April 2011

“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.” Mahatma Gandhi

Positive and negative thoughts can become self-fulfilling prophecies: What we expect can often come true.

If you start off thinking that you’ll mess up a task, the chances are that you will: You may not try hard enough to succeed, you won’t attract support from other people, and you may not perceive any results as good enough.

Positive thinking, on the other hand, is often associated with positive actions and outcomes. You have hope and faith in yourself and others, and you work and invest hard to prove that your optimism is warranted. You’ll enthuse others, and they may well “pitch in” to help you. This makes constructive outcomes allthe more likely.

When it comes down to it, positive, optimistic people are happier and healthier, and enjoy more success than those who think negatively. The key difference between them is how they think about and interpret the events in their life. So, how do you think about your successes and failures? Do you have a predictable thinking pattern?

The first step in changing negative thinking is to become aware of it. For many of us, negative thinking is a bad habit – and we may not even know we’re doing it!

When you’re aware of the way you think, you can take action to use positive situations to your advantage, and re-shape the negative ones. The goal is to think positively, regardless of the situation, and make a conscious effort to see opportunities instead of obstacles.

Quite often, our experience of stress comes from our perception of a situation. Often that perception is right, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes we are unreasonably harsh with ourselves, or jump to wrong conclusions about people’s motives, and this can send us into a downward spiral of negative thinking.

The most commonly accepted definition of stress is that it occurs when a person believes that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize”. In short, it’s when we feel out of control.

When people feel stressed, they have made two main judgments: First, they feel threatened by the situation, and second, they believe that they’re not able to meet the threat. How stressed someone feels depends on how much the situation can hurt them, and how closely their resources meet the demands of the situation.

Perception is key to this as (technically!) situations are not stressful in their own right. Rather it is our interpretation of the situation that drives the level of stress that we feel.

Quite obviously, we are sometimes right in what we say to ourselves. Some situations may actually be dangerous, may threaten us physically, socially or in our career. Here, stress and emotion are part of the early warning system that alerts us to a threat.

Very often, however, we are overly harsh and unjust to ourselves in a way that we would never be with friends or co-workers. This, along with other negative thinking, can cause intense stress and unhappiness and can severely undermine our self-confidence.

Six Steps for Turning Negative Stressors into Positive Challenges.

1. Identify The Stressor (Example: new role at work with more responsibility)

2. Identify Your Self Talk (I already have too much to do!)

3. What I Feel: Frustrated, Angry

4. Negative Stressor Renamed As A Positive: My boss needs my expertise for

this important project

5. New Self Talk: He/she needs me for this one! I am a valued team member

6. What I Feel: Proud, Successful

Seven Change Mastery Shifts

From Kevin Cashman’s book “Leadership From The Inside Out”

Change Mastery Shift #1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to take adv! antage of the opportunities inherent in change.

Change Mastery Shift #2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of  the chaos of change.

Change Mastery Shift #3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose during turbulent times. Value and meaning rise above immediate circumstances.

Change Mastery Shift #4: From Control ! Focus to Agility Focus.
Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results.  However, agility, flexibilty and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul.

Change Mastery Shift #5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress.

Change Mastery Shift #6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions.

Change Mastery Shift #7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus.
Effective leaders are more secure in themselves. They possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way. Their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change

Do you have a place that you can go to alone to think? I call this the personal sacred space or my total life incubator.

This is the place I go to be autonomous.  A place to be “myself” by myself.  It is a place to find quiet time alone everyday for a few minutes or more. I am not with my work, my family, my friends, the electronics, etc.  This is a place where I can bring forth who I am, what I might be, and a look at my deeper purpose with all I do.

It is amazing how just a few minutes each day can make such a huge difference in my focus, patience, stress level, and most importantly a deeper knowledge of who I am, where I am going and why!

Peace!

Seven Keys To Self Coaching

1-Identify your values: Gain an understanding of what values drive your decision-making and the beliefs and behaviors that support them. How are they aligned to you actions both at work and home

2- Understand your motivations: Get clear and focused on why you do what you do each day, and in particular, your motivation for going to work and how it relates to your larger life outside of work.

3- Understand your current purpose: Get clear on your most important goals and the outcomes you want to achieve in both work and life

4- Clarify your mission: Understand and get clear on your life purpose.

