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(New Post) Exceptional Things Can Happen with Minimal Talent
Einstein said “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
Exceptional things can happen with minimal talent.
In culture, we idolize talent, titles and temporary fame….confusing what’s exceptional with ego.
However, I’ve seen exceptional people shine when others’ have dismissed or discounted their potential.
Here are ten that have huge impact on our potential and performance:
- Be on time
- Work Ethic
- Effort
- Body Language
- Energy
- Attitude
- Passion
- Being Teachable
- Doing Extra
- Being Prepared
Real influencers are leaders before others recognize them as a “leader.“
You don’t have to have a higher degree or a large “title” to impact those around you.
(New Post) When To Repair a Burned Bridge
The most commented and “liked” tweet I ever sent happened several weeks ago.
Actually, October 8th to be exact.
I was surprised, honestly, of the response on social media including my personal Facebook page.
Here’s what I said: “I’ve decided to never burn bridges. Ever. Even if the other person attempts to pull away, seek to repair it if it’s within your power.”
Now I understand. We’ve all blown up relationships, either personally or professionally.
And, we’ve had others do something (or say something) towards us that completely destroyed the trust required to continue the relationship.
Could be a spouse, a friend, a coworker or a leader in our life.
But Bridges can be rebuilt.
How do you rebuild a bridge you’ve blown up?
And, how do you know when you can trust the other person enough to “rebuild” the bridge?
Here are four questions to ask:
1. Do they keep their word? (and am I willing to keep mine?)
This is where it starts. We have to count on them (and people have to learn that they can count on us) to deliver on promises. If you commit to following up on something, do it. No excuses.
If you can’t do it, proactively let the other person know.
For example, “Terri, last week I told you that I would get back to you with a proposal. However, I am waiting for a bid to come through from an outside vendor. It looks like that might add a week to my schedule.”
People are usually very forgiving if you take the initiative to communicate. However, if they have to chase you down, you lose points. Your reputation will take a hit.
2. Do they tell the truth? (And, am I willing to be honest with them moving forward?)
This is harder than it sounds. Most of us like to think of ourselves as truth-tellers. But it’s easy to round the numbers up, spin the facts, or conveniently leave out the evidence that doesn’t support our position.
But if we are going to build trust, then we have to commit ourselves to telling the truth—even when it is difficult or embarrassing.
People are more forgiving than you think. (Witness all the celebrities who have publicly blown it, apologized, and received a pass.) They don’t expect you to be perfect. However, they do expect you to acknowledge your mistakes and to come clean when you screw up.
3. Are they transparent and authentic? (Am I willing to be real with them first?)
People will not trust you unless you learn to share yourself, warts and all. You have to take a risk and be vulnerable. This creates rapport and rapport builds trust.
However—and be warned!—you can’t use this as a gimic or a technique. If you do, people will see it as manipulation. Instead, you have to be authentic. The reason this builds trust is because you are demonstrating trust. You are taking the initiative to go first.
In essence, you are saying, “Look, I trust you. I am taking off my mask and showing you my true self. Some of it isn’t very pretty. But I am willing to take that risk, believing you will still accept me.”
4. Do they Give without any strings attached? (Am I willing to give first?)
Nothing builds trust like love. What does love have to do with the workplace?
As Tim Sanders points out in Love Is the Killer App, everything. You have to be willing to share your knowledge, your contacts, and your compassion—without expecting anything in return. The more you take the initiative to give, the more it builds trust. Giving lets others know that you know it’s not “all about you.” From this, people learn that they can trust you, because you have their best interests at heart.
Bridges can always be rebuilt.
Granted, in some situations, it can take years.
It takes doing the right things over a long period of time.
But in most cases, it won’t take that long. Relationships can be turned around quickly if both will take the steps needed to rebuild trust.
(New Post) How You Can Be Courageous
Some of our Worst Behaviors are fueled By Fear and Insecurity.
However, confidence fueled By Values births Positive Energy and Engagement from others.
Consider These:
- Grudge-holding. Forgiveness requires courage.
- Self-blaming. Insecurity may cause leaders to blame themselves for the delinquency of others. The difference between self-blame and responsibility is corrective action.
