Leaving Legacy

The real question is not will you leave a legacy but what kind will it be?  An even more important question is what do you want it to be?

It is amazing how proficient we have become in establishing clear and attainable goals in the business sector.  We can break down our plans into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and beyond to ensure that we accomplish what we have determined is important.

I am convinced the reason we do not give the same amount of passion and excellence to our private lives is that we have never taken the time to define what is really important.  This lack of prioritization leads to a hope it all works out mentality that would not last for one week in the hit your numbers or else corporate sector.

Most people I have talked with over the years will tell you that in the end the personal part of their life that includes family and friends is really more important to them than the public part.  If so, then why this huge disconnect?

It all goes back to understanding Covey’s time matrix in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  Almost everything in our public lives fits into the urgent category.  They demand that we respond even though many of the things we do every day are not really important at all.

The people we care about the most fit into an important category that is not urgent.  Ball games, piano recitals and dates with your spouse will not scream in your face but they are the things that make up your legacy.

Don’t wait for the heart attack or cancer, have the courage to take a major time out and define in very specific terms what really matters so that in the end you will leave this world a better place than you found it.

 

 

 

 

Work-Life Balance

If there has ever been a day when the demands of work and home have been greater I am not aware of it.  The sheer pace of life today leaves us emotionally and physically worn out and feeling empty at the end of most days.

Technology keeps us connected all the time and people in the workplace culture almost demand that we stay available 24-7.  Our families are all running on the same high speed treadmill that produces stress in every area of our lives.

There are several key principles that must be in place if you want to create margin for the people and priorities that you care about the most:

1.       Lead Yourself First—it is impossible to successfully help lead other people at work or in the home if you are not able to accomplish what is most important in your own life.  You should set specific goals in the areas of health, personal development and faith with the necessary time allotment to make sure they get done.

2.      Prioritize Your Family Next—at the end of your life it will not matter how much professional success you have had if you consistently neglected your role as a spouse and parent.  There are no guarantees that time alone will produce a great marriage and character driven children but without it there is a high probability that both areas could fail.

3.      Choose Right Career—most organizations are looking for people who will perform and improve their bottom line.  However there is a growing awareness that if you want to attract and keep the best people you have to give some deference to work-life balance.  The key is you have to be outstanding at what you do and you have to be in a culture that will reward that effort by giving you more time off and not more projects to accomplish.

4.      Develop Life Plan—it never ceases to amaze me that some of the most effective leaders in the corporate arena do not practice any of the leadership disciplines that made them successful in their home and personal life.  The can lead multi-million dollar projects from start to finish at work but not take more than 30 minutes to plan the annual family vacation. 

 

When you develop a total life plan with goals and strategies for everything personal, private and public you just assumed the C.E.O.  leadership role for your whole life.   You will never have a more important job.

Love & Respect

There have been a lot of great marriage books written over the last twenty years.  The Marriage Builder by Larry Crabb is probably the best based on how our individual needs for security and significance impact our relationship with our spouse.

Love & Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs is extremely good from the standpoint of giving a simple foundational framework for the major role that each partner needs to play in the marriage.  Then the book gives lots of practical applications and illustrations on how to live this out in real world.

He writes that the husband should love his wife by:

1.      Closeness—she wants you to be close

2.      Openness—she wants you to open up to her

3.      Understanding—don’t try to fix her; just listen

4.      Peacemaking—she wants you to say, “I’m Sorry”

5.      Loyalty—she needs to know you’re committed

6.      Esteem—she wants you to honor and cherish her

The wife should respect her husband by:

1.      Conquest—appreciate his desire to work and achieve

2.      Hierarchy—appreciate his desire to protect and provide

3.      Authority—appreciate his desire to serve and to lead

4.      Insight—appreciate his desire to analyze and counsel

5.      Relationship—appreciate his desire for shoulder-to-shoulder friendship

6.      Sexuality—appreciate his desire for sexual intimacy

One of the very helpful points that he continues to make throughout the book is just because our needs make us so different that does not make either of us wrong.  When we assume the best about our spouse’s motives then we can give them the benefit of the doubt when they fall short of giving us what we want and need.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Six Ways To Make Emotional Deposits

We are all familiar with the metaphor of making emotional deposits and taking withdrawals from another person both personally and professionally.  When you end up taking more than you give to another person you end up with a negative balance and believe me there are serious fees and late charges involved.

