"The bottom line in both professional sports and business are results! Dr. Ron (one of my former players) has assembled a team of highly elite business speakers, trainers and coaches. You will get results with this MVP Team."
- Don King, Former U. of Hawaii Head Football Coach and Dallas Cowboys Scouting and Player Evaluations
When you are willing to go through the "ouch," you can get to the "a-ha!" and finally, the "aaahh."
Communication can be painful, especially the communication we have with ourselves. Often, we distract ourselves from the pain by criticizing, blaming or simply ignoring what's triggering us. That means it stays with us and we stay in pain.
In my upcoming book, I'll explain how to quickly move through the pain to get to the "a-ha!", the insight that's behind the pain. When we do that, relief takes the place of the pain and we become free of the trigger.
When I first started working when I was sixteen, I had already learned the value of good hard work. Growing up, my father had insisted on us working every spare moment of every day. Well that's what it seemed like! I had to tell my friends on most occasions that I could not go to the party or have a stay over because I had to help my dad build something or clean something. I hated it.
But after I had started working a real job for real money, there was a comment made to me from a manager of the Albertsons store that I was working at while I was staying overtime to mop up the floor. I will remember his words the rest of my life. As he watched me work with enthusiasm and vigor, he said with sincerity, "Eli, if you ever need a job at anytime in your life, you've got one."
Wow! Someone noticed my hard work ethic. That made me feel good.
Since that day I have always tried to compliment those
When managers want to accomplish goals through their employees, they usually think in terms of accountability. It’s common to hear questions like “Who’s accountable for that project?” “Whose idea was that?” and “Whose fault is it?”
How do the answers to these questions accomplish goals? I don’t think they do. In my experience, questions that focus on accountability lead to discussions about blame, which often divide work groups into gossip camps and passive aggressive reactions. That wastes a lot of time.
A different approach is to focus on self-responsibility. Instead of the above questions, an employee with self-responsibility might say, “How can I help?” “I like / don’t like that idea because ______ and here’s what I suggest _____.” “How did our process (not a person) cause that problem?&r
In my last post, I described how life reflects back to us what we believe about our worthiness and “enoughness” and I said that watching for patterns is a great way to recognize these reflections. I recently identified a pattern in my own life and connected it to a painful belief that held me hostage for most of my 38 years ~ not any more!
About a month ago, I moved into an idyllic 1930s cottage right along the river and Missoula’s beautiful river’s edge bike path. I was so happy to be in a house again, especially one with so much charm. What could be wrong with that? Plenty!
The floors creak more than you might imagine, and there is a renter in the basement. During my first few weeks in the house, I felt terrible about walking around in the morning, knowing that my neighbor might be woken up by my movements. While I was doing everything I could think of not to disturb her, she slammed her door every time she went in or out and she blasted
As humans, we are social beings. For most of us, one of the cruelest punishments is total isolation. We need other people to listen to our stories, to share their own, and to mirror and respond to our thoughts and feelings and behaviors. But since we really do need other people, why do so many of us, so much of the time, have the biggest conflicts and the most harrowing difficulties with those people we need the most?
Part of the problem is that we need people, yet we may believe that we should not need anyone. The dream of Marlborough Man, the independent, cool, tough guy, still exists for men and women alike. So, we get into relationships with people we need and then we make every effort to prove to them how much we don't need them. And this happens at work, at home, and in any situation where we spend time and share activities with other people.
Communication is easy. All you need to do is say what you mean and mean what you say. Right! How many of us are able to truly do that? And, when we finally do say what we intend to say, why is it that the people we say it to are not always happy to hear our words?
Whether we want to believe it or not, there definitely is an art to communicating effectively. First, of course, we need to really know what we think, feel, believe, and want to communicate to others. Right here, many of us run into problems. We may have some idea about what needs to be said, but we may not be clear about how we feel and we may have no idea how the other person or persons might respond. So, first, we have to gain clarity about our own thoughts, ideas, needs, desires, beliefs and intentions.
Next, it is important for us to know who we are communicating with. How does this person tend to receive and interpret information? Do they often&n
If you're like me, you carry on a conversation with yourself all day long. It usually goes something like this, "Wow, that was a great point he just made. I wish I were as sharp as he is," or, "She looks so confident! I wish I were that confident."
Most of our self-talk is a reinforcement of a belief that we are not enough. For you, this may show up as not having enough, not knowing enough, not being acknowledged enough. It's important for us to recognize what we're saying about ourselves because our core beliefs will be reflected back to us.
People and circumstances will either confirm or contradict what we believe about ourselves.
Let's take that last point a little further. I coach a manager who is responsible for two very different departments. The staff in one of her departments frequently complains about her, saying she is not available to them, that she does not follow up on thei
Recession anxiety is at the top of the news every day. It's inevitable that your team and staff will be affected.
Symptoms of recession anxiety include: chronic worry about job security and financial issues. Is your business going to survive? Will you have to lay people off? Arguments, gossip, stress-related ailments, and loss of productivity due to managers and employees taking sick days can reduce your company's effectiveness at the time you need it most.
Here are some guidelines for proactive management:
. Keep information flowing. Employees who sense that management is holding out on them by witholding information tend to lose motivation. Even if the future of your business is uncertain, keep your team informed and make sure the flow of information reaches everyone in the company.
The United States is no longer a nation of readers. We are no longer a nation of writers. We aren’t even a nation of talkers anymore. We have become a nation of shorthand communicators. The well-constructed sentence no longer holds intrinsic value because of its usefulness in communicating complex ideas. Instead, we increasingly gravitate to abbreviated forms of communication that rely on not only a syntax that may be at odds with standard English, but that use an entirely new lexicon that is rapidly infusing the ways in which we write and talk to each other. In fact, this lexicon is developing and spreading so quickly that it is arguably the fastest growing language in the world. This new language of the 21st century is not Spanish or Japanese or even standard English. The new language is called Text, and it’s sweeping the globe like a pandemic flu. Despite its shortcomings, texting is a cornerstone of contemp