- Excuse-making. Insecurity prevents them from holding others accountable to their commitments.
- Attacking and defending. Insecure leaders attack back. Rather than defending their team, they defend themselves.
- Nit-picking. Nit-pickers are unhappy insecure people who never truly celebrate.
- Image-protecting. It’s all about what others think when you’re insecure.
- Fear mongering. The use of fear to motivate is an insecure leader’s method of motivation.
Boldness and Courage:
Bold action springs from either confidence or fear. Strength drives confident leaders. Dread drives the insecure.
8 Ways You Can Demonstrate Courage:
- Invite alternatives when you think you know. Insecurity needs predictability. Contrary to some opinions, confidence isn’t about having all the answers.
- Believe in your ability to learn when you don’t know.
- Exercise emotional steadiness. Stay calm.
- Listen and make decisions.
- Trust people to figure things out. Stay available but make space for others to solve problems. Too much help propagates insecurity.
- Spend time thinking and planning for the future.
- Prepare for contingencies.
- Honor your own mistakes by sharing what you’re learning.
Confident people go further than fearful.
Successful leaders inspire boldness by instilling confidence.
(New Post) The Cure for the Human Heart
Nothing can replace Connection.
Connecting with friends.
Connecting with family
Connecting with God.
When we stop feeling connection, we slowly shrivel up on the inside.
When we don’t experience authentic connection, people quit. Quit marriages. Quit Friendships.
Quit their leaders and their jobs.
Building connection with others is our lifeline. It’s their lifeline as well.
In my humble opinion, “dis-connection” has become an epidemic: driving people to desperately find incomplete substitutes. Resulting in broken hearts, broken bodies and broken futures.
Yet, re-connecting restores the human heart. And nothing else can do that.
Studies are now showing that addictions and self-destructive choices are often driven by our unmet need of Connection.
No one strategically chooses a life goal to eventually live in depression or addiction (food, sex or drugs) or a deep distrust of others. This is all an attempt to heal the pain caused from dis-connection.
I watched the video below and it floored me. It explains so much about why people slip into addictive patterns to deal with personal pain.
And it presents a whole new perspective on the real cure for the human heart.
How To Fail Forward
All of us fail.
In a difficult season several years ago, I learned that failure doesn’t have to be permanent. We can learn to fail forward.
Here’s the difference between permanent failure and temporary failure: Successful people fail often and learn more from that failure.
However, these two habits keep us in a never-ending failure cycle:
- Getting good at avoiding responsibility (and therefore blaming others).
- Acting on the urgent things in life at the expense of the important.
While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.
Here are six random ideas that will help you FAIL Better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:
- Grow yourself by doing hard things. The results? You grow both your competence and your character. You become a master at your craft.
- Find your “Why”. Most people get so focused on “what” they’re doing in life, they rarely focus on “why” (which is walking in purpose). You’ll eventually become excellent at your “what” because it’s empowered and inspired by your “why”.
- Engage with others. Bring people along with you. If you fail, they provide support and direction when you need them most.
- Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away.
- Concentrate your energy on initiatives that you can influence, but prepare for external circumstances that could derail your plans.
- When you fail (and you will) be clear about it. Call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won’t make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they’ve never done it.
If that list frightened you, you might be getting to the heart of the matter.
If that list feels like the sort of thing you, your team, and colleagues could adopt as part of your culture, then perhaps you’re onto something……
(New Post) 3 Reasons Why I Hired a Coach
I’ve had the privilege of serving as a leadership coach for others for several years now, but recently I began receiving coaching again for the three reasons below.
Before we get to those, in a New Yorker article titled, Personal Best—Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?, surgeon Atul Gawande writes, “No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where a coach comes in.”
Atul continues to share how, at age 45 and at the top of his profession, he leveraged a coach to build his “expert competence” and move him into undiscovered areas of surgical development.
Like Atul, you are a “genius, at the top of your game, and highly respected by your colleagues,” so why on earth would you need to a coach to improve?
Will Rogers said, “When you are through changing you are through.”
Below are three reasons even the best high-achievers need a coach (and the benefits I received recently from several sessions with a leadership coach):
- Leverage a pair of outside eyes and ears. What we perceive is often quite different from how others see or hear us. The best performers look to coaches for a neutral perspective so they can view problems more objectively with less emotional attachment.
