “The most critical issue we face is not pricing, costs, or the dismal state of the economy; it is whether we have the courage and the will to keep love alive.”
“Southwest encourages its people to conduct business in a loving manner. Employees are expected to care about people and act in ways that affirm their dignity and worth. The company understands that when people feel loved they develop a greater capacity to love others.
Employees bear out this belief every day in the kindness, patience, and forgiveness they extend to each other and their customers.”
Kevin and Jackie Freiberg: Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for
Business and Personal Success
Sometimes love is tough
As we shall see in the next Core Action Value on leadership, one thing effective leaders do is help followers raise their own standards and expectations. Love may be gentle and kind, but it can also on occasion be tough – holding people accountable for their commitments and actions, and their attitudes.
Of course, the one person in any of our lives who is most in need of tough love is probably the person we see when looking in the mirror.

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“The laws of love differ from the laws of arithmetic. Love hoarded dwindles, but love given grows.
If we give all our love, we will have more left than he who saves some.”
John Marks Templeton: The Humble Approach
In his classic 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote: “How can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that no matter what one’s difficulties for the moment appear to be, one’s life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust?”
Extensive research has shown that spiritual faith plays a large role in health and healing. Beyond this, especially in today’s turbulent world, effective leadership is first and foremost spiritual leadership.
People with a strong sense of spiritual faith tend to be more highly service oriented, to have more solid belief in themselves and in their dreams, to be more resilient in the face of adversity, and to be more committed to the success of fellow team members. One of the healthcare leader’s key challenges is to cultivate an environment that honors spiritual faith, while simultaneously honoring each person’s individual beliefs.
Love is reflected in spiritual tolerance
One of the great challenges for spiritual leadership in any organization is to create an environment that honors and encourages individual spiritual beliefs, without in any way creating an environment in which people feel that certain religious beliefs are being imposed upon them. It is important as a CVC-T that you understand it is not your role to prescribe to anybody what they should believe, but simply to encourage them to strengthen their own beliefs. It is your role to ask questions, not to give answers.
“We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation, by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek such an explanation in the first place. If we wish to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of ‘understanding’ from that of rational explanation... I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama... We are truly meant to be here.”
Paul Davies: The Mind of God
The power of prayer
Prayer has played a central role in virtually every spiritual and religious tradition of the world. While people from different traditions pray in different ways and perhaps with different ends in mind, the goal is the same: to create a sense of connection and communication with a power larger than the self. For our purposes with The Twelve Core Action Values, prayer has potential significance in three areas: the health and healing of our patients, the spiritual well-being of our organizations, and our own personal success and happiness.
“And so I urge you: carry on an ongoing conversation with God about the daily stuff of life, a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. For now, do not worry about ‘proper’ praying, just talk to
God. Share your hurts, share your sorrows, share your joys--freely and openly. God listens in compassion and love, just like we do when our children come to us. He delights in our presence.

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When we do this, we will discover something of inestimable value. We will discover that by praying, we learn to pray.”
Richard J. Foster: Prayer
Faith and healing
There is a great deal of research evidence that people who pray, and people who are prayed for (even if they do not know they are being prayed for) are healthier and recover more quickly from illness. While the reason for this can certainly be debated, the evidence itself is virtually incontrovertible. As Dr. Dale
A. Matthews wrote in his book The Faith Factor: Proof of the Healing Power of Prayer:
As much as or more than any other factor measured by epidemiologists, religious involvement appears to promote health and well-being virtually from cradle to grave. Whatever life challenges we face, research shows that we will face them better if we have authentic belief and practice as cornerstones of our lives.
Thus, it can be appropriate for caregivers to encourage patients in their own spiritual faith, to create a welcoming environment for their prayers, and perhaps if they feel comfortable in doing so, even to offer to pray with them.
Caveat: This does not mean prescribing prayer, much less imposing hour own religious views on your patient. Furthermore, while it might be appropriate to ask the patient if they wish to be prayed with and for, the caregiver must be quite cautious about praying for the patient without his or her knowledge or permission. None other than Dr. Dossey himself, in his book Be Careful What You Pray For… You
Just Might Get It writes, “the problem is, we usually think we know what’s best for others, and we waste no time telling God how to fix the person we’re praying for. But any time we’re tempted to pray for the destiny of someone else, we ought to examine our motives. We may discover that we have our own wishes uppermost, not theirs.” For example, a doctor might pray for the recovery of a patient as a reflection of his skill, not necessarily because it’s in the best interest of the patient.
“We are all children of one God. We’re all here to learn to grow and to fulfill our destiny, and when we’ve learned our lessons we are allowed to graduate. We have to learn to understand rather than to judge, to give and receive, to love without expectations and to practice what is so beautifully said in Gibran’s Work Is Love Made Visible.”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Working It Through
Faith and prayer in the workplace
In recent years there has been growing interest in the role of faith and prayer in the workplace. Such national business magazines as Fortune and Business Week have run cover stories on the subject. In some organizations, board meetings are commenced with a prayer, and a growing number of executives are “coming out of the closet” to talk about the relationship between their own spiritual life and the organizations they lead (and pray for). In her book Jesus CEO, Laurie Beth Jones writes: “Imagine what kind of management this nation would have if CEOs spent as much time mulling and praying over their staffers’ growth as they did over their budget reports … Leaders and managers often spend too much energy trying to make the numbers dance. Anyone can tell you that numbers don’t dance. Only people do.”
“This understanding [of non-local spiritual connectedness] may lead to a transformation in the way we pray. No longer will we pray incessantly for things, such as our health, but our prayers

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Page 91 of 176 will be predominately prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving-our proper response on realizing that the world, at heart, is more glorious, benevolent, and friendlier than we have recently supposed.”
Larry Dossey, M.D., Healing Words
Faith and prayer for the individual
In what has been called “the age of anxiety” for many people prayer can be a compass and a rudder. In fact, the best advice anyone might take from any of the many books that have been written about prayer is in the book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard J. Foster. He says that prayer should be “an ongoing conversation with God about the daily stuff of life … Share your hurts, share your sorrows, share your joys – freely and openly. God listens in compassion and love, just like we do when our children come to us.” Again, people can argue about whether you actually talking with God, or simply caring on an inner communion with your own conscience. What cannot be argued is that for many people, prayer is an important source of strength in adversity and courage for achievement.
“There is only one god, and He is god to all; therefore it is important that everyone is seen as equal before god. I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, a Catholic become a better Catholic.”
Mother Teresa: A Simple Path
Listening for answers
Finally, don’t overlook the listening component of prayer. In Core Action Value #3, Awareness we covered the role of reflection, meditation, and mindfulness for personal peace and enlightenment. If somebody believes enough to ask a question in prayer, does it not stand to reason that they will perceive the answer if they are paying attention? As comedian Lily Tomlin put it, why is it that when someone is on their knees with their hands folded and talking we call it prayer, but when they say that
God is talking back to them we call it schizophrenia?
“Of course there were lots of different religions, and Anna was never really certain that somebody might not suddenly find another with one more holy day to cut out of the week, so that she would have less time than ever to play with her friends. But it didn’t really matter when you saw them all as beams of the one light. As Mum said, you are born into one religion because you have no choice, but you die with them all or nothing.”
Fynn: Anna, Mister God, and the Black Knight
Expect a miracle
Every great accomplish was once an impossible dream requiring nothing less than a miracle for its fulfillment. We have all been in desperate straits where it seemed our only salvation would lie in a miracle, and somehow survived. It is well for us to periodically look back on those situations where we were blessed with such miracles, and to look ahead to the future with hope and expectations and expect additional miracles. In all the miracles he performed in the Bible, Jesus often said two things: 1) It was not his magic but rather the faith of the person being healed that created the miracle; and 2) That whatever he did, any of us could do if we had sufficient faith. Whatever one’s religious beliefs, faith can be a powerful source of courage and optimism, which in turn creates self-fulfilling prophesies masquerading as miracles. It is important, however, to understand what a miracle is and what it is not:

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“A miracle is not a magic trick. It is the bringing about of a change that would previously have been thought impossible. A miracle is not an event. It is a process. A miracle is not a gift. It is something earned through hard work and painful introspection. A miracle is not free. It comes with strings attached, and if you’re not willing to share it, you will be unable to keep it. In truth the greatest miracle is this: the miracle of profound self-transformation. Many of the miracles recorded in history are simply metaphors for this simple truth, that we each have the power in our own hands to create the miracle of becoming the person we were meant to be.”
Joe Tye: Never Fear, Never Quit: A Story of Courage and Perseverance
Expect a miracle, but don’t give God a deadline
I love stories about entrepreneurs, writers, and anyone else who perseveres through the darkest parts of their own stories – who can remain true and keep their balance on the knife edge between triumph and disaster for long enough to reach a broader and more generous path in the next chapter.
Unfortunately, sometimes the book gets closed too soon. John Kennedy Toole was a brilliant young writer who became seriously despondent when his first novel garnered a shower of rejection letters (as first novels usually do). In his despair, he took his own life. His novel A Confederacy of Dunces went onto be published, win a Pulitzer Prize, and sell millions of copies. The young writer’s dreams all came true, but only after he had pulled the plug on God and closed the book on himself.
Expect a miracle, but don’t give God a deadline. When all else seems to have failed, faith is the fuel that can keep you turning the pages, one after another. The leader who has, and can instill in others, a higher sense of faith, brings to the organization a powerful and sustainable source of competitive advantage in a tough marketplace, and more important, gives people a precious gift that will help them persevere through the dark days that inevitably intervene en route to glorious success. As Art Berg wrote in his book Some Miracles Take Time, the miracle is not what happens but rather what happens inside of us as we are waiting for the miracle.
Take-Home Exercise
For the next month, have people every morning upon waking and/or every evening at the end of the day, make a list of at least ten things for which they are grateful. Have them be especially alert for opportunities to take things about which they might have been complaining (my back relay hurts) and turn them into a source of gratitude (“thank goodness for pain relieve medication”). In addition, encourage them to “thank God ahead of time” for the as-of-yet unseen miracles that they would love to see happen in their lives. Finally, ask them to think about the gratitude for the forgiveness they have given and received, for the love they have given and received, and for the strength of their spiritual faith.
“Eastern thought – and more generally, mystical thought – provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science; a conception of the world in which man’s scientific discoveries can be in perfect harmony with his spiritual aims and religious beliefs. The two basic themes of this conception are the unity and interrelation of all phenomena and the intrinsically dynamic nature of the universe.”
Fritjof Capra: The Tao of Physics

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A sense of purpose transforms a job into a mission, and it converts mere work into a meaningful achievement. No leader ever became great because greatness was called for in a job description; leaders become great because of the greatness of their mission. A sense of purpose is what brings meaning to work and fulfillment to achievement. It is also the glue that bonds together the members of a team, and creates the mutual trust and teamwork that are necessary to accomplish important goals. Purpose ties back to Core Action Value #1, Authenticity, because the work that we choose to do, and the attitude and commitment that we bring to that work, is one of the most important factors in creating the person that we are to become.
For the organization, a strong sense of purpose is also imperative to success. In the world of healthcare, we often hear the phrase “No Margin, No Mission” to connote the fact that no organization can for long fulfill its mission if it spends more than it makes. That is true, but it’s also true in reverse:
“No Mission, No Margin.” Especially in healthcare, it’s important to remember that it’s more than a business – it really is, or should be, an overarching purpose. If we do a great job of taking care of that purpose, the margin will usually take care of itself. And the organizational sense of purpose is founded on the purposeful commitment of the people who work there. As the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said: “The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward one is small or of little worth. The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth, and all length.”
“Your job may be and ideally should be part of your mission, but a mission is always larger than a job… To confine the entire sum of your personality and gifts within the boundaries of your current job is to put yourself in the precarious position of losing your sense of identity when your job changes… Your mission is always bigger than your current role.”
Laurie Beth Jones: The Path
Ice-Breaker Exercise
Here’s a great way to launch this session: slowly walk around the room and ask people the question
“What do you do?” After eight or ten responses, stop and say loudly and with feeling, “Can’t you just
feel the enthusiasm in this room! You all must really love what you do!!!”
People will feel a bit sheepish, because most of us tend to respond to that question almost as if we’re embarrassed by the answer – often using the most unjust word in the English language to describe ourselves, as in “I’m just a (fill in the blank).” Explain why this question can be so disempowering; based on how you answer it, the other person will automatically make a whole range of assumptions about your personality, education, ambition, social status, etc. That, of course, is not right, it is not fair, but it is the way the world works.

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Offer suggestions for how to answer it in a way that is more self-nurturing and self-empowering. One thing I have found particularly helpful is to actually have people write out a creative response to that question, and then one-by-one to come up to the front of the room and answer the question in front of their peers, who critique the performance each in his or her turn.
Were it not for aspiration – or ambition – there would be no one taking this course. In fact, were it not for the fact that humans naturally aspire to make things better, we would all still be hunting and gathering. Aspiration means aspiring to personal growth – to become the person you are meant to be, and it means aspiring to making your corner of the world a better place.
In his wonderful little book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote that “work is love made visible.” Purposedriven people are positive thinkers who expect the best from themselves and from others, and who are willing to make any contribution necessary to the successful achievement of their purpose. The attitude that you bring to your work is in many respects the most important choice that you make on a day-today basis. That choice defines the excellence with which you do your work, the perceptions of those around you (patients, co-workers, and others), the professional and career goals that you set for yourself, and whether you are happy and fulfilled or stressed-out, burned-out and put out.
See your work as the hammer and chisel with which you carve the statue of YOU
Have you ever thought about the fact that humans are the only species on earth born not knowing what to do with their lives? Every other animal is pre-programmed. Fish swim, bird fly, bees buzz, lions hunt, frogs croak, but humans have to think about what to make of their lives. In Core Action Value
#1, Authenticity, we spoke of visualizing your ideal character and then creating it. Thinking of the future “you” as a statue, the work that you choose to do, and the way that you choose to do it, becomes the hammer and the chisel with which you craft that statue. For most of us, finding our purpose in life comes as an evolutionary process, not as a sudden epiphany.
A central premise of the Bhagavad-Gitâ is that the wise person works for the joy of the work itself, without attachment to outcomes, results, or rewards. In this way, one surmounts the ego and grows in wisdom and awareness, while setting an example that helps to lead others along the right path.
Similarly, the I Ching admonishes us to do each task for its own sake, making it perfect, without worrying about pay or praise. This attention to the work is the foundation of excellence that ends up bringing about the pay raises and the praise which cannot be obtained by direct effort.
“To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.”
John Dewey
Inoculate yourself against Dilbert Disease and avoid the downward spiral of victimhood
One of the most popular cartoon strips of the past decade is Dilbert by Scott Adams. Adams truly is a genius, and in addition to being funny, has put his finger on much of what is wrong with corporate
America today. Unfortunately, however, far too many American workers have Dilbert Disease – the negative and cynical attitude in which work is seen as a necessary evil to make enough money to pay for the house and the hobbies. Dilbert is also the mother of all neurotics – he hates his job, but his biggest

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Page 96 of 176 fear is that he will lose that very job. That is truly neurotic! Dilbert Disease is often the end result of a downward spiral of insidious loser attitudes which goes as follows:
Self Pity: Feeling sorry for yourself because the work is too hard, the hours are too long, they pay is too low, the help is inadequate, and on and on, which leads to…
Learned Helplessness: Feeling un-empowered to do anything about the problems that are behind the self-pity which eventually and inevitably metastasizes into…
Blame Game: The perception of helplessness leads to a need to blame others for not fixing the problems, which finally hits bottom in…
Victim Syndrome: The terminal state of Dilbert Disease. It’s hard to have a sense of mission if you feel like a victim; on the other hand, seeing your work as a mission is one of the surest ways to overcome the symptoms of Dilbert Disease and empower yourself for success and happiness.
Be an energy faucet, not an energy drain
Attitude is contagious. We’ve all had the experience of having someone walk into a meeting room and their mere presence literally sucks the energy right out of it. We’ve also had experiences where somebody has stepped in and with the power of a smile energized the whole room. This latter is quite often the symptom of someone who sees their work not merely as a job, but as a mission. Determine to be an energy faucet, and never an energy drain.
“There are no menial jobs, there are only menial attitudes.”
William Bennett: The Book of Virtues
Love the work more than the job
James Autry, author of the book Love and Profit: the Art of Caring Leadership and a number of other books on business and leadership, once wrote that in his career as an executive, he had needed to fire people who’d loved their jobs (the title, the paycheck, the status, etc.), but that he had never had to fire anybody who loved the work itself. You might ask your listeners to take a moment of introspection and honestly ask themselves where they find their greatest joy – in the job or in the work.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a nurse who worked in hospital intensive care unit. All she could do was complain about budget cuts, paperwork, productivity standards, managed care, and all the other things that prevented her from doing what brought her into nursing in the first place: providing hands on patient care. I asked why she didn’t’ quit and go to work at the hospice right down the street, where she could provide patient care without the bureaucratic encumbrances. She responded that she couldn’t afford a pay cut. Life is just too short to be trading your precious and limited time on this earth doing work you despise in order to maintain a certain style of living when, with perhaps a few (probably temporary) compromises in your expenses, you could be doing work that is rewarding and fulfilling.

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Rather than drifting from job to job, in search of greater pay, status, or security, you will be both happier and more successful if you pursue the work—or maybe even create your own work—that helps you fulfill your mission in life. The linkage between mission and work cannot be overemphasized. For many people, work is the canvas upon which they create one of the most important sources of meaning in their lives. Most of us spend more of our waking hours at work than any other single activity -- including those which, like family and personal growth, we tell others are more important to us.
“Too often, people chug along aimlessly while they are asleep at the wheel. Years later, many are jolted awake only to find themselves at a dead end, spinning their wheels in a job they hate.
Others realize, too late, that their batteries went dead long ago and they can’t get a jump start in a new direction.”
Joan Lloyd: The Career Decisions Planner
Master the details
When someone purchases a McDonald’s franchise, they must attend Hamburger University. Here they learn how to run the business from the floor tiles up. Every detail is covered: from sanitation to cooking to customer service. I had my first real job (other than cutting grass and sacking groceries for tips) at a
McDonald’s in Rhode Island in 1968. The same person taught me how to flip and wrap hamburgers, polish chrome and police parking lots, and greet customers at the cash register: the owner. He had an assistant manager, but in our daily operations no detail slipped his attention. The people at that
McDonald’s formed one of the best-run, highest-performing operating teams I’ve ever been a part of.
During the Newport Cup races, when the line stretched all the way to the street, we ran, we shouted, we pushed and cajoled each other, and I’m sure we must have broken land speed records for getting burgers out the door. But you know what? It was fun and it was exhilarating!
It’s often said that successful people are willing to do the drudge work which the less successful disdain. As Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute writes in Business as a Calling, in addition to talent a real calling requires love of the detail and of the drudgery. “Long hours, frustrations, small steps forward, struggles: unless these too are welcomed with a certain joy, the claim to being called [to your work] has a hollow ring.” George Gilder writes in his book Recapturing the Spirit
of Enterprise:
Wealth usually comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring… Most people think they are above learning the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you [create wealth] not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.
Love all of the work, even the boring stuff
Every field of work has its elements of drudgery. One of the things that characterizes mission-driven people is that they are able to do the work that’s not fun with the same level of commitment as they do the work that is fun. In the old testament book that bears his name, Ecclesiastes was unable to find a sense of meaning in anything the world offered – wealth and comfort, travel and adventure, knowledge and wisdom – it all seemed meaningless, like dust in the wind. And what was it that finally brought meaning to his life? It was his work. Whatever your hand finds to do, he said, do with all your might.
“We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that one thing, at whatever the cost, must be attained.”

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Marie Curie
Purpose and patient-centered care
In the book Working With Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman cites studies that show a strong correlation between a high level of nurse burnout and patient dissatisfaction with the care they receive.
We can put kitchens and fountains on patient care units, treat people to music and massages, but if the staff are burned out, stressed out, cynical and bitter about the work, there will not be a patient-centered care environment.
“The best-kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than enjoy a pampered idleness.”
John W. Gardner: Excellence
Intentionality is the difference between wishful thinking and positive thinking: Wishful thinking is
hoping for something and waiting for someone else to make it happen for you; Positive thinking is
expecting something and making the personal commitment to do the work required to make it happen.
Identify your strengths, follow your bliss
“Follow your bliss” wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell in one of his most frequently quoted lines. In
Core Action Value #1, Authenticity, we talked about the importance of identifying strengths and passions. These are rarely reflected in job descriptions. You are not likely to see a hospital job description that includes writing poetry or cultivating roses. One element of creativity, however, is to find ways that you can bring those strengths and passions that bring spice to your life into your job, for example, for writing a poem for a patient or by sharing your roses with co-workers.
“As you can well imagine, it’s difficult to get your creative juices flowing if you’re always being practical, following rules, afraid to make mistakes, not looking into outside areas, or under the influence of any of the other mental locks.”
Roger Von Oech: A Whack on the Side of The Head
Know what puts you into a state of flow
According to Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a state of being so absorbed in the joy of the work itself that you are unconcerned about the opinions of other people, the potential for reward, the ultimate outcome of your work, or even the passage of time. That state, he says in his books Flow and Creativity, is one of the most intrinsically rewarding and motivating states of human existence. It is, he says, like being so totally absorbed in a great book that you forget everything else while you’re reading it. To a greater extent than many of us realized, being in that state of flow can be a choice. We can choose to disregard the critics and the nay-sayers, to put our doubts and worries on the back burner, and to give ourselves heart and soul to the work at hand.
There is an additional benefit to knowing the kind of work that puts you into a state of flow, the circumstances in which it happens, and how you feel while there, and that is it will help you get ahead

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Page 99 of 176 in the world. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins evaluated the handful of companies that in recent history have made the leap from acceptable to superlative performance. One of the things he found was that, without exception, they did not start by trying to be the best at what they happened to do, but rather to identify those things about which they were truly passionate, and then to be the best at doing those things. In other words, because they loved the work itself, because the work put them into that state of flow. It will be the same in your career – the more you are able to reach that state of intrinsic motivation that comes with flow, the more successful, the more fulfilled you will be.
“When you are completely caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.”
Rollo May
Look around (observe and network) and think by analogy
In Market Driven Healthcare, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger suggested that those of us in healthcare could learn a lot by studying – are you ready? – McDonald’s! – to learn about how they produce a product of such consistent (if not excellent) quality. One of the best ways to enhance your creativity is to do a better job of paying attention and looking for lesions by analogy. Hospitals are not in the entertainment business, but many have enhanced customer service by copying ideas from
Disney. You can also increase your creativity by networking—getting out of you usual circle of friends and contacts, getting to know new people, and asking them great questions—such as, “How do you guys do that?!”
“Self-improvement can take place in any of four directions: 1. Developing positive attitudes, habits, and skills. These include things like being constructive, the skill of effectiveness and the habit of contributing; 2. Reducing the domination of bad habits and attitudes such as laziness, selfishness, depression and intolerance; 3. Getting better at whatever it is (work, job, task) that you are doing; 4. Acquiring specific new skills.”
Edward De Bono: I Am Right You Are Wrong
Have a Bias for Action
In their landmark book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman listed “a bias for action” as one of eight characteristics of excellent companies. Today, Peters says that this one characteristic is the only one to have really stood the test of time. Most creative people do have a bias for action, and if you want to become more creative yourself, one way to do it is by acting sooner and faster on your ideas. In surgery residencies, the motto is often “see one, do one, teach one.” In the fast changing world of today, the most successful organizations will be those which experiment, build prototypes, try things, and keep what works and fix what doesn’t.
“Business (and public service in the public sector) ought to be about… service… growth… innovation. I.E., THAT DAMN DAY JOB SHOULD MATTER! IT S-H-O-U-L-D BE AIMED AT
CARING AND ATTENTIVENESS AND INCREASING HUMAN POTENTIAL (yours, mine, our colleagues’, our customers)… It is JOB NO. 1 for A-L-L bosses to damn well make sure that the day job is something that A-L-L of their employees can BRAG ABOUT to kids, spouses, neighbors, significant others.”
Tom Peters: The Circle of Innovation (emphasis in original)

