Attitude is everything. The only things that will happen for you today are those things that you believe will happen. So stack the deck into your favor. Think positive and expect success.
Attitude is Everything
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Category Archives: Personal Development
Quit Smoking
If you are reading this, you or someone you know needs to quit smoking. This is good. My father smoked for 62 years before lung cancer took his life. If you have ever watched someone die of lung cancer you will understand why I have entered this blog post.
First, understand that there are no magic pills or other devices that will make you quit smoking. Only you and you own personal drive can do that. Actually, you do have two very effective tools available that cost nothing. Your intellect and your desire are all you need.
From an intellectual point of view, you have to be able to know that you have an addiction and you have to understand the nature of your addiction. From a desire point of view, you have to want to break the addiction. There can be no excuses.
Here are a few things to understand about addiction to smoking. First, even the heaviest smokers only need about a third of a cigarette to get their addictive fix. The other two thirds of the cigarette does nothing more than deepen your addiction. The only reason the other two thirds gets consumed is because it is there and because the tobacco companies want your addiction to stick. In other words, if cigarettes on the market were only one half of their current length, no one would miss the other half from an addiction point of view.
This leads you to a way to weaken your addiction. Simply cut each cigarette in half. This reduces the addictive force of the tobacco and reduces the harmful effects by half. Even if you smoke the same number of times per day, the effect will be a 50% reduction in your smoking habit. Don’t start telling yourself that you are wasting half of your money by doing this. You have already wasted the entire investment in the cigarettes the moment you bought them. If you don’t understand this, you are probably not serious about quitting.
Another thing to understand is that your addiction has triggers. These are events or circumstances that trigger your awareness to a need to smoke. Part of quitting smoking involves identifying these triggers and removing them. This is not that hard to do once you have weakened your addiction.
A log book will be handy for identifying triggers. Every time you have the desire to light up, document the circumstances at the time, how you feel, and what you are thinking. Be detailed. The better you understand why you want to smoke, the easier it will be to eliminate the trigger. For example, I had a friend that quit smoking, but had an urge to smoke every time he smelled the burning brickets in his BBQ grille. His solution was to buy a gas grille. It worked.
Reducing your addiction and eliminating triggers will take a couple of weeks. Once accomplished though, quitting will be a manageable affair. Don’t get me wrong. Quitting will not be the easiest thing you have ever done, but it will be the most rewarding. Surround yourself with people that know you are quitting and will provide a degree of peer pressure against smoking. It will not be easy to light up in front of someone who will chastise you for smoking.
As a recap, the method I am proposing for kicking the smoking habit involves 4 steps. These are:
- Reduce each smoking event to ½ cigarette.
- Identify the triggers to smoking events.
- Reduce smoking events by eliminating the triggers identified above.
- Once your addiction is manageable, stop smoking.
Before you pass judgment, let me share the facts with you. I have helped many people quit smoking using this strategy, with few dropouts. The plain fact is that if you are not committed to quitting, you won’t. If you are committed to quitting, you will, no matter what program you use.
I am inviting anyone who wants to help someone quit smoking to comment. I will not pester you with email. I just want to make a difference.
Thanksgiving Notes
This will not be a post about Six Sigma or personal development. It is a time for being thankful and telling those you love how you feel.
Things I am thankful for and people I care about:
My mother and her recovery from cancer surgery.
My wife who deserves recognition for putting up with me.
My grandson Caleb who brings light into every corner of my life.
My son and the difference his life makes with others.
My daughter-in-law whom I love as if she were my own daughter.
My job and the opportunities it gives me.
My friends. Special mention: Lonnie who gave me a job, Brian and Fadi who share my burden at work.
My readers, who follow my words agree or not.
The problem is that when making a list you will undoubtably leave someone or something off by mistake. If I left anyone out, please do not take offense. I am only a human man, flawed, but saved by Grace.
Talent vs Heart
If you follow professional football you are hearing a lot about Tim Tebow’s perceived lack of passing talent. Even so, he continues to win. So what’s up with that? If you look deeper into the story, you will find that his teammates believe in his leadership and drive, even if his head coach and the sports news talking heads do not.
Obviously, there is something else in play here. Let me explain. Talent by itself is like a box cake mix. Until you add some water and eggs, you have nothing of value. Talent without heart and drive will not win a championship for you. After coaching high school basketball for several years I found that teams who relied on their talent for success were the easiest to beat.
Success comes more from effort than talent. Yes, talent is an important ingredient to success, but it is just an ingredient. The plain truth is that there are many people with talent who are wasting away with sub-par performance because of a lack of effort. At the same time, there are people who are less talented, but because of their effort they accomplish great things.
