When I read the article “21 Unvarnished Truths About Retirement” by Jonathan Look, I thought immediately of some of my coaching clients even though they aren’t anywhere near retirement. Two truths, in particular, triggered this reaction:
I saw a bumper sticker today that read “Mediocre Is The New Fabulous.” This really got to me because it’s a little too true. It is also sad. Mediocrity is a sad state. It’s a state of moderate quality. Ordinary. Middling. We don’t want mediocrity for our families, our towns, our teams, our country, or ourselves. We want fabulous! We want awesome! But calling things awesome doesn’t make them awesome.
Before I started Uncommon Clarity in 2004, I read Alan Weiss’ book Getting Started in Consulting. Any independent professional, whether consultant, painter, lawyer, or something else is in the marketing business first and foremost. Hanging a shingle on the proverbial door might let you call yourself a consultant, but it doesn’t let you practice it.
I was stumped. I was at a talk on resilience at Alan Weiss’ Million Dollar Consulting Convention and the speaker, Richard Citrin, asked us to map our careers. He demonstrated using himself, much like the diagram at right, describing each achievement and setback through his long career. Then he gave us some time to do the same.
To get a handle on an overflowing To-Do list, divide a sheet of paper into two columns and label them “Urgent” on the left and “Important” on the right. If you like, also draw a horizontal line and label the top half “Business” and the bottom half “Personal.”
My executive coaching clients tell me it’s tough to avoid distractions that pull them and their teams away from strategic priorities. Readers worldwide write to complain about too many priorities and not being allowed to focus on strategic priorities. Across every organization, there is too much to do and yet it’s common to see many hours devoted to less important tasks while strategic priorities languish. What’s to do?
If you are blind to improvement opportunities, you will never improve. How blind are you? Let’s look at the evidence. Here are 10 signs that you can’t see the enormous opportunity before you to improve productivity, profits, and engagement:
Agreement, as well as progress, starts with objectives. We will never agree on alternatives if we can’t agree on objectives. In other words, we will never agree on a route if we can’t agree on a destination! Thus, objectives are what we should be debating, not alternatives. Case in point: Gun control. The gun control debate is impossible largely because everyone is arguing about alternatives before agreeing on objectives. Here are just some of those alternatives:
Would you like to be that person who silences chaos and moves things forward with a simple question or statement? You can! The secret lies in making distinctions.
Since military leaders make decisions affecting the fates of nations and millions of lives, one would like to think their decision-making skills are as carefully honed as their combat skills. So I was gratified to find plenty of reassuring evidence among the leaders of the Norwegian Resistance in the excellent book by Neal Bascomb called The Winter Fortress. Bascomb’s book provides several examples of consistently excellent decision making. Whether this was the result of specific training, excellent role models, or natural clarity, I will never know. However, the contrast between their uncommon methods and the way most people approach decisions is like night and day.