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Do what you love and the money will follow (won’t it?)
Mention the book title Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow by Marsha Sinetar, and ask people if they agree. Ask if people can think of examples from today's world, (for example Mattie Stepanek, the young man with multiple sclerosis who wrote poetry to inspire himself and others, and ended up a New
York Times best-selling author). In many such cases, the individual in question did not set out to be successful, rich or famous – that was a serendipitous consequence of their pursuit of their passion.
When you start to see the job description as a floor and not as a ceiling, you will be astonished at the opportunities that open before you for creativity and pursuing your purpose.
Think long, act fast
Microsoft shocked the world when the company, seemingly in the blink of an eye, did a U-turn on its internet strategy. One day the company’s position was that the internet would be a sideshow not particularly relevant to Microsoft’s core business, and the next it was marching toward the web the way the way ants attack a picnic. Despite its apparent speed, the Microsoft action, was just the natural last step in a long process. Bill Gates did not wake up one morning with a sudden and unheralded epiphany that the internet was the future; rather, it was a rapid coalescing of many years of watching, listening, analyzing, and thinking. It’s the difference between gut feel and intuition.
Gut feel is an emotional reaction, the direction of which is primarily determined by inner conditions – ego, emotion, and ambition. Intuition, on the other hand, is the sudden gelling of an inchoate potpourri of facts and figures, observations and opinions into a coherent picture which prescribes a certain course of action. Unlike gut feel, intuition is outer-directed, operating independent of – and often in contradiction to – the inner-directed feel of the gut. Wise leaders learn to distinguish between gut and intuition, and to distrust the former and trust the latter.
“Because she deals with challenging and occasionally life-threatening conflicts, the owl places and extremely high value on discovering the truth. She knows that failure to discriminate between fact and fiction will make her vulnerable. Trying to block an imaginary punch or strike an imaginary target will inevitably lead to trouble. At best, illusion and distortion are expensive distractions; at worst, they can kill. If you want to perform with grace and fluidity, you must address things as they truly are.”
Frank Rivers: The Way of the Owl
Be in it for the long haul
In his book Management of the Absurd, Richard Farson wrote that lost causes are the only one’s worth fighting for. By that he meant the most important wars cannot be won. Think of the war on poverty, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. This does not mean they should not be fought. Quite to the contrary. What it does mean is that they require an exceptional long term commitment, even when it’s frustrating, even when (especially when) it feels hopeless. When Mother Theresa was asked why she spent so much time caring for the poor when she knew there was no chance she’d be successful at eliminating poverty, she snapped back that she was not there to be successful, she was there to be faithful. This implicitly recognizes the fact that the greatest beneficiary when someone makes a commitment to make a contribution is frequently that individual.
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
Helen Keller

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One of the things that makes healthcare special is that it is the quintessential service industry, one in which people really make a difference in the line of others. For the purpose-driven person, it’s not a matter of “what’s in it for me,” but rather an understanding that what is in it for you will be substantially determined by what you create in it for others.
“One of the central troubles that human beings fear is the waste of their potential. Again and again the sadness that people long to share with their friends or counselors is a sense that we’re going nowhere.”
John Carmody: How to Handle Trouble
Be part of a cause that is bigger than you
Here is a paradox that has been put forth in most spiritual traditions: to find yourself you must lose yourself, to save your life you must lose your life. In part what that means is that people who connect themselves to a bigger cause than their own success and welfare “lose themselves” to the mission, but in a larger sense “find themselves” through the work and the relationships involved with the mission.
When you stop thinking about yourself (ego) and devote yourself to a bigger cause, a truly heroic self transformation (soul) can take place.
Contribution is the Antidote to Stress
Psychologists tell us that hard work and long hours are less stressful than the feeling that one’s potential is not being achieved, or that they are not making a contribution. In his classic book Man’s
Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote that the survivors from Hitler’s concentration camps tended to be those who could find a larger sense of meaning in the experience, and who had a commitment to surviving so they could make a contribution. In the world of nursing, it is hard to imagine any nurse who every worked harder or under more stressful conditions than Florence Nightingale during the
Crimean War or Clara Barton during the Civil War, yet both went on to make substantial contributions to healthcare and to the profession of nursing.
“The highest reward for a person’s work is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”
John Ruskin
Make a commitment to the mission
In her book Making a Living While Making a Difference: A Guide to Careers With a Conscience, Melissa
Everett provides a wonderful discussion on commitment. “One of the most frightening aspects of commitment,” she says, “is the specter of success... Because unconditional commitment to one’s work is powerful, it is also terrifying -- so terrifying that many of us screen it out of our awareness at all costs.” True commitment, which she distinguishes from externally-imposed duty, includes the following components:
It comes from within, articulated by what’s important in your life.
Keeping such a commitment offers a path for self-expression and actualization. It may require delay of gratification, but not suppression of your essential self.

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It is grounded in a higher purpose than personal satisfaction; it entails the desire to leave a legacy.
Everett says that commitment is not just a state of mind, but requires a consistent pattern of behavior.
It’s not just caring, but cultivating the skills necessary to effectively act upon that commitment.
“Thinking about your values helps in your search to find purpose and meaning in your life and work. Setting priorities requires you to think more deeply about what is important in your life.
Through identifying and evaluating your values, you can get to know yourself better. With every decision you make, no matter how small or large, you are making a statement about what matters to you.”
David P. Helfand: Career Change
Purpose is a “we” sport, not a “me” sport. Especially in the complex world of today, it takes a team to complete a mission every bit as much as it takes a village to raise a child. As reflected in the following book excerpt, one thing that characterizes a great team is that team members are committed to each other:
Be purposeful in all dimensions of life
Balance means 360-degree purposefulness. That does not necessarily mean that you have to always be serious about everything – quite to the contrary. Balance might mean being jovial and spontaneous in the workplace, and being serious and disciplined when pursuing a hobby as a landscaper.
Integrate your work and your life rather than striving to balance the two
Leadership expert James A. Autry says that after a career of asking himself how he could balance his life and his work, he realized he’d been asking the wrong question, and that the right question was how could he integrate the two. This makes for a great discussion question—how can you integrate your life and your work rather than trying to keep them in separate boxes? For example, if you are a manager working on a budget, you could ask your child to double check your figures, thereby giving him or her the opportunity to feel useful, learn something about what you do, and gain some experience at a real world skill that will come in quite handy later in life.
“Our fulfillment as human beings lies not in our jobs but in the whole picture of our lives – in our inner sense of what life is about, our connectedness with others and our yearning for meaning and purpose. By separating work and wages we bring together the different parts of ourselves and remember that our real work is just to live our values as best we know how…
When we are whole, we don’t need to try to consume our way to happiness.”
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin: Your Money or Your Life
Choose work that supports your life priorities
People obviously need to make a living, and are not always able to choose work that would be that work they would do if every job paid the same and had the same social status. But especially over time, we can work our way toward the sort of work that is most authentic. And in doing so, we reinforce our sense of purpose in almost every other dimension of life.

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“The choice of a work community defines our lives and identities more powerfully than our choice of a suburb or a senator or even a house or a vacation destination. Yet many people look on a job only as a necessary evil, the unavoidable means of achieving a desired standard of living. they don’t expect principled management, just a generous paycheck. They don’t expect to get meaning and spiritual sustenance from a job, just to spend by far the greatest part of their waking hours working at it.”
Frederick F. Reichheld: The Loyalty Effect
Enthusiasm is essential to a balance life
“Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Enthusiasm is the catalyst that transforms a mere job into a mission, that transforms mere work into a calling.
Without enthusiasm, no organization will ever achieve optimal quality in the production and promotion of its products and services, in its customer relationships, and in creating a culture and environment that foster employee loyalty. And no individual will have a great life.
“When I work with a top manager, one of the first things I look for is how involved he or she is in the over-all workings of the organization. If there’s a passion and an intensity, I know the manager cares and wants the organization to be the best.”
Ken Blanchard (with Don Shula): Everyone’s a Coach
Take-Home Exercise: Have people write a personal mission statement
Encourage your participants to write for themselves a Personal Mission Statement. Emphasize that there is no right or wrong way to do this. A Personal Mission Statement can be as simple as one sentence (“my mission is to bring joy and light into the lives of others”), or it can be a page long with sections for career, family, and other dimensions of life. It is important to note that in doing this, the process of asking questions and thinking about passions and strengths and interests is far more important than the finished product.
In fact, there might never be a finished product (my own mission statement has been “under construction” for eight years, and I anticipate continuing to modify it for the rest of my life). There are lots of great books on how to do this, several of which are included in the book selections of the resource section. The Path by Lori Beth Jones is simple yet very effective; the book First Things First by
Stephen Covey and colleagues is primarily about managing time and priorities, but in that book
Appendix 1 includes lots of great questions that can help with writing a mission statement.
“The puzzle of figuring out what your Mission in life is, will likely take some time. It is not a problem to be solved in a day and a night. It is a learning process which has steps to it, much like the process by which we all learned to eat... Your first mission here on Earth is... to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived... Secondly, once you have begun doing that in an earnest way, is to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guidance of God’s spirit within you and around you... [Y]our third mission here on
Earth is one which is uniquely yours, and that is: a) to exercise that Talent which you particularly came to Earth to use--your greatest gift, which you most delight to use; b) in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you the most; c) and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.”
Richard Nelson Bolles: What Color Is Your Parachute?

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Jonathan Swift said that vision is the art of seeing the invisible, and that is a distinctly human quality.
Humans are the only species of animal that have the capacity to see what is not there, and on the basis of that vision to bring about an altered reality. Unfortunately, many of us have forgotten how to see the invisible. Fortunately, that talent can be restored, with a bit of practice along each of the four
Performance Cornerstones. Your vision of today is the single most important determinant of your future reality. Don’t cheat yourself by pursuing anemic dreams or inauthentic goals.
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Ice-Breaker Exercise
Begin by asking people what would be the first thing they would do if they were traveling to a distant city they’d never before visited. The answer, of course, is get a road map and plot out a route. This is a simple metaphor for creating a memory of the future: the more clearly you can see something in your mind, the more certain it is you will take the right steps to make it happen in the world outside.
One way to really get people’s attention is by asserting that they can remember the future more clearly and more accurately than they can remember the past. Illustrate the point by asking people to remember their second birthday in every detail, and to raise their hands once they have that picture clear in their minds. They will look at you like you are crazy. Then ask them to think about where they will be this time the next day—what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, who they’re with etc., and to raise their hand when that picture is clear in their mind. Most people will raise their hands, making the point that vision can be a much more powerful force than memory.
Of course, most of us can visualize where we will be tomorrow because it will be the same place we were yesterday, and we will be doing much the same work as we were doing yesterday, with pretty much the same people that we were with yesterday. The real art of vision, and a quality that all successful people share in common, is being able to look out to the future and see something different than a simple extrapolation of the past, then to take the steps necessary to make that vision a reality. Every great accomplishment was once an impossible dream; nothing great was ever accomplished without first having been somebody’s impossible dream.
“If thinking big accomplishes so much, why doesn’t everyone think that way? I’ve been asked that question many times. Here I believe is the answer. All of us, more than we recognize, are products of the thinking around us. And much of that thinking is little, not big. All around you is an environment that is trying to tug you, trying to pull you down to second class street.”
David Schwartz: The Magic of Thinking Big

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One of the most important choices we each make on a moment-to-moment basis is what we pay attention to. Indeed, the precious and irreplaceable nature of attention is what underlies the phrase
“pay attention,” because you can only spend each moment’s attention once. It is often said that time is your most precious resource, but that is not true. Everybody has the same amount of time, and it cannot be killed, it cannot be saved. Your most precious resource is not time, it is attention – how you choose to use your time. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time; it cannot be multi-tasked.
Your choices regarding how you allocate your attention will determine whether you see the best of times or the worst of times when you look around you; the opportunities you perceive for getting ahead and for making a difference; and will substantially determine your circle of friends and associates. Most important, the things that you pay attention to today will substantially define the boundaries of your vision for tomorrow.
You won’t know it when you see it
Some of history’s greatest conquerors, from Xerxes to Napoleon, were ultimately brought low by defining success as “more than what I have now.” Successful leaders, on the other hand, have a much more clear sense of purpose in their vision, as did Thomas Jefferson in making the Louisiana Purchase. I have many opportunities to speak with people about what success means to them. I get very concerned when I hear answers like, “Oh, I just want to be happy” or “I only want enough money to tell the boss to take a hike.” Those diffuse “I’ll know it when I see it” answers can make people feel like ultimate failures because for them, success is always something “out there.” Success is unattainable if it is indefinable. Having a clear focus on well-defined goals will help you be more successful, and a lot happier to boot!
Healthy dissatisfaction creates energy for change
Motivational speaker and author Anthony Robbins is best known for his fire walk seminars, but he is also a leading exponent of neuro-linguistic programming. One of the things he says is that there are only two basic sources of motivation: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It is the second with which we are dealing in this performance cornerstone. As soon as somebody becomes sufficiently sick and tired of being sick and tired, they will begin to do something to become healthy and energized, and that is the first step toward transforming a daydream into a memory of the future.
Without a healthy dissatisfaction, there is no motivation for change. Someone can be living like comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck – the house has wheels and the car doesn’t – but if they are perfectly content with that situation, it’s unlikely they will ever graduate to a big house. Make sure that in this discussion, the emphasis is on the word “healthy.” Whining about things that can’t be changed, like the weather, or that you have no intention of working to change, like the U.S. tax code, is not healthy dissatisfaction.
“If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are.
For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.”
Saint Augustine

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Cultivate a healthy sense of cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a situation that comes about when there is a serious discrepancy between a person’s inner beliefs and what they perceive in the world around them. It’s a very uncomfortable psychological state, which is why people often go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. For example, a person who believes himself to be a nice man, but who is abusive in his treatment of others, will rationalize away the discrepancy by convincing himself that the people he beats up deserve the treatment they’re getting, or that they can be motivated in no other way. Someone who has spent his entire life feeling like a victim but who suddenly wins the lottery must either change his self image
(victim) or find a way to blow all that money, since being a rich victim is a contradiction in terms in the eyes of most people. In the same manner, the self-conceived winner who loses a job might have to work delivering pizzas as a temporary measure to feed his family, but it won’t be long before he again has work that is consistent with his self image.
When somebody raises their sights and standards, it often creates a sort of healthy sort of low-level cognitive dissonance, in that there is a divergence between the dream and the reality. At this point, one of two things must happen: either the dream dies and becomes just a daydream, or the dream becomes a source of motivation and energy that brings about its own fulfillment. Ask your participants to think about the things that are making them unhappy in their lives – about the gaps between what they would like to see and what they actually do see. Ask them to think about how painful those gaps really are. Is it just a psychological nuisance, or does it create unbearable mental agony? If it’s the latter, have them imagine how wonderful life would be without that agony (living in the new home instead of the dumpy old trailer, being out of debt instead of being chased by bill collectors, etc.).
“We are all afraid--for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the
Ascent of Man.”
Jacob Bronowski: The Ascent of Man
Be willing to pay the price required to close that gap
The story is told of an ancient king who charged the greatest scholars of his empire to compile the world’s most profound wisdom into one sentence. After years of work, they finally came back to him with that sentence: There is no free lunch. It is not enough simply to be dissatisfied with your circumstances; you must also be willing to pay the price for bringing about the desired change. A comfortable retirement someday might mean less frivolous shopping today; getting back in physical shape might mean a lot less television. There’s always a price. And remember this: great dreams take time, perhaps a great deal of time, to reach fulfillment. It takes patience and perseverance, time and effort.
“It’s that old inescapable cosmic reality again: no such thing as something for nothing. The greater the happiness you wish to achieve, the greater the price you must pay to achieve it. It’s up to you to decide how great a price you’re willing to pay, and it’s to your advantage to decide on that price before you take action.”
Robert J. Ringer: Looking Out For #1

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Don’t create artificial gaps with material or status concerns
This one is easier said than done in a world where a primary function of business, including almost all media, is to convince us to want things that don’t need, and the acquisition and maintenance of which can actually distract us from pursuing more authentic dreams and goals. It harkens back to authenticity – making sure that the things you desire really are authentic, and not meant to please or impress others. In a world that is saturated with advertising and status-consciousness, constant vigilance is required to make sure that your desires truly are authentic.
Many people are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which in essence states that people cannot pursue self-actualization until they have taken care of basic needs such as security, food, and shelter.
So why is it in a society where most of us eat reasonably well (many of us too well!) and live in pretty nice houses, so many people are still frustrated in their search for self-actualization? A big part of the problem is that as we become more comfortable and affluent, our definition of basic needs expands.
Living in a tent or dorm room no longer meets the definition of shelter. And the more we have, the more we want. As you ask your participants to think about their vision for the future, encourage them to include self actualizing activities like education, travel, and relationships, and not just material things.
“Those who learn best and most, and change most comfortably, are those who: a) take responsibility for themselves and for their future; b) have a clear view of what they want that future to be; c) want to make sure that they get it; and d) believe that they can.”
Charles Handy: The Age of Unreason
Save your dissatisfaction for things that really matter
Although most of us are rarely at a loss to find something to complain about, we only have so much genuine dissatisfaction to go around – that is, if we are only expressing dissatisfaction about those things we intend to change. The more powerfully you can focus your dissatisfaction on a few key gaps, and not fritter it away on every little thing that bothers you, the more powerfully motivating and energizing it will be. Think of dissatisfaction as a limited resource, just like time and money, and don’t fritter it away on things that don’t really matter, or that won’t really change.
“Regardless of the circumstance of your life, you are the writer, director, and producer of your mental images. You will always act out those pictures. Your circumstances do not determine what your life will be; they reveal what kinds of images you have chosen up until now. From the quality of your physical appearance, to your level of nutritional health, to the state of your financial holdings, to the quality of your relationships and everything else… your mind stores away all of the images that you elect, and you daily carry out the assignments of those thoughts.”
Wayne Dyer: You’ll See It When You Believe It
See the world as it really is
Wishful thinking is hoping for something and waiting for it to happen, while positive thinking is
expecting something and working for it to happen. If you truly want to be self-empowered, and to make a difference and be successful in this world, you must master the Law of Reality: See the world as it really is – not as it used to be, as you wish it were, or as you fear it might become.
Perhaps no one has ever more eloquently elaborated the benefits of seeing the world as it really is than the stoic philosopher Epictetus. My favorite modern interpretation of this ancient wisdom is The Art of
Living by Sharon Lebell. Were he sitting here today, Epictetus would advise you to first have a realistic

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Epictetus would tell you to be an objective observer because “things and people are not what we wish them to be nor what they seem to be. They are what they are.” This discipline is important for your success and happiness as an individual, and imperative for your effectiveness as a leader. Many are the enemies of clear thinking and the reality-based vision upon which it depends: wishful thinking, false modesty, blame game, victim syndrome, learned helplessness, emotional projection, and low self-esteem are just some of the inner conditions that cause a distorted perspective of reality. The leader’s first responsibility is to counteract these negative and distorting influences in him or herself. The second is to help other members of the team see the world as it really is and respond to that world appropriately.
“One of the traits [great and famous people] have in common is a sense of expectation and destiny. They always believed that they were destined for greatness... Our society creates heroes in every endeavor of life. We all want people to look up to and emulate... In [these heroes], you’ll not see a different species of human being, but you will see the same doubts and fears that you face, and you will see their greatness and potential in yourself.”
Jim Stovall: Success Secrets of Super Achievers
Attention to the present is the platform upon which your future dreams are built
What’s the best thing you can do if you’re unhappy with your current career? Well, a good place to start would be paying attention to all the other ways people make a living to see if you can’t find something that would be more rewarding. How about if you want a new house? Driving through other neighborhoods, attending real estate open houses, reading books on buying real estate with no money down, and reading home and garden magazines can all help you crystallize your vision of the ideal house – and in the process greatly increase the likelihood that you will someday live in that house.
“Take dead aim at a spot on the fairway or the green, refuse to allow any negative thoughts to enter your head, and swing away... Take dead aim. Make it a point to do it every time on every shot.”
Harvey Penick: Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book of Golf
Find a need and fill it
One approach to leading a more fulfilling and rewarding life is to adopt the entrepreneur’s mantra of finding a need and filling it. Millard and Linda Fuller crafted for themselves a highly rewarding life by finding the need to provide for the millions of people who are living in substandard housing all around the world, and then beginning to fill that need by founding Habitat For Humanity. Angelica Therioux found a need for more humane and empowering approaches to hospital care, and addressed that need by founding Planetree.
By paying attention to the needs of the people you see around you, you can often perceive opportunities for service and advancement that should be, but are not, obvious to everyone else. Everyone knows that Americans are insatiable coffee drinkers, but Howard Schultz used that observation to build the

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Starbucks empire. Scott Cook watched his wife’s agony as she spent hours trying to pay the family bills and balance the checkbook; he wrote a software program to help her do it more easily, but didn’t stop there. Today, Intuit – the corporation he founded to market that software, is one of the world’s most successful software companies, and has made Cook a very wealthy man.
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Mark Twain
Ultimately, you become what you pay attention to
You know how husbands and wives can finish each other’s sentences, how people begin to resemble their pets, how we pick up the slang we see on television? Over time, the choices you make with regard to allocating your attention profoundly influence the kind of person you become. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson famously put it, “A man becomes what he thinks about all day long.” Pay too much attention to the news (or what I call the tragi-tainment media) and you’re likely to become a frightened and anxious person. Pay too much attention to television sitcoms and you will ineluctably become more cynical and sarcastic. Pay attention to educational and inspirational books and tapes, and – you simply can’t help it – you’ll become a more positive self-empowered, and highly motivated individual.
“In my years of research on human achievement and accomplishment, one of the most striking things I’ve learned is that a high expectation of success is the single most valuable quality you can bring into any challenging situation. A high expectation of success is more important than natural ability or the lack thereof. It’s more important than practice or preparation. This has been proven in any number of controlled experiments.”
Denis Waitley: The New Dynamics of Winning
Don’t chase what you don’t really want
In Pierre Boulle’s novel The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Colonel Nicholson was the senior British officer in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. His men, who were seriously demoralized by maltreatment at the hands of their captors, had been put to work on building a railroad across Burma to support a planned
Japanese invasion of India. Irked by the unprofessional incompetence of the Japanese engineers trying to build a bridge across the River Kwai, Nicholson stepped in and took charge. He tasked his own engineering officers to design a bridge that would be an edifice to British superiority. Morale soared as his men took pride in the magnificent structure to which they were giving shape in the jungle. In the end, however, Nicholson was so fixated on his short term goal (building the bridge) that he lost sight of the ultimate goal (win the war). When he discovered that a British commando squad had mined the bridge (his bridge!), he blew the whistle. He was killed in the resulting melee, and the bridge survived— a double tragedy born of Nicholson’s not being clear about what he did and did not really want.
Companies often get themselves into unnecessary battles by chasing after something they really don’t want. When strategists at ATT saw the convergence of computer and telephone technology, they concluded that they needed to get into the computer business (remember the ATT Personal Computer
Store?). After losing billions of dollars picking fights with the likes of IBM, they discovered that they really didn’t want to be in the personal computer business after all. Like Colonel Nicholson, they lost sight of their real goal (winning the communications war) in chasing after a false goal (beating IBM and the other entrenched computer makers).