Let me give you some exciting information. Your success depends on your effort. Sure, talent helps but effort is what carries you to the top. You can go as far in life as your effort will take you. There is no magic, no silver bullet, or short cut to success. It is all up to you. My dad used to tell me that in order to win I had to out work the competition. I have found this to be as true in business as it is in athletics.
So, put on your game face and get busy. Plan to out work and out effort the competition. Success is a choice you make, not something that just happens to you.
Personal Development and Six Sigma
You might ask why I write about personal development on a website that is supposed to be focused on Six Sigma. This is a question that I hear from those who are trained in Six Sigma, but I rarely hear by those who are not.
The answer is that I see Six Sigma as a paradigm change for business people, not a just statistical business management program. At the end of the day, businesses are operated and managed by people. Any real change in the way things are done will happen at the people level. Failure to understand statistics will not cause a business to fail. Failure to understand the underlying, people focused reasons for why things happen in a business will lead to failure. The “why” is more important than the “what”.
Let me give an example. Business arrogance will cause a business to have a deaf ear toward customers and employees even if the business metrics show a problem. Six Sigma processes and statistics will not solve the problem of a manager who is not a believer or is protecting their turf. Therefore, a paradigm change at the individual manager level has to take place in order to bring business processes in alignment with customer expectations.
The majority of Six Sigma consultants are probably aware of the importance of existing corporate culture and its ability to adapt to the Six Sigma paradigm. At the same time, they probably do not know how to fix the problem and (or) are unwilling to walk away from the job opportunity. The resulting Six Sigma roll out fails because of failure to change the leadership culture. No one is happy as a result.
From a cultural perspective, the change is from the inside out not the outside in. No consultant can push change in an organization. Change is pulled. The impetus of pushed change comes from desire that is outside the organization. The impetus for pulled changes comes from the organization’s internal desire to change. This is where the rubber meets the road in Six Sigma.
Circle of Influence
The concept of a circle of influence has been around for a while. For me, Stephen Covey’s description was the most influential. Just in case some of my readers have not had much thought time with the concept, your circle of influence incorporates those people, organizations and circumstances you are able to influence in some way.
Each of us, as individuals, or even as a business/organization, has some control over expanding or contracting our circle of influence. Obviously, for growth to take place, the expansion of your circle of influence is important, as long as it is for the right reasons.
Breaking things down to a simplistic philosophical level, I see four sets of opposing forces at work. Each set is made up of a quality that will expand your circle of influence and a quality that will contract it. These are:
Self-honesty/Self-deceit
Reality centered/Self-centered
Self-confidence/ Self-doubt
Self-Esteem/Self-condescension
Bear in mind that balance is important in any relationship and the same is true here. Going too far in the direction of self-honesty, for example, can be as bad for you as practicing self-deceit. Our wishes and dreams are not always in the realm of reality, but can still be used to give direction and motivation to our lives.
Being honest with yourself is critical for any forward progress with your personal life. If you consider a business/organization a self-contained entity, the same relationship to forward progress applies. Being honest with yourself allows you to make quality decisions based upon facts and the truth. The fear of the facts, or the truth, is a sign of deception and untrustworthiness that will contract your circle of influence. No matter how hard you try to hide it, others can see right through you.
Being reality centered means realizing that you are very seldom at the center of the universe, as a person or as a business/organization. Actually, in the human experience, the center of universe changes along with circumstances and priorities. When others see a reality base perspective about what is important, your circle of influence grows because trust and confidence in your opinions and perspectives grows. When others see a consistent self-centered perspective, your circle of influence shrinks along with trust in your opinions and perspectives.
It is difficult to make quality decisions when you doubt yourself. Whereas it is prudent to evaluate your abilities in specific circumstances, to always doubt yourself is not. Just think of how the world would be different if people like Edison or Einstein let self-doubt prevent them from making bold statements and decisions. On the other hand, being over confident has its own problems. People want to be lead either directly or indirectly, so they pay more attention to self-confident people and pity those lost in self-doubt. Your circle of influence expands with self-confidence until the tipping point of arrogance is reached.
I consider self-esteem to be one of the most important of human perspectives. It is the firewall that allows you to operate interdependently with others in our social network. When self-esteem is healthy, you are not nearly as dependent on other people’s opinion or criticisms of you. When self-esteem is low (self-condescending), your voice joins other voices in criticizing and bullying you. The resiliency that comes with good self-esteem expands your circle of influence because others appreciate your emotional strength and stability.
