Minute Mindset

Would you consider yourself a negative or a positive person? Do you look for the wrong or the right in situations? Does your positive or negative personality depend on the situation you are handed? All people carry the ability to be positive and/or negative.

How dangerous is a negative person? Can their presence affect other people around them? Can their presence influence the positive that is happening? Given enough time and space can they beat a positive person down? You bet they can! Give a negative person enough time and space and they can take the most positive of people and turn their world upside down.

I find negative people to be an interesting study. They were not born that way; it is a learned behavior. If you can accept the fact that all behavior has an agenda, it opens your eyes to what they are trying to achieve.

Negative people control the environments they are in by the negative behaviors they bring. Each behavior is designed to create confusion. They use that...

Have you ever met yourself coming back and didn’t realize you had been there yet? Have you ever gone through a time when you felt your life was just out of control? The harder you worked the less you got done; the more you tried to achieve the more you found waiting for you around the corner.

Most who are high achievers or who have this strong desire to succeed, find their #1 enemy is not time; it is actually pace. Each year I take on five people and work as their mental coach for a year. One of my great challenges is to get them to slow down and move at a pace they can manage.

When I talk to them about slowing down, I always get this funny look that says. "Yea, right. I am going to slow down. I am already so far behind I will never get caught up."

It is a major lesson for them to learn. The faster you move the less mental clarity you have. The faster you move the less calmness you bring to anything you touch. The faster you move the more you open yourself to the negatives...

Do you ever wrestle with the issue of time? How many days do you have where you create your agenda, get to work and never get to it? Do you ever have days where you go in early or stay late to get your work finished? Have you ever stayed after everyone had left? You watch the last one leave, you wave good night and think I would like to work for me. Is there something wrong with a picture where you never get to your work?

Time is one of the most precious gifts we have, and at the same time it is blamed for a lot of our frustrations. Day in and day out I hear people talk about not having enough time. Daily, I watch people as they struggle with all there is to do. Constantly, I see people who are exhausted, because they are buried with more than their time will allow them to complete.

My research tell me these are the common things that eat the average person’s TIME:

The inability to say “no”

The result — you keep getting more and more added to your already...

Have you ever had a day that was going great until you got out of bed? Have you ever gotten up, felt good about your day, arrived at work to be greeted with, "We got a problem?" Have you ever felt the tension increasing within you? I mean everything you looked at stared back at you with a problem or something that needed your attention

When you are not controlling your day and the events of the day are emotionally controlling you, that is a stressful day! It is amazing what stress can do to you:

• It can emotionally drain you until there is a pounding in your head.

• It can mentally paralyze you to the point that you don’t have the energy to emotionally deal with anything.

• It can physically wipe you out so nothing gets your attention, and if it did, it would only get messed up.

Stress is such an interesting fact of life. Reality is — you can’t live without it. It is a medical fact if you could take all the stress out of your life, you...

Do you have any idea how many businesses I go into where the environment is out of control? I mean you walk in and you can feel the confusion. You stand and watch and see the emotional interchanges that are going on.

Most don’t seem to understand the need to create an environment that is calm. I know, I know — you are thinking this guy doesn’t live in the real world. There is no such thing as calmness around here. All I do is move from one crisis to another.

That is not how things have to be! That is how leadership has designed the environment. You see, any business is simply an environment that is decision driven or crisis driven. The difference is the style of leadership.

Show me an environment that is crisis driven and I will show you a place where people are constantly involved in emotional collisions. Someone is blaming someone else for what is happening. No one is really looking for resolution; their only concern is protecting their territory.

Someday...

As much as you may believe a day of your life is controlled by the events, it really isn’t. Each event is actually controlled by the choice you make. Each choice you make is created by whether you approach it mentally or emotionally. When you study the behavior of most people, they race in emotionally, examine what they feel is happening, react and then move on to their next crisis.

They fail to understand the damage that behavior does to all who are involved. The “hit and run” method simply leaves people emotionally laying all over the place. From the moment the emotional collision happens they aren’t worth much for the rest of their day.

One of the most important philosophies I have ever written contains only five words — I must respond, not react.  

The mastering of these five words is critical if you want your personal and business life to have calmness and stability. These five words can control where and how information enters your life.

You...

How important is the customer’s experience with your company? How important is it that the customer feels good about their experience? This is one of the most critical issues in business and at the same time one of the most mismanaged moments of business.

Too many treat the customer like a moment, rather than one of the most important experiences. With all that has and is being taught about customer care, why does this happen?

For some it is the result of being overwhelmed. Their day starts with good intentions, but ends up out of control. They start their day thinking about all they want to get done, BUT the minute they enter the business environment they are greeted with “We have a problem.”  From that moment their day is out of control. They emotionally speed up and any event they come face-to-face with is filtered through their emotions.

As the customers arrive, they get filtered through all the emotional garbage that has already happened. The result is...

Every time I talk to leadership the question of motivation comes up. It seems to be a constant challenge to keep the environment motivated. Recently, I had a manager put it this way, “I get so tired trying to keep these people up. It seems like each time something good happens, something else goes wrong. I don’t understand it, they choose to remember the bad and forget the good. I just don’t understand it.”

Human behavior is an interesting thing to study. It seems that no matter how much good is happening in a person’s life, the majority tend to remember the bad that has happened. What one takes from yesterday, creates the emotional pictures they use to define today.

Have you ever had a negative person around your life? When I ask that question, do names come to your mind; do faces appear in your brain? Negative people have a way of playing with our emotional presence. What many fail to understand is that “negative”...

One of the most valuable lessons I learned while I was working as a counselor was most people want honesty as long as it is not honest. As much as people say they want you to be truthful with them, most cannot handle the truth.

This is even true in the business environment. When I go inside a company to work, I search for three things:

• Is there clear communication among all the people?
• Are people honest about what is happening?
• Is there trust among all levels of people?

If you look at these, they go together — don’t they? You will never have clear communication without people trusting each other. If there is no trust, there sure won’t be honesty. Without the honesty, things can’t improve. When you can’t honestly deal with issues, they don’t go away. They just hang around and fester until they become an emotional issue so large they explode as a wild fire.

So, here is a question for you: Do you want your people to always be honest with you?...

According to research, organizational change happens more often than expected. In fact, recent data states that 2 out of 3 organizations must change a minimum of four times every five years. But while organizational changes are common, they are not always easy.

Poorly implemented adjustments when introduced to a shaky team did will not keep them relevant or future-proof. On the flip side, when done well, organizational changes can usher in a more sustainable, more proactive, and more well-rounded organization. The best way to achieve this is to enact an Agile leadership.

What’s Agile leadership?

This leadership style doesn’t just refer to leaders who are able to pivot and adapt quickly. In ZDNet’s article on management style, Agile leadership is described as a concept designed on Agile software development. This approach allows teams to respond in a timely and effective manner, with as few siloes and as little executive intervention as needed. As such, Agile...