A thought about action

“Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!”

- Og Mandino

A thought about making decisions

“High achievers spot rich opportunities swiftly, make big decisions quickly and move into action immediately. Follow these principles and you can make your dreams come true.”
- Robert Schuller

How do you respond to the countless opportunities that pass your way each day?

Do you wait to get all of the data and make a detailed business case for each one, or do you act on impulse, spreading out all of your energies until you keel over, exhausted? I hope that you integrate the best of these two options...

Us humans tend to first decide on emotion, then justify the decision by cherry-picking the facts that fit the choice. And this goes for those of you who call yourselves "analytical"... you also are guided by your unconscious emotions, because they filter out from your consciousness any facts that don't fit.

Effective leaders master the art of making instantaneous decisions, based on imperfect information. By developing a finely-tune sense of intuition, they interpret their emotions through the prism of conscious values, well-examined experience and explicit intentions.

To win in business, you have to be open to possibility, guided by a crystal-clear mission, vision, value set and motivations. You must be willing to continuously re-examine yourself, and get constant feedback to improve your decisions and your actions.

This is why professionals who must make split-second decisions do so through simulation: police, firefighters, paramedics, soldiers, pilots, air controllers, etc. By putting themselves through simulations, they can do a post-exercise analysis to better integrate lessons learned and therefore hone their prism of values, experience and intentions. They develop a sixth sense, that of intuition, that allows them to make fast decisions, with confidence.

Preparation, simulation, decision, execution and integration, these are the steps of the action cycle that allow you to power your passion into tangible and profitable results.

When you face an opportunity, ask yourself the right question: instead of asking "is this the best option?", ask yourself "does this option move me in the right direction?"

The natural choice, the one that puts you in the flow, is also the one that ignites your passion, that fires up your energy, your smile, and makes you stand up straight and proud. You want to leap to action right here and now. It's the decision where your soul is shouting YES! YES! while your head, properly clear and focused, says "OK, I'll go along with this..."

The "right" choice for you, as leader, is ultimately the opportnity that summons the conviction of your values and the courage of your vision.

You swim through a sea of opportunities, all with varying degrees of possibility to move your vision forward. Are you ready to recognize which ones to immediately act upon, with clarity, commitment, confidence and courage?

What would you do if you were ten times bolder?

A thought about self-discipline

“Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”
-- Harvey A. Dorfman

David Brooks, in today's New York Times, penned an interesting column about self-discipline :

[...Harvey A. Dorfman's] assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind.

[...] It’s commonly said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years. Dorfman assumes that players would have already put in those hours doing drills and repetitions.


[...] As a pitcher enters a game, Dorfman continues, he should bring a relentlessly assertive mind-set. He should plan on attacking the strike zone early in the count, and never letting up. He will not nibble at the strike zone or try to throw the ball around hitters. He will invite contact. Even when the count is zero balls and two strikes, he will not alter his emotional tone by wasting a pitch out of the strike zone.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

Dorfman then structures the geography of the workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

Dorfman has various breathing rituals he endorses, but his main focus during competition is to get his pitchers thinking simple and small. A pitcher is defined, he writes, “by the way the ball leaves his hand.” Everything else is extraneous.

In Dorfman’s description of pitching, batters barely exist. They are vague, generic abstractions that hover out there in the land beyond the pitcher’s control. A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

Dorfman once approached Greg Maddux after a game and asked him how it went. Maddux said simply: “Fifty out of 73.” He’d thrown 73 pitches and executed 50. Nothing else was relevant.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

By putting the task at the center, Dorfman illuminates the way the body and the mind communicate with each other. Once there were intellectuals who thought the mind existed above the body, but that’s been blown away by evidence. In fact, it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the mound.

And by putting the task at the center, Dorfman helps the pitcher quiet the self. He pushes the pitcher’s thoughts away from his own qualities — his expectations, his nerve, his ego — and helps the pitcher lose himself in the job.[...]"

To get what you want, to paraphrase the famous Law of Attraction as proposed in "The Secret", it's not that "thoughts create things"... it's MINDSET that creates results.

Read the full article here