All of this can be state in a unified way. Being honest, confident, grounded and emotionally strong will expend you circle of influence. This expansion results in more opportunity on multiple levels.
Avoid Being a Commodity in the Sales World
According to Wikipedia:
“A commodity is a good (product)…. which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market…. the market treats it as equivalent, or nearly so, no matter who produces it….one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole.”
As you drive along looking for gasoline, and you see multiple gas stations, how do you choose which service to use? Most people chose the least expensive, thereby treating gasoline as a commodity. Quality is considered equal across the suppliers and, as a result, is not a part of the shopper’s decision making process.
No matter what you are selling, you don’t want your product or service to be treated like a commodity. Without differentiation, you are like driftwood and have no control over your sales. Product or service differentiation is what gives you control over the market.
The best way to differentiate yourself, and what you are selling, is to begin with the awareness that the shopper is looking for a solution, not a price. The shopper cannot evaluate prices without first understanding the solution options.
Consider the game show “The Price is Right”. A contestant has to choose between Door Number 1 or Door Number 2, without knowing what is behind the doors. The decision is a hard one if the only thing you have to work with is price. This is why it is not a good idea to start any sales pitch with price. You are forcing the shopper to think commodity.
When you start by trying to understand the need and present a solution that fits that need, the shopper is now focused on differentiation. What you are trying to get to is relevancy. When the shopper can say “yes” to what you are saying (even if silently in their mind) you are moving toward a closing opportunity because you are in tune with them.
Next, understand that the solution and the price are related. Once the solution options are understood, the price becomes relevant. For example, if I say that I can sell you a calculator for $100.00, your first question is what kind of calculator is it and what can it do. You are not in a closing situation. If I tell you that I can sell you a calculator that can evaluate and trade stocks with a single key stroke based upon an algorithm used by Warren Buffet, and it only costs $100.00, you are in a closing situation.
Here is the formula to avoid being a commodity. Find out what the shopper needs, offer them a solution that fits their need, then price the solution accordingly. Always be pricing is a bad strategy. Always be closing is a good strategy.
You Are What You Expect
What you expect from others becomes the minimum you will accept from others.
There are certain aspects of human nature that are predictable and usable by marketers. These behaviors occur whether we are aware of them or not. One of these is shopper/customer expectation behavior. When we tell a sales person what we expect, we are really telling them the minimum acceptable performance required for us to buy. In Six Sigma this becomes a critical to quality concern.
Whether you are in sales, Six Sigma or a relationship, knowing the expectations of the other party allows you to know the minimum level of performance expected. People who operate at or below this expected level are probably going to fail.
If you what to succeed in business and have quality relationships, exceeding expectations should be your goal. In life, we cannot always control our circumstances, but we can always control our effort.
What you expect from yourself becomes the maximum effort you will put forth.
A few years back, when the Orlando Magic played the Houston Rockets for the NBA championship, the series was a blow out. The Magic had a great season and talked consistently about “playing for the championship”. They accomplished that goal, which seemed to be the target of their season. The problem is that they played poorly in the championship series and were embarrassed by being swept. They met their expectations and could go no further.
This is another one of those unconscious behaviors mentioned above. When you set expectations for yourself, you have also set a target for your effort. This is why you should not set your expectations too low, or unreasonably high. Goal setting is a progressive thing. The healthy pattern is to set expectations that you know will change once you reach them. The satisfied person is also a stationary or static person. Becoming satisfied will stop your forward momentum.
Look at it from the good, better, best approach. If you believe that “good” is good enough, you are a minimalist and failure will plague you. If you think in the better category, that just makes you average, and though you have a somewhat higher probability of success, true excellence escapes you. When you think in the best category, you have the highest probability of success and excellence comes to define your efforts.
Fearless Moral Inventory
Belief System
What do you believe? This is not an easy question to answer. We are complicated beings living in a complicated world. With that in mind, let’s make the answer easier to get by being honest with ourselves. A fearless moral inventory will only be useful if it is based in reality and honesty.
A good question to start with is who owns your beliefs? Did you come to them by means of your own intellect and life experiences or were they given to you by your family, boss or some other significant person in your life. If your belief system belongs to someone else, you are living someone else’s life through your choices and consequences.
If you do not own your belief system, you will have a hard time being consistent with it when decisions need to be made. You will also have a hard time living with the results of those decisions, leaving you frustrated or in denial. It is essential to a fulfilled life that you operate on what you believe and on what passes your own reality test.
