You Already Know How To Be Great, by Michael McKinney reviewing a book by Alan Fine

You Already Know How to Be Great

One of the hardest things we will attempt to do is to act on what we already know to do. It’s that difficulty that lies behind much of our search for the next big thing; some way to get around or make easier that which we know we should be doing. It is never easy but by applying some new thinking we can get out of our own way. 

Alan Fine states in You Already Know How to Be Great, that performance improvement is most often an issue of reducing theinterference that’s getting in the way of using the knowledge we already have. Fine says that we have to get right the three elements that facilitate the use of the knowledge we already have. They are: 

Faith: Our beliefs about ourselves and our beliefs about others. High performance is more likely when we believe that we can learn and do better. The absence of Faith could be described as insecurity. 

Fire: Our energy, passion, motivation, and commitment. High performance is more likely when we are excited about learning and doing. The absence of Firecould be described as indifference. 

Focus: What we pay attention to and how we pay attention to it. High performance is more likely when we pay attention in a way that will quiet our minds. The absence of Focus could be described as inconsistency. 

High performance happens when we “get rid of the interference that blocks these natural, inherent human gifts.” Focus is the most powerful tool for removing distractions and thus the “most effective way to release Faith and Fire.” If we “create a singular focus on one or more critical variables of the task, we’re far more likely to create the flow state that creates high performance.” 

More than instructing, Fine believes we would be better off looking to what is blocking Faith, Fire, and Focus in our organizations, performers, families and teams. Unleashing these qualities facilitates the use of knowledge.

As managers, leaders, coaches, or parents, we’re incredulous to think (or more likely, it never even occurs to us to think) that without our excessive instructing, regulating, controlling, directing, and intervening, people might actually be able to perform with greater confidence, more enthusiasm, and more effective focus.

Fine introduces the GROW process as a way of creating focus. The process asks: “What is my Goal? What’s the Reality? What are my Options? What’s the best Way Forward? 

GROW increases Decision Velocity [the speed and accuracy with which we make decisions]. It helps reduce interference, clarify thinking, identify options, and chunk down the challenge into doable tasks. It unblocks Faith, Fire, and Focus and frees people to use the Knowledge they already have. 

As leaders, we tend to approach most situations by providing more information. We actually nourish the expectation that we are to be telling people what to do, when we really need to working to help them get what’s inside of them out. Fine calls this inside-out coaching. It’s less about providing more Knowledge and more about releasing the Faith, Fire and Focus that already there in the performer. It’s more Focus coaching than it is Knowledge coaching. “It’s easy for coaches to get blindsided by what they think people have to pay attention to—to get so focused on the task that they miss the window through which a person can actually pay attention.” 

“When leaders simply tell people what to do (which is often the case), the result is often a lack of engagement and accountability on the part of the employee and little or no performance improvement. One of the primary observable signs of an outside-in approach is people constantly asking managers, leaders, teachers, or parents what to do.” As a coach, the biggest challenge isn’t the performer; it’s your own interference. 

You Already Know How to Be Great is about coaching ourselves and others to remove the interference that is blocking performance. It is full of applications of inside-out coaching and the GROW process he advocates. As such, it is indispensable book for coaches or leaders of all types. 

8 Reasons You’re Stuck, by Dan Rockwell

#1. No vision – day to day urgencies create a fog that obscures future objectives and opportunities.

#2. Waiting for perfection – perfection is the enemy of progress.

#3. Lack of prioritization and delegation – the belief that you have to touch or do everything is a ball and chain.

#4. Complacency – your own complacency, more importantly the complacency of those close to you.

#5. Fear of opinions – over-concern about what others think is a snare that creates timid leaders.

#6. No Urgency – Kottner believes the #1 reason projects fail is lack of urgency.

#7. How-focus – focusing on “how things get done” more than on “what gets done” paralyzes progress.

#8. Success – Success makes some people feel they know enough. Problem is you don’t know what you don’t know.

Most Frequent Leadership Advice of Jim Kouzes, by Dan Rockwell

I recently asked bestselling author and leadership expert, Jim Kouzes some questions. Here’s part of that exchange.

*****

Leadership Freak: “What piece of leadership advice do you give out most frequently?”

Jim Kouzes: “The most important advice that I can give a leader is credibility is the foundation of leadership. I bet I’ve said this at least once a day for the last 30 years.

This is the inescapable conclusion we’ve come to after thirty years of asking people around the world what they look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow. The key word here is “willingly.”