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At the height of the dot-com bubble, hordes of business leaders and investors fell into a similar trap.
They lost sight of what should be the ultimate aim of every corporation: building a business that can be profitably sustained over the long term. In pursuit of a quick killing in the IPO (initial public offering) market, they deluded themselves into thinking that traditional measures of business success like revenue growth and profitability were of secondary importance in “the new economy.” Instead, they concentrated on such nebulous indicators as website hits, eyeball stickiness, and viral contagiousness.
For the most part, those companies whose leaders had done the best job of holding to the true north of their real business aims did best in surviving the shake-out, while most of those who were more concerned with making fast money (building a bridge) than with building a company (winning the war) did not.
Here’s one thing you can do to make sure that you are spending most of your time trying to win the war, and not on building bridges to inauthentic ambitions. Review your calendar and checkbook register, and ask yourself what percentage of your time is spent on activities designed to “build the bridge” (e.g. watching television) versus those designed to “win the war” (e.g. time with family or working with customers and potential customers). Then commit yourself to immediately implement at least one action strategy to move time from the former into the latter category.
“One of the most important expectations a leader must set has to do with the generation of optimism, hope, and aspiration, especially in the context of transformation, a change that unfolds over many years. Optimism, hope, and aspiration are best conceived in statements and actions that say, ‘We can solve our problems,’ ‘Change is a normal, healthy, human response,’
‘Change can be exciting,’ and ‘We have the ability to create a more desirable world.’ Implicit in these statements is an enhanced faith that engaging in a difficult effort will have a fruitful outcome. This faith involves faith in oneself, in one’s leaders, and in the process of transformation itself – no small order in today’s cynical world, but it is essential to develop this set of beliefs as a foundation for transformational change.”
Edwin C. Nevis, John Lancourt and Helen G.
Varsallo: Intentional Revolutions
If you can dream it, you can do it, said Walt Disney, but unfortunately, many of us have lost the capacity to dream. Imagination is like any other muscle—it becomes weak and atrophied if not used.
This is a great place to tell one of my favorite stories: Katie is a little kindergarten student who was drawing a picture of a tree in class. Her teacher walks over, looks down at the picture, and says, “Why,
Katie, I’ve never seen a purple tree before.” At this, Katie looks up at the teacher, wrinkles her nose, and replies, “Gee, that’s too bad!” Where, you could ask your audience, do we lose the capacity to see purples trees? And more important, how can we regain that mental capacity?
Imagination is more important than knowledge, said Albert Einstein. We spend years in school trying to fill our heads with knowledge. How many of us ever took even a single class on imagination? When was the last time any of us read a book on how to be more creative, on how to use our imaginations

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Worry and daydreaming can be misuse of your imagination
Many of us devote most of our imagination to imagining a horrible future that we do not want to have happen, which is all worry is. Or, we devote it to imaging a beautiful future that we have absolutely no intention whatsoever of working to bring about, which is fantasy or daydreaming. While worry and fantasy can both be beneficial in moderation, if that’s the only use you’re making of your imagination, you are wasting a precious God given resource.
“There are no right or wrong goals, only ones that excite you because you believe in them. Don’t set humdrum, Milquetoast goals; you’ll be too bored to bother. Don’t set goals within such easy reach that you can knock them off with a fly swatter. Give yourself a sense of adventure, a quest for the mountains of the moon, perhaps, or the silk route to China.”
Mary L. Sprouse: If Time is Money, No Wonder I’m Not Rich
The five tools that big goals give you
A big goal gives you four tools that timid little dreams do not give you:
Compass: A big goal can be your true north. For example, if you truly want the dream house we’ve just described, you’ll find a lot less time to go east for watching television or west for impulse shopping at Wal-Mart.
Magnifying Glass: A big goal has incredible leverage. When you are committed to a big dream, your efforts are magnified through everyone else who buys into that dream with you (friends, family, co-workers, and even eventually your banker).
Magnet: A big dream is like a magnet that attracts the people, money, and other resources needed for its fulfillment. Examples of magnet dreams are everywhere: Habitat for Humanity,
Ronald McDonald House, Apple Computer, the list goes on and on.
Flywheel: A flywheel is the heavy metal disk that gives momentum to a cars engine in between firings of each piston. In the same way, a big dream gives you momentum to power your way through the inevitable down days, obstacles, and setbacks.
Spark Plug: Someone who is solidly committed to the achievement of a goal becomes to the group what a spark plug is to a car – they galvanize the entire effort in a way that is far out of proportion to their individual humanity.
Three paradoxes of big audacious goals
Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) are often no more costly or risky than timid little milquetoast goals, and more likely to bring about great results.
Paradox #1: Big goals are often more likely to be achieved than timid goals, because they inspire you (and probably others as well).

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Paradox #2: Big goals often require the same level of risk and effort as smaller goals; but once achieved they can generate substantially greater revenue.
Paradox #3: Big goals almost always become the platform for an even bigger and more audacious goal in the future.
Couple “impossible” goals with “impossible” deadlines
In 1985, Rotary International took on the “impossible” goal of eradicating the disease of polio, with the
“impossible” deadline of doing it by the year 2005. In 1988, an estimated 350,000 people contracted polio around the world. By the year 2000, this had been reduced by 99 percent, to fewer than 3,500 cases worldwide. The Western Hemisphere was certified as being polio-free in 1994. Rotary’s PolioPlus program raised over $400 million and vaccinated nearly two billion children. During World War II, the
Sea Bees famously said that the difficult they accomplished immediately, while the impossible took a bit longer. That’s the philosophy adopted by Rotary, and one that will help you achieve success.
“I think the time has come now when we should attempt the boldest moves, and my experience is that they are easier of execution than more timid ones.”
William Tecumseh Sherman in letter to U.S. Grant
Be Today, See Tomorrow
Be Today, See Tomorrow is a paradox which has been contemplated by philosophers for many ages. In plain language, it says that the secret of happiness is to keep your attention in the present, while the key to success is to keep your vision in the future.
Before it can become reality, a vision must be articulated in such a way as to inspire passion and confidence in those who must bring it about. The first step is knowing what you want, and as specifically as possible. Can you articulate the dream? Instead of just “a big house” can you describe the ideal location (country or city); do you have a mental picture of the ideal floor plan; in your mind, can you feel the brass fixtures with your fingertips, smell the new carpet on the floor, and hear the wood crackling in the fireplace? The more vivid your mental image, and the more different senses and emotions involved, the higher the likelihood of achievement.
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The 5-As for transforming dreams into Memories of the Future
You can “remember” the future more clearly and more accurately than you can remember the past, and you can transform dreams into memories of the future. A memory of the future is far more likely to be realized than a wish or a daydream; it is inevitability waiting to happen. There are five steps – the five
A’s – to transforming a dream into a Memory of the Future. When I’m presenting this, I’ll often use the example of the guy who meets Jeff Foxworthy’s definition of a redneck: his house has wheels and his car doesn’t – and now he wants to leave the trailer farm and move into a big house. Here’s the process for creating a memory of the future:

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Articulation: The first step is knowing what you want, and as specifically as possible. Can you articulate the dream? Instead of just “a big house” can you describe the ideal location (country or city); do you have a mental picture of the ideal floor plan; in your mind, can you feel the brass fixtures with your fingertips, smell the new carpet on the floor, and hear the wood crackling in the fireplace? The more vivid your mental image, and the more different senses and emotions involved, the higher the likelihood of achievement.
Affirmation: This step is vital, because we tend to dream in pictures but worry in words. As we’ve already learned, a great deal of our self talk is negative and obstructive. It is essential to counter act this with affirmations that are positive and nurturing. Most affirmations fall into two categories. They remind you that you are 1) capable of achieving your dream (perhaps not immediately – you might need to save more money, go back to school, etc. – but if it is an authentic dream, you are capable of making it happen), and that 2) you deserve to enjoy the fruits of your success (which is why it is so important to counteract poor self image and low self esteem, which can be the ultimate dream killers).
Asking: Any dream of significance will require help from others, and the way you get that help is by asking for it. In the case of the dream house, for example, you will probably have to ask the bank for a mortgage. The best approach is to, very early in the process, go to the bank and share your dream, then ask: “What do I have to do in order for you to give me the loan I need to make this happen?
Action: Without action, a dream is just a wish. But here’s the neat thing: small actions consistently applied can add up to great accomplishments. Every time you do something, anything, in the pursuit of your dream, even something as simple as window shopping for fixtures, you are reinforcing a future reality in your own mind, which is ultimately where the battle is won or lost. The secret is to do something every single day.
Adaptation: Finally, you must be willing to adapt to changing circumstances. In many cases, that will mean adapting upward. The more you practice transforming dreams into memories of the future, the more you exercise the mental muscles of attention, imagination, and belief, the bigger your dreams are likely to become.
We could add a sixth A by circling back to Core Action Value #1, Authenticity, because if a memory of the future is not authentic, it’s as likely to turn into a nightmare as a dream realized.
“Aiming for the moon is a good start, but the secret to extraordinary accomplishment is continually re-adjusting your sights, aiming higher and higher. To be successful on your journey, you must continue to think bigger and bigger with each step, establishing new goals when you reach each plateau.”
Daryl Bernstein: Venture Adventure
Keep It Simple
In the movie Amadeus the young Mozart (played by Tom Hulce) anxiously awaited the king’s reaction to his latest masterpiece. His majesty’s response: “Too many notes.” In other words, Wolfgang was told that his music was too complicated. Fortunately for posterity, Mozart didn’t remove a single note, but even so, some of his most beloved works were based on simple themes (like the one children know as
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, a Mozart tune).
Being an effective leader requires being an effective communicator, and this often means simplifying the message. Of the thousands of books that have been written on change management, the best selling

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Some of the most successful companies in America have been built on deceptively simple business models. Southwest Airlines’ simple city-to-city model has been widely emulated but never successfully duplicated, largely because imitators have lacked Southwest’s discipline for keeping a relentless focus on the basics, and not allowing the model to get too complicated. Nordstrom’s legendary customer service is founded on an employee policy manual of two simple sentences that tell people to use their best judgment in every situation.
Plans are useless – it’s planning that’s essential
Planning should be seen as a way of thinking, an ongoing process, not a finished product. It is a starting point, not an ending point. Confucius said that a wise person is always asking, “What should I do about this? What should I do about that?” Just so, planning is a state of mind as much as it is a formal activity. Let’s assume that you’ve used your imagination to “build your castles in the air.” Here are some questions that planning can help you answer, so that you can put foundations under those castles:
 What resources do I need, whose help do I need, and how can I go about getting it?
 What are the alternate routes I can take to achieve my desired end?
 What is the best sequencing of the required activities, and what is the best timetable for phasing them?
 How will I measure my progress toward the goal, and how will I know when I’ve achieved it?
 What contingencies should I be prepared for?
 As I approach accomplishment of my goal, how can I make sure that it serves as the platform for an even bigger goal?
“The most common mistake I see in public and private organizations alike is that people treat strategic planning as a process separate from daily management, not as a way to reinvent the way we do business day to day… Instead, your planning (and Strategic Management) system should be designed organization-wide so it is self-renewing and self-perpetuating.”
Stephen G. Haines: The Systems Thinking
Approach to Strategic Planning & Management
Words must eventually beget action
Florence Nightingale is well-remembered for her work in establishing the profession of nursing and for developing care standards that profoundly influenced the development of the modern hospital. At the age of seventeen, she believed that she had been called by God to devote herself to a great cause, and eventually decided to commit herself to nursing. She was inspired, but she also knew that inspiration without planning and preparation would not change the world.
In 1853, Nightingale led a team of 38 nurses to Turkey to care for British soldiers who were wounded in the Crimean War. She was appalled by the squalid conditions of the military hospitals, where cholera

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Had Nightingale merely been inspired, chances are she would not have had such a lasting impact. She was also a meticulous planner who was thoroughly prepared. She pioneered the use of statistical analysis in healthcare. The charts and graphs she created during the Crimean War were crucial in gaining political and financial support.
Upon her return to England, she continued to combine inspiration with methodical preparation. She founded the first true school of professional nursing, developed a Model Hospital Statistical Form to encourage the consistent collection and analysis of patient morbidity and mortality data, and wrote two books, one each on hospital practice and professional nursing. For Florence Nightingale, planning and preparation helped to channel inspiration into the achievement of constructive results.
“You ask me why I do not write something.... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.”
Florence Nightingale (letter)
All things are possible for one who believes. Mark 9:23 is one of many biblical references to the power of faith and belief. As already pointed out, all great accomplishments were once impossible dreams.
The catalyst was belief. As Napoleon Hill wrote in the classic self help book Think and Grow Rich, what the human mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.
When Admiral DuPont was explaining to Admiral Farragut why he did not sail his fleet of ironclads into Charleston Harbor, Farragut waited until the end and said, ‘DuPont, there is one reason more.’ ‘What is that?’ asked DuPont. ‘You did not believe you could do it’ was the answer.
Every great accomplishment was once an impossible dream
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right, said Henry Ford. People often cheat themselves by believing in their limitations but not in their powers, believing in their fears but not in their dreams. This, again, goes back to the power of affirmations (plus action!) to build a more solid level of belief. As they say in the Seabees, the impossible just takes a little longer.
“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
You’ll see it when you believe it, so believe in the dream and not the obstacles
Henry Ford also said that obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals. Of course, your believing must be believable. In other words, if that’s all you’re doing, all the mantra chanting in the world won’t get you that new house, no matter what you think you believe. On the other hand, belief that is founded on the bedrock of a well-conceptualized plan, a willingness to work

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“Concerning all acts of initiative there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then
Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamed would have come along.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goals are the stepping stones to dream fulfillment
When we held the first Never Fear, Never Quit conference in 1996, our closing speaker was Mark Victor
Hansen. At the time, the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series that Mark co-authored with Jack
Canfield had just crested two million copies sold, and had staked out a position on The New York Times bestseller list. Even so, when Mark announced that he and Jack were determined to sell 500 million
Chicken Soup books, most listeners assumed this was just one of the motivational techniques Mark uses so well to encourage his listeners to stretch their vision of what is possible. Well, unless you’ve spent the past five years as the house guest of a Mongolian goat herder, you know the rest of the story.
Mark and Jack have sold well over 100 million books, and the organization they’ve created to continue producing and promoting new Chicken Soup titles will virtually assure that they surpass the 500 million goal. How did they do it? Here’s what they say in The Power of Focus (written with Les Hewitt):
One of the main reasons we have enjoyed considerable success with our Chicken Soup for the
Soul series of books is the consistency in setting weekly, monthly and yearly targets. These are well-defined and challenge us to the max. Our goals inspire us because we are not exactly sure how we will accomplish them. This stirs our creative juices. With the help of our Mastermind
Group partners, we always find solutions.
Note very carefully what you’ve just read. Mark and Jack have a long-term “big hairy audacious goal,” but they also consistently set shorter range objectives that move them closer to the fulfillment of their goal. The vast stretch of time between the short-term objectives and the long-term goal is an unexplored adventure waiting to happen. Here’s another important point: consistency builds and sustains momentum. Canfield and Hansen don’t only work on their goals on the days they feel like working on them. They work on them every single day and draw satisfaction from microscopic daily progress toward the eventual achievement of magnificent goals.
“Learn to see, and then you’ll know that there is no end to the new worlds for our vision.”
Carlos Castaneda
Set measurable goals and reward performance
When I was chief operating officer for Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, one of my fellow executives earned the same A-plus. Thom Greenlaw was then Director of Environmental Service
(he has since become Business Manager of the Dana Hall School and also serves as Executive Director for the national Environmental Management Association). In response to an organization-wide initiative to enhance patient satisfaction, Thom had his people conduct a survey of patients and staff regarding perceived facility cleanliness. The overall score was 70% - a C-minus at best.

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Thom set out a challenge to his department. He would host an ice cream party for every team that achieved a 90% score. A departmental training program was instituted, quality discussion groups established, and the process for patient room cleaning reorganized to give one person ownership for the outcome. Within a month the first team hit the target, and within several months, ice cream parties were a regular occurrence. The stakes were raised to a pizza party for 92%, and then to a steak dinner for 95%. At the annual Housekeepers’ Week celebration that year, the audience literally went wild when the winner of the departmental quality award was announced. Of course, people weren’t working so hard and getting so emotionally involved for an ice cream cone and a few slices of pizza. Rather, it was being made part of a team that was pursuing a clear and important goal, was given considerable voice in determining how that goal was to be achieved, and then was honored by a victory celebration once it was.
“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbably, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
Christopher Reeve: Still Me
These are the qualities of an effective goal:
 It is based on a dream that inspires you and is consistent with your purpose and mission.
 It rings with integrity and is compatible with your personal values.
 It is consistent with your other goals, both those you have selected for yourself and those you must meet in your work with others.
 Its achievement is in the best interests of those you care about.
 You can measure your progress toward its fulfillment and you have a way of knowing when you’ve achieved it.
 You know the price that will be required for achieving it, and have decided that you’re willing to pay that price.
 It has a timetable for completion.
 You know who you can ask for help, and what specific assistance you will request.
 It’s do-able — even though right now it may not be evident how it can be done without a miracle.
 You have written it down in a place where you will see it often.
“The vast majority of us have absolutely no idea how to begin to make our dreams come true!
Undoubtedly you already have all the tools necessary to create a magnificent life, but what good are they...if you don’t know how to use them? And how can you build a life worth living without any plans or blueprints?”
Og Mandino: Og Mandino’s University of Success
The power of collective vision
From the building of the transcontinental railway to the civil rights movement and putting a man on the moon, as more people buy into a dream, ultimate success becomes more a matter of when than of if the
“impossible dream” of today would become the reality of tomorrow.
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
Nikos Kazantzakis

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It does not take absolute belief
In his classic work on military strategy On War, Carl von Clausewitz wrote that on the eve of any battle, the military commander must subdue a whole new range of doubts and anxieties. So too in the pursuit of any big dream. There will always be doubt. There will always be worry. Especially when the going gets tough, all you really need is enough faith to take one more step, and then another, one day at a time. That, by the way, is also a central message of one of my favorite Bible passages: Mark 9:23 – all things are possible for one who believes. When Jesus asked the man if he believed, the man replied “I believe – help me overcome my unbelief.” Jesus was not asking the man to be a “true believer” (not even the apostles were at that point), nor was he demanding total belief. Just enough to take the first step.
Think big, start small
Many a dream has foundered when the dreamer went too fast, overreached, and eventually fell flat.
Indeed, overly rapid growth or unexpected (and unprepared for) success has killed many a fledgling business. Beginnings can be such sensitive times, wrote the author of the Chinese classic I Ching, that it is well to proceed slowly and wisely in order to build a solid foundation for the magnificent dream to come. Ray Kroc spent years perfecting the operating model for McDonald’s at his first restaurant in
Oak Brook, Illinois before setting out to create a fast food empire, and it was on the basis of that process of thinking big yet starting small that his success was built.
“Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult; make something big by starting with it when it is small. Be as careful at the end as at the beginning and there will be no ruined enterprises.”
Lao Tzu: Tao te Ching
Vision becomes destiny
The leader who truly believes that he or she is acting in accord with a bigger plan and that, no matter what obstacles are encountered, a way will be found or a way will be made, is in possession of an extraordinarily powerful resource. The leader who is certain of success is willing to take risks that ordinary mortals would consider to be bone-crushing, but which the leader recognizes as simply a necessary step along the road to success. In the harrowing early days of MCI, founder William
McGowan would give employees their paychecks late on Friday afternoon, knowing they wouldn’t be cashed until Monday. Then he would race around over the weekend trying to cover those checks.
In Failure Is Not An Option, Lorraine Spurge tells the story of how MCI broke the AT&T telephone monopoly. Even in the darkest days of their litigation with AT&T, even when they had to lay off a third of their workforce, even when their copy machines were repossessed for nonpayment, McGowan and his colleagues never lost faith in their mission to not just build a great company, but to revolutionize an entire industry. Failure was not an option because, in the mind of McGowan and his colleagues, their success had been preordained. Their task was to find the way leading to that success. When dreams are so tangible that they become memories of the future, the leader’s job becomes to find a way to carve the dream out of the future and make it real in the present.
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
Patanjali

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Take-Home Exercise
Refer back to the big dream that you suggested everyone think about in the opening session. Then, challenge them to take several hours each week over the next month to transform that dream into a
memory of the future by using the 5-As:
Articulation: Ask them to write down in their journals, in as much detail as possible and using as many dimensions of physical senses, emotions, dreams and memories as possible, the details of that dream.
Affirmation: Ask them to think about the negative, nagging, nattering voices in the back of their heads that will tell them that they are not capable of, nor do they deserve to achieve that dream. Then have them write down affirmations that will help them transform those negatives into positives, reinforcing that not only are they capable and deserving, but that the dream has become inevitable.
Asking: Have them think about all the help they will need to make that dream become reality, and who they can ask for help. Have them begin making a list in their journals of the people they can ask for help, including telephone numbers. To make it less intimidating, tell them that they don’t need to make calls at this point, but simply to write down the phone numbers so they can be quickly referred to when the time comes.
Action: Have people write down specific actions they can take everyday in pursuit of that dream. For example, if the dream is a new home, a simple action would be to go window shopping for fixtures at the local home supply story, or to begin reading magazines on home design.
Adaptation: Remind people that as we approach completion of a goal, it begins to seem less immense and overwhelming than it did when we started, and ask them to think about how their own plans might be enlarged as that occurs – the dream beyond the dream.
“When we project our dreams into a positive future, we see that we can have what we want. A positive image of the future not only shows us how to get there, it draws us to it, attracting us toward our dreams like a magnet.”
Jon-Roger and Peter McWilliams: Do It!

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“Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No individual or organization can do everything well. Focus provides the discipline to target key goals and then to concentrate all available resources on the accomplishment of those goals. For hospitals, having a clear focus can enhance community image, employee involvement, operating productivity, and patient outcomes and satisfaction.
It is often useful at this point to discuss the word “productivity.” Most of us, when we hear that word, think in terms of business and finance, of doing more with less, of speeding up the assembly line. In fact, however, high productivity is essential to quality, both at the organizational level and the personal level. Southwest Airlines has the highest productivity in the airline industry by a substantial margin; it also has more celebrations, more parties, and more fun than all the rest put together. There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship here: Southwest can afford to have more fun because it is more productive, and it is more productive because its people have more fun. The same factor work at a personal level.
One of the main reasons that some people have the time to travel, go back to school, or engage in other activities that the rest of us are unable to find time for is that they are more productive in taking care of the basic essentials. Furthermore, high productivity is often associated with high morale, and not the reverse. People like to know that their time is being used effectively, and for things that matter.
Productivity is not simply a measure of business performance — it is the
determinant of quality work and of quality life — and focus is the driver.
Ice Breaker Exercise: Ask for Money
Walk around the room asking people if they will give you fifty dollars. Tell them that it is not a loan, that you are not going to give it back, and that it is none of their business what you’re intending to do with it. You simply want them to give you fifty dollars. Most of them will look at you like you’ve gone out of your mind. When it has become clear (as it undoubtedly will) that nobody is going to simply give you fifty bucks, say: “how about two-and-a-half hours of your time?”
Of course, it will become immediately obvious that they are in the middle of doing exactly that. Point out that if they were as careful about budgeting, and focusing, their time as they are their money, they would be a lot wealthier, happier, and more successful.
With Core Action Value #8, Vision, we talked about Memories of the Future. The bigger your dream is, the more important it is to keep it on the front burner. Many of us feel like the circus performer trying

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Page 122 of 176 to keep fifty plates spinning precariously atop sticks, frantically running from one to the other to keep them all from falling (to make your point, actually act this out). That is a formula for frustration and ultimate mediocrity. It’s impossible to build your dream house and simultaneously keep fifty plates spinning in the air!
“Understand that you create your life from a series of choices you make, and you can never be doing anything unless you’ve chosen to do it. The quality of your life is the result of choices you make. Don’t let the three thieves of freedom of choice steal your ability to make choices. The three bandits to watch for are peer group influence, promise of reward, and fear of punishment.
Understand that by controlling your choices, you control your future.”
Roger Dawson: The 13 Secrets of Power Performance
Don’t chase what you don’t want and don’t want what you can’t have
This sounds so simple, doesn’t it? The problem is, most of us want everything. We even want things we don’t want! For proof of this, you need look no farther than all of the attics, garages, and storage sheds filled with the things we just had to have but now no longer need. All of this stuff represents a use of time, money, energy, and attention that was not devoted to achieving something of lasting significance.
The problem is accentuated by our advertising-driven economy, a key function is which is to encourage us to want even more. We become like the kid at Christmas, rushing from one package to the next without stopping to play. Many people answer the question, “What do you want?” in much the same way that the Supreme Court defines pornography: “I’ll know it when I see it.” A much better approach is to crystallize in your mind those things which are truly important, and to devote yourself to their achievement, and to not chase the things that you really don’t want or want the things you can’t have.
“Almost as many individuals fail because they try to do too much as fail because they do not do enough.”
J. Paul Getty: The Golden Age
Don’t give in to the tyranny of the urgent
Stephen Covey, famous for his Seven Habits program, has made an important contribution with his emphasis on the distinction between urgent and important. We all have urgent matters that must be attended to – a crisis situation, a visit by JCAHO, responding to telephone calls, etc. It is certainly appropriate that these things be taken care of. The problem arises, Covey says, when we do not give ourselves sufficient time for activities that are important but not necessarily urgent, such as thinking about a personal mission statement, visualizing long term dreams and goals, cultivating stronger relationships with other people, and spending time for reflection and renewal.
“Like chemical abuse, urgency addiction is a temporary painkiller used in excess. It relieves some of the acute pain caused by the gap between the compass and the clock. And the relief may feel good at the time. But it’s cotton-candy satisfaction. It quickly evaporates, and the pain remains. Simply doing more faster fails to get at the chronic causes, the underlying issues, the
reason for the pain. It’s doing second (or third or fourth) things faster… but doing nothing to really solve the chronic pain that comes from not putting first things first.”
Steven R. Covey et al: First Things First