If, in honesty, you find that your belief system is not of your own making, take steps to correct this problem. I wrote an article sometime back titled “30 Things I Believe” this was my effort of ensuring the origin of my belief system. Being honest with myself while creating this document, my manifesto, was life changing.
An added complication is that your belief system has more than one component. Two common ones are religion and politics. These are also the most likely to be influenced by your friends and family. It is also common for these belief systems to be in conflict. Religion is based upon prescribed absolute truths and politics is based on marketing where truth is situational and always in flux. When you combine these two they make a toxic mix unless you synchronize them with what you value.
This becomes the second piece of defining what you believe. Your belief system should map to what you value. Testing the accuracy of your mapping is a reality check. Let me give you an example. If you are a Christian, you must accept the axiom that you can’t love Jesus if you don’t love people. If at the same time, you find it easy to attack and hurt others (especially those you disagree with), your belief system is not in sync with your values. Either you are fooling yourself about what you believe or you are fooling yourself about what you value.
In a fearless moral inventory, you must honestly evaluate the synchronization of your belief system to what you value. If you are out of sync, you are living a lie.
Moral Compass
Your moral compass is a combination of your belief system and a definition of what you value, which provides you a degree of guidance in decision making. Another way to state this is that your moral compass provides you with a definition of true north in your life. True north for some is defined by their religion, for others it may be their family or maybe just their own wellbeing. To be truly healthy and happy, your true north needs to be based upon a bed rock principle, not on opinion.
People get in trouble here because they bounce around between religious beliefs, a family focus, and a selfish focus. This approach is much like the guy who is switching lanes and using excessive acceleration in traffic only to find the cars he passed sitting next to him at the next stop light. A lot of wasted energy and frustration is the result. No one is perfect, but highly successful people are more consistent in paying attention to the position of true north in their lives than those who live moment to moment. They generally do not have to apologize to their family about a selfish decision they just made.
True north in your life does not bounce around. Circumstances in your life make it harder or easier to follow your moral compass, but true north is always true north. Simply put, your moral compass helps you to make decisions that take you where you want to go in the big picture of your life. This makes for clearer and cleaner decision making. A decision either takes you where you want to go or it doesn’t. Please don’t get me wrong, though. I know that there are situations where short term thinking has to prevail. Even in those cases, though, your moral compass will enable you to better understand what you are risking.
All of this being said, ask yourself the following two questions. What is true north in your life and do you consistently consult your moral compass in decision making. One way to answer these questions is to look at decisions you have made and ask yourself whether you were true to your moral compass at the time. Would decide differently now? Why or why not? Be honest and allow yourself to experience the feelings that result. These feelings will serve as a reality check when similar decision points are reached.
Consistency of Purpose
Purpose is related to action. Having purpose in your life gives you the “why” and the drive to take action. Everything we do in life has a purpose. The question is whether the purpose is in alignment with the philosophical underpinnings of your life. These underpinnings are your belief system and your moral compass.
To test this alignment, ask the following question. Does your adherence to your belief system change according to the situation you are in? Your answer to this question is probably “yes”. We are all human and subject to human emotions and instincts. Don’t consider this an excuse though. There is a difference between what we feel and how we act on our feelings. There are many of us who behave quite well in church, but lose our faith trying to fight traffic to get out of the church parking lot. If character is what you are in the dark when no one can see your actions, than what you truly value is demonstrated by your actions when under the pressure of difficult circumstances.
Here is another uncomfortable question. Do you hold yourself accountable to the same standards that you hold others to? You should, but it isn’t easy. This is why we see so many people in leadership fail. I once heard a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company say that his greatest accomplishment was making decisions that allowed him to sleep good at night. Being true to what he saw as his purpose allowed him to live comfortably with his actions.
This is only possible when you have a purpose to guide your efforts in the various roles you fill in life. When consistent with your belief system and moral compass, consistency of purpose will allow you to make decisions that you can feel good about . To define the purpose in your various life roles, ask yourself what roles you fill in your daily walk. Some examples are being a father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter, brother/ sister, employee, friend and so on. List these out and next to them write the purpose you have in each of them.
Now comes the hard part. Next to each purpose evaluate on a scale of 1 to 5 (poor to excellent) how well you are performing in meeting your expectations in these roles. Be honest. The areas where you see the need for improvement become targets for a “Consistency of Purpose” action plan. In other words, you will have purpose to create a plan of action to bring alignment into your life.
If you really want to put it out there, ask the significant others in your life to evaluate how well you are performing.