- Lift the “fog” and gain more clarity. Coaches help others see more clearly the path to action. They can ask just the right question or share a perfectly timed insight so that blinders come off and the coachee is able to create their own energy to execution…clarity is powerful!
- Make better, faster decisions. Life and work boil down to solving and acting on problems. Many of us make “emotional” or hasty decisions. Even the best lack a systematic approach for thinking through challenges. Coaches bring more rigor to the mind game while streamlining the decision-making process.
In the words of Dr. Gawande, “Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.”
If You Hire the Wrong Person, All Bets Are Off.
If you select the wrong team member, all bets are off.
In a previous organization, I had team members concerned that an open position was still vacant after several weeks. So I felt the pressure to hire quickly without fully examining an individual’s Character, Competency and potential Chemistry.
The results were what you would suspect: it was evident after several weeks that they were not the right person for the role or organization. And I needed to own it because it was my decision.
We’ve all been there: you’re trying to fill a key vacancy while the work piles up. Results are being comprised. And you just want to “fix” the problem and select someone who generally is “good enough”. Instead of being careful, we speed up the process.
The worst thing you could do is hire quick. It’s the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot – but on purpose. Because as a leaders you have to own selecting the wrong person for the role. Likely, it was your own stress that got you into this mess.
Do yourself a favor and follow these guidelines: (and trust me, I wish I had)
- Look for both Competence and Character. Think “And” because you need both. Yes, you can train the right person, but if you think “either/or” you’ll compromise.
- If you hire and Eagle, they won’t want to work with a bunch of turkeys. Make sure your existing team is healthy. Eagles want to fly with other eagles, or they’ll fly away after awhile.
- Don’t Blame Them – Train Them. Every Eagle wants to grow, develop and become a better leader. So provide it! Don’t just direct – but DEVELOP. Yes, really good leaders will develop themselves. But don’t let that be an excuse not to care about someone else’s development. We all need others to challenge and stretch us.
There’s no fix for hiring the wrong person. I’ve rarely seen a team recover or have a “come to Jesus” moment and decide to fix all their own problems right after their hired.
Select the best people can. Correction: Select the best LEADERS you can. Leaders will produce other leaders. That’s how a high-performing team is built.
4 Clues to Discover Your Life’s Work
Every summer, my family would visit my grandparents in northern Michigan. They lived on a lake, so when I was young, I would go “treasure hunting” on the same small beach – the same beach I dug up the summer before. With a small children’s shovel in hand, I set out to get rich.
Of course, the only wealth I found was nice colorful rocks.
Finding the Treasure of meaningful work is much the same way – it takes digging and persistence. But you have to dig in the right place. Like a treasure map, these questions are “clues” to your treasure.
Answering these 4 questions can provide clues into your ideal work.
1. Where does your creativity come most alive?
Take a look back into your work history. When have you been the most alive? When has your creativity been released? When has your work just felt right?
Maybe your creativity comes most alive in a brainstorming session with others. Maybe you do your best work when you are alone and have space to think. We all have certain activities we can do that still leave us energized hours later.
2. What type of work would excite you the moment you woke up?
Have you ever woke up excited about your work? Have you ever had trouble sleeping at night because you were excited about work the next day?
If your initial response is “never” than you are in for a big surprise. It is possible. I have had nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited about the work I was going to do the next day. I’m not the only one. If it were your choice, what type of work would keep you up at night (in a good way).
3. What energizes your emotional batteries?
We are all wired a certain way. There are certain things that re-fuel our batteries. Many working professionals are burned out with their work because they do not have a clue as to what type of activities re-fuel their batteries.
Some of us are fueled when we are around people. If we spend too much time alone, we can become depressed and drained. Others of us are drained with too much people interaction. We need some time alone to get our batteries recharged. Having space to think, write or read is what we need most. What energizes your emotional batteries?
4.Where does your genius meet the needs of the world?
Your core genius is hidden to you. Since you live in your own skin, you often miss what it is that you do best. You mistakenly believe that what comes easy to you comes easy to everyone else. That is just not the case.