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The one Big Yes Requires lots of little no’s
If you want to go back to school for an advanced degree, you’re going to have to say no to your television set and surfing the internet for entertainment. If you want to save a down payment for your dream house, you’re going to have to stop subsidizing Wal-Mart and Target by engaging in shopping therapy.
The one Big Yes requires lots of little no’s. But here’s the payoff: self imposed short term limitations lay the groundwork for long term abundance and freedom. It’s like the difference between having fun and being happy. Denying yourself opportunities to have short term fun and instead going to work helps you create the skills and the resources that provide for great future happiness.
“An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise it confuses. If it is not simple, it won’t work. Everything new runs into trouble; if complicated, it cannot be repaired or fixed. All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple.
Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say: ‘This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?’”
Peter F. Drucker: Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The paradox of goal targeting
Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, says you should have lots of goals. He says most people cheat themselves by having too few goals. He says this for three reasons (in his book
Future Diary):
Different goals have different gestation periods. A goal of planting a rose garden might come much more quickly than one of building a dream house.
When a goal is completed, it loses it’s power to motivate, which is why so many Olympic gold medal winners end up depressed when they get back home. Having lots of goals prevents this
The world is abundant, so there is no reason to not have lots of goals, because there’s plenty of everything to go around for everyone.
Well, you might ask, isn’t this inconsistent with the target principle? Not at all. Hansen would be the first to tell you that you cannot pursue all of your goals simultaneously. In fact, by applying the target principle you will accomplish your goals much more quickly, and thus over the course of a lifetime be able to achieve quite a few more goals than otherwise.
“You can dream all you want, but, bottom line, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.
Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. The team won’t buy your plan and everyone – most of all you – will end up frustrated and disappointed. But when your vision is based on a clear-sighted, realistic assessment of your resources, alchemy often mysteriously occurs and a team transforms into a force greater than the sum of its individual talents. Inevitably, paradoxically, the acceptance of boundaries and limits is the gateway to freedom.”
Phil Jackson: Sacred Hoops
Practice the 4 P’s of goal targeting
This process can help you accomplish your goals more quickly and assuredly, thereby making it possible for you to accomplish even more wonderful goals:
Prioritize: Look at the listing of your goals (you have written them down, haven’t you?) then pick out the one that is most important. Not the top five, not the top three – the top one. The key to keeping

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“first things first” is knowing what is first. This does not mean that you have to deny yourself all of the other goals, not even that you won’t be working on them. It simply means that you have identified your target, your most important goal at this point in your life.
Plan: Having a plan is one of the most effective ways of transforming a dream in to a memory of the
future. A plan does not have to be a thick three ring binder on the bookshelf; the original plan for
Southwest Airlines was sketched out on the back of a cocktail napkin. Still, a plan can be a road map.
Perhaps more important, a plan can be powerfully motivating; once you know how you are going to do something, you know that you can do it.
Prepare: It’s been said that the will to win is worthless without the will to prepare to win. Is your target a trip to Hawaii? Don’t just make plane reservations, read James Michener’s book Hawaii. Is your target a dream house? Read Better Homes and Gardens and keep your eyes open for builders’ showcases so you can start identifying the features you’d like in your own home.
Pursue: As Peter Drucker famously put it, even the most elegant plan must eventually degenerate into work. Once you’ve identified your target, pursue it relentlessly.
“Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.”
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
In 1936, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Dorothea Brand wrote a book entitled Wake
Up and Live!, which included a chapter on what she called “the will to fail.” This was, she said, “the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform the best work of which one is capable.” If anything, the problem is worse today than it was in 1936, if for no other reason than we have so much more information and so many more choices. Concentration is a key principle of military strategy: from Alexander the Great to
Napoleon, the greatest commanders have understood that victory hinges upon concentrating the greatest force at the decisive point (as Frederick the Great put it, to defend everywhere is to defend nowhere). The same is true in your own life. You only have so many resources, and how you choose to allocate them will determine your success (or lack of it).
“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.”
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Stay out of Pareto Prison (the trap of the 80-20 rule)
The Pareto Principle, better known as the 80/20 rule, states that as a general principle, 20% of the activity is responsible for 80% of the results, and the other 80% of activity generates only 20% of the results. As Richard Koch put it in his book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More
With Less, “The war is between the trivial many and the vital few.” If you can identify the 20% of activities that are highly productive and do more of that, and do less of the 80% that is not productive,

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Concentrate your key resources
Concentrating the three essential resources of attention, energy, and money can help you be far more effective at achieving your goals. Let’s look at each:
Attention: As we’ve learned, you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. Indeed, one of the most important decisions anyone makes on a moment-to-moment basis is to what they will devote their attention. You cannot simultaneously be paying attention to the evening news, a budget report form work, and playing with your children. Such attempts at multi-tasking attention usually end up in marginal quality across the board. On the other hand, focused attention is the first step toward achieving the big dream.
Energy: We only have so much energy, and most of us wish we had more. One way is to not waste it on things that do not contribute to achieving our target goals. Temper tantrums, self pity, complaining—many are the leaks through which our energy seeps.
Time: There are many activities for which a single one-hour block of time is more productive than four fifteen minute blocks of time. Having the discipline to concentrate a solid chink of time to your number one priority greatly increases the probability that it will be achieved.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien: Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings
Money: It should go without saying that you can only spend a given dollar one time, but many people act as if it is the ultimate renewable (or even self-renewing!) resource. One way of illustrating this point is by asking your participants how much it costs them to buy a $500 home entertainment center (what used to be called a TV set) at Wal-Mart. Point out that after sales tax, it is $530. But in order to replace that $530, they have to earn in the vicinity of $1,000, because they purchased the equipment with after-tax dollars. Of course, if they put it on a credit card and make payments, these will add significantly to the cost, as will the addition of cable and/or a library of DVDs. And the money that is being spent on all of this cannot be invested for retirement (the value of that home entertainment center come retirement time is likely to be zero – less than all but the worst savings or investment plans).
Worst of all is the time they will devote to watching it (see the next point) – time that can not be used to increase their earning power.
“Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for… This definition of money gives us significant information. Our life energy is more real in our actual experience than money. You could even say money equals our life energy. So, while money has no intrinsic reality, our life energy does – at least to us. It’s tangible, and it’s finite. Life energy is all we have. It is precious because it is limited and irretrievable and because our choices about how we use it express the meaning and purpose of our time here on earth.”
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin: Your Money or Your Life
Turn off the television
According to the A.C. Nielsen corporation, the average American spends more than four hours per day watching television. During times of national crisis, such as the Gulf War, that balloons to greater than

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Page 126 of 176 six hours a say on average. Of course, since many people watch less than that (hopefully including your participants!) that means that somewhere else people are watching even more.
Over the course of an adult lifetime, four hours per day watching television equates to nine full years; that is more than 17 years of eight hour days! Ask people what they can accomplish in 17 years of eight hour days – the answer is just about anything! And yet, how many people chronically complain that they never have enough time. Increasingly these days, the Internet is becoming a co-culprit – especially when it adds to instead of replacing time spent in front of the television. Here is a good Direction
Deflection Question to ask yourself before turning on the tube, firing up the Internet, or even picking up the morning newspaper: Does the subject I am about to give my time to affect me personally, do I intend to do anything about it and will it further toward achieving my top priority goal?
“It has been said that no one, at the end of his life, wishes he had spent more time at the office.
He probably doesn’t kick himself for not watched more TV or keeping a cleaner house either.
Spend some time now, while you can, thinking about what’s important to you. When you’re on your deathbed, how will you wish you had spent your time? Do whatever you have to do to make your lifestyle line up with your most deeply felt priorities.”
Traci Mullins and Ann Spangler: Vitamins for Your Soul
Concentration and creativity
One of the perhaps unexpected benefits of concentration is that it enhances creativity. People whose talents and energy are spread across the waterfront tend not to be very creative, or to accomplish a great deal. On the other hand, as Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt state in their book
The Power of Focus, “When you focus most of your time and energy doing the things you are truly brilliant at, you eventually reap big rewards.”
“It is creativity, not hard work, that is at the heart of success in any field of endeavor. And in order for a person to have the time to engage in creative thinking, he must learn to work efficiently. To do this, it’s crucial to develop the habit of focusing on the crux of the issue. By
crux of the issue, I mean the point or points upon which success or failure rests. You must resist the temptation to get sidetracked by peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter what their outcome.”
Robert J. Ringer: Million Dollar Habits
Small team focus optimizes effectiveness
It has long been recognized in military circles that small team cohesion is the fulcrum upon which victory and defeat are balanced in combat. The most successful business enterprises know that real innovation rarely take place in a large corporate setting, and so have structured mechanisms to encourage small team formation around specific projects. In the world of sports, a cohesive team of reasonably good players will beat a like number of prima donna superstars playing as individuals almost every time.
In Working with Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman shows that cohesive groups actually become collectively more intelligent. The “group IQ” is greater than the sum of individual IQs. This is true even in, perhaps especially in, such highly specialized fields as technology and medicine. There are, he says, no lone wolf researchers or inventors in today’s world, where knowledge is expanding at a geometric rate and its half-life is becoming ever-shorter.

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“Discipline is developed doing small things, many of which you’d rather not do, perfectly; then you keep on doing them until they become habits. Then you do a little larger thing, perhaps slightly more difficult or tedious or unpleasant, perfectly; then you keep on doing it until it becomes a habit. Then you do something more difficult, or more of the same thing, and continue until you’ve built up your tolerance.”
Steven M. Finkel: Break Through
Say what you mean and ask for what you want
In a world where all great accomplishment is a result of team effort, it is not sufficient for you to be focused in your own intentions; you must also have the ability to communicate your intentions to others clearly, precisely, and compellingly. There are a number of steps you can take to become a master of focused communication. Before you send a written communiqué, read it out loud; before you give a speech, write it down on paper: if your intention is not crystal clear in one format, it’s not likely to be clear in the other. Practice in front of a mirror. Become a more effective speaker by joining
Toastmasters. Then start each day by reminding yourself of what’s really important, so that you will be clear and focused in telling others what they can do to help you get it done.
From the book The Aladdin Factor by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
Speed promotes focus. In the hospital where I started my career, residents in the surgery program had a saying: See One, Do One, Teach One. That was not a prescription to be taken literally, but rather an indication that because of the huge knowledge base required to be a surgeon, students must continuously be pushing the envelope in their quest for information and experience.
Building a sense of urgency and moving quickly does a great deal to foster focus. When you are moving quickly, there is less chance of being diverted or distracted from your course, and a greater certainty that you will achieve your goal sooner. The faster you achieve your goals, of course, the more time you have for additional goals, and/or for relaxation and rejuvenation.
CAVEAT: If you are pursuing inauthentic goals, speed will only get you down the wrong road more quickly, which is why Authenticity is the Core Action Value #1.
“It is an undoubted truth that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and, therefore one seldom does it at all; whereas, those who have a great deal of business must buckle to it, and they always find time enough.”
Lord Chesterton
Use Metaphorical Visualization™ to overcome negative emotions that cause procrastination
You cannot, of course, go fast until you first get going. This means overcoming procrastination, which is a key to both gaining speed and maintaining momentum. The root cause of procrastination is almost

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Page 128 of 176 always emotional blockage of some sort (almost always with an underpinning of fear). One of the reasons it is so difficult for us to overcome this Resistance (I follow Steve Pressfield in his wonderful book The War of Art, which is essential reading for anyone wishing to overcome life-deadening procrastination, in capitalizing the word Resistance to emphasize that it is a real thing – like cancer is a real thing) is that emotions are invisible, and how do you fight what you can’t see?
Metaphorical Visualization is a process I use to help people overcome invisible emotional barriers.
Creating a pictorial metaphor helps give body to invisible emotions. For example, seeing negative selftalk as mental graffiti (which is exactly what it is) and then having a Janitor in Your Attic come along and paint it over and replace it with self-talk that is positive and affirming is great way to rewire your brain away from negative and toward positive inner dialog. The Janitor in Your Attic can also help sweep away cobwebs of anxiety and illuminate shadows of depression. It borders on mental magic!
Following is a technique that I myself use to employ the janitor in my attic to help me overcome procrastination. When I share this with audiences, I actually act out the part where Spike (that’s the name I’ve given my janitor) hops on the giant bulldozer and guns the engine, then accelerates into and crashes through the wall of Resistance that is causing me to put off doing something I need to do or want to do.
The Janitor in Your Attic ™ for conquering procrastination
Traditional (Boring) Approach to overcome procrastination
Explore with your shrink the relationship between delayed potty training as a child and procrastination as an adult.
Break the project down into chunks.
Reward yourself with a chocolate bar each time you complete a chunk.
The Janitor in Your Attic Approach to getting yourself in gear
Think of all the things holding you back: fear (of rejection, failure, commitment, success), self doubt, guilt, low self esteem, lack of energy, and whatever else that’s blocking you from doing what you want to
do and know you can do.
Visualize each as a rock that’s part of the wall of resistance standing between you and achievement of your goals.
Now picture The Janitor in Your Attic sitting behind the wheel of a giant yellow bulldozer. Watch him turn the ignition key, and listen to the bulldozer’s massive diesel roar to life. Look at that determined expression as he stares at that wall of resistance – Ali staring down Foreman; Joan of Arc on the ramparts of Orleans!

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Now your Janitor slams the bulldozer into gear and jams down the gas pedal. Watch it picking up speed, heading straight for the wall that’s been holding you back. CRASH! See it, hear it, feel it slam into that wall at full throttle.
POW! Rocks are flying everywhere. All the fear, self doubt, low self esteem, guilt, and the other emotional anchors have been CRUSHED into tiny pieces. Now watch your Janitor use those pieces to build a nice straight road that leads to the accomplishment of your dreams.
Through the alchemy of metaphorical visualization, the fear that once paralyzed you is now the energy that catalyzes you. Self pity is transformed into a genuine concern for other people. Guilt becomes the motivation to try a little harder. Lethargy is alchemized into a new commitment to focus your limited reserves of energy.
Play it again, and again. The wall of resistance. The bulldozer. The look of determination on your
Janitor’s face. The crash. When the wall tumbles down again, you feel a surge of inner power as you look down the road toward your accomplished goal –transformed into a memory of the future. Play it again. SLAM!
Down comes the wall and up goes the road. Again – KAPOW! And again – CRUNCH!
Each time, you are reinforcing your belief in the inevitability of your dream, and quite possibly bringing about a real change in the wiring of your neural circuitry. By the tenth time, you are so energized you can hardly sit still. BAM!
Now you can see yourself running down the road toward your cherished goal. And right now, before that feeling goes away, jump out of your seat and do get started on the first action step you need to complete so you can begin the journey down that new road toward the realization of your dreams.
“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the ‘someday I’ll’ philosophy.”
Denis Waitley: The Psychology of Winning
Write things down to keep first things first
Read the quote following by Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics. One thing that a great many successful people share in common is a propensity to use written lists to keep them focused on the most important thing that they should be doing.
“[I make]up my own daily list of the six most important things I have to do. Writing this list is one of the smartest things I ever learned to do. I believe in it, heart and soul. Each night, I put

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Page 130 of 176 together my list for the following day. If I don’t get something on my list accomplished, it goes on the next day’s list. I put the hardest or most unappealing task at the top of the list. This way, I tackle the most difficult item first, and once it’s out of the way, I feel my day is off to a good start.”
Mary Kay Ash: You Can Have It All
Travel light
It is unlikely that you will ever see a horse win the Kentucky Derby carrying a three hundred pound jockey. You can always travel more quickly if you travel light. You will build your dream house a lot sooner if you’re not cluttering your life with all kinds of material things now. You will sooner achieve emotional equanimity and spiritual peace if you stop dragging behind you the dead weight of old grudges, regrets, fears, and anger. Complexity is the enemy of focus, and simplicity is it’s ally. The more you can simplify your life—physically and emotionally—the sooner you will achieve the goals that really matter to you.
Balance urgency and patience
One of the common characteristics of high achievers is that they have an incredible sense of urgency coupled with the patience to labor and to wait, because great accomplishments take time. How do they do it? One of the keys might surprise you: they overcome tendencies to perfectionism. They try a little something, see what works and what doesn’t, then try it again. They are not afraid to build a prototype, not afraid to fail. Their sense of urgency is satisfied by constant movement in the direction of the goal, and their patience is rewarded by incremental progress.
Keep close track of important matters
If you read any book of advice on how to more effectively manage your time, you will be told to use your calendar as a tool to monitor how you actually spend your time. Likewise, virtually every book on personal finance will tell you to closely track all of your financial affairs. Every book on goal-setting will stress the importance of writing down your goals, and of tracking your plans and progress toward meeting those goals. Pen and paper are powerful tools for helping you achieve your dreams and goals, and become the person that you truly are meant to be.
“The first practical step that an individual can take to free himself from the thrall of money is not to turn away from it, but to take it more seriously, to study himself with such diligence and concern that the very act of self-study becomes as vivid and intense as the desires and fears he is studying. ‘The truth shall set you free,’ not because it will give you explanations, but because the conscious experience of the truth, even when the truth is hellish, is itself space and light and contact with a higher world.”
Jacob Needleman: Money and the Meaning of Life
There are no short cuts on the road to success
If your goal is to become a more effective leader, you cannot skip over any of the first eleven Core Action
Values – you simply will not be a true leader if you are inauthentic, lack courage, perseverance, and vision, and so forth. You won’t get rich without first tending to the details of your personal finances
(trust me on this, you are not going to win the lottery), and you won’t stay healthy without adequate exercise and nutrition. In the same way, over the long term you pay a high price if you try to take a short cut around grief after loss, around introspection after rejection or failure, or around preparation before embarking upon a new venture. We often don’t like those intermediate steps, which is why we

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Page 131 of 176 yearn for shortcuts. But they are essential. There are no shortcuts on the road to success, but in the end you become who you are as a result of the journey, and that makes it all worthwhile.
“One-pointed intention is that quality of attention that is unbending in its fixity of purpose.
One-pointed intention means holding your attention to the intended outcome with such unbending purpose that you absolutely refuse to allow obstacles to consume and dissipate the focused quality of your attention. There is a total and complete exclusion of all obstacles from your consciousness. You are able to maintain an unshakable serenity while being committed to your goal with intense passion. This is the power of detached awareness and one-pointed, focused intention simultaneously.”
Deepak Chopra: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Stay away from the water cooler
Every leader must strike a fine balance between active listening and wasting time by absorbing unproductive chatter. For example, if a team member is having a tough time, a sympathetic ear is certainly in order, but lengthy commiseration may not be (remember, when you break down the work
“commiserate” – co-miserate – you get being miserable together). People love to talk about themselves.
They love to talk about their problems and to brag about their successes – especially if the boss is listening. If you’re the boss, it’s important that you listen, but that you do it without encouraging trivia with excessive and unproductive patience.
“Perhaps the most significant thing that great leaders have in common is that they don’t do a lot of unfocused things. Rather than running around doing what everyone else ought, in fact, to be doing, they focus productively on a small set of actions necessary to cascade leadership down, and throughout, their organizations.”
James O’Toole: Leadership A to Z
Learn to delegate more effectively
The more you are willing to get help, and to delegate to other people, the more effectively you will be able to pursue your own most important priorities. The late Mary Kay Ash, founder of the cosmetics company bearing her name, always told her beauty consultants that they did not have time for housework. By hiring a housekeeping service, she said, they could devote their time to the far more profitable activity of building their business. The Mary Kay company is the single largest purchaser of pink Cadillac’s from General Motors, attesting to the wisdom of this philosophy. Even more important, learning how to effectively delegate is an important management skill and an important parenting skill.
The way people grow is by being challenged, and one way to challenge people is to delegate higher levels of responsibility.
“Like the formula for failure, the formula for success is easy to follow: a few simple disciplines practiced every day... We must remember that discipline is a requirement for progress, and that affirmations without discipline is the beginning of a delusion.”
Jim Rohn: The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle

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Zig Ziglar is one of the nation’s top motivational speakers and an expert on how to achieve success in sales. One of his secrets to success is to “move decisively from one task to the next.” In other words, to maintain your momentum. This relates to a basic law of physics, that it is easier to keep going than it is to stop and start again.
Western author Louis L'Amour wrote over one hundred novels during his career. How did he achieve such productivity? At the end of each novel, after he had typed in the words “The End,” before he even got up out of his chair he scrolled in another piece of paper and typed “Chapter One” at the top. In this way, he was already anchored in the next book, and thus less likely to slack off, and perhaps never get back to it.
“Some people today suggest that this search for meaning and identity has resulted from having too many choices, rather than too few. Instead of becoming a gateway to freedom, our wealth of options tether us to a dilemma. And this conundrum echoes through our leisure and free time experiences.”
Martin Kimeldorf: Serious Play
Make every moment count
You can illustrate this point by asking people to imagine a jar that is filled to the brim with stones. Is the jar now full? No, you could still pour in a bag of sand to fill the spaces between the rocks. Is the jar now full? Again, the answer is no, because you could pour in a cup of water to fill in the spaces between the grains of sand.
This was exactly the principle used by J.K. Rowland to become the most successful author in the history of literature. Using scraps of paper, she wrote bits and pieces of her novel Harry Potter while sitting on the train, waiting for an elevator, or engaged in other activities that many of us would consider dead time. Her focus on productivity resulted in four best-selling novels in four years, not to mention highly successful spin-offs for movies and ancillary products.
“Every time we postpone some necessary event… we do so with the implication that present time is more important than future time… for when we delay something, we simultaneously admit its necessity and refuse to do it. Seen more extensively, habitual delays can clutter our lives, leave us in the annoying position of always having to do yesterday’s chores. Disrespect for the future is a subtly poisonous disrespect for self, and forces us, paradoxically, to live in the past.”
Robert Grudin: Time and the Art of Living
After success is when arrogance and complacence set in
Over the past ten years or so, dozens, and perhaps hundreds of books have been written by athletic coaches about their formula for success. If you read all of these books, you will see many different philosophies concerning motivation, organization, training, etc. The one consistent theme throughout will be this: your greatest success is also the moment of your greatest danger, because that is the point where arrogance and complacence tend to set in. It’s only human to want to, after a victory of some sort, to step back, pat ourselves on the back, and take it easy for a bit. What great achievers know, however, is that this is precisely the moment to push down harder on the gas pedal. For example, the greatest sales people know that the best time to make a sales call is right after just having closed a sale.

