Posts for category ‘Personal Mastery’

Hi there,
It’s Brian here, from Selling By Giving.

Gratitude. First off, thank you.  I received quite a few responses to the last email I sent to you (the 5am one) letting me know how it connected with people and provided them with value.  I’m all about feedback, and I greatly appreciate each email I receive.  While I don’t reply to nearly as many as I would like to, please know that I read pretty much every single personal email I receive, and I value them highly.

Inspiration. In the last two weeks (ever since the SANG conference) I’ve kept waking up in the early hours with different ideas I want to share.  Now, my friends know that I’m anything but a morning person, so this has come as a bit of a shock to the system.  Perhaps its training for the new baby that’s on the way.  And at least today I got to sleep in to 7am before things started up.

So, here are a few more (hopefully not random) thoughts again…

A question. When was the last time you broke out of your daily routine in a major way?

In the last two weeks, I attended a 3 day conference and a 1 week family reunion/vacation, and I’m astonished at the results.  I didn’t realize how stuck in a rut I’d gotten with some of my work stuff.  Now, it was a great rut.  It was familiar and productive, and while it was stressful at times, even my stress felt rather comfortable.  But it was a rut, and a lot of stuff was starting to feel like “have to’s” instead of “want to’s.”

It took immersing myself in two radically different environments (a retreat and a vacation) to shake me up – and OPEN me up.

Then in the Practice Building Academy call the other day, someone asked about  breakthrough-level retreats I’d recommend.

Here are my top 3.

1) Anything put on by the University of Santa Monica (www.gousm.edu)
2) Byron Katie’s school for the work (www.thework.com)
3) Insight seminars (www.insightseminars.org) – particularly Insight I and Insight II.

Love and light,
Brian

GM’s bankruptcy. Goldman’s bonuses. AIG’s collapse. It’s easy to look at what’s going on and say “How Stupid!” And this is true – but perhaps not in the way you think. This is because study after study shows that the core problem in business is not a lack of cognitive intelligence. It’s a lack of emotional intelligence.

Yet almost all of our focus, education and training misses this point.

Think about your work for a minute. What – or perhaps who – are the biggest challenges you face? What are some of the tactics you have tried so far to fix them? Do these issues seem stupid sometimes?

Well, they are. Not because the people involved are stupid, but because the core of these issues is usually emotional in nature, and can’t just be solved in our heads. People seem irrational sometimes because the roots of our issues aren’t rational.

The simple truth is this: at their core, 80% of unresolved issues are not intellectual or ideological, but emotional in nature. And while we receive many years of schooling for our minds, very few of us are ever given classes on how to work with our emotions and the emotions of others.

Emotional “blind spots” are often the most prevalent – and most crippling – at the top of the company. Think about Enron. The executives there were known as “the smartest guys in the room” yet they managed to do some remarkably stupid – and illegal – things. Now we could look at them and say they were bad, evil people, and we’d never do such things. But is that really true? In my experience, everyone is doing the best they know how to get their needs met. It’s just that sometimes, our best isn’t enough. And most of the time, this is because we haven’t yet developed enough emotional intelligence to deal with the challenges we face.

In Developing Management Skills, David Whetten and Kim Cameron summarize this research.
“A study of UC Berkeley Ph.D.’s over 40 years found that EQ was four times more powerful than IQ in predicting who achieved success in their field – even for hard scientists. A McBer study comparing outstanding managers with average managers found that 90 percent of the difference was accounted for by EQ. In a worldwide study of what companies were looking for in hiring new employees, 67 percent of the most desired attributes were EQ competencies. In a study of highly emotional intelligent partners in a consulting firm … the high EQ partners contributed more than twice as much revenue to the company as did the low EQ partners.”

Think about GM. From 1984 – 1999, GM was the #1 company in America. In 2009 it declared bankruptcy. For decades GM was able to hire from among the smartest graduates our schools had to offer. If we were to test the IQ of its people, it would surely be well above average. But over time, it developed a culture that was more and more dysfunctional. The conflicts between labor and management kept getting worse, escalating bureaucracy made change increasingly difficult, and a creeping sense of entitlement sucked away its competitiveness and creativity.

Because here’s the thing. Emotional problems breed. Once an emotional issue has taken root in a company, it grows. It spreads. It infects others. Like a cancer, it eventually metastasizes, to the point where it can kill a company. Saturn was created as a way of reinventing the way GM did business. For a while it worked brilliantly. But eventually the emotional diseases in the parent company took over.