It’s one thing to follow someone because you think you have to “or else,” and it’s another when you follow a leader because you want to. It turns out that the believability of the leader determines whether people will willingly give more of their time, talent, energy, experience, intelligence, creativity, and support.

Only credible leaders earn commitment, and only commitment builds and regenerates great organizations and communities.”

(More tomorrow)

*****

I’m currently finishing, “The Truth about Leadership,” by Kouzes and Posner. Chapter two focuses on credibility. Their First Law of Leadership is, “If you don’t believe the messenger, you won’t believe the message.”

Their research indicates the top four characteristics of admired leader’s are honesty, forward-looking, inspiring, and competency. (in order of importance)

*****

Yesterday, I heard a leader explaining that he convinced his organization to make major investments in an unseen vision. This leader has delivered in the past. Now his organization is following him into the future. That’s credibility.

All leaders inevitably ask others to believe in a not-yet, a vision.

The benefit of credibility is if you do what you say, others will be willing to do what you say.

Persuasion Tactics of Effective Salespeople, by Steve W. Martin

Without language, you wouldn't be able to share your ideas, display your personality, or express yourself to the world. You couldn't communicate your needs and desires to others, and the never-ending dialogue within your mind would grind to a halt. The words we speak truly define who we are. However, since we are continually talking all the time, we often take it for granted.

Many well-established fields of language study exist to help us gain a deeper understanding of how we talk to each other. Sociolinguistics is the study of language use in society and social networks; psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind acquires, uses, and represents language; and neurolinguistics is the study of how brain structures process language. "Sales linguistics" draws from these fields to help us understand how salespeople and their prospective customers use and interpret language during the decision-making process.

Successful customer communications are the foundation of all sales, and the most persuasive and effective salespeople — the ones I call "Heavy Hitters" — naturally speak in the language of their customers. The question is, "What do they say?"

The three fundamental principles, drawn from sales linguistics, can help us be more persuasive salespeople: every customer speaks in his or her own unique language, successful salespeople build rapport through harmonious communication, and, finally, that people are persuaded based on personal connections. Let's look at each of these imperatives in turn:

1. Understand that Customers Speak Unique Languages
Most companies arm their salespeople with a "one size fits all" company sales pitch. Unfortunately, each person on this planet speaks his or her own unique language. All the mundane and traumatic experiences of your life have determined the language you use — where you grew up, the language used by your loved ones, where you went to school, your friends, your career, the amount of money at your disposal, and even your spirituality. Just as no one else has had your exact life experiences, no one else speaks your precise language. Therefore, the language two people use to describe the same situation — or the way two people interpret the same language — may be very different.

For example, reading the word "snake" might cause you to visualize a rattlesnake, python, or a cobra. While these are all specific interpretations of the word, they all may naturally invoke fear and negative emotions. Conversely, if you had raised a pet snake as a child, you probably have a positive mental association. Since the personal meanings of words can vary greatly, you may have thought of an unscrupulous businessperson when you first read the word "snake."

2. Build Rapport Through Harmonious Communication
Unfortunately, when most salespeople meet with prospective customers, they talk in only their own language and only about themselves. The subject of the conversation is me, me, me: my company, my product's benefits, and my product's features and functions. When Heavy Hitter salespeople meet with customers, they talk about them, them, them: their problems, their values, and their plans and desires. They speak their customers' language in order to build rapport.

Rapport is a special relationship between two individuals based upon harmonious communication. However, human communication occurs in several different forms and on several different levels. An immense amount of information is conveyed verbally, nonverbally, consciously, and subconsciously. A Heavy Hitter naturally adapts their mental wiring and language to mirror that of their customer.

3. Persuade People Through Personal Connections
Salespeople are paid to persuade. But what makes them persuasive? Is it their command of the facts and their ability to recite a litany of reasons why customers should buy? In reality, the most product-knowledgeable salesperson is not necessarily the most persuasive one because it takes more than logic and reason to change buyers' opinions. A personal connection must be forged.

Persuasion is the process of projecting your entire set of beliefs and convictions onto another human being. It's not about getting others to acknowledge your arguments or agree with your business case; it's about making them internalize your message because they believe that it is in their best interests. Ultimately, persuasion is the ability to tap into someone's emotions and reach the deeper subconscious decision maker within that person.

