Minute Mindset

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?...