This is why companies report such incredible returns from coaching. Great coaching is all about training people – in direct, pragmatic, applied ways – on how to increase their emotional intelligence. It supports companies in curing the root of their problems, instead of just focusing on the symptoms.

One study of 140 companies showed that they received $5 for each $1 spent on coaching. Another study measured an ROI of 600%. “Asked for a conservative estimate of the the monetary payoff from the coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies.” – Fortune, 2/19/01

In my work as a coach, I’m regularly amazed by the level of hard results that occur when we focus on the “soft” side of the business. As Roger Enrico, a Vice Chairman of Pepsi stated, “The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. Human interactions are a lot tougher to manage than numbers and Profits and Losses.”

So how do you work with this? In a series of upcoming columns I’ll be walking through 7 Secrets of Emotional Intelligence. Or if you want, please feel free to jump ahead and download the whole article.

Additional resources are available at http://www.corecoaching.org/resources.html.

Do you have any questions on this topic? If so, please feel free to send them to corecoaching@corecoaching.org and we may answer them in a future column.

One of my clients made a major shift this month in her business. She’s building a new company that’s exciting, innovative and heart-felt. She’s got a big vision and a big opportunity, but like most of us, her fears and insecurities had been holding her back.

She kept asking questions like “Who am I to do this business?” “Why would investors give me money?” “Why would people buy from me?” Each time she did, she found herself feeling more insecure and unworthy.

The key she used to change things for herself was to change the core focus of the company. When she listened to her insecurities, she thought it needed to be about her. And when she thought she needed to be the center of the company, she kept comparing herself to others and finding herself wanting. Which created more insecurity, and more of a need to make the company about herself…

But her business isn’t really about her. It’s about a bigger purpose. It’s about a cause she cares deeply about. And when she focused on this purpose, then the question shifted from “Why would people want to work with me?” to “Who wants to join with me in support of this purpose?” The answer: lots of people, including some very rich and successful investors, who might be delighted to enlist her in their cause.

Their cause? What about her cause? Ah…but it’s the same cause. Self-focus creates a win/lose mentality. How can I take from you? How can I convince you? How can I enroll you in what I want? It puts us on opposing teams. Purpose-focus creates a win/win or no deal mentality. It shifts the game so we’re both on the same team.

I notice the same shift in me. When I start thinking that Selling By Giving is about me, I start feeling insecure and thinking that I need to convince others of its value. But it’s not about me. It’s about service. It’s about making a difference in people’s lives. It’s about a cause I care deeply about – integrating spirituality and business, so we can learn how to turn business into service and sales into spiritual growth.

Do you ever feel insecure about business? If so, what is the purpose behind what you’re doing? And how can you focus more on that, particularly when talking to others about sales, investment or partnership?

Love and light,

Brian

P.S. Big announcement coming soon! Probably this next week!

I talked with a client today who is retrenching in the face of the downturn. While it’s painful for them, they’re doing a great job of “not letting a good crisis go to waste.” They’re using the stark clarity of their new financial situation to cut through some old patterns they’ve known for years they “should” get rid of, but which have been holding them back in major ways. Like many of us, when times were good, their business was functioning just well enough to allow them to indulge in their old patterns.

So, like many of us, they did.

When we started coaching together, they started shifting these patterns. They made beautiful, powerful progress. And yet, like many of us, they had some stubborn, deeper, fear-based patterns that kept hanging in there.

Until the crisis made it clear that they had to choose between indulging these patterns and surviving as a business. To their credit, they had the self-honestly to really look at this choice, and the courage to confront their fears. In doing so, they are transforming themselves – both who they are as individuals, and who they are as a business.

And from this new place, they’re realizing that a down economy can also be a tremendous gift.

A gift?!? Really?!?

Yes.

For example, this client is a small, boutique, service based business that competes with big ad agencies and consulting companies. During good times, most of their potential clients chose to work with big, brand name, expensive firms. These firms cost twice as much, and do half the quality of work (mostly by farming it out to young associates). But during the good times, who cares? They’ve got the name, and people wanted the name. During good times, who cares if they could save $100,000 here, or $400,000 there?