Heavy Hitter salespeople are accomplished communicators who know what to say and, equally important, how to say it. Through their mastery of language, they are able to convey and decipher deep underlying messages that less-successful salespeople miss. While using the same language as most salespeople, they develop an uncanny ability to influence nonbelievers to trust them and convince complete strangers to follow their advice. Sales linguistics can help us understand how they turn skeptics into believers and persuade prospective customers to buy.

Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales neurolinguistics, Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology, is based on his successful 20-year sales career.

The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (And Very Few Have), by Tony Schwartz

The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (And Very Few Have): "

When I was a very young journalist, full of bravado and barely concealed insecurity, Ed Kosner, editor of Newsweek, hired me to do a job I wasn't sure I was capable of doing. Thrown into deep water, I had no choice but to swim. But I also knew he wouldn't let me drown. His confidence buoyed me.

Some years later, I was hired away by Arthur Gelb, the managing editor of the New York Times. This time, I was seduced by Gelb's contagious exuberance about being part of a noble fraternity committed to putting out the world's greatest newspaper.

Over the last dozen years, I've worked with scores of CEOs and senior executives to help them build more engaged, high performance cultures by energizing their employees. Along the way, I've landed on four key capacities that show up, to one degree or another, in the most inspiring leaders I've met.

1. Great leaders recognize strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves.

This is precisely what Kosner did with me. He provided belief where I didn't yet have it, and I trusted his judgment more than my own. It's the Pygmalion effect: expectations become self-fulfilling.

Both positive and negative emotions feed on themselves. In the absence of Kosner's confidence, I simply wouldn't have assumed I was ready to write at that level.

Because he seemed so sure I could — he saw better than I did how my ambition and relentlessness would eventually help me prevail — I wasted little energy in corrosive worry and doubt.

Instead, I simply invested myself in getting better, day by day, step by step. Because we can achieve excellence in almost anything we practice with sufficient focus and intention, I did get better, which fed my own confidence and satisfaction, and my willingness to keep pushing myself.

2. Rather than simply trying to get more out of us, great leaders seek to understand and meet our needs, above all a compelling mission beyond our immediate self-interest, or theirs.

Great leaders understand that how they make people feel, day in and day out, has a profound influence on how they perform.

We each have a range of core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Great leaders focus on helping their employees meet each of these needs, recognizing that it helps them to perform better and more sustainably.

Arthur Gelb helped my meet not just my emotional need to be valued, but also my spiritual need to be engaged in a mission bigger than my own success. Far too few leaders take the time to figure out what they truly stand for, beyond the bottom line, and why we should feel excited to work for them.

3. Great leaders take the time to clearly define what success looks like, and then empower and trust us to figure out the best way to achieve it.

One of our core needs is for self-expression. One of the most demoralizing and infantilizing experiences at work is to feel micromanaged.

The job of leaders is not to do the work of those they lead, but to serve as Chief Energy Officer — to free and fuel us to bring the best of ourselves to work every day.

Part of that responsibility is defining, in the clearest possible way, what's expected of us — our concrete deliverables. This is a time-consuming and challenging process, and most leaders I've met do very little of it. When they do it effectively, the next step for leaders is to get out of the way.

That requires trusting that employees will figure out for themselves the best way to get their work done, and that even though they'll take wrong turns and make mistakes, they learn and grow stronger along the way.

4. The best of all leaders — a tiny fraction — have the capacity to embrace their own opposites, most notably vulnerability alongside strength, and confidence balanced by humility.

This capacity is uniquely powerful because all of us struggle, whether we're aware of it or not, with our self worth. We're each vulnerable to believing, at any given moment, that we're not good enough.

Great leaders don't feel the need to be right, or to be perfect, because they've learned to value themselves in spite of shortcomings they freely acknowledge. In turn, they bring this generous spirit to those they lead.

The more leaders make us feel valued, in spite of our imperfections, the less energy we will spend asserting, defending and restoring our value, and the more energy we have available to create value.

All four capacities are grounded in one overarching insight. Great leaders recognize that the best way to get the highest value is to give the highest value.

"

How to Nail Your Elevator Speech, by Sarah Kessler

Nailing down a short pitch for why someone should invest in your business will come in handy at some point, even if you never actually end up in an elevator with the venture capitalist of your dreams.

For about 30 startups at the Web 2.0 expo in New York last week, that point was Thursday’s Startup Showcase. Attendees, which included Tim O’Reily of O’Reily Media Inc. and Fred Wilson of Union Square ventures, had 50 minutes to check in with each startup and decide on a favorite. O’Reily, Wilson and a popular vote each decided on one startup that conveyed its idea best and in a short time. When Food52, Gympse and hour.ly were selected, they had a chance to give their pitches on stage.