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“The secret to happiness is keeping your mind on the things you want and off the things you don’t want.”
Earl Nightingale
The law of entropy will inevitably set in if not countered
Entropy is one of the laws of thermodynamics; it states that unless energy is continuously applied to a system, things begin to fall apart. You have undoubtedly seen this happen in your organization, and in your own life. The solution is to keep moving forward, to keep that foot on the gas pedal.
General George Patton was the most aggressive commander of World War II, and his third army covered more territory and captured more German prisoners than any other allied army in that war. His philosophy was “move and shoot.” He told his men that they would not dig in because they would be constantly moving forward, and that a bullet in their gun was a useless bullet, that the only useful bullets were bullets in the air. Hence, move and shoot. Now, if you were to guess that with this aggressive philosophy Patton’s army had a high casualty right, as logical as that seems, you would be wrong. The third army, in fact, had the lowest casualty rate of any allied army in active combat.
“No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Make your life an adventure
Some 2,500 years ago, the Chinese warrior/philosopher Wu Ch’i said that on a battlefield, those who were determined to die with glory would live, while those who simply hoped to escape with their lives would die. That is a paradox that holds true even today. Those who simply hope to survive their jobs until they can vest in the retirement plan are not likely to achieve a great deal of success or happiness, while those who see their work as a mission and their life as an adventure will have more than their share of both success and happiness. Or as Ernest Hemingway put it, Never mistake motion for action!
“If only a man will not do what he himself would like to do, and do those things that he finds unpleasant, his position, no matter what it is, will be much improved.”
Takeda Shingen
Take-Home Exercise
Refer back to the Memory of the Future that your participants identified with Core Action #8, Vision.
Encourage them, for the next month, to track the time and money (as precisely as possible) they are devoting to its accomplishment. Ask them to think about what they find has to say about the priorities in their lives, and the extent to which there is a difference between what they say they want and what their calendar says they are working to achieve.
“Fortunate is the person who has developed the self-control to steer a straight course toward his objective in life, without being swayed from his purpose by either commendation or condemnation.”
Napoleon Hill: Think and Grow Rich

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Enthusiasm is the fuel for personal happiness and professional success. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and truer words were rarely spoken.
Enthusiasm is the fuel for personal happiness and professional success. Its presence or absence determines the difference between a negative, high-stress work environment and one that is positive, productive, and resilient. Enthusiasm is more contagious than measles in a daycare center, and it’s spreading presence can bring to fruition even the grandest of dreams and most naïve of expectations
(when people use the term Pollyanna as a put-down, they are forgetting that Pollyanna was absolutely successful in her aspirations, and became one of the most respected people in her community).
Effective enthusiasm is the marriage of emotional energy and disciplined intellect. It is not just a bubbly emotion; to be effective it must be combined with the skills and discipline to create that outcome for which you are enthusiastic. It’s both a left brain (logical) and right brain (emotional) proposition. A common denominator among all great achievers is that they approach their work with enthusiasm; a common denominator among all great organizations is that they promote a culture of enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm is the active ingredient in positive thinking.
“The individual who takes up any activity as a positive adventure can inspire the same attitude in others. The worker who looks for ways to enjoy his work, to be enthusiastic about it, sets the stage for others to follow his example. Always remember that what a person does, for good or for ill, can be contagious. A smile is contagious but so is a frown. Although no one can be sunny all the time, if we take up our tasks with enthusiasm, it’s likely those around us will also catch the spirit. Enthusiasm really is contagious!”
John Marks Templeton: Discovering the Laws of Life
Ice Breaker Exercise: Look Silly
This one will be fun! Give people three minutes in which to be absolutely, ridiculously, and riotously silly. Have them make faces, do somersaults, make weird noises, or anything else that is silly, preposterous, and funny. What you will undoubtedly find is that for most people this is an impossibility. We are so tightly crammed into our business costumes, and the associated expectations of behavior, that we all suffer from what C.W. Metcalf calls “terminal professionalism.”
“The job of the leader is to get a group moving, to get them do something they are going to be happier doing, and to get them involved in the fun of doing something more worthwhile. In light of this, it is odd to find so many leaders who try to suppress their own enthusiasm in order to appear cool, unengaged, and ‘above’ optimism and eagerness… Leaders can show enthusiasm in many different ways, but what is important that it be authentic and not be hidden (and when there is no well-spring of natural enthusiasm to tap, that’s probably a sign that they are doing the wrong thing.).”
James O’Toole: Leadership A to Z

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Attitude is everything. You have no doubt heard that – and it is a great universal truth. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that Enthusiasm is the master value. When you are enthusiastic, it’s much easier to be authentic and to act with courage and perseverance; it’s much easier to be clear about your purpose and your vision, and to focus your resources on the achievement of your goals. And when you are not enthusiastic, everything is more difficult – getting through a day is like swimming in Jell-O – life offers you resistance at every turn.
We return again to the theme that whether you think you can or you think you cannot, you are right.
Enthusiastic people are happier and more successful because they expect to be happier and more successful—they are positive, and they are optimistic. They choose to look around and see that we do indeed live in the best of times rather than seek evidence for a more dismal conclusion. Their enthusiasm becomes the fuel of self empowerment.
“Like a gardener, you choose the specific thought-seeds you want to plant. Hypnosis helps you to care for and nourish those thought-seeds to grow and bear fruit. Your subconscious mind is your secret garden where the thoughts you plant grow to become your reality. This garden is more fertile than you may realize, so plant carefully!”
Henry Leo Bolduc: Self-Hypnosis
Use conscious mental programming to be optimally positive
Experts in the science of how the human mind inform us that negative thinking is natural. The human mind automatically gravitates toward negative, frightening, and depressing thoughts and emotions. Ten thousand years ago, such thought patterns were necessary for survival in a world where physical danger was prevalent and failure could be fatal. Today, however, the world that most of us live in is much safer (when’s the last time you saw a saber toothed tiger on the prowl?), and negative thinking can be downright self-sabotaging. It takes a serious conscious effort to reprogram your mind away from negativity and toward positivity. One useful construct for thinking about this is appreciating the various ways your mind is like a computer:
GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) is computer speak for the fact that if you program nonsense into a computer, it will spit nonsense back at you. Perhaps without intending to, many of us program our own mental computers with nonsense. For example, the prevalence of violence and tragedy in the news media conditions us to perceive the world as a violent and threatening place; hanging around with gossip mongers conditions us to view other people in a more cynical and suspicious way. Because it comes so naturally, it’s easy to find negativity—it’s all around us. It takes a more conscious and deliberate effort to program yourself with positive ideas, information, and inspiration.
WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) is computer speak for being able to print out exactly what you see on the screen. It’s a great metaphor for us humans: what you see when you look into the metaphorical mirror of your life will determine what you get in the real world. If you look in the mirror and see a victim, no outside event (not even winning the lottery!) will make you a winner. If, on the other hand, you look in the mirror and see a winner, no outside event can make you a victim.
Operating System: Your computer has an operating system that is for the most part invisible to the user. In the same way, we all have subterranean programming which is not apparent on a daily basis.

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Much of this is determined by your genetic make-up and early childhood experiences, and might not amenable to immediate or fundamental change. Simply being aware of it, however, can help you prevent inappropriate and self-sabotaging attitudes and behaviors, and learn new skills that help you overcome the negative effect of you operating system. For example, you might not be able to transform yourself from being a natural introvert into being an extrovert, but you can learn social skills that help you be more comfortable in groups.
Upgradeable: You can add memory to your computer hardware, and you can install new software programs to make it more functional. It’s the same with your mind. It’s never too late to take a class on Shakespeare or lean how to play the piano. And here’s an especially exciting point: up until very recently, neuroscientists believed that the human brain stopped growing at around age 21. They are now discovering, however, that every time we learn new skills we actually make physical changes to the brain. By installing new programs, as it were, we are also upgrading the hardware. Positive thinking and lifelong learning can help you be happier and more effective, and also live longer.
Periodic Maintenance: Your computer requires periodic maintenance. Every now and then, you need to defragment the hard drive and clear out old files. So too with your mind. Whether it’s fifteen minutes of sitting in the chapel, or a week in the Grand Canyon, you need to give yourself time for rejuvenation and “defragmentation.” And with your mind as with your computer, more serious problems may call for the help of an expert.
Subject to Virus Attack: Like your computer, your mind is subject to virus attacks. These may occasionally be of malicious intent, but more often than not are innocently transmitted by a third party
(for example, most of what you hear on the rumor mill). As with your computer, there are two lines of defense. First, to install a mental filter that alerts you to an incoming virus so you can either block or reinterpret it before it embeds itself in your mind. Second is to do a periodic virus scan by questioning the validity of your own negative assumptions, opinions, and beliefs.
“The most up-to-date research in gerontology has uncovered a shocking conclusion: as much as
80 percent of what we now call ‘old age’ is not related to biology. Instead, it has its roots in expectations and attitudes. True, the 20 percent that is a product of biology may incapacitate us and even result in our death. But the good news is this: if we concentrate on improving and changing the unnecessary 80 percent, we stand to profit beyond our most optimistic expectations… Everyone—young, old, rich, poor, healthy, diseased—absolutely everyone has the capacity to change, to learn, to evolve, and to grow.”
Greg Anderson: The 22 {Non-Negotiable} Laws of Wellness
Avoid the 3-Cs of negativity
“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the horizon of the spirit.”
Helen Keller
Out on the prairies, the grass typically bends to the east because the prevailing wind is from the west.
It gets beaten down. It’s the same with us humans: we can get beaten down by the negativity of others.
Chief culprits are the three C’s of negativity – criticizing, complaining, and commiserating:

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Criticizing: There are, of course, times when constructive criticism is appropriate, but if you really listen to most of what you hear around you (and perhaps what is coming out of your own mouth), it is not particularly helpful, and rarely includes useful suggestions.
Complaining: Whining about your problems (your victimhood) is almost never useful, and is almost always emotionally destructive; no matter what it is you are complaining about (the weather, the size of your paycheck, the lack of support by co-workers, etc.) what you are really telling the world – and yourself! – is that you are a victim (poor me!).
Commiserating: When someone else is complaining, it makes us feel good to be sympathetic, to commiserate, but when you break the work “commiserate” down into its components – co-miserate – what you get is “be miserable together.” In fact, what you are usually doing is enabling the victimhood of the complainer, when what they most need is to be firmly told to get a grip and take responsibility for their problems and their lives, and escape from the downward spiral of victimhood that we discussed with Core Action Value #7, Purpose.
“Every negative thought must be set aside before it takes root.”
I Ching
Overcome the barriers that inhibit enthusiasm
In order to be optimally enthusiastic, you need to overcome the mental and emotional barriers that can push you toward negativity. These include:
Poor self-image and low-self esteem: It is hard to be enthusiastic if you don’t like yourself, if
Following are the four essential elements of high self esteem. Enthusiasm and self esteem are a virtuous cycle—the more you have of one, the more you will have of the other.
 Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, because we all have warts; spend more time working on your strengths than you do trying to compensate for your weaknesses.
 For those weaknesses or flaws that are important to your work or life, work on fixing the warts
(especially if they involve a failure of character or integrity).
 Take complete and absolute responsibility for your life – your present circumstances and your future outcomes (The Self Empowerment Pledge is a great tool for helping with this).
 Avoid negative people and media, and consciously seek out positive people and media.
“I’d rather be a failure in something that I love than a success in something that I hate.”
George Burns
Pessimism: It’s hard to be enthusiastic if you’re expecting bad things to happen. As we have seen, pessimism tends to be the natural state of affairs, so it is necessary to program yourself to be optimistic.
In the book Learned Optimism, Dr. Martin Seligman documents the considerable evidence that the single most important determinant of success is the expectation of success. Whereas the pessimist tends to see problems as being personal (why do bad things happen to me?), permanent (bad things
always happen to me), and pervasive (all these bad things are ruining my life), the optimist refuses to

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Cynicism: It’s hard to be enthusiastic if you’re expecting the worst from other people, when you feel that you cannot trust them. Cynicism is one of the core symptoms of Dilbert Disease. The cure for cynicism is to become a Dionarap. That is the word “paranoid” spelled backwards. A Dionarap is a reverse paranoid, someone who routinely expects the best of other people, and assumes that whatever they do, they are acting in good faith. Dionaraps may occasionally be taken advantage of, but over time they are happier, healthier, and more successful.
“When you have decided that a ‘should’ is undermining your self-esteem, either as a general rule or in a particular situation, you need to cut it out of your internal self-talk. This means aggressively fighting back when the [internal] critic tries to hit you with your should. The best way to fight back is to prepare a one or two sentence ‘mantra’ that you can memorize and use whenever you feel wrong for not living up to the should.”
M. McKay and P. Fanning: Self-Esteem
Erase negative self talk
One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in being more positive is the Inner Critic, the author of much of our negative self talk. One approach that has proven powerfully effective for helping people change their self talk from negative to positive is The Janitor In Your Attic. One Janitor exercise is having people visualize negative self talk as graffiti in the walls of the attic (their mind). The Inner Critic is like a vandal with a paint can, littering our minds with the graffiti of self doubt and self criticism.
Every time someone is struck with such negative self talk, they can visualize a janitor with a paint cart erasing this graffiti from the walls of their mind and replacing it with positive affirmations reminding them that they are capable and deserving. One of the things that makes this technique so powerful is that, unlike merely repeating affirmations, it is visual as well as verbal.
“Of all the self-help concepts I have uncovered, the concept of ‘programming’ the brain with a more successful ‘new’ picture of yourself is the most sensible. I am not the first behavioral researcher or author to figure this out. Others have come to the same conclusion as I, that whatever you put into your mind--in one way or another – is what you will get back out – in one way or another.”
Shad Helmstetter: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself
Become more stress resistant
One study of executives and managers at a large corporation identified a relatively small number who were particularly adept at not only coping with stressful events, but at turning them into meaningful experiences for growth and learning. These individuals shared three characteristics in common.
Contemplate these characteristics, then think (and write) about how you can become more stressresistant — what the researchers called a “hardy” person.
Characteristic 1: Hardy people felt committed and connected, enthusiastic and involved. By contrast, the stressed executives were often bored, found little meaning in their work, and had few enjoyable leisure activities.
Characteristic 2: Hardy people felt that they had a reasonable level of control over their circumstances, whereas the stressed people felt more like powerless victims of the outside world.

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Characteristic 3: Hardy people saw change as a challenge; stressed people saw it as a threat.
“People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most to them – in effect, they approach their work as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.”
Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline
Get your body into the act
The science of psychoneuroimmunology, a field that has only developed since the early 1980’s, has conclusively documented a powerful connection between attitude and health. People who are enthusiastic are healthier, more resilient in the face of disease, and they live longer. So get your body into the act. Stand a little bit straighter, walk a bit faster, stop slouching when you’re sitting, smile and laugh more often, set your face with determination before tacking any new project. You’ll feel better, you’ll be more successful, and you’ll live healthier and longer. And there is absolutely no downside.
“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow
Foster contrarian toughness
When people quit a job, they often cite stress, burnout, fatigue, and discouragement as factors in their decision. In his book The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle, Steven Pressfield (a former
Marine) writes that what makes the Marines so proud is their infinite capacity to be miserable! Put a
Marine in a wet, freezing foxhole without enough food or water and he’s happy, because he knows that he’s one of the few and the proud who can still function at a high level under such circumstances. That is contrarian toughness.
Think about the leaders who historically have inspired the most intense loyalty. I’ll be that you can’t recall a single one who inspired that loyalty by making life easy for followers. In fact, I’ll bet that every single one of them was responsible for leading people through times of incredible difficulty. We think of
George Washington at Valley Forge, or Martin Luther King leading marchers through cities in the segregated South; we think of Florence Nightingale leading her small band of nurses through the incredible hardships of those horrid hospitals during the Crimean War, or of FDR reminding us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.
Spend much time in any organization’s cafeteria and it won’t be long before you hear somebody complaining about (fill in the blank: the work is too hard, the pay is inadequate, they couldn’t find a parking space right up front, whatever). What if, instead of whining about these little problems
(problems that most people in most of the rest of the world would love to have!), people would express

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Raymond Aaron is a very successful entrepreneur in Canada. He likes to say that life is problems: a good life is new and challenging problems; a bad life is the same old problems repeated over and over.
We should be thankful for our problems, since problems mean we’re alive! One of the most important things loyalty leaders do is help people take pride in their toughness, in their ability to tackle difficult problems and knock them off, so that they can graduate to new and more interesting problems – that essence of good life. How can you instill this sort of mental toughness where you work?
“What is it going to be for you: a positive attitude or a negative attitude? The choice seems fairly simple, doesn’t it? The problem is that we often forget that we have a choice… You should choose your attitude thoughtfully because it determines how you respond to the many challenges you will encounter.”
Keith Harrell: Attitude is Everything
Honor legitimate grief
There are times when to stoke up artificial enthusiasm is exactly the worst thing that the leader can do.
After a serious loss or setback of some sort, for example, leaders know that people need time to process.
Freud believed that depression can often be traced back to an earlier failure to honor grief. In Healing
the Wounds, David Noer wrote that the biggest mistake executives make after a layoff is trying too quickly to return to “normalcy,” to create a spirit of enthusiasm that must at bottom be artificial, because it masks an underlying strata of unresolved grief, guilt, and other negative emotions. Knowing when to stop and honor legitimate grief, and when to fan the flames of enthusiasm, is part of the art of leadership.
“It takes objective thinking to work through challenging situations. Even if there is only an iota of positiveness, you must search to find it. It takes only a match to light of a room. If you sink into the negativity of a situation and start thinking of all the bad things that appear to be happening, the obstacles to your progress will only seem greater. If you focus on only the seeds in a watermelon, you missed the sweetness of the meat.”
Wally Amos: Watermelon Magic
Energy is your most precious physical resource, and how you choose to use that energy is perhaps the most important choice you make on a daily basis. So get off the couch, turn of the television, and do something that moves you in the direction of your dreams. As Thoreau promised, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours!
You have more energy than you think you do
The first principle of optimizing energy is to accept that to a much greater extent than many of us care to admit, energy is a decision. To a greater extent than many of us care to admit to ourselves, whether or not we have the energy to do the things we want to do and the things we must do is based on a decision made at a point of apparent fatigue. To demonstrate: Imagine that you’ve come home at the end of a long, stressful and frustrating day. You know that you should go ride your exercise bike and listen to that educational CD, but… you say to yourself that you are absolutely exhausted. So instead

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Page 141 of 176 you plop down in front of the TV with a big bag of chips and a bowl of ice cream. You’re soaking in the soaps (or whatever else happens to be on) when you hear a knock at the door. Reluctantly, you get up to answer it. There on your porch step, flanked by a camera crew, is Ed McMahon with a sweepstakes check made out in your name.
Now, if you tell them all to come back tomorrow because you have no energy today, then by all means, go back to the couch. But if you’re ready to call the neighbors, have a party, and go shopping, where did all that energy come from? The truth is that you had it all the time; you were just waiting for an excuse to tap into it, for some external stimulus like winning the lottery to spark it for you. The technical scientific name for this syndrome is – LAZY! If you want to live your life with a sense of purpose and a spirit of adventure, then it is your job to discover and activate those things which will galvanize your energy, because Ed McMahon is not going to do it for you.
“If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, then, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer of this experience, a third and a fourth wind. We find amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed, because habitually we never push through the obstruction of fatigue.”
William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
Appreciate that Energy is a Self-Renewing Resource
Human energy is the ultimate renewable resource. When you make the decision to have energy, and then to expend it, you expand it. When you come home after a long, hard day at work and do not give in to the temptation of lounging in front of the television set having your brains transformed into pudding but instead go for a walk, or when you determine yourself to pick up the phone and make the call that you have been putting off, you not only lose the energy it takes for that action, you will find that the energy you thought you had expended has actually come back to you stronger than before.
When it comes to your personal energy: e ≠ mc
In other words, since you do not have to destroy matter to create energy, at least for your own inner sources of energy, Einstein’s famous equation is not correct. You create energy by using it!
“Passion generates a supply of positive energy far more abundant than vitamins, exercise, or any other health remedy you can imagine. When you’re passionate about what you do, it’s not just the destination that matters, but the entire journey. From beginning to end, the journey is an adventure. When you love what you do, you have the energy to overcome any obstacle.
Cynthia Kersey: Unstoppable
Change your reference group
Sociologists tell us that one of the most important, if not the most important, influences on our lives is the people we spend time with, the people with whom we identify. This is what they call our reference group. People tend to hang around with others who are like them in terms of attitudes, opinions, income level, etc. We are all profoundly imprinted by the characteristics of the reference groups with which we identify, in both conscious and subconscious ways.

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If your reference group consists primarily of people who are depressed, pessimistic, and chronically whining about how the world has made them a victim, over time it will be almost impossible for you to not fall into that emotional quicksand. On the other hand, if you are depressed and anxious but spend time with people who are confident and optimistic, their attitudes are likely to rub off on you.
One of the surest ways to enhance your courage is to change your reference groups. You do this by consciously seeking out people who have the qualities you would like to emulate. This entails sticking your neck out, making those proverbial cold calls, joining Rotary or the Optimists Club, and otherwise getting out of your shell. The payback can be enormous, however, both personally and professionally.
“What all drain people have in common is that they drain you of time, energy, peace of mind, relaxation, comfort, and/or money. Interpersonal conflicts waste time and energy, and Drain
People are masters at causing interpersonal conflicts.”
Robert J. Ringer: Million Dollar Habits
Learn to Worry Effectively
Worry can be a serious energy drain. Like fear, worry is a natural human condition that can be managed, but really cannot be made to go away. In his book Worry, Dr. Edward Hallowell says that one of the keys to an effective and successful life is learning how to worry well. Two key steps, he says, are:
1) to focus on your goals rather than on your fears and 2) to attack problems quickly (before they attack you!). So anytime you find yourself overwhelmed with worry, ask this question: What is the problem
about which I am worrying? Transforming the worry into a problem will direct you toward the actions you can take to ameliorate the worries by solving the problems.
“Worry is a real killer; worry saps strength, causes people to be random in their work and thinking, breeds anger and confusion, and breaks out many friendships because of irritation and frustrations. In substance, worry is caused by one’s inability to see a successful solution to a problem. What to do about worry and anxiety? There are two basic things: make a list of your worries, then analyze them.”
George Shinn: The Miracle of Motivation
Go To Bed
Sleep deprivation can increase anxiety and worry, says James Mass in Power Sleep. When you skimp on sleep, you can end up with “overwhelming feelings of not being able to cope, even with simple problems or moderate workloads; increase in worry, frustration, and nervousness; and inability to maintain perspective, or to relax, even under moderate pressure.” Most of us require at least eight (8!!!!) full hours of sleep every night. “The process of sleep, if given adequate time and the proper environment, provides tremendous power. It restores, rejuvenates, and energizes the body and the brain.” Turning off the TV and setting aside that mystery novel so you can go to bed earlier can help you be more fully alert, creative, enthusiastic, and alive during your waking hours.
Get in Shape
Becoming physically stronger will give you the stamina to persevere when you’d rather quit, and to focus your energy more intensely. It does not take several hours a day at the gym to make a difference; exercise physiologists tell us that even something as simple as walking for twenty minutes three times a week is a whole lot better than doing nothing at all. If you spend a lot of time on the road and use that as an excuse for not exercising, you know that you are fooling yourself. Most hotels now have fitness rooms with exercise equipment, and if they don’t, they have stairwells that can be used for simulating

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“When your body is strong, it will bend you your command; when your body is weak, you will give in to its demands.”
Samurai Warrior Proverb
Enthusiastic people tend to be curious. They’re always asking questions, wanting to know how things work, and expanding the horizons of their own knowledge. One way to become more enthusiastic yourself is to simply start asking more and better questions. If you want to enhance the quality of the answers you get from life, improve the quality of the questions you ask of life.
“No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life. All the opportunities in the world are waiting to be grasped by people who are in love with what they’re doing.”
Samuel Goldwyn
Cultivate wide-ranging interest in people and in the world
As we have already seen, fear can be a serious learning disability when it prevents us from getting outside of our comfort zone, from asking questions (even dumb questions), and from learning from experience. Fear is a curiosity killer. On the other hand, one of the surest ways to overcome fear is to become more curious, to ask more and better questions.
“Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual... Successful innovators use both the right side and the left side of their brains. They look at figures, and they look at people. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be to satisfy the opportunity. And then they go out and look at the customers, the users, to see what their expectations, their values, their needs are.”
Peter F. Drucker: Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Ask dumb questions
Some of the greatest inventions, intellectual breakthroughs, and business innovations in history have come when someone asked how, why, or why not about something that everyone else considered to be self-evident, and came up with a surprisingly new answer. Velcro, the Pet Rock, sliced bread, the theory of relativity, open book management – the list of discoveries and innovations that began with someone challenging conventional wisdom is endless.
In our culture we do not place a premium on looking dumb. To the contrary, we honor and reward intelligence and knowledge. Unfortunately, when the intelligent, knowledgeable person begins to believe his or her own press clippings, it can lead to some pretty dumb decisions.
William J. O’Neil is the founder of Investor’s Business Daily. In his book 24 Essential Lessons for
Investment Success he cites several examples of smart people who are successful in their careers, but who have made terrible investment decisions. He goes on to say that “a high IQ means absolutely