You have talents that when combined with the world’s needs make a powerful combination. It’s the place where magic happens. You do what you do best and you meet the deep needs of others. What are your top talents? How can they meet the needs that others have?
Are you energized by those around you? If not, think twice.
You are energized by the energy of others.
The people we surround ourselves with greatly influence our growth and success.
Although unavoidable, negative interactions can derail you – even stunt your progress – if you don’t know how to handle it.
And, there’s a HUGE difference in receiving feedback from a generally positive person who makes meaningful contributions to the culture and people around him or her, and receiving feedback from a truly negative person.
Negative comments from a positive person can almost always be helpful. Negative comments from a negative person is designed to tear you down.
The key is to differentiate between the two. Here are 5 Questions to determine someone’s impact on you:
- Is optimism or negativity part of a pattern?
The criticism you’re dealing with is either ‘in character’ for them or ‘out of character.’
If it’s in character, then they are negative about many things in life. You just happen to be one part of the whole.
If it’s truly out of character (and they are generally a positive person), its time to listen.
- Do they Pass the Caller ID test?
As subjective as this sounds, the call display test is a pretty good indicator of whether a person drains you or energizes you. When you see anyone’s name come up on your caller ID, you get an immediate emotional reaction to it.
Sometimes you’re thrilled to see the name and can’t wait to take the call. Other times you’re neutral. But sometimes you wince. Whether it’s a phone call, a text or an email, you respond negatively and quietly think “oh no.”
That’s a sign that the person’s overall influence in your life has been negative, not positive.
- Are they “for” something, or just “against” something?
Sadly, negative people rarely know what they stand for; they only know what they stand against.
If the person you’re dealing with isn’t “for” anything positive, they likely have a negative worldview
- Are Compliments sincere, or are they followed by the word “but”?
A positive person (and even a neutral person for that matter) can give a compliment. Negative people can’t.
What starts out positively (“I really enjoyed the event today”) is inevitably followed by a “but” (“but had they turned the volume down and shortened the message it would have been better.”)
People who can’t give a compliment are rarely the kind of people you build the future on.
- Do they Add value or Extract value in relationships?
Negative people rarely give themselves to something that benefit others.
Because they are against so much, few people want to work with them. Stalled out careers, a history of frequent job changes, financial trouble and other similar markers often characterize negative people.
Honor the humanity in everyone. But you don’t have to hang around everyone.
Why You Dread Sundays
Scientists did a study to determine what the most depressing hour of the week was for Americans.
Can you guess what it was?
Sunday at Noon.
Why?
Because that’s when Monday lands on your shoulders. Sunday afternoon is when the reality of Monday sets in. The weekend is over. The freedom of a day or two off is done. The break is complete.
And in the shadows, Monday waits. It lurks there as the hours of Sunday tick by, ready for you. It’s not alone either, no, it brought a friend. Who?
The job you don’t love.
And you don’t have to hate your job to dread Sunday. Your boss doesn’t have to be horrible.You might even like your job some days, but the true test is on Sunday.
Is that feeling creeping in?
Maybe it’s not for you, but maybe your spouse is feeling it. Sometimes I felt like a “Sunday Jerk” because on Saturday I was carefree but on Sunday I could feel Monday weighing on me like a ton of bricks.
Maybe you see something in your spouse that you wish he or she saw too.
I know that feeling because I lived it for years and didn’t understand why. However, after encountering a few “Necessary Endings” professionally, those experiences shifted me from ‘Sunday Dread’ to ‘Sunday PEACE’.
I learned I didn’t have to dread Sunday and I don’t want you to dread it either.
If you resonate with these thoughts, here’s why: You’ve told yourself a thousand reasons why this Sunday will be different or this year will be the year you write a book, start a business or get in shape.
But the big change is your career. You invest at least 40+ hours a week, and if you’re dreading going back each week – it’s time for you to discover:
1.) What you’re really Passionate about,
2.) What Talents and Skills you have, and
3.) How those two pieces can come together to bring purpose, excitement and destiny to your life.
I’ve encountered hundreds of people just like you who swear they’ll never regret another Sunday again. I hope you’ll join them.
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Chad Pfeifer 