It was, in short, an elevator-pitch bonanza. If contestants didn’t have advice about how to improve an elevator pitch before they started, they sure did by the time their 50 minutes were up. Here is what seven of them had to say.

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Describe the Problem Your Company Solves

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• “Keep it short, and make sure your lead-in deals with the problem you’re trying to solve.” — Jeff Evans, Co-Founder of MindSnacks
  Since Evans’ company makes mobile language learning games, he started his pitch by explaining that current language learning programs can be dull, expensive, and time consuming.
• “People have to have an idea of what the problem is and what the current solution is and why yours is better.” — Carl Leubsdorf, CTO of hour.ly
  Leubsdorf’s approach apparently paid off, as hour.ly was voted “people’s choice” at the showcase. Since hour.ly helps connect hiring companies with job seekers, he uses his elevator pitch to explain how the service is superior to something like Craigslist.

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Get to Your Point

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• “Know what you have to say and say it fast.” — Ben Hughes, Director of Technology at NabeWise
  In NabeWise’s case, this includes an explanation of why there is a demand for information about neighborhoods and how the company would monetize this site by charging real estate agents to be “neighborhood experts” and selling advertising.
• “Really brief.” — Patrick Swieskowski, Co-Founder of Ninite
  We guess there’s something to be said for practicing what you preach.

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Interact as Much as Possible

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• “It doesn’t work quite as well in an elevator, but the way I describe the problem is to show a picture of my first apartment in New York. It helps people understand why storage in New York is a necessity, not a luxury.”– Daniel Hughes, Founder of StorageByMail.
  StorageByMail offers cheaper storage than is typically found in a big city by allowing customers to mail their storage to a warehouse outside of the city. Showing a crowded New York apartment helps investors visualize why there is a need for the service.

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There’s No Replacement for Finesse

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• “Practice, practice, practice on new people every day. You can’t develop an effective pitch by yourself…Everyone in my family has heard my pitch 100 times, and when their eyes glaze over I know that I’m doing something wrong.” — David Bloom, CEO of Naama Networks
  Bloom’s current pitch for his online food ordering site mentions that the first e-commerce transaction was apizza, but that since then restaurants haven’t done a great job selling online. It’s an interesting tidbit that prevents eyes from “glazing over,” as he put it.
• “Go for it. ‘Pretty good’ won’t hack. Pretend you’ll be rated on a scale of one to 10 after your pitch. Only a 10 matters. One through four is a one; you’re done. Five through nine is a five; they might remember you and say ‘interesting,’ but you’re done. Only a 10 is success, and hopefully opens the door to the 10 or 60 minute pitch. It’s not about batting average, it’s about home-runs.” — Bryan Trussel, co-founder and CEO ofGlympse.
  Glypse is another company that clearly followed its own advice, winning Fred Wilson’s pick at the showcase. Trussel says part of his successful pitch involves interacting as much as possible with the pitch recipient. For instance, he’ll often ask for the person’s phone number and send a Glympse to his or her phone as part of the pitch. “In 10-15 seconds, I’ve demoed the product, illustrated our key values…and had the person interact with our product on their personal phone,” he says. “And, they now have a permanent, visual reminder in their inbox or text queue for reference.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Commentary by Michael Josephson

R-E-S-P-E-C-T 690.5:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T – Aretha Franklin reminded us how it's spelled, but a lot of us need coaching on how to show it. In both personal and political relationships, the failure to treat each other with respect is generating incivility, contempt, and violence.

There's an important distinction between respecting a person in the sense that we admire and hold that person in especially high esteem and treating others with respect. While respecting others is desirable, respectfulness is morally mandatory. Thus, people of character treat everyone with respect, even those who are not personally respect worthy.

The way we behave toward others is an expression of our values and character. Thus, we should treat others with respect, not because they have a right but because we have a moral duty to do unto others the way we want them to do unto us. Again, it’s not because they deserve it, but because doing less would diminish our own character.

That's the message in an old story about a politician who caught himself being drawn into mud slinging and name calling. Once he realized he was lowering himself to his opponent's level, he stopped and said, 'Sir, I will treat you as a gentleman, not because you are one, but because I am one.'