Well, those times are over. This client now has such a competitive advantage, it’s almost unfair. The value proposition they offer is so compelling, they have the potential to virtually poach clients at will.

The real question is: will they? Will they continue milking every benefit they can from this crisis? Will they continue choosing to make the hard inner choices that are going to make the difference between the winners and the losers in these new times?

I believe they will…

Will you?

When we go in to our place of victim consciousness (which we all have somewhere inside) this financial crisis feels like a horrible thing that’s taking things from us we’re entitled to. It’s like a bad monster stealing our blankie.

When we go in to our place of self-deception and denial (which we also all have somewhere inside) this financial crisis is something we do everything we can to ignore, so we can continue “putting off hard choices” in the hopes they will go away. It’s like hiding in a closet and waiting for the world to become the way we think it “should” be.

Those are two choices we can make.

Here’s another.

We can also step in to our place of personal responsibility and courage (and yes, we all have this inside too) and ask “How can I use this as an opportunity?” “How can I avoid letting a good crisis go to waste?”

In these new times, people are becoming much more discerning about the level of value they’re receiving. If you’re committed to providing exceptional value (and Selling By Giving can show you how) you too can join the ranks of the new winners that will be emerging out of this storm.

The question is: Will you?

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. If you’d like support in this choice, we’ll be releasing the full Selling By Giving information product shortly. Stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

2009 promises to be a remarkably “interesting” year. More than any time in recent memory, we’re being pushed to shift from victim consciousness to ownership consciousness. We’re learning the challenges that come from expecting outside institutions to take care of us (i.e. “The government should take care of my retirement” or “The market has to keep going up”). And we’re rediscovering the value of developing authentic self-reliance. This is one reason why many coaches and healers are finding their practices booming even as many other forms of discretionary spending are being cut. (If this isn’t the case for you, it may be because of the inner conflicts we tend to have around selling our services. If this applies to you, please check out www.sixfigurepractice.net/introcds.html)

A core foundation of this ownership consciousness is our ability to set and achieve our goals. Yet almost everyone I know approaches goal setting with one of two core mistakes. Either we set huge goals and fail to reach them, or we set tiny goals that don’t call on us to manifest anything near our full potential. We’ll either declare that “I’m never going to eat ice cream again” (And when could we succeed at this? Only when we die!) Or we’ll set a wishy washy goal like “I’m going to try to eat less ice cream. You know. If I can.”

So at this time of New Year’s Resolutions, how can we become master goal setters?

The key to this goal lies in the distinction between intentions and commitments.

An intention is a big picture goal, which invokes our spiritual will. It declares to our spiritual/higher/authentic self, “This is what I choose. It’s what I want, and what I’m committed to moving towards.” While it also says “And, I recognize that I don’t always know what’s best for me, so I ask for this or something better for the highest good of all concerned.” An intention is a direction, a prayer, an aspiration. It’s an act of co-creation, simultaneously displaying both self-confidence and humility.

But it’s NOT a commitment.

A commitment is an act of will and integrity. It’s made by our conscious self, out of our store of personal willpower. When we make a commitment to something, we have three choices.

1) Get it done, and experience an automatic increase in our level of self-trust and self-confidence.
2) Fail to get it done, and experience an automatic decrease in our level of self-trust and self-confidence.
3) Consciously renegotiate it in good faith.

When we set huge goals as commitments, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. We get a short motivational burst of fear and guilt, but after that wears off, we crash and pay the automatic inner price for failing to deliver on our commitments.

When we only set tiny goals, we’re also setting ourselves up for failure. Now, we tend to do this because we’re afraid of failing again at our commitments (i.e. “Remember how our resolutions turned out the LAST 10 years?!”) But in failing to even try to reach our potential, we’re failing anyway.

So what’s the answer?

The key is to combine large intentions with small, consistent commitments.

It’s to stair step our way to success.

No one can climb a mountain in one step. And no one can climb a mountain if we only stay in the valley. The way to climb a mountain is to set a clear intention to do so, accept where we’re at, and then keep going up the mountain, one step at a time.

This is also the way to create new resolutions, new habits, and a new life.

Wishing you the best in 2009!