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Page 144 of 176 nothing in the stock market. In fact, it may work against you because intelligence is usually coupled with ego and overconfidence. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that ego is deadly in the market. It’s when people attempt to prove they’re smarter than the market that they stop learning and close their minds to ways of doing things that are different from their comfortable habits and past patterns.”
People who think they already know the answers rarely ask dumb questions. Understanding is the ultimate reward of asking dumb questions and then listening with an open mind for the answers.
“The most up-to-date research in gerontology has uncovered a shocking conclusion: as much as
80 percent of what we now call ‘old age’ is not related to biology. Instead, it has its roots in expectations and attitudes. True, the 20 percent that is a product of biology may incapacitate us and even result in our death. But the good news is this: if we concentrate on improving and changing the unnecessary 80 percent, we stand to profit beyond our most optimistic expectations… Everyone – young, old, rich, poor, healthy, diseased – absolutely everyone has the capacity to change, to learn, to evolve, and to grow.”
Greg Anderson: The 22 {Non-Negotiable} Laws of Wellness
Enthusiasm and creativity feed on one another
What comes first: enthusiasm or creativity? This mirrors one of the oldest debates in the field of human behavior: what comes first, changes in attitude or changes in behavior? The answer is, it doesn’t matter! You can think your way into new ways of behaving, or you can act your way into new attitudes, and the most successful approach is to do both simultaneously. Likewise, by becoming more enthusiastic you will become more curious, and by asking better questions you will become more enthusiastic. The key is to start, and having started, to not stop.
Make it look easy
Some of the most effective leaders are like the proverbial duck – few people see the furious paddling that went on underwater to keep him gliding so gracefully across the surface. One of the most influential courses I took at Stanford was Michael Ray’s “Creativity in Business.” One day he said something that struck a dissonant chord: “Do only what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable.” Those were not adjectives I applied to work! Ray clarifies the point in the book Creativity in Business (written with Rochelle Myers):
“But do not think that the goal of living with EEE (easy, effortless, and enjoyable) is ease, effortlessness, and enjoyment. Surprisingly, EEE turns into a discipline for achieving a higher goal: the discovery of your true purpose in life.”
I think back on two men I worked for at different stages of my career. Both were successful chief executive officers of large health systems, but in style they could not have been more different. One worked virtually round the clock, and seemed to carry the weight of the entire organization on his shoulders. When he left work at the end of an already long day, as often as not he carried not one but two briefcases full of work still to be done. His underlings caught the spirit, and would say things like
“the best thing about Friday is there are only two working days left until Monday.”
The other CEO was much more laid back. His attitude about Friday seemed to be that if you couldn’t knock off a bit early for a quick round of golf on a sunny day, you weren’t working smart enough. He didn’t feel the compulsion to be on top of everything, and gave considerably more latitude to his staff.
One, a certifiable workaholic; the other with a knack for making everything look easy, effortless, and enjoyable. To this day, I have a deep respect for both men and their accomplishments. But I would never again work in the kind of environment created by the first, both because of the personal toll I

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Page 145 of 176 know it exacts on people, and because I don’t believe that an organization with a workaholic culture can ever bring out its people’s greatest creative potential, which in today’s world puts it at a serious competitive disadvantage with organizations that do.
Why did hard-working, dedicated, serious Jimmy Carter stumble so badly during his one term as
President while happy-go-lucky Ronald Reagan waltzed his way through two terms and into the history books as one of our more effective leaders? Marc Myers has the answer. He is Executive Editor of
Bottom Line / Personal and author of How to Make Luck. He says: “Struggling isn’t what the American
Dream is all about… People who struggle and show us how hard they’re working don’t make us feel good. They force us to share their angst.” This one is rife with paradox, isn’t it? Making “easy, effortless, and enjoyable” a discipline; limiting your potential for success by working too hard; becoming great by having fun rather than by trying to become great.
Think by analogy
Leonardo da Vinci was a master of thinking by analogy. His insight that canals are like tree branches lead him to the invention of a unique water way transportation system. HCA, the nation’s largest forprofit hospital chain, was founded on the insight of Dr. Thomas Frist that standardization could enhance hospital quality and efficiency in the same way it had done in the hotel industry.
“Very gently, but with great excitement, I was instructed in the method of walking backward.
Keeping my eye firmly on the answer, I was encouraged to walk backward until at last I bumped into the question.”
Fynn: Mister God, This is Anna
C.W. Metcalf is an expert on the role of humor in the workplace, and author of the book Lighten Up:
Survival Skills for People Under Pressure. In that book, he talk about a condition he calls “terminal professionalism.” As we grow up, we grow into other people’s expectations about what to wear, what to say, what to do, even what facial expressions are or are not appropriate. One way of becoming more enthusiastic is restoring the sense of spontaneity that we all had as children.
Southwest Airlines is the most successful company in its industry, and one of the most successful companies in the history of American business. Southwest is famous for encouraging its people to have fun on the job, the fact that a sense of humor is the number one criteria for getting a job there.
Cultivating an environment where people can play, have fun, and laugh on the job is good for business.
Even more so, it is important for the people working within that business. As C. W. Metcalf wrote in
Lighten Up: “Without humor skill, there is no ultimate triumph over tragedy, no joy in the journey, no sense in the nonsense of it all.”
“As you can well imagine, it’s difficult to get your creative juices flowing if you’re always being practical, following rules, afraid to make mistakes, not looking into outside areas, or under the influence of any of the other mental locks.”
Roger Von Oech: A Whack on the Side of The Head
Stress and fatigue can be caused by boredom and inactivity

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We usually equate stress and fatigue with being overworked, but in actuality, boredom and ennui can actually be more tiring and stressful. It’s unusual (to say the least!) to see someone get up and do a somersault in the middle of a budget meeting, but something like that could be precisely what is needed to make that meeting less stressful and more productive.
In a 1995 survey of top executives by Accountemps, it was found that 90% said a good sense of humor is important for anyone desiring to reach senior management.
Be willing to look silly
Winston Churchill once said that it took him two hours to prepare for an impromptu speech. If you want to break out of the terminal professionalism trap, you have to be willing to look a bit silly. This might be a little easier if you practice in the safety of your own home before taking your show on the road.
We’ve all heard people say, “I’m dead serious about this!” But if you are dead serious long enough, you end up seriously dead—emotionally, if not physically. We all know people who are deader than cut grass, they just haven’t stopped breathing so we can bury them without breaking the law!
Make it fun
Many American corporations are still suffering from the hangover left by the buttoned-down corporate culture described in such classic post World War II books as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and The
Organization Man. The expected behavior is what C.W. Metcalf calls “terminal professionalism.” Solid and trusting friendships are discouraged in organizations that practice management by Machiavelli, or where having fun and getting the work done are seen as mutually exclusive.
I spoke with a venture capitalist who told me that before he will consider making an investment in a company, he wants to visit the plant or office where people work. If he sees energized and enthusiastic employees who laugh and play, who refuse to take themselves too seriously, and who obviously love their work and have fun doing it, then and only then will he consider an investment. Why? Because people who are having fun tend to be more creative, their enthusiasm generates more effective sales results, and they are less likely to crumple during the inevitable obstacles and setbacks.
One of my most memorable acquaintances from the Stanford Graduate School of Business was Bob
Moog, who graduated the year before I did. You could rarely catch Bob with shoes on his feet or without a smile on his face; he was often to be found in the courtyard selling fellow students on his latest idea for an entrepreneurial adventure, or inviting friends to participate in a murder mystery party. On April
Fool’s Day of 1985 he and college friend Cris Lehman launched University Games, which today is a $35 million company that is one of the top five board game companies in the nation. Moog is living proof that having fun can be good for business.
“These two sources of negativity -- what we’re told about our world and what we’re told about ourselves, can gradually erode our self-confidence. If this erosion is not checked, we can begin to believe there’s no sense trying anymore. We give up on our goals. We abandon our dreams.
We stop hoping and we start fearing... [People] expend a tremendous amount of energy and time
‘looking down.’ We focus on those things we cannot control, instead of focusing on those things we can control. We focus on falling, or more accurately, on our fear of falling... It is only useful to look down when you need to see where you are putting your feet.”
Alan Hobson and Jamie Clarke: The Power of Passion

Sing songs and tell stories
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Songs and stories had many uses in the great stories of mythology. They created a sense of historical continuity, helped establish expectations of behavior, celebrated victory and honored grief, and lifted spirits in times of trouble. Experts in corporate culture tell us that stories exert profound influence, but most leaders do not consciously use them, much less have everyone singing songs (at least not since
Tom Watson had IBM salesmen singing company fight songs.)
I once gave a speech in which I commented on the culture of enthusiasm at Southwest Airlines.
Afterward, someone came up and told me of a time that two Southwest flights were woefully behind schedule, and there was no joy in the waiting areas. A Southwest agent came out from behind the counter and challenged the passengers to engage in a singing duel: which waiting area could outdo the other on Row, Row, Row Your Boat? Within minutes, misery was transformed into merriment, and
Southwest had one more story to tell its people – “This is the kind of company we want to be.”
How long do you suppose the delayed passengers will remember that little party? Probably forever. Will they be more or less likely to fly Southwest again in the future, despite the delay? You bet – that’s why the company has such incredible customer loyalty. Did they attract the attention of literally thousands of other passengers passing by on their way to other flights? Without Question. How much did this stroke of customer service wizardry cost the company? Not one penny.
One more question: Do you feel a little bit sheepish at your immediate reaction to the heading of this particular strategy (Sing Songs and Tell Stories? Give me a break! I run a business, not a kindergarten!)? Perhaps everything you need to know about creating a customer-centered company you learned in kindergarten!
“High-achievers tend to act differently than their underachieving colleagues. You might say that the high-achievers exude a different sense of interpersonal drama or theater in the ways that they interact with other people. In other words, ‘showmanship’.”
Michael W. Mercer: How Winners Do It
Cultivate your Humor Quotient
In a study of graduates from Harvard University, it was found that HQ (Humor Quotient) was a better predictor of future success than anything else, including class standing or participation in extracurricular activities. Having a sense of humor can not only help you be happier, it can also help you be more successful. Fortunately, you do not have to be a comedian to improve your sense of humor. In Lighten Up, Metcalf describes three important humor skills that we can all cultivate:
1. The ability to see the absurdity in difficult situations.
2. The ability to take yourself lightly while taking your work seriously.
3. A disciplined sense of joy in being alive.
“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.”
Henry Ward Beecher
Get into the laughter habit

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Metcalf devotes five pages of Lighten Up to instructions on how to laugh. That’s right! Many of us are so out of the habit (other than the occasional polite giggle) that we have to be reminded how to laugh, which another writer has characterized as jogging for the soul. One exercise Metcalf suggests for taking yourself lightly while taking your work seriously is to get up in the morning and stand fully naked in front of a full length mirror and laugh at yourself.
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Create your own Joy List
In his seminars, one of the things that Metcalf told his audience to do is to create a Joy List, a roster of the things that bring them joy. He says that you’re experience is likely to be similar to his when he first did it; he said he was far more likely to spend his time complaining about or avoiding the things that made him feel bad, then looking for the things that brought him joy. Here’s what he has to say about his experience in asking his audiences to create their own joy list: “I was surprised to find…most people over thirty could not come up with more than a half-dozen items. Evidently, I wasn’t the only human being who had bought into the idea that realistic, professional, and adult meant serious, uptight, and grouchy.”
“There is an age-old debate about what must come first: a change in your attitude or a change in your behavior. Why take a chance? If something in your life is not working satisfactorily, change both, starting right now... Don’t wait around for someone to empower you, because it will never happen. The only one who can empower you will be the one sitting around waiting.”
Joe Tye: Personal Best
It’s not humor if it makes someone else feel bad
If you watch what passes for comedy on television, you will quickly notice that most of the so-called humor is at somebody else’s expense. It’s a putdown. Humor that makes somebody else feel bad, including sexist or racist humor, is not really humor. And just because somebody appears to be laughing and going along with it doesn’t mean they’re enjoying it.
“Laughter is itself a delightful form of whole body relaxation... Our culture is emotionally constipated and, as a result, we are dysfunctional... Modern medicine’s approach is to remove the symptoms of physiological problems and claim healing. By drugging or disallowing catharsis in medical practice, we are cut off from our natural healing process.”
Annette Goodheart: Laughter Therapy
Get less Dr. Kildare and get more Patch Adams
In 1995, Christopher Reeve--the actor who played Superman—was paralyzed from the neck down in a horse riding accident. For weeks, he was in the hospital, in and out of consciousness, his doctors not even sure he would live, and he himself not sure he wanted to. At that critical juncture, his best friend,
Robin Williams, came into his hospital room with a big frizzy wig, a red rubber nose, and pulling on rubber gloves insisted that he had to do an emergency rectal exam. At that moment, for the first time since the accident, Reeve laughed, and with the laughter came a renewed will to live. In the most real

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Perhaps more than any other organization other than funeral homes, hospitals tend to be places of terminal professionalism. This is too bad, since in many cases what our patients most need is a good laugh (remember what psychoneuroimmunology tells us: laughter is good for physical health).
When Christine Clifford was recovering from breast cancer in the hospital, she was surrounded by flowers, sympathy cards, and the sad faces of well-wishing friends. She said she felt like she was at her own funeral! What she most needed, and what nobody gave her, was a goods laugh. So when she got home, Clifford started The Cancer Club, with a tag line of “Don’t Forget to Laugh.” She wrote a book called Not Now, I’m Having a No Hair Day, and more recently published the book Cancer Has Its
Privileges, which has stories of humor and hope from cancer patients and survivors all around the world. She also has a newsletter and website (www.cancerclub.com). Cancer, she says, also has its blessings, one of which is serving as a reminder of how important it is to laugh.
“Humor is a powerful analgesic. It’s free, non-prescription, has no side effects, and is completely habit-forming.”
Roger Crawford: How High Can You Bounce?
It is most important to maintain enthusiasm when it is hardest to do, and the first thing that usually goes is laughter
It is most important to be enthusiastic, to have fun and to laugh, at precisely those times when it is hardest to do. It’s hard for the person who fears that a job might be in jeopardy to be enthusiastic, yet a lack of enthusiasm could bring about exactly that circumstance which they fear. It is hard to find the humor and to laugh when going through cancer therapy, yet the physiological effect of laughter could in fact be an important part of that therapy.
“Years after leaving the Center, I came to understand that emotional responses are like frequencies on a radio dial; if you turn the volume down on one station, you turn it down on all the others at the same time. If you’re going to develop joy, laughter, and humor, you will open yourself up feeling the pain, loss, and sadness of the world, too. Or you can opt, as I had done for most of my life, to turn volume down and never hear the music at all.”
C. W. Metcalf: Lighten Up

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“Whatever you most need in life, the best way for you to get it is to help someone else get it who needs it even more than you do.”
Joe Tye: Never Fear, Never Quit
We have all heard the word service a lot in recent years. We know that ours has become a service economy, and that a majority of us have become service workers. We know that, even in (especially in!) a hospital, excellent customer service is critical to the long term success and survival of the organization, and with it our own job security and opportunities for enhancement and advancement.
And while it is an ancient concept, the idea of servant leadership – that those who would lead must first be committed to serve those who follow – is an idea that has gained considerable currency in recent years. Service becomes a value, and not just a series of activities, when it is engrained as an underlying philosophy which informs attitudes and guides actions.
“Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”
Richard Bach: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Service begins with a sincere desire to help other people, which is then followed up by action. It is an ancient paradox that he person who gives a helping hand often benefits as much or more than the person being helped. Zig Ziglar has written many books on motivation and success, and each and every one of them contains the following sentence: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
“If you want to experience moments of sheer joy and downright fun, there is nothing better for the heart, mind, and soul than to get involved in helping some individual or family less fortunate than yourself.”
Millard Fuller: The Excitement is Building
Ice Breaker Exercise: Service Project
Before you start the session, send your participants out on a sort of a reverse scavenger hunt – have them seek out a simple opportunity to perform a small random act of kindness. For example, they might complement someone on what a great job they’re doing or how nice they look, might find someone who looks like a lost soul and offer to give them comfort and directions, slip a dollar bill under the windshield wiper of an anonymous car in the parking lot. When everyone has returned, ask people how it felt to offer to help someone, perhaps someone that would never even know who performed the service. From there, go on to discuss some of the ways that random acts of kindness could help create a more friendly and service-oriented organization.
“No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral wellbeing of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward.”
Booker T. Washington

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A great real world example of helpfulness is Ray Kroc, who at the age of 54 began the process of transforming one McDonald’s restaurant into a worldwide fast food empire. For his first eight years,
Kroc did not personally draw a paycheck from the company. Everything went back out to helping the initial franchisees be successful. Toward the end of his life, when Kroc was asked which of his many achievements he was most proud of, he would always reply that he had helped more people achieve their dreams of financial independence than anyone else who’d ever lived before him. Ironically, by not pursuing his own gain, but instead committing himself to helping others succeed, Kroc became one of the world’s wealthiest men.
See the job description as a floor, not as a ceiling
“It’s not my job.” “That’s not my department.” “I don’t know.” We’ve all heard, and perhaps have ourselves given, some of the many excuses for not helping out. When service becomes a value rather than an activity, however, we find the motivation and the means to step outside of the box of our job description or departmental boundaries. This attitude is one of the things that has made Southwest
Airlines such a great company: in order to maintain their thirty minute turn around time, even pilots will come down from the cockpit in order to help load bags. To get a feel for how unusual that is in the airline industry, imagine a hospital where in between cases surgeons helped housekeepers scrub the floors to get the room ready for the next case. This commitment to pitching in has made Southwest the most productive airline in the business. More important, however, it has fostered an incredible sense of teamwork, and added a greater depth of meaning and reward to the work of each individual Southwest employee.
“At some point each of us has to discover that our self-interest is better served by doing good work than getting good things. The more our job and our survival is on the line, the easier it is to make this discovery. In this way hard times are an ally.”
Peter Block: Stewardship
Real service sometimes entails sticking your neck out
Sometimes lending a helping hand means taking a step outside of your comfort zone, and perhaps sticking your neck out. Say, for example, an administrative secretary happens to be walking through a patient care unit and from inside a patient room hears somebody calling for a nurse. Looking around and seeing that every nurse on the unit is otherwise occupied, that secretary has a choice to make: either take a risk and go talk to that patient, perhaps delaying whatever it was he or she had set out to do, or leave the patient in distress to wait for a “proper authority” to arrive on the scene. The secretary may or may not be able to help the patient’s problem (anyone can fill up a water pitcher or change a television channel, but only a nurse should fill an IV or change a dressing), but at least can show the patient that somebody is concerned. And whether or not anyone else ever acknowledges it, that secretary will certainly feel an intrinsic sense of reward upon leaving the patient’s room.
“I am mystified by the fact that the business world is apparently proud to be seen as hard and uncaring and detached from human values. Why is altruism in business seen as alien to the point where anyone claiming to be motivated by it is considered suspect? I personally don’t know how the hell anybody can survive running a successful business… without caring.”
Anita Roddick: Body and Soul

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In the case of management, the obligation to be helpful is more imperative. In his classic book Up the
Organization (updated as Further Up the Organization), Robert Townsend wrote “the best managers think of themselves as playing coaches…a good manager is a blocking back whenever and wherever needed.
No job is too menial for him if it helps one of his players advance toward his objective.” One of the real benefits of practicing “management by walking around” is that you see more opportunities to serve.
Training is a form of service
“Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” That ancient proverb captures an essential truth, that the best way to help somebody is often to teach them.
One of the great privileges of being involved as a CVC-T for The Twelve Core Action Values is that you are teaching people vital life skills that can help them be more effective, more successful, and happier in their lives. And while there is no real empowerment other than self empowerment, one of the surest ways to help somebody else empower themselves is to teach them the necessary skills.
“Empowerment is the self-generated exercising of professional judgment and discretion on the customer’s behalf. It is doing what needs to be done, rather than simply doing what one has been told to routinely do. From the manager’s perspective, empowerment is a key element in the process of releasing the expression of personal power at the front lines.”
Chip R. Bell and Ron Zemke: Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service
Turn your problem into someone else’s solution
Richard Tripp had a problem: he was broke and homeless in Kansas City, and watching alcohol tear apart his family and his life. It was only when he turned his problem into someone else’s solution that his life finally started to turn around. Recognizing that thousands of others were cold, hungry, homeless, and hopeless, Tripp started a nonprofit organization call COPP – Care Of Poor People. He also wrote a book entitled It’s Hip to Help the Homeless, proceeds of which go to help the organization.
Every year he provides food and clothing for thousands of homeless people, and every Thanksgiving more than ten thousand receive a hot meal courtesy of COPP.
“Each of us will define and measure success differently. Some will place more emphasis on the economic scorecard than others. No matter what your choice, if you are to succeed, you must understand that your rewards in life will be in direct proportion to the contribution you make.”
David McNally: Even Eagles Need a Push
Service recovery
Research has shown that the most loyal customer (or patient or staff member) is often the one who had a serious problem which somebody took the time to resolve. It is when the chips are down, when the customer is furious, that a helpful service attitude, coupled with the corresponding effective action, is most important. It’s been well-documented that the most effective advertising medium in the world is a dissatisfied customer, because they will tell everyone they know, and probably quite a few people they don’t know. That is not, however, the kind of advertising you want to have!
Service does not mean doing for others what they should do for themselves
Watch a child who is trying to do something when the parent comes around and starts to do it for them.
What will the child say? “No! Let me do it!” There is an art to knowing when the greatest help you can give somebody is letting them do something for themselves. If you are a manager, you know that this art lies at the heart of effective delegation.

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“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only one’s among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”
Albert Schweitzer, in a commencement address
Don’t rescue people from their messes
One of the hardest things in the world is to watch someone get into a big mess and to not bail them out, even if it would be easy for you to do so. Rescuing them might feel like the right thing to do at the time, and certainly makes you feel warm and fuzzy for doing it (especially if you receive the appropriate gratitude for being the savior of the moment), but is quite possibly the worst thing you could do.
Rescuing someone from their problem, while making both you and the rescued party feel more comfortable about the situation, could be preventing that person from learning valuable lessons and developing strength of character.
Almost any leader can empower someone to succeed (knowing that he or she can step in to prevent an embarrassing failure should the need arise). It is a very special and courageous leader who can empower someone to fail, allow them to fail without being rescued, then transform their failure into a success by sharing the story and its lessons with the rest of the organization. And above all, to allow people to fail without being branded as failures.
“You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should be doing for themselves.”
Abraham Lincoln
Charity is a means of expressing compassion for those in need as well as gratitude for your own blessings. True charity comes not from a sense of obligation, but rather is given willingly, generously and in a spirit of spontaneity. And here’s another paradox: as with helpfulness, when it comes to charity, the person doing the giving often benefits more than the person who is receiving. But charity goes beyond just giving; it’s really a state of mind, and an approach to life and to other people.
“The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.
You won’t have time to think about yourself and get bogged down in your emotional difficulties.”
Norman Vincent Peale: The Power of Positive Thinking
Be charitable with both money and time
Many successful people attribute the beginning of success to a commitment on their part to give away part of their money, including those who have made a commitment to tithing. But, as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, you give but little when you give of your time, the greatest gifts are often of yourself. A recent Business Week article (“The New Face of Philanthropy” by John A. Byrne) wrote about philanthropists like Bill Gates, who has already given away 60% of his incredible wealth, are also devoting their time, expertise, and energy to the causes in which they believe.
A commitment to charitable giving can also offset ambivalent feelings about money. As Dennis P.
Kimbro pointed out in his book What Makes the Great Great, money is not the root of all evil; quite to the contrary, poverty is often the source of great evil. Kimbro states that we all have an obligation to be

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“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
Viktor E. Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
A treasure shared is a treasure multiplied
It’s the story of an American classic with a powerful lesson for all time – how Johnny Appleseed headed off for the frontier with a sack full of seeds and cultivated a nation of orchards. Quite the opposite of
King Midas, he appreciated that the surest way to grow a treasure was to share it.
“If you are successful remember that somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a lift or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember, also, that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”
Napoleon Hill: Grow Rich with Peace of Mind
Giving as investment?
Writers throughout history have said that those who give receive. The same point has been made from many a church pulpit. One man, hearing such a message, started making charitable contributions.
After several years of doing this, he had not received anything I return, so in typical all-American fashion, he sued the church for fraud. Fortunately, the judge had the common sense to throw the case out of court, stating that if the man expected return, then it was an investment, not a donation, and by definition investments carry a risk.
“I contend that the reason to give is because it changes the giver… Responding to the needs of the poor is a socially transforming experience. It’s a psychologically transforming experience.
And most important, it’s a spiritually transforming experience.”
Tony Campolo
Charity is a state of mind
It may well be that the spirit in which something is given away is more important than the absolute magnitude of what is being given away. The Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company is well known for giving corporate funds to worthy causes. What is less well known is that the company got its start by, among other things, giving away ice cream. Many companies give things away, but the special spirit of this company was captured by Fred Lager in his book Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop: “Giving away ice cream came to them [Ben and Jerry] naturally, and they did it without a premeditated calculations to what the payback might be down the road. They truly believe that the joy was in the journey, and were determined to seize upon every opportunity to have fun that came their way.”
“One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.”
John Rutledge

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Giving appreciation and recognition
Ask your participants to raise their hand if they have chronic back trouble because they are so frequently patted on the back. Chances are you will not have any takers! This is unfortunate because, as William James, the father of modern psychology stated almost one hundred years ago, “The deepest principle of human nature is a craving to be appreciated.” Consider having a quick brainstorming session about things that can be done to increase the level of recognition and appreciation being expressed within the organization – preferably without requiring a big budget or approval from the CEO.
Again we see the paradox: if you crave appreciation, start going out of your way to appreciate others. As
Mark Twain once put it, “To have a friend, be a friend.”
“You give but little when you give of your money, and much more when you give of your time and of yourself”
Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet
Engage in random acts of kindness
Thus said the bumper sticker that launched the random acts of kindness movement. Here’s another great brainstorming opportunity: what are examples of random acts of kindness that can help create a kinder and gentler organization, while at the same time making the perpetrator of such acts feel, well, a bit kinder and gentler as well? (One of my own personal favorites is to drop the coins in my pocket on the ground; it makes my whole day to see the reaction of a young child picking up a lucky quarter.)
“Deeds of courage and self-sacrifice are never meaningless. Don’t feel that you are a failure when you lose one battle in the service of a cause that deserves to win. Even as a match has the power to light a candle and perpetuate its light before it is consumed by its own flame, even as a candle can chase the darkness from an entire room before it uses itself up in the process of shedding light and warmth, so your dedication will make a difference to people whose existence you may not even know about today.”
Harold S. Kushner: Who Needs God?
Compassion, according to my Webster’s Dictionary, means “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.”
Consider the fact that at some point or another, all of us are so stricken, and for many people it is almost a chronic condition (at least in their own minds). As such, everyone you meet needs, and is deserving of your compassion.
“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
Ann Landers
Suspend judgment
You cannot simultaneously be compassionate and judgmental. That may be one of the greatest lessons taught by Mother Teresa: if you are judging somebody, even as you console and assist them, it is not so much compassion as it is condescension. This is especially a problem in hospitals, where we are quick to judge others on the basis of where they fit on the status totem pole.
“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

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John Stuart Mill
Genuine compassion entails mutuality
One of the first lessons that Bill W. learned when founding Alcoholics Anonymous was that trying to help another alcoholic stay sober never worked, because the recipient drunk was usually too proud or defensive to accept the help. What did work, however, was explaining to that drunk that you needed him as much as he needed you, because the only way you could remain sober was by helping others achieve sobriety. That’s a great metaphor. We all have wounds that need to be healed. The only way to get a hug is to give a hug. Compassion requires mutuality.
“If there ever was a moment to be seized, this is it. Work matters. It’s where we earn our livelihood and find out what we can be. It’s also a major arena where we participate in something outside ourselves and have the most of our impact on the world around us. What’s needed on a societal scale is also what’s needed for individuals; to engage in the struggle to contribute through their jobs, to develop as people who can create and set priorities and lead and preserve hope. It’s not about trading in our lives for something totally different, but about living the lives we have for all they’re worth.”
Melissa Everett: Making A Living While Making A Difference
Do not confuse kindness with blindness
To be compassionate does not necessarily mean that you are accepting or approving of inappropriate behavior. You can be compassionate of the alcoholic without tolerating the alcoholic’s destructive behavior. This is the central message of any tough love approach – to love the sinner without approving of the sin.
“The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity. It is a secret known only to a very few people, a secret that has to be rediscovered over and over again.”
Henri J. M. Nouwen: Here and Now
Transcend self-interest
Persistence is easier when our efforts are directed toward service to others rather than toward benefit of self. Serve others and you find that what you once thought would feel like sacrifice in fact becomes the greatest reward.
“The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means helpless, unable to grasp the world – things and people – actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react.”
Eric Fromm: The Art of Loving
You cannot pour from an empty pitcher. A question that often arises in healthcare is, “who cares for the caregiver?” Ultimately, that must be each individual’s own personal responsibility. Caregivers who do not take time for renewal, who do not take care of themselves, often end up cynical, burned out, and frankly not very caring.