Your Fears
Everyone has fears. It is human nature and part of our self-defense instincts. There is no shame in fear unless you let irrational fears control you. There are two aspects of controlling your fears. These are gaining an understanding of the source of your fear and taking action to mitigate them.
Fear will knock your life out of alignment. This is how political and sales operatives work. If you create a fear of something in a person’s life, you make it easy to hijack their belief system and moral compass. As a result, if you are to protect yourself, you must take action to understand and mitigate your fears.
Let me give you a personal example. I began writing a book a few years back. The subject matter was being challenged by a particular group of people, so I spend a great deal of time editing and re-editing trying to achieve perfection. My fear of rejection froze me in the edit mode until I took all of the teeth out of my manuscript. When I realized what was happening (someone else was in control of my creative process), I went back to my original manuscript and sent it to a publisher. I am now a published author with a product that has wide acceptance. Oddly enough, it even has acceptance with the very people that I perceived to be challenging me. My fear was unfounded, even though it seemed real to me.
To establish control over your fears, make a list of situations that create fear for you. For example, being in a dark room might make you fearful. Be thorough and honest. You want to document the situation that brings on the fear, not the fear itself.
On the same list, add a column titled “afraid of…” and fill in the blank beside each situation with what you are specifically afraid of in that situation. The fear you feel in a dark room, for example, is a typical human reaction, but what is its source? Psychologists will tell you that fear of the dark is nothing more than fear of the unknown. In this case, you can hear a sound, feel something or even smell something, but your fear will not be allayed until you see what it is. This is because of our dependence on vision as the primary sensory device on our bodies. Knowing this gives you power over your fear.
Next, you will need to have an action plan to face up to the fear. Fear of the dark, for example, can be mitigated by conditioning yourself to become more comfortable with what you can’t see. Just as a blind person must find a way to deal with what they cannot see, a person afraid of the dark must deal with the unknown.
Being the best that I can be requires that I perform this fearless moral inventory from time to time. I don’t always like what I find, but that is just part of being human. As I grow to understand myself better, I am also making adjustments to keep my life in alignment. Understand that if your belief system, moral compass and purpose in life are based on bed rock principles, these adjustments in alignment are made to your behavior, not the principles.
Conventions of Convenience
We have a habit of making two dimensional categories to describe people. I call these categories “conventions of convenience”. We give each category a name and start separating people into one group or the other. This is the problem. Thinking about people or issues in this way makes the world seem all one way or the other. It tends to heighten the divisiveness in our culture. Below are some examples.
Conservative verses Liberal
If you use the definition of these terms, a minority of the US population is truly conservative and a minority of the population is truly liberal. The majority are a mixture the two categories. For example, I consider myself a social liberal/fiscal conservative. You might say that this makes me an independent voter. The problem is that no one ever calls me an “independent”. My liberal friends call me a conservative and my conservative friends call me a liberal. Both are wrong.
People are a mixed bag of beliefs and values. This is why congress rarely has a confidence rating of more than 25%. Extremists are always pulling the dialog away from the middle where the majority of us live.
Religion verses Religion
Do you believe in god or are you an atheist? Are you Christian or Muslim? Are you Catholic or Protestant? Even though the above conventions of convenience have been the cause of great pain and strife in the world, the majority of people involved do not totally buy in to all the belief and behavior requirements of any of these religious groups. There is a great deal of belief and behavior overlap among these groups that is ignored by a few extremists in order to accentuate the differences.
When left to their own devises, the vast majority of people can get along just fine with persons from other belief groups. The problem comes from situations where extremists begin to control the dialog.
Race verses Race
I heard a story recently where a magistrate was telling an African American defendant that the charge of possession of marijuana would affect his ability to keep his subsidized housing arrangement in the projects. The problem was that the man in question was a middle manager in a large company who owned a $200,000 home in the suburbs. Conversely, I know of a situation where a young white male was told by a magistrate that his possession of marijuana was an embarrassment to his family. The problem was that both his parents were drug users who had been in and out of jail multiple times.
The truth is that we are more alike than we are different. Regardless of race, we all pretty much want the same things out of life. The categories don’t fit the vast majority of us. Only extremists worry about the differences.
How can we cope with a society where we go to such great effort to categorize everyone into polar-opposite categories? We can start by spending more energy looking at how we are similar to each other and less energy looking at our differences. We can also try to move the dialog away from the extremists to the middle.
Let me leave you with this. During World War II, one allied Chaplain observed that both sides of the conflict prayed to the same god for victory. How stupid are we to assume that God, or anyone else, is ever going to reward us for our conventions of convenience?