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. If this nugget was valuable to you, please also feel free to check out last year’s nugget on “Making New Year’s Un-Resolutions.” http://ecoaching.corecoaching.org/?p=38

During these busy holidays, it’s easy to either skip over gratitude, or hold it as a “should.” Particularly during the current crisis, it’s all too easy to get caught in an inner conflict between the piece of ourselves that says “I need to be afraid, in order to keep safe…” and the piece that says “I should be grateful for what I have, if I’m to be a worthy person…”

So let’s talk about the power – and joy – of gratitude.

Gratitude – like honest service – is one of the highest vibrations on the planet. Fear and judgment are two of the lowest. So it doesn’t work very well to try and “should” our way into gratitude. It’s like trying to use darkness to create light. Instead of forcing gratitude, we find that it’s something that naturally occurs within us. It’s part of our truest nature – when we open to it, and let go of the fear and judgment that has been keeping us in the dark. Gratitude is joyful. It’s a song of thanks.

And it’s also powerful.

The spiritual law of attraction dictates that like attracts like. Put another way, “where you focus is where you go.” While we often think that the way to a happy life involves focusing on the things we want to avoid, or the things we’re doing wrong, negative focus creates negative results. Over the long run, the more we focus on what’s wrong, the more we’re going to experience the exact things we’re trying to avoid. Because of this, a core key to life is to focus on getting more of what we do want, rather than avoiding what we don’t. It involves holding a positive focus, particularly with our inner thoughts and judgments. This tool is illustrated by the following Native American story, as told by Ether Acosta.

“A grandson told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. Grandfather said: ‘Let me tell you a story.’ ‘I, too, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of then try to dominate my spirit.’ The boy looked intently into his grandfather’s eyes and asked, ‘Which one wins, Grandfather?’ The grandfather solemnly replied, ‘The one I feed.’”

Gratitude is one of the most positive vibrations there is, and so connecting with our gratitude is one of the most powerful practices there is – not just as a way of being thankful for what we already have, but also as a foundational step in opening ourselves to more.

Interestingly, like with discipline, many of us have gratitude paired with judgment, scarcity, and fear. For example, I’ve found myself regularly thinking that “I should be grateful for what I have instead of wanting more” and “If I’m grateful for what I have, then this means I’m resigning myself to how things are right now, and I’ll never get anything more from life.” However, these statements aren’t accurate. Like Love, gratitude is not a choice between either being thankful for what we have or receiving more. Instead, it’s one of the fastest ways both to be thankful and to open ourselves to receiving more.

As some concrete tools for practicing gratitude, you can keep a gratitude journal, make a regular gratitude list, or create a family ritual where you teach the abundance that comes from gratitude, and then invite each member to state three things they are grateful for. Or you can work with the five core disciplines of spiritual psychology – acceptance, loving self-discipline, self-awareness, healing and self-forgiveness – as taught in the soon to be published book (really!) Love Beyond Belief.

“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart

Happy Holidays!
Love and light,
Brian

P.S. These nuggets are now available all in one place.  ecoaching.corecoaching.org – check it out!

I worked with someone this week who had become trapped by her yeses. In the name of friendship and caring, she had been giving away so much of her time and energy that she wasn’t taking care of her own practice and her own needs.

When we looked at this pattern, the challenge wasn’t that she was doing the wrong things, or that she was doing things she didn’t want to do. She loved what she was doing, and she loves giving to others. The challenge was that she wasn’t being honest with herself about what she was giving up with each yes.

She was pretending she could say yes to as many things as she wanted to, instead of realizing that every yes comes paired with a no – the no we’re silently saying to the other things we could be doing with that time.

This is fine if the things we’re saying no to are less important. But how often have you said yes to something just because it’s urgent, or because someone asked you to? How often have you said yes because you were afraid to say no? How often have you said yes out of fear of the voice that tells you “I should do this…”?

When we look at each request as a choice between saying yes or doing nothing, this allows us to avoid facing our fears and conflicts over all the things we “should” do. We ask ourselves, “Oh, it’s no big deal…I can just add one more thing to my plate, right?”

But in doing so, we’re lying to ourselves.

Because that one more yes is often the thing that shifts our motivation source from the loving self-discipline that comes with “I choose to…” to the pain based motivation that comes from overload and “I have to…” It’s often the thing that shifts our energy from love to fear, and shifts our choices from being based in freedom to being based in addiction.

It’s like sweets at the holidays. The challenge doesn’t lie in that first taste. It lies when we go for the tenth helping in a week. It lies in the tenth yes, where we commit to doing something we know is going to stress us out, because of our fears of what it would mean if we said no. (And what is stress? It’s simply a polite name for pain, fear and guilt.)