Stephen Covey in his great book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People gives us six ways that we can make sure we are making deposits on a consistent basis with another person:

1.      Understanding the Individual—really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit.  You simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual.

2.      Attending to the Little Things—the little kindnesses and courtesies are so important.  Small discourtesies, little unkindness’s, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals.  In relationships, the little things are the big things.

3.      Keeping Commitments—keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal.  In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through.

4.      Clarifying Expectations—the cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.  That’s why it’s so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table.

5.      Showing Personal Integrity—personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits. One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present because that builds trust with those who are.

6.      Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal—when we make withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account, we need to apologize and we need to do in sincerely.  Great deposits come in the sincere words we share with the people we have hurt.

Resolving Conflict

All of us at some point in time will have conflict and disagreements with someone else either in our personal lives or professionally at work.  These situations can be painful at times but seeking resolution is the only way to maintain positive momentum in your life.

There are at least three critical steps that you must take if you want to restore the relationship and move forward in your own life.

1.       Own Your Part—In every disagreement there are always two sides to the story.  I have never known a situation where there was not some responsibility for the problem with both parties.  If we think the other party is the major offender then we tend to wait for them to make the first move.  Instead we need to take whatever percentage of the problem is ours even if it’s minor and do what we need to do to admit it and ask for forgiveness regardless of what the other person does.

2.      Talk Person Privately—Most of the time when we are having problems with another person we tend to go to other people first and complain or try to find emotional support.  What we should do is go privately to the person who offended us first and tell them in a respectful way why we are offended and give them a chance to respond.  When we are talking about someone else to another person rather than talking to them the situation will only get worse.

3.      Give Benefit Of Doubt—When we sense that a conversation is not going well and we can tell it may hurt us we have a decision to make.  We can either assume the worst about the other person’s motives or we can believe the best.  Many times if we can give them the benefit of the doubt at this critical moment then even though it may still hurt there will be no lasting damage because we give them a pass because we trust their heart.

The Importance of Knowing Life Purpose

In a day when our calendars are beyond full and yet our lives seem to be empty something has gone wrong.  We in many cases have assumed because we are busy the things we are doing must be important.

We clearly have shifted the focus from being as a person to doing and what we are able to accomplish.  Technology has helped us in many cases simply to do the wrong things faster.

The great paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by the Dalai Lama:

“We have more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees, but less sense…more knowledge but less judgment.

More experts, but more problems.

More medicines, but less healthiness.

We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.

We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.

We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.

It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”

For many of us we have been living the script for our lives that were given to us by someone else; parents, peers, friends or the culture we live in.  The time has come for us to have the courage to say no and the passion to write our own.

 

Creating Margin

A simple definition of margin is the space between our load and our limits.  It is the opposite of overload because you will have something in reserve for a time when you will need it.

Richard Swenson wrote an incredible book entitled Margin to help us learn how to restore emotional, physical, financial and time reserves to our overscheduled lives.  Of all these important areas he believes everything must start with our emotional energy.

Every day we only have so much emotional energy to give to our family, work, friends and other people.  Most of these people are making withdrawals from our emotional bank accounts and if we are not careful we become overdrawn with nothing left to give.

We must start each day knowing our emotional balance and then set limits on those people and things that will tend to drain us to the point of experiencing the pain of being overwhelmed.  He lists several things that can restore your emotional energy:

1.       Cultivate Social Supports

2.      Reconcile Relationships

3.      Serve One Another

4.      Rest

5.      Laugh

6.      Offer Thanks

7.      Grant Grace

8.      Be Rich in Faith

9.      Hold Fast Hope

10.  Envision a Better Future

 

Some of the emotional drainers in life cannot be avoided but when you build in things that make deposits then you can routinely within your day monitor your balance and make the necessary adjustments to maintain margin.