It can take a lot of self control to be respectful to people who are nasty, dishonorable, or disrespectful to us. Still, our inner sense of integrity should help us resist temptations to 'fight fire with fire.' As Lily Tomlin said, 'The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.'

This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.

Selling A Book That Has No Name, by Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer

Selling A Book That Has No Name

In Gene Logsdon Blog on September 22, 2010 at 8:45 am

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From GENE LOGSDON

Prairie Public Radio interviewed me recently about my latest book, Holy Shit. The interviewer was kind about my writing. He knew a lot about farming which is rarely the case but always a relief when discussing agriculture before an urban audience. The only problem was that he did not mention the title of the book during the entire interview! He said that he would get fired if he did. Regulations forbid the utterance of that awful word, shit, even when it is in the title of a book.

It happened again. The excellent website, The Chronicle of Higher Education, referred to my book with kind praise, even calling it “charming.” But never once did the reviewer give the title of the book. Policy, he said.

Several years ago, I wrote an article for The Draft Horse Journal in which I felt obliged out of sheer honesty to use the naughty word. This proved to be a problem for Maury Telleen, the editor. He didn’t have a problem actually, but his lovely wife, Jeannine, (they are two of my favorite people) ruled the roost when it came to proofreading and she did not intend for the naughty word to soil her publication. They compromised and rendered the word as “sh#!” ! By now I’ve seen “sh*t”, “sh–”, and even “s…”, none of which is quite as ingenious or resourceful as “sh#!”. But it opens up a whole new frontier. How about “czhit” or “sh?t” or “sh[]t” or “shi”.

I should just have been content to call the book Holy Manure. But all this hypocrisy speaks eloquently to the main underlying point I wanted to make. We are so ashamed of our excrement and that of all the other animals on earth that we pretend the stuff doesn’t exist. It is as closely connected to us as our digestive tracts, and having been delicious food just hours earlier, it becomes in the very instant that it leaves the colon, obnoxious and poisonous. So fearful is our attitude in this regard that we have scrubbed the most common word in the American language (well maybe the second most common word) from polite language. We have even made excrement disappear in real life. Flush it and forget it.

Because flushing seems to be so handy, agriculture is making one of the biggest blunders in its history. For some thirty years now it has been trying to handle uncountable tons of livestock manure by flushing it out of animal confinement buildings with water and electric power into large ponds lugubriously called “lagoons” or into underground, fly-infested toxic pits. These “manure handling systems” have led to some of the worst cases of polluted waterways in our history.

The amount of manure we are talking about is beyond comprehension, at least mine, especially when the water to do the flushing and treating the sewage is included. Each of the 300 million plus people in the U.S. excretes about a thousand pounds of fecal material a year. Every toilet flush takes about two to three gallons. You can do the arithmetic. An expert in these matters whom I quote in the book says if the whole world flushed like we do, it would be impossible to handle all human manure this way.

It takes about ten tons of barn manure and bedding to fertilize an acre of corn adequately. The cost of commercial fertilizer is averaging a little under $100 an acre. That means that just in pet horse, dog and cat manure, (9.5 million horses, 73 million cats, 68 million dogs) there’s about two billion dollars of fertilizer much of which is being thrown away, as I pointed out in an earlier blog. There are about 100 million cattle in the U.S., each of them defecating 80 to 100 pounds a day. The latest figures show an ongoing pig population in the U.S. of about 60 million. A hog defecates at least as much as a human does. There are over a billion chickens in the U.S., each of them contributing as much manure as a cat. I don’t even want to try to do the totals.

This could be charged off as just the necessary cost of doing business. (My elders used to refer to a bowel movement as “doing your business,” another euphemism to avoid uttering any dreadful words.) But the sources of commercial fertilizers are rising in price and declining in easy availability. We need to find alternatives. Manure is the best one as centuries of farming traditions have attested. Even farm manure that is being returned to the land now (as slurry out of animal factories or as material artificially dried at great cost) has lost much of its plant nutrient value because of improper handling. The book that often has no name describes how we can turn this situation around. Shit really is holy.

