The Power of Believing in Yourself

In the late 1970s, sports psychologist Jim Fannin was coaching
Adriano Panatta, one of the top-ranked tennis players in the world
and a former French Open champion. He tells the story of Panatta's
quarterfinal match with one of the newcomers at an ATP tournament.

“As the match unfolded, this low-ranked, left-handed, red-headed jerk
of a guy has no respect for a top-ranked player in the world. He
stalls. He berates an umpire. He yells at a ball kid. He crushes my
player! We are humiliated!”

“Fourteen years later I’m at my home in Chicago having dinner with my
best friend Peter Fleming and his doubles partner, John McEnroe Jr. I
turned to John that night and said, “Do you remember when I met you
back in San Francisco?” He smirked and replied, “Oh, you mean when I
crushed your Italian boy?” We all started laughing.

And I said, “Yeah, how did you do that?” Your ranking
was so low. How did you play like that?” McEnroe
looked me cold in the eye and said, “I was number one
in the world. My ranking just hadn’t caught up yet.”

Wow. That’s self-belief.

Too many of us have it backwards. We think it’s when we reach the
milestone goal – the ideal weight, million-dollar income, major
promotion or championship trophy -- that we will finally become the
person we want to be.

In fact, it’s the opposite. We have to embrace our vision before it
actually happens. As Wayne Dyer says, “You’ll see it when you believe it.”

Quoted from The Flow Factor - Renita Kalhorn

What Makes A Good Leader

Leading others is about FIRST serving others. As a reference, I recommend Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, by Greanleaf, Spears, and Covey. Servant leadership is about working, as a leader, to enable those that you lead to have what they need in order to fully exercise their gifts, talents, and skills in accomplishing the organizations goals. As to those who are a member of the team that is lead by an individual who is truly modeling Servant Leadership, those team members are responsible for helping that leader to have what they need in order to execute to business goals (be successful): this can include information, perspectives, insights, feedback, etc. As an effective leader in my own right, and as someone who serves an individual who models Servant Leadership, I feel impelled to have fierce conversations about goals, objectives, and outcomes in the light of a people centric culture. It IS my responsibility to bring my gifts, talents, and skills to the table and to provide all of the information that I have at my disposal to strengthen my leader's position. This DOES NOT mean that I am a YES person, or coddle to his vanities or feed him what he wants to hear. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THIS IS IN ANYONES BEST INTEREST! As a VALUED member of the team, it is my responsibility, my obligation, and my honor to share what I know, think, feel, and experience. "When the right people with the right mindset come together, you've a championship team."

With regards to Simon Sinek's Tweet: "A team's job is to provide their leader more options. The leader's job is to give his/her team the resources to do so." The options available are about the teams efforts to provide leadership with the input they need to be able to consider all viable options. It is in the role of best serving the team, that the leader willingly and open-mindedly considers the insights and ideas coming from the team. This support structure is SYMBIOTIC in nature and inclusive regarding the importance of the team to the ultimate success and viability of the outcomes.

As a part of an effective team, we must all engage in the kinds of sharing of information and unfiltered dialogue that challenges and strengthens each of us.

Degrees of Consciousness

I recently watched Simon Lewis's TED talk on "Don't Take Consciousness for Granted" - http://on.ted.com/9RQh , and it really impacted me as to the value of Consciousness and what Consciousness brings to my life. As I thought about how conscious I am at any given time, I realized I exhibit varying degrees of consciousness in any given time span. To be really conscious of what is going on around me, or of what is happening at any point in time, I find I have to "pull" myself back into that moment - I find that being in the NOW takes focus, for me. My natural state is for my consciousness to be occupied with the past, now, and the future. Often times, in fact, I find that NOW takes a back seat to what I am working through in my mind relative to the past or in anticipation of the future.

What an interesting thing to be doing with my mind! I believe, as I look at how my mind works, that, a good part of the time, I am most unconscious in the present. WOW! That's scary!

All I actually have, in reality, is NOW. Yesterday is gone; tomorrow doesn't exist; and yet I focus very little of my consciousness on the one point in time I REALLY have the opportunity to make a difference - NOW.

So, I ask myself WHY? Why do I focus so much energy on yesterday and tomorrow? What comes to mind as I ask these questions is that it is REALLY important to me to be able to "connect the dots" in my life - to see and understand how the past flows into the present, and then into the future. My mind is always looking for patterns that it can recognize in the evolution of time in order to facilitate, and/or guide the linear flow of events.

So, I ask myself WHY? Why is this approach so important? What comes to mind is that I am afraid of chaos, of a perceived regression into the primal state. As I look at this fear I realize that control is important to me. I have an understanding that having control in my life comes from this "mapping" process, and from pattern awareness. I look at this desire to have control and I realize that I am driven to not be a "victim" - of anything. WOW!

Victim is a state of mind. It isn't about linear process, or about preparing for any possible outcome, or about combing through the past. It isn't about pattern recognition and it isn't a result of chaos. It is a choice. Simon Lewis's TED talk touched me because it is proof positive of what that choice can do in one person's life - it is a powerful, life changing choice. WOW!

What Makes Things Special

I just read Simon's blog on his insights on what makes things special: http://sinekpartners.typepad.com/refocus/2011/07/small-is-special.html

I agree about the small part and about the making it personal. However, I have to say that I have had some really special personal moments that had more to do with where my head was at at the time I made a note of the specialness of the event, than the size of the event. For example, I took a trip to Vienna with my Mom before she was unable to travel. When I booked the trip, I didn't book it because Vienna was some place I wanted to go. I booked it because it was the place that my Mom had always dreamed about going. Because of her physical frailness at the time, we took a small trip in the AM, then would return to our Bed and Breakfast, lunch, and take a nap, and then we would take a trip in the evening. I went with no expectations except to make a dream of hers come true. I booked all the events she wanted to see, and yet, in the end, it was one of the most magical and special times that she and I were able to spend together before her death. We took the trip over Easter time. One of the events that I booked was a concert at St. Stephens Church featuring Kathleen Battle and the Vienna Boys Choir. I am not an Opera fan to speak of, though I have always enjoyed the Boys Choir. The concert was magical and the setting surreal. Another evening we were sitting outside our Bed and Breakfast, which happened to be right next to the Vienna School for the Arts. The sun was setting, we were having a glass of wine, and as we were sitting there just enjoying the evening a woman started singing an aria that was so touching, so beautiful and so unplanned. It brought my Mom to tears, and for me was one of the high-points of the myriad of unplanned but treasured memories that we amassed. I guess what I'm sharing is that there are so many ways to lend meaning to any given moment. I look for every opportunity to lend meaning to NOW, to make NOW special, magical, memorable. If I use only emails to bring meaning to NOW, then shame on me. I would hope that I am constantly building my resources to enrich what ever time I have left and to touch lives and lend dimension, including emails. I hope that, in the end, the math of my life adds up to positively impacting the lives of others, even if it's as small as 1+1+1, or on a larger scale.

The Story of The Tainted Well

There was once a wise king who ruled over a vast kingdom. Now, in the heart of the city, there was a well with pure and crystalline waters from which the king and all the inhabitants drank. When all were asleep, three witches entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well. They said that henceforth all who drink this water shall be “of a different mind”.

The next day, all the people drank of the water, but not the king. And the people began to say, "The king is ‘of a different mind’ and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. He is not like us any more."

The king, aware of what had transpired, was faced with a dilemma: drink from the well and become like the rest of his subjects, but remain king; or don’t drink from the well, remain “single minded”, but be swept from power by those who would view his very state of mind as a threat.

I have always loved this "parable". It is food for thought. There is a price to be paid for being of "a different mind".