And notice the wording here. “The challenge lies…” Literally. To one extent or another, most of us are addicted to stress. And addiction always comes paired with denial and self-deception. It’s based in the lies we tell ourselves.

So as a practice, when you’re about to say yes to something, try asking yourself an honest question – “what am I really saying no to, if I say yes to this request?”

Or create a not to do list. And practice putting one thing on that list every time you put something on your to do list.

Because often times, what we do is much less important than how we are as we do it.

Love and light,
Brian

Do you remember playing on the teeter-totters as a kid?

In a coaching call last week, I realized how much the essence of management and delegation is similar to this game. It’s all about balancing two sides of the seesaw. (By the way…note how everything in this also applies to SELF-management.)

On one side, we have risk and accountability. Done wisely, accountability is about making agreements with people (instead of managing by expectations) and then holding people accountable to their agreements. A complete agreement includes agreeing – up front – what the consequences of not honoring the agreement will be. For example, what will happen if a client pays you late? Is there a fee? Do you stop services until they pay?

We often feel that it would be more loving to let this piece of things slide. But it’s not. It’s usually less loving. Loving boundaries, agreements, and consequences are an essential piece of learning and growth. Without them, we rarely grow into our full potential.

Because of this, accountability involves risk. It means committing to agreements, it means committing to results, and it means opening ourselves to the consequences of those results. It means opening ourselves to our fear of failure. (In Reality, there is no such thing as failure – that’s just a story we create. But it can sure FEEL real!)

On the other side of the teeter-totter is reward and responsibility. How will others share in the success they help create? And what level of authority do they have to do so?

Okay. Now here is the key. A huge percentage of the failures in business come an imbalance between these two sides. A fear-based manager will try to keep employees afraid for their jobs (high risk) while minimizing bonuses (low reward). An indulgent manager will do everything they can to avoid firing an under-performing employee (low risk) while trying to keep increasing employee pay (high reward).
Similarly, a micro-manager will demand results (high accountability) while undermining the employee’s ability to make real decisions (low response-ability.) And an irresponsible manager will give employees more power than they’re ready for, without adequate agreements and oversight (low accountability and high responsibility).

A client of mine is creating a business that supports healers, and their original business model was going to be a real struggle, because they were trying to take on all the risk and accountability of the business, while giving up most of the reward and responsibility. They thought this was being nice and loving, but love has two sides – acceptance and loving discipline. In changing this, and seeking to find ways to balance the seesaw, they are dramatically increasing their odds of success.

Take a moment and look at your life. Which side of the seesaw do you tend to overbalance? Does it change it different areas of your life?

Interestingly, for heart-centered practice builders, this picture gets even more complicated. Because of the natural conflicts we feel between love and business, many practice builders create a deep level of denial about the real risks of their business, and create a deep level of fear about the rewards.

Which is one of the core things Selling By Giving teaches practice builders to work with.

Love and light,
Brian

I received two nuggets this week that were particularly valuable to me. Even though my life is great and business is booming, I’ve felt myself getting pulled into fear this last month, around all the “market” events. As always, I find that I teach what I most need to learn…

Gratitude and Fear
“Notice the abundance of what you do have, right here right now, and let it in, really let it in. You may lose it all later, but for now, while you still have it, can you relax and be still, be comforted in what you do have in this moment? Worry when you have lost it all. Losing it all later is to long for what you have right now. Later you will notice that you didn’t appreciate it when you did have it. It would be nice to think, later, ‘I really appreciated it when I had it, I didn’t waste being grateful for a moment.’ … We could wait gratefully for years to lose it all and notice to the end of our lives that losing it all never happened. To open to what is reality right now is to see options that are unimaginable to the frightened, living-in-the-future, I-know mind.” ~ Byron Katie

Coaching When the Market is Down
“Individuals are eager for coaching…actually, the demand for life coaching goes up in ‘tough’ and scary conditions. People want to learn to depend on THEMSELVES from now on and not some company or their government or an investment gamble. Therefore coaching and training desires go WAY up…I had a field day during the financial plunge right after 9-11…when people are scared, they want coaching…they want to STOP depending on other people and institutions and start depending on themselves…” ~ Steve Chandler

Love and light,
Brian