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Service is a best way to escape the Iron Triangle of False Personality
Because true service helps us rise above our own egos, set aside self pity and other negative emotions, and for a while disregard our own selfish ambitions, it is one of the surest ways to escape the baleful prison of the Iron Triangle of False Personality. There is something truly liberating about escaping the
“what’s in it for me” mindset, and devoting yourself to helping others. When General George C.
Marshall was asked for the criteria he used in selecting the commanders who led American forces during WWII, he simply replied “selflessness.” It’s no coincidence that the most selfless of these leaders,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, went on to become Supreme Allied Commander and a two term U.S. president.
“The dilemma is that to be able to trust, you must be able to accept the risk associated with trusting. When reaching out to people, we always risk the chance of being wrong, but if we never try for fear of failing, we may never experience the satisfaction of being in a trusting relationship.”
Frank K. Sonnenberg: Managing With a Conscience
Ask for help, then be willing to receive it
In the Lone Ranger culture of America, it is difficult for many of us to ask for the help we need, especially if it implies some sort of weakness on our part. Nevertheless, renewal – the refilling of the pitcher – often requires that we do just that. It also requires that when others offer to help (including perhaps unwelcome suggestions) we accept their help like a good Dionarap (Dionarap is “paranoid” spelled backwards – a Dionarap is a reverse paranoid), assuming that they are offering in good faith and with our best interest at heart.
Leave people better than you found them
Stress has been called the invisible epidemic of our time, and is certainly responsible for a great deal of mental and physical distress. However, stress is caused not so much by what happens to us as by how we react to what happens to us, whether we let it de-energize us or catalyze us. The following story is perhaps a metaphor for the best prescription for reducing the negative impacts of organizational stress.
At the end of every July, the Des Moines Register newspaper sponsors RAGBRAI  , the world’s oldest and largest organized bicycle tour. More than 12,000 people participate in this annual bike ride across Iowa which, despite what you may have heard, is not flat. Tim Lane is a co-founder of Team Skunk, the bicycle club with which I ride (named for the Skunk River, not the riders). Every year, he gives a welcome to new members in which he admonishes us to leave each campsite better than we found it, but then to go one step beyond and to leave each person we meet somehow better for the encounter.
On RAGBRAI XXVIII in July of 2000, one of our riders was Cindy Porteous, then-executive director of the National Association for Health and Fitness. Near the end of one particularly arduous day, she was struggling her way up a hill into a headwind when she felt a strong hand plant itself in the small of her back and begin pushing her up the hill at a high rate of speed. Looking around, she discovered that the hand belonged to the leader of an Italian bicycle racing team, of which she had just become lead bike.
It was an exhilarating moment!
The next day came a moment not so happy. Cindy was riding in a pack down a congested gravel road when a pickup truck came barreling down upon them from the opposite direction. The driver showed no signs of slowing down or pulling over as he raced toward the bicycles, and riders frantically scattered

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When Cindy came from the hospital to our campsite late that afternoon, physical pain and disappointment weighed heavily upon her. Tim, who had disappeared for several hours after reaching camp, was surprisingly ebullient, and went around telling everyone to make sure and be there at 6 o’clock, because something special would be happening. Sure enough, at the appointed hour the Italian bicycle racing team showed up. For a few magical moments, there was no language barrier as they presented Cindy with an official Italian bicycle team jersey and a team photo, which they had all autographed, and as everyone posed for photos and shared a beer and a laugh.
Cindy laughed and she cried, and it was obvious that in his own way, Tim had done as much for her healing as had the doctors who stitched up the deep gash on her chin. And in the years to come, I’d be willing to bet that while memories of being run off the road by a speeding pickup truck will fade away,
Cindy will never forget the day she was an official member of the Italian bicycle racing team. Indeed, she has completed two RAGBRAI rides since.
That afternoon, while the rest of us were propping up our sore legs and downing prodigious quantities of Gatorade and other liquids, Tim Lane was scurrying around trying to arrange the visit by the Italians.
He wasn’t about to allow a fellow member of Team Skunk go home worse for having participated in the ride. It wasn’t just Cindy who was affected by Tim’s commitment: I know that his example has had a positive influence on me, and I’m sure on every other member of Team Skunk – as well as, I imagine, on members of that Italian bicycle racing team.
What if people in every workplace had a similar commitment to their coworkers? What if our mutual determination was that nobody would leave work at the end of a stressful day any worse off than they had come in that morning – probably taking home all that accumulated stress and negativity to dump on their families? What if at the end of such days someone always took it upon themselves to go out for root beer and ice cream before wrapping up for the day?
Sounds like the kind of organization you’d like to work for, doesn’t it? Well, you don’t need to wait for the CEO to send out a memo, because that’s not necessary. Anyone can share a favorite inspirational message, put on a red rubber nose and do a somersault, give a sympathetic pat on the back, or even run down to the convenience store for root beer and ice cream at the end of a hard day. Build that kind of environment and everyone – customers as well as employees – will, like Cindy, keep coming back.
“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be a healer
After his victory at Yorktown, George Washington allowed the British to surrender with dignity, and began the long process of healing his war-ravaged nation. After taking Lee’s sword at Appomattox,
Ulysses S. Grant extended generous terms to the former secessionists in an effort to begin healing the deep wounds that would scar his country for generations to come. After engineering the unconditioned surrender of Nazi Germany, George C. Marshall oversaw the Marshall Plan to rebuild the nations of his

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“If you have your eye on your own profits and avoid helping those in need, you may do all right in short run, but in the long run it will catch up with you. If you think only of your own profit in human relations, then you’re putting yourself at risk. You have to put the principle of mutual benefit to work. If one side takes everything at the expense of the other, then the relationship is not going to last very long.”
Kim Woo-Choong: Every Street is Paved with Gold
Establish rituals
We have many rituals that govern our behavior in the business world. We shake with the right hand, men wear neckties but not dresses, and big deals get done over power lunches or on the golf course.
But relatively few organizations consciously establish rituals to give a sense of power, meaning, and dignity to people’s daily work, and to instill a sense of manifest destiny to the organization’s goals. As quaint as they may seem today, Thomas Watson’s strict dress code and company fight songs were instrumental in differentiating the IBM sales force in the company’s early days, and helped create a unique esprit de corps that carried the company to huge success in the ensuing decades.
I once spoke with an entrepreneur who put a ship’s bell in the middle of her offices. Every time they closed a sale, the successful salesperson would ring the bell and people would gather round for an impromptu celebration. Of course, everyone thought this little ritual was fun, but it was also highly effective. It wasn’t long before a competition got started to see who could ring the bell most often.
Rituals like this ringing of the bell are a powerful way of manifesting and reinforcing enthusiastic expectations.
In The Reinvention of Work, Matthew Fox says: “Of all the ways to reinvent work one is more crucial to our time than all the others. It is crucial because it has been most roundly neglected during the industrial era. I am speaking of ritual.” This would make a great discussion topic: what rituals can we use in our organization to make stress not only more manageable, but a source of greater achievement and productivity, and to make sure that we leave it behind when we go home at the end of the day.
“Ritual is the primary means by which a community names itself and comes to life, responding to the deep mysteries of life whether these by mysteries of joy and hope or of sorrow and angst…
It is through ritual that the young can become excited enough about their existence to throw themselves into the adventures of living, learning, relating, forgiving, letting go, and letting be.
Ritual puts them in touch with generosity of heart, with the courage and gratitude that will energize them for the journey.”
Matthew Fox: The Reinvention of Work
Take-Home Exercise
Encourage participants to engage in at least one Random Act of Kindness each day of the next month, and to pay attention to how this small kindness makes them feel.

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Anyone who takes to heart and acts upon the first eleven values that we have covered in this course will become the sort of person who is an example to others, who inspires and influences others. In other words, will become a leader. When leadership becomes an attitude and a way of life, not just something that is done because of your job description or title, it becomes a value in its own right. As reflected in the following quotation from the book Primal Leadership, leadership closes the circle of The Twelve Core
Action Values by bringing us back to Authenticity:
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Leadership, James MacGregor Burns differentiates between
transactional leadership, which he defines as the management necessary to run any organization, and
transforming leadership, which he defines as a relationship between leader and follower in which both are raised to higher levels of personal expectation and moral values. When you think about the greatest transforming leaders in history – the people who have most profoundly changed our world, and indeed our view of what it means to be human – they almost universally share one thing in common: nobody told them to do it; they were not elected or appointed, but rather saw a need and an opportunity, and took responsibility upon themselves to meet it. One of the most important ultimate objectives of The
Twelve Core Action Values is to teach people the attitudes and the skills needed to become a transforming leader in their own circle of the world, regardless of what their job title might be.
In many respects, leadership harkens back to authenticity. While management is something you might do as part of a job description, leadership is more a reflection on who you are as a person. As leadership expert Warren Bennis puts it, people do not become leaders because they need to be leaders, but rather because of who they are and what they are seeking to accomplish they attract followers.
Ice Breaker Exercise: What is a Leader?
Begin by asking this question: What is the single most important activity of leadership? At the end of the discussion, point out that there is no right or wrong answer: leaders come in all sizes and shapes, with a wide variety of agendas and styles. If, however, someone had the time to read biographies of every great leader, and to read every great book on the theory of leadership, that person would come away with this overwhelming conclusion: the key responsibility of the leader is to listen.
Great leaders listen, observe, and understand the real needs of their followers, and then help them fulfill those needs. Adolph Hitler was not a leader – he was a tyrant who drove people to help him achieve his desires, not to meet their own needs (quite to the contrary). Florence Nightingale, on the other hand, was a genuine leader who perceived and achieved legitimate needs for the soldiers of the
British army, as well as for future nursing professionals.
“In a nutshell, here’s how effective leaders spend their time: once they have set their organization’s goals and strategies – and established appropriate plans, structures, and metrics to carry them out – leaders devote about half their time to developing people and half their time to communication.”
James O’Toole: Leadership A to Z

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The leader’s first duty, wrote Max DePree in his book Leadership is an Art, is to define reality. This turns out to be more of a challenge, and more of a balancing act than is superficially obvious. One of the key attributes of the most successful leaders studied by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: Why
some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t was this: the most effective leaders had the ability to be brutally realistic in facing the facts and problems of their current situation while still maintaining positive optimism about dealing with the circumstances, and also had the ability to distinguish between
“big hairy audacious goals,” on the one hand, and delusions of grandeur on the other.
“When I reflected on my own [leadership] experience, it struck me that when I was most effective it was because I knew what I wanted. When I was ineffective, it was because I was unclear about my desired outcome. So, the first leadership competency is the management of attention through a set of intentions or a vision, not in a mystical or religious sense, but in the sense of outcome, goal, or direction.
Warren Bennis: Managing People is Like Herding Cats
Know yourself
Know thyself. This, said Socrates, is the height of wisdom. In his book Growing a Business Paul
Hawken wrote, “Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.”
That gets to the heart of the questions any leader or would-be leader must ask if he or she is to be truly effective: Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who am I meant to be? Leaders become great not because they aspire to leadership, but because they aspire to authenticity; in the process of pursuing authentic goals and of becoming the kind of person they really want to be, they gravitate towards positions of leadership and pull followers along in their wake.
If your work as a leader moves you closer to being the authentic, meant-to-be “you,” then you will ultimately be successful. If, on the other hand, you are pursuing leadership for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, you are setting yourself up for failure. To be a leader, time spent enhancing selfawareness by writing in a journal, reflecting quietly, and dreaming, visualizing and goal-setting is a valuable investment in achieving authentic success.
“Every CEO, manager, human resource director, employer, and employee must be able to state what they need, want, or prefer with confidence and in a manner that is clear, honest, and forthright. But good leaders must go even further. They must be able to interpret the needs, wants, and preferences of their colleagues and customers to create a cooperative and successful work environment. They must also be able to demonstrate respect for others through their words and actions.”
Connie Podesta and Jean Gatz: How to Be the
Person Successful Companies Fight to Keep
Communication is essential
Effective communication is essential to teamwork. In the typical hospital, a number of factors interfere with clear communication. First is the silo effect – the tendency for the organization to be segmented into individual departments between which communications is often incomplete or fragmented, and sometimes downright hostile. Second is the rumor mill; for the most part, the “information” that is

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If you need information, have a question, or would like to verify the accuracy of a rumor, empower yourself to go find the information. In such a case, the only dumb question is the one that is not asked.
This has added benefits for personal growth to the extent that it pushes you out of your comfort zone and your usual circle of acquaintances.
Especially if you are a manager, get out of the office, get out of your department, and make rounds. For example, some of the most stressful conditions on patient care units are caused by the perception of inadequate support. If you are a manager of a support department, you might not be able to fix the problems (at least not immediately) but you can show your concern by being visible on the unit, by asking questions, asking for ideas, and being as straight as possible about what you can and cannot do to help.
“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both. This requires first getting a strong image of your ideal self, as well as an accurate picture of your real self – who you are now. Such self-directed learning is most effective and sustainable when you understand the process of change – and the steps to achieve it – as you go through it.”
Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and
Annie McKee: Primal Leadership
Argue until the decision is made, then get behind it
Smart managers know that debate is good, and empowered workers love to participate. If it is a real team, however, once the decision has been made, people don’t second guess it, don’t try to undermine the decision-maker, but instead they get behind it heart and soul.
Foster an all-or-none team attitude
In The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith wrote that there are two things effective team leaders never do:
1.
They do not blame or allow specific individuals to fail.
2.
They never excuse away shortfalls in team performance.
In other words, they cultivate an “all-or-none” team attitude. “Unfortunately,” the authors say,
“organizations built on individual instead of mutual accountability often foster the reverse. Too often, when expected results do not materialize, individuals get singled out for blame… By contrast, real team leaders believe that success or failure is a team event. No outside obstacle is an excuse for team failure, and no individuals fail. Only the team can fail.”
Exchange the spotlight for a floodlight
In Sacred Hoops, Phil Jackson describes how the Chicago Bulls evolved from the one-man Michael
Jordan show of the late 1980s into the dominant NBA team of the ‘90s. The process began when
Jackson told Jordan that the sign of a great player was not how many points he personally scored, but rather how much he contributed to elevating the performance of every player on the team. They implemented a new offense that gave other players more scoring opportunities. The rest, as they say, is history. Jordan proved not only to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game, but also

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Jordan Show.
Robert Townsend, author of Further Up the Organization, wrote about how he spread the limelight when he was at American Express by allowing subordinates great latitude to negotiate deals, and then to report their successes to the board in person. In addition to the chance to broaden their skills and gain recognition from top management, Townsend says, “they started using 80 percent of their abilities instead of the normal 20 percent (in poorly managed companies) and they had more fun. Pretty soon they got promotions and more money.” Townsend himself ended up with more recognition, more opportunity, more fun, more money, and promotions – probably none of which would have occurred had he tried to hog the spotlight.
Build a winner without creating losers
In recent years the word co-opetition has emerged to describe situations where organizations compete in one arena and cooperate in another. In today’s complex and fast-changing world – and you know it’s a complex and fast-changing world when FedEx and the United States Postal Service are exploring ways to work together! – yesterday’s competitor might be tomorrow’s customer, partner, or owner. Smart leaders recognize that things are tough enough already without creating new enemies. And the surest way to create a new enemy is to make someone else fail en route to your success. One of the most successful business leaders in recent memory is Cisco CEO John Chambers. As David Bunnell writes in Making the Cisco Connection, Chambers is “willing to crush the competition, but [prefers] them to be friends.”
Persuade, don’t coerce
When I was studying for my MBA at Stanford, I did an internship at Hewlett Packard during the summer of 1984. I was in the newly-created Personal Computer Group, and often heard the phrase,
“sell it to the sales force.” In effect, engineers were told that if the sales team did not voluntarily pick up the burden of selling a new product, it would not be forced upon them, no matter how magnificent the technology. It is much more difficult, perhaps impossible, to create a mission-driven organizational culture when there is a top-down, command-and-control operating philosophy. Allow people to pick up burdens by their own choice and you will find that many will voluntarily carry much heavier loads than the leader would command them to carry.
Simplify the vision
Whether the leadership task is running a scout troop, a company, or a nation, the most effective leaders have the ability to communicate a powerful and complex vision in terms that anyone can understand.
Martin Luther King made the case against segregation in a lengthy, complex, and thoroughlydocumented Letter from the Birmingham Jail; he also made the vision powerfully accessible to the general public in his I Have a Dream speech, which lasted under five minutes. In Good to Great, Jim
Collins compared companies which made the leap to corporate stardom with similar companies that did not. One of the most important differences was that great organizations organized around a simple guiding concept, whereas also-rans tended to make things much too complicated. Collins set forth what he called his “three circles” formula as a way of keeping a clear focus on a simple guiding principle which is applicable to an individual as well as to an organization. Your guiding focus, he says, should be the intersection of three circles representing the following:
The one area of activity where you have the potential to be the absolute best.
The activity that generates the revenue which drives your economic engine.

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The one thing that you are most passionate about.
When you can find the one area of your life where those three circles overlap, Collins says, you have quite likely identified your realm of potential greatness.
“One of the most sacred relationships among teams of people is that between leaders and followers. This relationship, so central and crucial, depends to an extraordinary degree on the clearly expressed and consistently demonstrated values of the leader as seen through the special lens of followers. That is why leadership and ethics are inextricably woven together.”
Max DePree: Leadership Jazz
Be a hub – gather information from many sources
Ivan Misner is the founder of BNI – Business Network International, which is the world’s largest referral networking organization. He is also the author of several books on how to use networking to generate leads and to promote word-of-mouth marketing for a business. One of his suggestions is that you should position your company as “a hub firm” in order to optimize the number and quality of your business connections. A hub firm, he writes in his book The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret, “is the key business in a constellation of independent businesses tethered to one another to make the most effective use of the organizational strengths of each. Cooperative relationships between these businesses can be the source of dramatic competitive strength.” The concept is not limited to business.
You can become a hub person by bringing people together in a way that optimizes their individual strengths and creates synergy within the group. You can do this as a business manager, a scout troop leader, or as a wizard creating the team for wild adventures.
“Churchill held that there were three positive hallmarks (do’s) of effective thinking, and three common errors (don’ts) to be avoided. The three hallmarks: always keep the central or most important aspect of the current problem in mind, know how to balance the chances on both sides of a decision and keep these factors in proportion, and remain open to changing your mind in the presence of new facts. The three common errors: trying to look too far ahead, trying for excessive perfection, and making decisions for decision’s sake that would be better postponed or not made at all.”
Steven F. Hayward: Churchill on Leadership:
Executive Success in the Face of Adversity
Become a better listener
One of the best definitions of charisma is this: it is the ability to make the people with whom you interact feel like their work is important, and they are valuable as individuals. By this definition, every leader, at every level of every organization, should cultivate charisma. In this sense, charisma contains two elements: visibility and listening. When you as a leader are visible to your people, and are really listening to them, you have charisma. That is the underlying power of managing by walking around – it puts the leader out there on the front lines where he or she can interact with people about the issues which concern them most. The added benefit, of course, is that the more visible the leader is, the more actively he or she listens to a wider range of people, the more accurate information will be obtained, and the less likely it is that leader will fall victim to only hearing what people think they want to hear.
“The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people, and their failure to lead, and to follow servants as leaders. Too many settle for being critics and experts. There is too much intellectual wheel spinning, too much retreating into ‘research,’ too little preparation

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Robert Greenleaf: Servant Leadership
Expand the circle
Earlier we commented on the fact that fear creates enemies while courage creates friends. In a world where competition is a way of organizational life, even in (sometimes it feels like especially in) healthcare, there can be a tendency to look at competitors, and even regulatory and other outside agencies, as “the enemy.” In her book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic
World, Margaret J. Wheatley argues that this can be seriously counterproductive, in no small part because it clouds the clarity with which people in that organization perceive the world around them.
She cites the example of a heavily regulated chemical plant which historically had an adversarial relationship with the community, which brought down the walls and invited in regulators, environmental advocates, even schoolchildren. “As trust developed and defensive postures faded, traditional boundaries dissolved… As relationships developed far beyond the plant, it [also] created conditions within the plant for levels of autonomy and experimentation that resulted in extraordinary new levels of safety and productivity.”
Be clear in your communication
At one point in my hospital administration career, I was not seeing eye-to-eye with a fellow executive, and our relationship was seriously strained. As a small peace offering, I purchased for him a copy of a book I had recently read and enjoyed entitled Small Decencies by John Cowan. To my surprise, not only did this not help the situation, things actually got worse. At last, we finally had an air-clearing conversation. He told me that when he received the book, he took a quick look at the title, thought it said Small Deficiencies and, assuming it was my comment on his abilities, tossed it aside. This was obviously a case in which, as the big boss man in the movie Cool Hand Luke famously put it, a failure to
communicate. Instead of beating around the bush with the book offering, I should have confronted the situation immediately and directly.
Be clear in your performance expectations
In the mid-90s, Baptist Healthcare of Pensacola was struggling to compete in one of the nation’s most intensely competitive healthcare markets. Every step they took to compete – new buildings, new technology, new services – would be almost instantly countered. Finally, the hospital’s leaders decided that in order to survive, they would have to compete with superior service. Of course, most organizations say that’s what they are trying to do; what was different about Baptist is that they really have taken it seriously.
Their first step was to acknowledge that simply having a customer service program wouldn’t do it, especially considering that competing hospitals would be implementing their own such programs. What was needed was a radical re-orientation of the organization’s culture, in which that the key to success would be employee buy-in at all levels. As a first step, they adopted a philosophy that employee satisfaction is a pre-requisite to customer satisfaction: they established open-book management practices, and they asked employees to tell them what they needed to be satisfied in their jobs. Instead of giving them excuses why they couldn’t, they gave people what they had asked for.
Then they worked with employee groups to establish standards of performance (such as honoring patient privacy), but what really makes their experience so unique is that they went one step beyond

