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Category Archive: Personal Leadership

How To Maintain The Right Perspective

Posted by on August 19, 2016

Ultimately everything we do outwardly is driven by all of our inner attitudes about what is important and what is not. If our actions are not what they should be we must first change what we believe to be true before we can see bad habits broken and new good ones take their place.

I think the most important attitude you must draw from everyday is gratitude. The media is almost totally focused on all that we are losing in this election cycle. The pain is real and there are significant problems that must be solved. However, almost all of us still have plenty to eat, a nice place to sleep and friends and family that care about us. Think about what is really important today and be grateful.

The second important thing to me is hope. As we deal with the reality of lost jobs and endless bad news we must have a picture of a better day ahead. Hope fuels a positive attitude about life when the majority of people are negative. We may not be able to change the global economy or Wall Street but we can change ourselves.

Finally, we must be people who are committed. Your passion about life is what will move you beyond the pain of the present. The promises we make and keep to ourselves and the people we care about the most is the sum total of who you really are as a person. If what you say you believe is not moving you to act everyday, then you really did not believe it after all.

Remember the old saying, what you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.

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The Power Of A Personal Vision For Your Life

Posted by on August 17, 2016

My home town for all practical purposes is Tuscumbia, Alabama. Our number one and only claim to fame is we are the birthplace of Helen Keller. On CNN web site there was a story about researchers who had uncovered this rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan, nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod.

Helen was born blind and had to overcome many difficult obstacles in her life. In spite of all the hardship she lived a very meaningful and rewarding life that impacted a lot of other people in a very positive way.

Helen was once asked, can you think of anything worse than being born blind? Her immediate answer was, to have sight and yet lack vision for your life. The overwhelming majority of people you know have physical sight but do they clearly see all the things that are really important in life.

What vision do you have for your life? Please tell me it is more than going to work, coming home and watching T.V. and then going to bed. There are so many important things to be done and hurting people that need to be touched.

Can you see them?

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Moving Beyond Paycheck

Posted by on August 12, 2016

As Christians we are to do everything as unto the Lord and not unto men. That means we have far more than a job we have a calling.

We tend to live segmented lives with separate time and devotion given to work, family, faith, friends and entertainment. What comes with this mentality is the faith part of our lives tends to be limited to what we do on Sunday and it has very little practical impact on how we live the other six days of the week.

For some of us it goes way beyond that. Our careers become the major source of emotional fulfillment in our lives and we become seduced by all the power, position and possessions that come with worldly success.

In my opinion every Christian should see themselves living in full time ministry on mission for God. Their career then becomes their platform for impacting other people and not merely project deadlines and performance reviews.

When your whole life is integrated around your faith everything you do and every relationship you have takes on eternal significance. The person you are now working for is not your boss but the One who died for you so that you might live for Him.

Changing the world one person at a time is a career worthy of God’s grace in our lives and it is way beyond any paycheck that any company can give.

How do you keep your work from just being a job?

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8 Unrealistic Expectations That Will Ruin You

Posted by on August 8, 2016

One of the most significant responsibilities of leadership is the setting and managing of expectations. If they are unrealistic, no matter how hard your team works you will still fail. If they are realistic, then everyone feels this is doable and gives their best effort. This post by Travis Bradberry is great:

“Your expectations, more than anything else in life, determine your reality. When it comes to achieving your goals, if you don’t believe you’ll succeed, you won’t. The tricky thing about your expectations is that they impact other people too. As far back as the 1960s, Harvard research demonstrated the power of our beliefs in swaying other people’s behavior. ”

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When You Must Resign

Posted by on August 5, 2016

If you are an A player as defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great you are a character driven leader. This means that you are willing to set aside any personal agenda for the good of the team and the organization.

It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent. You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.

In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change. This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.

The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why. The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.

If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear. What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.

A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture. You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you. That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.

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How To Access Your Peak Performance

Posted by on July 15, 2016

The whole idea of time management is a little bit of a misnomer. You really can’t manage time as much as you can give leadership to how you use it. The ability to identify what must be done from what should not be done at all is critical. This Forbes post offers some practical help:

“There is a feeling some people call “being overwhelmed.” It makes them unsure about where to start because there are a trillion things requiring their attention. Others call it “being off-balance.” Something feels just not right.

And then there are those who keep repeating what nobody can hear anymore because everyone is feeling the same thing: “I am so stressed. I don’t even know where to start.”

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Why Do We Fight For What We Don't Want

Posted by on July 6, 2016

This post by Celinne Da Costa is challenging to read and even more dangerous to live. She is pushing back against living your life by the script that the American Dream culture has handed you. If indeed we are going to have to fight for something, then why can’t it be something that we care passionately about doing.

“As I sat on the edge of Horseshoe Canyon, overlooking the majestic landscape of Page, Arizona, it hit me: “I don’t have to do this.” “This” was my life in New York City, which was an endless grind of work to make money, look good doing it, go to a social event every night, and work some more. For years, I felt like I was fighting an emotional uphill battle working for a company I didn’t believe in, in a role I didn’t terribly care for, for money I didn’t need to spend. I worked hard for that life, but my heart was not in it.”

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Circle of Influence

Posted by on July 1, 2016

Several years ago Stephen Covey wrote one of the all time best selling leadership books The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that I have read several times and refer to often.

The first habit in the book is to be proactive and take responsibility for leading our own lives. He writes, “It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.”

One of the most practical tips for doing this on a daily basis is what he calls the circle of concern in our lives vs. the circle of influence. The circle of concern represents all the things we really care about but have no control over to change the outcome. If we are not careful we can spend most of our day here with nothing to show for all the emotional effort.

The circle of influence though contains all the things that are important to us as well but we do have the ability to control the outcome. When we focus on what we cannot control during the day that just means there were many things that should and could be done that were not.

The amazing thing about this principle is that the more you prioritize the things you can do and start accomplishing them the things you cannot control proportionally diminish in their importance.

When we are doing the things we know we should do it not only allows us to accomplish something but it also gives us the needed perspective to deal with all the things that are beyond our control.

To quote another Covey principle: WIN WIN

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The Difference Between Trying And Doing

Posted by on June 29, 2016

The end result of many things are not due to the obstacles we face but the attitude we bring to the situation. If there is a sense that I cannot do this, then in all likelihood you will fail. On the other hand, if you are highly committed then your chances of success dramatically increase. Michael Hyatt has a great post:

“There’s an instructive scene in the Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda is instructing Luke Skywalker in how to use the Force. He asks Luke to retrieve his disabled spaceship out of a bog where it has sunk, using only his mind. Luke, of course, thinks this is impossible. Sure, he has been able to move stones around this way. But a spaceship? That’s completely different. Or is it?”

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Don't Get Surprised By Burnout

Posted by on June 27, 2016

This is a painful subject if you have ever had to admit you lost your margin and that you did not know it until the crash occurred. I have had to put in place some early warning alarms to try to avoid this happening again and again. This is not inevitable but you must have a plan. Steven D’Souza has a plan and it’s a great one for you to adopt:

“Coming back to the UK after an intensive, three-day consulting trip, I was on the edge of a panic attack. For a few seconds, I had a vivid “day-mare” of myself in the hospital, surrounded by doctors, with no way to cope or communicate coherently. As the vision passed, I became aware, for the first time in a long time, of a great heaviness and tiredness in my body. I realized – with some surprise – that I was burned out.”

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