The Reality-Based Leader's Manifesto, by Michael McKinney, Leading Blog

The Reality-Based Leader’s Manifesto

“If you believe that leadership is tougher today than it was in the past, you’re not alone,” writes Cy Wakeman, author of Reality-Based Leadership. “We are living and working in dramatic and demanding times, but that is not our biggest problem. The source of our pain is the absence of great leadership that is based in reality. …The future belongs to the leader who is able to change the way people think and perceive their circumstances, the leader who engages hearts and minds.” To that end, she offers the Reality-Based Leader’s Manifesto:

1. Refuse to argue with reality
2. Greet change with a simple “Good to know”; defense is an act of war
3. Depersonalize feedback—whatever the source
4. Let go of our need for love, approval, and appreciation at work so we can focus on the goals of our organization and not on satisfying our egos
5. Are very careful about what we think we know for sure
6. Ask ourselves, “What is the next right thing I can do to add the most value?”
7. Ask others, “How can I help?” instead of judging and blaming
8. Work to find the opportunity in every challenge
9. Work harder at being happy than at being right
10. Work with the willing
11. Lead first, manage second
12. Value action over opinion

Do You Argue with Reality? by Michael McKinney, Leading Blog

Do You Argue With Reality?

Chris Thurman wrote in The Lies We Believe, “The number one cause of our unhappiness are the lies we believe in life.” Too often, we operate apart from reality. Given a choice between reality and our version of it, we are inclined to choose the latter. It is a central tendency of human beings. The result is drama not peace. 

“Instead of getting the results we want,” says Cy Wakeman, “we end up with reasons, stories, and excuses for why things didn’t work out—leading to more drama, disengagement, judgment, and ineffective leadership.” 

In Reality-Based Leadership, Wakeman presents a much-needed wake-up call. We can ditch the drama by getting in touch with what is. Quit making up stories. Quit arguing with reality. Ditching the stories that are causing us stress. “We all tell ourselves stories and live with the resulting drama.” It sounds like: 

“I shouldn’t have to do this—it’s not part of my job description. 
“Our department is always having to clean up after others’ mistakes.” 
“The boss just doesn’t get it.” 
“Management only care about the bottom line.” 

“You are arguing with reality whenever you judge your situation in terms of right and wrong instead of fearlessly confronting what is.” You need to respond to the facts, not the story you create about the facts. This is easier said than done. Interwoven in our stories are our egos, insecurities and identities. (At one point Wakeman suggests we ask, “Who am I as a manager or as an employee when I believe this story?”) We like our stories. They make us look better. They place the blame somewhere south of us. If other people are always coming up short in our stories, then it’s all about us. But letting go of our stories is not always easy as we have a lot invested in them. 

Too often our criticism is about setting us apart from others and not about helping them. It says a lot more about us than it does those it is directed towards. 

Wakeman says, “When you are judging you are not leading.” In her analysis of case study about Steve and a team he dreaded working with, she concludes, “his biggest obstacle is his belief that they are a negative group. What if he just dropped that whole story and simply responded to reality directly? The phone rings? Answer it. The team asks a question? Answer it, or teach them where to find the answer. The team shares what worked in the past? Listen and lead them into the future. The team requests some time with the leader? Engage with them—lead! When Steve began to lead the team rather than judge and criticize, the team began to change for the better.” She adds, “When you focus your energy on what you are able to give And create rather than what you receive, you are truly serving.” 

Do you see any applications in what you and involved in? Wakeman insightfully writes: “What is missing from a situation is that which you are not giving.” 

Operating out of a judging mindset of “I know” or “I am right” effectively shuts down the potential to learn or accomplish anything. Moving on based in reality requires setting the story aside and asking, “If I set the story aside, what would I do to help?” 

The minute you start judging is the very minute you quit leading, serving and adding value. When you’re in judgment, you are dealing with your story—not with reality. Wakeman suggest that when you get off-track:

1. Do a reality check. Get back to the facts of the situation b y editing out anything that you can’t absolutely know to be true. “What is the next right action I can take that would add the most value to the situation?” Direct your energy on that action.
2. Get clear about motives. Seek to be successful rather than right. Is it about you?
3. Be the change. Practice those virtues that you have determined to be lacking in others.
4. See others through a lens of love and respect—not anger and fear.When faced with those whose personalities are different from ours, or whose behaviors have reached a stress-induced inappropriateness, work to see through those behaviors and identify their needs or goals. Ask yourself, “What are they striving for?” Then ask, “How can I help them achieve it?”
5. Invoke a clearer, higher perspective. When you sense that conflict is getting personal, be prepared to return to a professional perspective by asking your team to clarify the overreaching goal of their work together. “Given our goal, what do you think is the best way to move forward?”

What stories are you telling yourself that causing you to operate in your own world? While it may be cognitively economical, it is costing you far more in every other area.