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The results have been incredible. The hospital consistently ranks in the top one percent of its peer group on patient satisfaction measures; its nursing turnover rate has been cut in half; hundreds of hospitals from around the country have sent teams to Pensacola to learn Baptist’s secret; and the organization has created a leadership institute to promote these principles.
No news is no news
No news is good news, goes the old saying, although many of us tend to assume that no news is bad news. Not having heard from somebody or about something, we begin to imagine all sorts of bad things having happened, to suspect that somehow someone has fouled things up, and jump to conclusions that are altogether inaccurate and inappropriate. Unfortunately, if we act upon those jumped-to conclusions, we can create the conditions that actually bring about the undesired outcome – the leap to a false certainty can cause a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a complex environment like a hospital, or a family, there will always be uncertainty, lack of information, conflicting information, and various mutually-exclusive ways to interpret information. This is what Carl von Clausewitz, in his classic work of military strategy On War, called “the fog of war.” As a manager, as a parent, it is important for you to maintain an objective clarity about what you know and what you do not know, and to prevent speculation, rumor-mongering, and conclusion-jumping. One way of doing that is to actively seek out information that fills in the gaps of your knowledge. Remember, fear grows in the darkness of ignorance, and shrinks under the light of information and intelligence.
Effective leaders are people who continuously raise expectations, of themselves and of others. This is a powerfully important point, given the incredible evidence that in life, as in business, we tend to get what we expect. Then they set a positive example by working to fulfill those expectations.
“I have also come to believe that whatever view we have of people is self-fulfilling; that is, we will produce the evidence to support our view. If we have an enlarged view of human nature and human potential, we will gradually find the evidence to support our view until we feel inwardly confirmed and reinforced.”
Stephen Covey: Principle-Centered Leadership
Expect the best from yourself and from others
While we have seen that leaders must have the clarity to be brutally honest while facing the facts of their situation, they also must foster an environment that encourages confidence and optimism. It was this ability, more than any other that allowed explorer Ernest Shackleton to save the lives of his entire crew of the ship Endurance when they were stranded in the Antarctic ice for 634 days. One of the things that Shackleton did with great genius was to “reframe disastrous events in positive, empowering ways.” In the parlance of modern day public relations, Shackleton was a master of “spin,” able to give a positive twist to even the most desperate news, knowing that the alternative would be anxiety and

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Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition, Dennis N.T.
Perkins explains the valuable uses, and the dangers, of reframing as follows:
It is important to note that the concept of reframing is not simply saying blithely that things will be all right. There are three steps to the process. The first step is to take a difficult situation and envision all the possible outcomes, both positive and negative. The second step is to focus on a positive way of thinking that is consistent with the reality of the situation. This positive view may not, in a statistical sense, be the most likely outcome. But it must be a conceivable scenario. Finally, this positive outlook must be maintained in spite of resistance and cynicism.
After they were saved with not a man being lost, Shackleton himself wrote: “I have marveled often at the thin line that divides success from failure and the sudden turn that leads from apparent certain disaster to comparative safety.”
Prepare people for change
Leadership expert James O’Toole likens management in today’s organizations to running a fire department. In today’s fast-changing world, there is no way you can anticipate every potential scenario, and to expect that every decision will be made by “the boss,” would lead to disaster. Instead, people must be given the skills and the confidence to empower themselves to make the appropriate decisions in each situation, just as firefighters can never rehearse a specific fire, but only prepare themselves for whatever fire might come along. One of the surest ways to prepare people for the challenges of leadership is to teach them – both through your personal example and your communication efforts – how to live The Twelve Core Action Values.
“If your players know you are consistent and your organization is without significant cracks, they will go to the wall for you. This is a far greater motivator than Knute Rockne speeches or sales contests with trips to Hawaii as prizes.”
Fran Tarkenton: Playing to Win
Replace the tyranny of “OR” with the genius of “AND”
One of the characteristics of visionary companies described by Collins and Porras in their book Built to
Last was that they replaced “the tyranny of OR” “with the genius of AND.” They were not, for example, willing to accept a tradeoff between cost and quality; to allow customer service to suffer in the pursuit of productivity; or to reduce investments in research or marketing to accommodate a recessionary economy. By holding themselves to high expectations at all times, these companies create the sort of
“can do” environment in which the impossible only takes a little longer.
“Perhaps the most impressive and memorable quality of the leaders we studied was the way they responded to failure... [T]hese leaders put all their energies into their task. They simply don’t think about failure, don’t even use the word.”
Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus: Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge
Create heroic self expectations for your people
Psychologists refer to “the Pygmalion Effect” to refer to the fact that people tend to perform at the level that is expected of them. Studies of schoolchildren, for example, showed that those who were told they were brilliant performed brilliantly, while those who were told that they needed remedial classes

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“When you get right down to it, one of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuses for failure. But if you’re a paper manager, hiding in your office, they may not tell you about the problems only you can solve. So get out and ask them if there’s anything you can do to help. Pretty soon they’re standing right out there in the open with nobody but themselves to blame. Then they get to work, they taste success, and then they have the strength of ten.”
Robert Townsend: Further Up the Organization
Give credit, take blame
John H. Dexter has provided visionary leadership for the Trevor Day School in New York City for nearly twenty-five years. “Give Credit, Take Blame” has always been one of his guiding principles. When they established a new high school in 1991, he went out of his way to deflect praise from himself to the specific individual(s) responsible for a particular accomplishment. But when the new high school ended its first year over budget by $750,000, he took sole responsibility, even refusing to single out individual culprits for impatient board members. This philosophy helped Dexter build a thriving school. Equally important, his example of leading by putting your ego in the corner is an example that will help many of
Trevor’s students learn to be more effective leaders – and citizens.
“The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
George Orwell
Keep raising the bar
The pursuit of excellence is a never-ending process. Effective leaders fight off arrogance and complacence by continuously raising the bar after each successful accomplishment.
Broaden the horizons of your expectations
A growing number of innovative companies have shown that raising expectations with regard to more than just their own business can be good for business. Companies like Southwest Airlines, Ben &
Jerry’s Ice Cream, McDonald’s (with the Ronald McDonald House), and The Body Shop have made a commitment to a better world on element of their corporate mission.
Don’t tolerate demeaning attitudes
It is incumbent upon leaders to do everything possible to create an environment that honors human dignity, irrespective of each individual’s race, occupation, or social status, for two reasons. First, it is good business sense. In today’s competitive world, you need the best thinking of all your people, and people think best when they’re treated as equals. Second, it’s a matter of integrity; the very word implies a wholeness and unity that is violated by prejudice and demeaning treatment. Create an environment in which everyone is treated with respect and dignity, if for no other reason than that you just never know when a janitor might save your business!

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Believe in your destiny
One of the things great leaders do is create a sense of destiny. When Roosevelt called for the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in World War II, he fostered the perception that total victory was not only possible, it was inevitable. When Kennedy called for putting a man on the moon, we all just knew it was going to happen, even after Kennedy himself was no longer there to provide leadership. He had already created the destiny.
Does the leader have to have absolute belief in destiny before inspiring others to buy-in? At the start, the leader must absolutely believe that the goal is honorable and attainable, and be personally committed to doing everything possible in its pursuit. After that, the sense of destiny is intensified through a complex interaction between leader and followers.
A good example of this is Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. At the outset, the only destiny he promoted was that of one nation, still undivided. Before the wear, Lincoln himself had fairly atavistic notions about black people and their bondage. As the war progressed, however, the shared sense of destiny grew to include the abolition of slavery, something Lincoln himself did not publicly proclaim as a war objective until 1863, but after which he prosecuted with intensity. Whether the goal is winning a war or building a successful business, the leader who can first believe and then convince others to believe that victory is preordained, has taken a huge step toward victory.
“One of the traits [great and famous people] have in common is a sense of expectation and destiny. They always believed that they were destined for greatness... In [these heroes], you’ll not see a different species of human being, but you will see the same doubts and fears that you face, and you will see their greatness and potential in yourself.”
Jim Stovall: Success Secrets of Super Achievers
By definition, a leader is someone who is in front of followers. Tyrants, despots, and slave-drivers are not leaders. Managers who “motivate” performance with fear, intimidation, and manipulation are not leaders. Rather, leaders motivate people with encouragement.
“Those who are confident of their abilities tackle something new with a strength that comes from having met and mastered many challenges before... For them the unknown is challenge rather than threat. They relish risk. They dare to try the novel, the uncharted, the completely original.
In short, the fledgling creative spirit feeds on encouragement and shrivels with criticism.
Mastering a task is one way children build self-confidence. Knowing that they have been appreciated for doing a good job is another. It’s best to judge a child’s effort according to a child’s standards, and give praise that will urge the child onward.”
Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman, & Michael Ray: The Creative Spirit
Be in it for the long haul
When the late John Wooden joined UCLA as head basketball coach in 1948, the school did not have a proper basketball facility. It would be sixteen years – all if them housed in what was known as “the
B.O. Barn” – before Wooden’s UCLA team won the first of ten national titles between 1964 and 1975, an accomplishment that may well never be equaled. What would have happened if the UCLA

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In his book Wooden (with Steve Jamison) Coach Wooden said that character is more important to sustained success than athletic ability or coaching talent: “Character creates longevity… When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’” And what builds character? Adversity and time. When you decide to go after something, make it a total commitment. Work through every setback and adversity. Love what you do and do it with love. Then, be in it for the long haul.
Leadership entails voluntary loss of freedom
When you are a leader, and this includes being given any sort of management job title, you must give up certain freedoms: the freedom to be negative; the freedom to second guess administrative decisions after they’ve been made (hopefully with your input if you are involved); the freedom to be a pessimist, since your view can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the freedom to slack off when it comes to making a sincere effort to live The Twelve Core Action Values, since your example has a profound influence on those who look up to you.
“The skilled commander seeks victory from the situation and does not demand it of his subordinates.”
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
Be willing to take risks
One aspect of leadership commitment is a willingness to stick your neck out and take a risk, even when there is no assurance of success. As Warren Bennis put it in his book On Becoming a Leader, “Unless you are willing to take risks, you will suffer paralyzing inhibitions, and you will never do what you are capable of doing. Mistakes—missteps—are necessary for actualizing your vision, and necessary steps towards success.”
“I believe the most important thing you can sell people is a belief in themselves. The most significant investment you can make is one in your own potential for greatness, and your own capacity to make a difference in the lives of those around you.”
Les Brown: Live Your Dreams
Ownership is not given, it is taken
I recently read about a newly-appointed CEO at a struggling consumer products company. At his first meeting with the division heads, he asked how many thought that the company’s costs were too high; every hand went up. He then asked how many thought costs in their department were too high; not one hand was raised. He later said that is a common problem at companies in trouble – everyone knows that there is a problem, but nobody thinks that it’s their problem (Katrina Brooker: “Jim Kilts is an Old-
Fashioned Curmudgeon – Nothing Could be Better for Gillette,” Fortune, December 30, 2002).
Just as the only real empowerment is self-empowerment, you cannot give someone else ownership of a problem or of an opportunity – they must take it. But unless they do take ownership, your operation – be it a hospital department, an entire company, or a family – is headed for trouble. Hence, an important leadership responsibility is to create the sort of environment that encourages people to take the ownership (and the concomitant risks) that is a necessary element of both personal and organizational growth and sustained success.

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“No empowerment is so effective as self-empowerment... In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are always positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right
[because it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure].”
David Landes: “Culture Makes All the Difference” in Culture
Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (edited by Samuel P.
Huntington and Lawrence E. Harrison)
Be first in attack, last in retreat
Officers in the Israeli army honor the Palmach Doctrine. This states that officers are to be in the lead tank during an attack, and last to withdraw in the event of a retreat. This has several positive effects.
First, officers are more likely to plan their attacks wisely knowing that they will be in the vanguard.
Second, troops are more likely to fight with courage and determination when their officer is fighting alongside them. Third, the officer actually on the front line is in a better position to make instant adjustments if the original plan isn’t working. And fourth, the officer is less likely to call a retreat from a desperate situation knowing that he personally will be the rear guard for the rear guard. That last bit of determination has more than once salvaged victory from what otherwise might have become a route.
Shortly after becoming chairman of the Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford, Jr. made a trip to “the front.”
As recounted in a Fortune magazine article, there had been an explosion at the company’s Rouge plant, killing six people and injuring several more. As the 42 year-old scion of the Ford family left his office en route to the parking lot, his lieutenants tried to talk him out of making the trip. They had all sorts of reasons for wanting to insulate the boss from this disaster, but he was having none of it. Finally, one of them blurted out, “You don’t understand. Generals don’t go to the front.”
As it turns out, Ford understood far better than his lieutenants: throughout history, the greatest generals have made it a point to be at the front: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, U.S. Grant, George
Patton, Moshe Dayan – they all understood that when generals visit the front, two good things happen.
First, the troops see that their leader is concerned; second, the leader gets a firsthand feel for what is really happening.
Ford, called “the antithesis of the Organization Man” by Fortune magazine, showed up at a UAW negotiating session wearing the union’s button that read BARGAINING FOR FAMILIES, explaining that he hated the traditional adversarial union-management relationship. Ford has also raised eyebrows with his vocal support for environmental issues. Jerry Sullivan, president of UAW Local 600, says of
Ford: “His concern for the people, for the community, for the environment – those are things you just don’t see in an industrialist.” They are, however, things you see in a real leader – a leader with a mission, a leader who is willing to be first in attack and last in retreat.
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
George Patton
Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of human motivation – and most of them overlook this essential fact: one of the most powerful forms of motivation is celebration.

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“The best team leaders are able to get everyone to buy into a common sense of mission, goals, and agenda. The ability to articulate a compelling vision that serves as the guiding force for the group may be the single most important contribution of a good team leader. A charismatic leader can hold a team on course when all else fails.”
Daniel Goleman: Working with Emotional Intelligence
The paradox of parties
“Keep your eyes on the road, your nose to the grindstone, and your shoulder to the wheel – now try to get some work done” (anonymous). Southwest Airlines is the only airline that has been profitable for each of the past 30+ years, even as many of its rivals have gone through bankruptcy. Southwest has highest productivity in the industry. They have the highest morale in the industry, with more than 400 applicants for every job opening. How do they maintain both high productivity and high morale? For one thing, they have more parties than the rest of the industry combined. At Southwest, they find any excuse for a celebration. And as they laugh and play their way through the workday, they’ve blown right past their “nose to the grindstone” competitors. You’ll probably never see a book called Party Your
Way to the Top on the Business Week bestseller list, but fostering a culture of celebration just might put your organization into the Business Week roster of the fastest-growing companies.
“A manager’s job is to produce better goods and services. A leader’s job is to produce better people.”
Roger Crawford, How High Can You Bounce?
Celebrate away stress
I once conducted a series of presentations at a busy hospital where too few nurses were taking care of too many patients. I asked my audience to envision a situation where, at the end of a stress-filled shift, the ICU manager called food service to order root beer floats to be delivered STAT for the nurses about to go off duty, because she didn’t want her people to take the accumulated stress and negativity home to dump on their families. The ICU manager happened to be in my first group. She raised her hand and said that food service would never go along, giving her the excuse that root beer floats weren’t in the budget. In the second group, the food service director remarked that if he received such a request from
ICU, he would move heaven and earth to make it happen. How often do we miss out on such opportunities to show our people that we really care about them as people and not just hired hands, and to build bridges between different areas of the organization, because we don’t make the time for celebration?
Celebrate both success and good faith failure
One day an engineer at Hewlett-Packard had a Eureka moment that solved one of his department’s most pressing technical challenges. At a loss for something to immediately recognize the accomplishment, the engineer’s boss reached into his desk and pulled out a banana. In the succeeding years, “the golden banana” became one of the most coveted awards given out for innovative accomplishments. At Mayo Medical Ventures, one of the most prestigious awards one can receive is the
“Queasy Eagle.” This is awarded for the most spectacularly failed investment as a way of reinforcing the fact that venture capital firms must encourage risk-taking (though people don’t want to earn too many

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Queasy Eagles!). Recognition and celebration – ranging from golden bananas and queasy eagles to the company picnic – can have a highly positive cultural impact.
Reinforce culture with rituals
Think of rituals as being stories without words. Simple rituals can have a massive impact on culture if they are sustained over time. The early days of IBM were defined by men in blue suits and starched white shirts singing the IBM fight song; the early days of Wal-Mart were defined by Sam Walton leading employees in the Wal-Mart cheer. Today, the culture of the Texas Roadhouse steakhouse chain is shaped by “alley rallies” in which employees sing and cheer before heading out to line dance with customers. Rituals have always been an important way for humans to bring a sense of structure and purpose to their work, yet in today’s organizations we’re too busy for rituals (we’ve replaced them with meetings). What can you do to restore the spirit and practice of rituals? Not having the time is a poor excuse: the Texas Roadhouse alley rally takes less than two minutes.
Celebrating past accomplishments sets the stage for pursuing future accomplishments
When reading a book, most people finish one chapter before moving on to the next. That’s a pretty good metaphor for our need to obtain closure on work of the past before moving too far ahead with work of the future. Celebration is the most effective way of closing out a chapter in a positive and fulfilling manner. It brings a sense of closure to old business – both the successes and the failures – and sets the stage for new ventures and new achievements.
Celebrate good faith “failures”
When asked to comment on the secret of success, Soichiro Honda (the man whose name is on the car) said that it was 90% failure and 10% introspection (understanding cause of the failure and fixing it).
When people are afraid of failure, you will not have an innovative organization; that’s why Dr. W.
Edwards Deming made “drive fear out of the workplace” one of his 14 points for total quality management. Creating a culture that honors good faith failure is also a key factor in fostering a loyal workforce. If people are afraid of being punished for failure, you will eventually lose your most creative and talented people. On the other hand, when you have a reputation for standing behind the people even if they have failed spectacularly, you will attract more creative and daring people, and keep the ones you have.
There’s a well-known story from the early days of IBM. A young IBM executive made a five million dollar blunder, and was called into the office of CEO Thomas Watson. “I suppose you’ll be wanting my resignation,” the young man said, hat in hand. “Your resignation!” Watson thundered. “I just spent five million dollars on your education. Now I want to see a return on that investment.” Is it any wonder that IBM, for decades, was able to attract and retain the best engineers in the country?
Mayo Medical Ventures is the for-profit venture arm of the Mayo Medical Clinic. Every year, they give the “Queasy Eagle” award to the individual who most spectacularly lost money on an investment. It cannot have been a stupid decision, and it’s unlikely that people get repeat awards, but I’m told that having a Queasy Eagle trophy on your bookshelf is a high honor within that company – even better than having one of those cliché eagles that adorn all of the other trophies and posters extolling us to greatness.
“Nothing undermines innovation more effectively than fear. By the same token, nothing encourages innovation better than finding ways to cope with fear. Real innovation is most likely to take place among those who aren’t hamstrung by anxiety.”
Richard Farson: Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins

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The legacy of a leader
The leader’s greatest legacy is not having his or her name on the building, or featured prominently in a textbook on leadership. The leader’s ultimate legacy is expressed in two areas. First, in his or her influence on the organization, and especially upon its culture. When that leader moves on, is he or she leaving behind a more values-driven organization? Do people hold themselves and each other to higher performance expectations? Id the commitment to values reflected in more positive attitudes and a higher level of trust and respect throughout the organization? If so, then the leader has left a grand legacy.
The second legacy a leader can leave is in the caliber of the leaders who are trained and ready to pick up the leadership baton. In that respect, it is fitting to conclude this CVC-Ts Manual with the following quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu in Tao te Ching: “The best of all leaders, when their work is finished, depart and the people say we did it by ourselves.”
“Strong personal commitments to one another’s growth and success distinguish high- performance teams… Energized by this extra sense of commitment, high-performance teams typically reflect strong extensions of the basic characteristics of teams: deeper sense of purpose, more ambitious performance goals, more complete approaches, fuller mutual accountability, interchangeable as well as complementary skills.”
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith: The Wisdom of Teams
Create an empowering environment
At the outset of this course, the point was made that no leader can empower anyone else, that the only real empowerment is self-empowerment. What the leader can do, however, is foster an environment in which people: 1) have the training and the resources necessary to do what is expected of them; 2) believe that what they are doing is important and has meaning that transcends merely making the boss look good or making money for the shareholders; and 3) build a sense of confidence that encourages out-of-the-box thinking and appropriate risk-taking.
“Empowerment is not about ‘power’ at all; it is about responsibility. It derives from a sense of responsibility without which the whole notion of empowerment is as meaningless as it is dangerous.”
Gordon R. Sullivan and Michael V. Harper: Hope is not a Method
Nurture the next generation
James Hall founded the Majority of One program, which helps support the emotional, social, intellectual, and physical needs of minority student-athletes at The Ohio State University. One of the ways that Majority of One fosters minority student retention, graduation, and post-graduation success is the “FBII Squad” (Former Buckeyes Investing with Interest). FBII agents serve as mentors for student-athletes, and help them create positive connections in their own communities. Majority of One encourages minority students to adopt the attitude that they themselves must be the M.V.P. of their own education, because no one else can do that for them. Self-empowerment through education, and leadership through nurturing, are themes that capture The Twelve Core Action Values of Personal
Leadership Effectiveness.
Members of the next generation are hungry for the challenge, and often more willing to work harder at it than their elders assume. The Spring 2000 issue of Student Leader magazine cited these examples: to celebrate Northern Arizona University’s centennial, students donated over 100,000 hours of community

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University worked with area hotels to establish steep student discounts after a student fell asleep at the wheel and died in a crash; and at the University of Wisconsin every fraternity and sorority is involved in a special Halloween event for children that also promotes racial diversity and harmony.
“The teaching mission of the guru is an attempt to free his followers from him. His metaphors and parables make it necessary for the pilgrims who would be disciples to turn to their own imagination in the search for meaning in their lives. The guru instructs the pilgrims in the tradition of breaking with tradition, in losing themselves so that they may find themselves.”
Sheldon B. Kopp: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
Look beyond the next generation
When Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, was asked to name her greatest achievement, she replied, “I think the biggest legacy we are going to leave is a whole community of children who believe they can do anything in this world because they watched their mommas do it.” I once read that when someone asked the composer Ludwig von Beethoven why he wrote music that because of the force with which it had to be played actually damaged pianos, he responded that he wasn’t writing for the puny instruments of his day, but for those of a future age. That is the commitment, the future orientation, which drove him to write music that because of his deafness he would never hear, but which would inspire generations to come.
In the small rural community where I live, there is a copse of trees with a wonderful history. They were planted in the year 1866 by a civil war veteran who had spent much of the war in the infamous confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, South Carolina. Every day, as he baked under the relentless southern sun, he promised himself that if he returned to Iowa he would plant trees. He knew that he himself would never picnic or nap under the shade of the giant oaks he planted; he was doing it for his children and his children’s children.
“Caring is the basis for community, and the first job of the leader is to build community, a deep feeling of unity, a fellowship.”
Richard Farson: Management of the Absurd
See one, do one, teach one
If you hang around a surgery residency training program long enough, you’ll eventually hear someone say this: “See one, do one, teach one.” That aphorism conveys two important points. First, it implies that there’s an awful lot to learn, so surgery residents can’t waste time on their lessons but need to progress quickly from learning to doing to teaching. Second, it says that the best way to make sure you’ve really learned something is to teach it.
Now that you have worked your way through this course on The Twelve Core Action Values, you have
“seen one.” Hopefully you’ve already started putting what you’ve learned into practice, and will continue to do so – you are “doing one.” Now, the best way for you to make sure that you make the most of this course is for you to share what you have learned with others – at home, at work, and in your community. In other words, “teach one.”
Take-Home Exercise
Since we concluded the discussion on leadership with the fourth Performance Cornerstone of Legacy, the most appropriate take-home assignment is to ask people about what their legacy will be as a result

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Who are the individuals they can help more effectively be leaders in the future? In short, what will be their leadership legacy?
“A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him… A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free.”
Steven Pressfield: Gates of Fire