We must find ways in this wired world we live in to have peace of mind so that we have something left to give to the people that matter the most.

 

Customer Service At Home

We all enjoy the experience of some organization or person who goes the extra mile and delivers high quality personal service.  In a day when most companies either put you on a phone tree from hell or only allow contact through email it is really nice when another person is simply pleasant and nice.

Mobile Travel Guide declares themselves as the gold standard of travel ratings and reviews.  They rate hotels and restaurants on a system of one to five stars based on their performance.  When you see their sign and there are at least three to the coveted five stars rating you know that the experience will be a good one.

Every day when we all go out into the public world of work and our daily to do list we interact with lots of other people.  Most of the time, we really try very hard to be courteous and polite to others especially if they are customers, suppliers, co workers or friends.  We give, give, and give to other people all day until we are emotionally spent by the time we head home.

When I evaluate my customer service rating at home I have to admit many times I would not receive even one star much less three to five. I treat the people I care about the most with the least amount of patience and kindness. 

If the Mobile staff were to interview the people who are the closest to you how many stars would you receive?  I am going to do whatever it takes to consistently improve my score.  How about you?

Definition of Balanced Life

All of us feel like we have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.  We have priorities in many different areas: our career, family, relationships, entertainment, faith and own personal life.  We also fulfill many roles as employees, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, and friends just to name a few.

Somehow we have developed this concept that true happiness and success comes when all of these areas and roles are in perfect balance.  It is as if they all have equal percentages of our time, energy and passion.

Realistically we all know that is an impossible goal to accomplish. Our career alone demands a ever growing disproportionate amount of our time and if you have a newborn child in your house all bets are off including time to sleep.

To me a balanced life means that all of these areas as well as our different roles will constantly be changing in the amount of resources they demand.  The critical factor is not to let anything that is important in your life be totally neglected to the point that you are now failing in that area because all of the other things have drained you to the point you have nothing left to give.

When you reach that point and we all do from time to time we must reprioritize our lives so that everything important gets its slot on our calendars.  This will mean that something else will have to get less or be eliminated all together.

Believe it or not sometimes we need to not go to the new latest and greatest parenting conference and just stay at home and play with our children.  Life can be crazy and its demands will change with each new day.

When you have the character and courage to assume the responsibility of leading your total life you will make sure that nothing major falls through the cracks.  Enjoy your day!!

Personal Crisis

When negative things are happening in your life and you feel like you are in a deep hole and cannot see how to get out there are three key personal leadership disciplines that will help you get your positive momentum back.

The first is perspective.  When things are not going well today it is very important to put the present in the context of the long look that includes both the past and the future.  All of life both the good and the bad tend to run in cycles.  You cannot choose many times the circumstances about what happens to you but it is your responsibility to choose how you respond to them. 

Adversity in life will either make you a better person or a bitter one and that choice is within your control.  The key thing about your past is you must learn from it but never live in it.  Failure never has to be final unless we let it.

The same is true about the future.  You can choose to watch the news 3 hours a day and live with fear, worry and doubt or you can be grateful for what you have and face the future with hope and a positive attitude. 

The second personal leadership discipline in dealing with change is priorities.  The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not. 

We must start by not asking the question what have I lost but what do I still have?  I would encourage you to write down everything that is still in your life that is important and when you see it all you will be amazed by how blessed you really are.

Someone has well said the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon but we wait so long to begin it.  Regardless of your age or stage of life this dramatic period of change we are all going through is the perfect time for you to decide how you want to spend the rest of your life.  If you need some help get a life coach to walk through this process with you.

The third discipline to deal with change is to be proactive.  When some people face dramatic change they choose to live in denial as if this is not really happening to me.  On the other extreme others know the change is real to the point of becoming emotionally depressed about their new state of life.

I must assume personal responsibility to change myself first and start leading myself by making good daily decisions before my life can begin to turn around in different direction.  The only way to do that is to do what you can with what you have right where you are and do it today with all your heart.

 

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