My feeling is that when people have easy access to too many safety nets they tend to lose their self-reliance. There is a wide spectrum to this. A few people have too much pride and accept little help from others. The majority I think go with the flow, swallow their pride and will accept help to various degrees, when there is a safety net available. At the extreme are people who rely on safety nets to exist. Many are doing the best they can because of illness or bad luck. But many others have used safety net options for so long that that they lose their ability to struggle towards self-reliance, even to the point of looking for a job. Sadly, some people never had a chance to learn self-reliance.

It’s the same in Europe but on a national scale. Countries, like Greece, on a national level swallow their pride and continuously use the safety nets offered by the more productive countries, like Germany. They seem to have lost their self-reliance and their problem just keeps getting worse. But now the safety net is about to rip because Germany et. al. are running out of money and there will be no one to pay for Greece’s safety net. Oooops

That’s what’s happening.

For example Tiger Woods’ putting coach helps him to go thru his pre-putt routine the same way each time. It’s designed to assess all the right things and gives him confidence that he hasn’t missed anything before he putts. His coach helps to provide the diligence necessary to do all the small actions that are part of the routine.

Coaching people to not quit is important. In business development coaching persistance is a paramount strategy. Cultivating the right people continually with email is effective. The cost is minimal. Persistance is easy. Except for one thing.

I have often found clients want to quit because they fear too many solicitations will make them look like a pest. I usually can turn around their reluctance by asking if they’d send that next email if I gave them $10,000, or whatever the value of a sale might be. They get the point and they persist.

Thank you Coach Lombardi.

Here are some synonyms for explain: describe, put in plain words, clarify.

You’ve probably heard the quote “The greatest tragedy in all history is the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts.” This week, I challenge you to aid and abet that murderer. Look for the facts. Don’t be sucked in, or suckered by, your own story. Dig out that magnifying glass and look for the truth.

Lynn

© 2011 Lynn Cutts, Manage Your Muse, and Weekly Challengers. All rights reserved. Muse@ManageYourMuse.com www.WeeklyChallengers.com

If you had to write The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People over again, would you change anything? Explain.

I would not. The sequence of the habits is the important thing. To win a public victory, you first need to win a deep private victory, taking responsibility and initiative—Habit 1, Begin with the End in Mind—Habit 2, and Put First Things First—Habit 3. Then the public victory follows — Habit 4, Think Win/Win, Habit 5, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood, and Habit 7, Synergize, which means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Habit 7 is Sharpen the Saw, so that the four parts of your nature are deeply developed and nurtured—your body, mind, heart and spirit.

Do you work with a properity mentality or a poverty mentality. Does some fear of running out of money or time get in your way of doing things you want to do.

Can you re-evaluate? Can you make a list of things you’re not doing for time or money reasons? Are those things you really want to do – really in your ‘bucket list’? Well if there are a few positive answers to those questions it’s time to take a new look and your time and bank book. Remember ‘you’re going to be dead a long time – it’s time to live now’.

This applies professionally as well as personally. At one end of the scale are business investment decisions. At the other end are those items on your personal ‘bucket list’.

The way it works is that your family and your personal life ought to be energizing; doing pleasurable things that boost your ego, making you feel better. For example doing the things that make you a good parent, relative or friend or achieving excellence in your hobby.

You carry this ego boosted energy to work and that makes you better at your job. And your job could also provide satisfaction so you do it better. And when you do your job better you earn more money, over time, which funds a more vibrant and successful life away from work. That’s work life harmony.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know I used to work at the ad agenecy, Ogilvy & Mather. I thought they were a great employer. I’m sorry I left when I did. Although I did leave to take a fabulous assignment.

What set O&M apart from the other advertising agencies I worked at is that management never stopped reminding us that we worked at the best agency in the world. That built loyalty in spite of a very stressful environment.

This strategy takes work but it’s not impossible by any means. Our leaders set about to do something to prove O&M’s superiority every day. They reminded us in many ways; in-house magazine articles, international ambassadors, uplifting memos from management, celebrating great commercials made in India or wherever etc. Whether their claim was true or not, they were persistent and that made what they had to say believable and motivating.

He’s a business development coaching client so my perspective on his situation is what’s best for his long term marketing success. It was easy to determine which of the five clients had the best long term revenue opportunities; one client is a company that’s much larger than the others. But my client couldn’t focus singly on this one company. So we solved the opportunity this way.

We agreed that the large company was the best long term opportunity. And we agreed that if he was to do a spectacular job on just one of the five projects the large company would be the preferred recipient of that good work. I’ve always advised my clients to ‘rise to the opportunity’ when one is presented.

But since he couldn’t focus singly on the large company we needed another idea. What we came to was that his subconscious would focus only on the large company opportunity so that when he came to the work on their project he would have done a lot of [sub-conscious] thinking as preparation.

The way to focus sub-conscious thinking is to simply write down a list of the things you most want to be thinking about on a 3×5 card that you carry with you and review from time to time. Writing things down, especially in pencil, for some reason, has been shown to imprint thoughts on your subconscious. Reviewing what you’ve written down refocuses the sub-conscious mind on what you want to think about.