5-Create a vision for your work and life Understand and get clear on what outcome you would like to create by following your life purpose.

6-Get aligned with your work and life: Evaluate to what extent your current work and life environments supports you in achieving your purpose, mission and vision, and if necessary change it.

7- Remember Who You Really Report To: create a weekly and monthly meet with yourself time to check on how things are going and make necessary adjustments and celebrate your successes in aligning your work and life for quality and satisfaction

I had a chance to read this paper published by Harvard’s Dean Nita Nohria.  Excerpts below. This message is both encouraging from the perspective of how students at Harvard will be stimulated in a new culture of thought as it pertains to leadership, as well as what current leaders in business can glean from this message.

FROM DEAN NITIN NOHRIA: “So let’s unpack our mission, and infuse each of its elements with meaning.”

What are the most important opportunities we face? What makes us distinctive? Where should we be doing more, or differently? How are changes in the world likely to affect us? How do you answer these questions?

Even as we explore new ways of doing things, we cannot lose sight

of the elements of the Harvard Business School experience that have defined us for many years: a student-centered and transformational learning environment, skilled and passionate faculty who care deeply about developing ideas that have power in practice, in the classroom, and in the academy, and a residential community and campus. While we must be open to change, we must be equally resolute about continuity, knowing that we have a very strong platform on which to build. How do you respond to this context?

The School’s mission—to educate leaders who make a difference in the world—provides a helpful framework for thinking about our future. Because many business schools use similar words or phrases to describe their objectives, we must be quite clear about the meanings we attach to each word in our mission and the commitments we make to live up to it. How do you respond this calling?

So let’s unpack our mission, and infuse each of its elements with meaning.

When we talk about leaders, we mean people who embody a certain type of competence and character—both the competence that comes from the general manager’s perspective the School cultivates and the character to understand the difference between being self-interested and self- centered. It goes far beyond knowing that it’s not right to lie, cheat, or steal. It involves recognizing that you are a true leader only when you have earned the trust of others, and when others, whether in your organizations or your communities, recognize you as such.  How do you respond to this meaning?

Making a difference means people who create real value for society, and who create value before claiming value. I’ve not found anyone who be- grudges a leader for claiming value after creating value. Rather, the recent economic crisis showed us too many examples of leaders who claimed value without creating any. It is worth noting here that there are many ways of making a positive difference: as an investor, as a general manager, as an entrepreneur, as an active citizen of your community. Indeed, what distinguishes Harvard Business School is that our graduates provide leadership in all walks of life.

The world reflects our understanding of a rapidly changing, dynamic environment, and the fact that many of the world’s most challenging issues will require a global perspective. Moreover, it involves embracing the view that the world desperately needs more leaders to address its most urgent and challenging problems, and that virtually none of these problems can be addressed without business leaders playing a vital role.

What do you think?

Over the past two years I have been involved in the training and implementation of a very powerful program that leveraged the power of peer coaching groups. This model leveraged the leadership that exists at all levels of an organization. This model utilized the following three key elements of great coaching.

Each peer coach plays three basic roles for the other.  From the peer coach’s point of view:

• I’m your thinking partner

• I’m here as objective support

• I’m here to help you be accountable

Thinking Partner:

It’s always easier to see someone more objectively than yourself.  The peer coaching participants are probably struggling to improve in the same developmental areas as you, most of the time a peer is more capable of identifying a solution for a peer than the peer can for themselves.  Having someone you can turn to for direction when you are in your old patterns is enormously helpful, especially when this person is someone who knows you, and is someone you can trust enough to reveal your blind spots and vulnerabilities.

Objective Supporter:

A Peer Coach, and a each member of the group are expected to participate in the group with a fresh point of view.  Together the group learns to see beyond someone’s current history,  and can see many more possibilities and strategies that are way outside the box of our habitual work or life habits.

Facilitator/Coach  is an Accountability Partner:

You will ask “how our you doing with the goals you set last week”.  You will be entrusted with the  list of what the peer group really want to accomplish, and what they have committed to themselves to actually do.  They will be counting on your role as an accountability partner.

Peer Coaching is a powerful tool for leveraging leaders at all levels!