Walter Chrysler's Example

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s Monday morning motivational minute.

“I feel sorry for the person who can't get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile.”

                                    -Walter Chrysler

In 1911 Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company when he decided to go into the car business.  The trouble was he really didn’t know a lot about cars except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roads.  To remedy this situation, Walter Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular.  To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together again.  Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated the process.  And then, to make ABSOLUTELY certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together 48 more times.  By the time he was finished, Walter Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness.

I am sure we all understand how important it is for both a company and an individual to have a vision and to have goals that drive towards that vision but this story is a reminder that your vision won’t do you much good without the skills to make it happen.

No matter how bad things may get.  No matter how dire the news we see and hear can sometimes make the future seem.  No matter how overwhelming our lives may get.  No matter where we are in life versus where we wish to be.  We have something special and that is the power to choose.  I choose to put together these stories.  I choose to read all of the books that inspire me with ideas.  I choose to create this blog and I choose to look at life like Walter Chrysler did and realize that my future and my success is mine to define.

The only caveat is that this is only true for us to the degree that we are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make it happen.

The world is a busy place and we have a lot to do.

So this week, make choices, build skills, be inspired and have a great week.

Reflections on Social Intelligence

Sometimes what we read can truly inspire. Sometimes a book speaks in a way that compels me to record my thoughts on what it means to me and how it might help shape my future.  Social Intelligence: the New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman, is just such a book.  I would like to share some of the book’s main messages with you with the hope that you will also find some value in them.

Goleman tells us that human brains are wired to connect socially with one another and that those connections actually affect us physically in measurable ways.  “Social neuroscience” is a new field in which scientists are mapping and identifying the areas of the brain responsible for social interaction and the effects of our positive and negative encounters with one another.

Negativity is contagious – it has measurable physiological effects that perpetuate negative attitudes by subconsciously passing them on to others. A positive attitude, on the other hand, increases positivity in others.  When two people feel a rapport they actually attune to each other physiologically.  People who are in synch develop strikingly similar brain wave activity and other physiological measurements such as breathing patterns.

This means that it is almost impossible to fake sincerity.  The subconscious mind is capable of recognizing subtle cues denoting insincerity in others. If we trust our feelings, we get a “sense” for that insincerity and it affects the quality of our social relationship with that person.

I believe that leaders, managers, teachers and parents must be keenly aware of how their behaviors can positively or negatively affect those whom they lead, guide, teach or raise.  How we make others feels affects how they perform.

Following are some of the main ideas I derived from the book on how to improve your social intelligence and enhance your interactions with others.

Attunement is a key component of Social Intelligence.  It is the ability to listen deeply and it tends to be very strong in successful leaders, sales professionals and those working in helping industries like medicine.  We attune to others by investing ourselves completely in any interaction with them.  Listening without interrupting is one of the most valuable tools in this process.

           

            Multitasking splits our ability to focus completely on one thing and dulls our ability to develop a strong resonance with others.  When we are interaction with someone, it is best to focus solely on that person.

Even simple positive behaviors like smiling can affect others neurochemically.  We actually feel what we are observing, both on the conscious and the subconscious level.

Empathetic accuracy tends to correlate with the most successful sales reps and leaders.  It is when your active conscious mind can accurately read the clues being communicated to your empathetic subconscious mind and you can act in resonance with what you “sense’ is right.

Be inspired and have a great day.

Positivity, "A Message to Garcia"

Hello everyone.  This Monday Morning Motivational Minute is about positivity and once again, I found my inspiration for this story within the pages of The 8^th Habit by Stephen Covey.

Just look around you. You never need to look very far to find negativity in the world.  People seem to carry it around with them everywhere they go, and ironically enough, it is the one thing no one ever seems to mind sharing.  People like this should have warning labels that read something like, “Warning – Listening to me can lead to serious reductions in general happiness and love of life.”

What I would like to do is share a short story that I believe very powerfully illustrates what it’s like if you take ownership of you own thoughts and your own life.  It is a true story called “A message to Garcia”, written by late American author Elbert Hubbard and first made into a silent movie in 1916 by Thomas Edison Inc. Yes, that was a motion picture production company owned by none other than the great inventor himself, Thomas Edison.

It reads,

“When war broke out between Spain and the United Stated at the turn of the century, President McKinley needed to get a message quickly to a Cuban revolutionary known as Garcia.  He was hiding somewhere on the island of Cuba out of reach of mail or telegraph and nobody seemed to know how to reach him.  But someone suggested that if anybody could do it, it would be an officer named Rowan.

 

When McKinley gave the letter to officer Rowan in Washington, D.C., the officer didn’t ask, “Where is he at? How do I get there? What do you want me to do when I’m there? How will I get back?”  He just took the message and figured out how to get to Garcia.  He took a train to New York. A ship to Jamaica. Broke the Spanish blockade to get to Cuba in a sailboat. Then wild carriage rides, marching and riding through the Cuban jungle.  Nine days of traveling later, Rowan got the message to Garcia at nine in the morning.  That same afternoon at five, he started his return journey to the United States.”

Mr. Hubbard comments further upon this story by writing,

“My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the boss is away as well as when he is at home,… the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly take the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing ought else but deliver it…Civilization is one long, anxious search for just such individuals.  Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go.  He is wanted in every city, town and village – in every office, shop, store and factory.  The world cries out for such: he is needed, and needed badly.

Be like officer Rowan, be inspired and have a great day.

Listen More and Notice Things

Good morning everyone.  Today’s motivational minute was initially inspired by a quote from late British psychologist R.D. Lange writing on awareness and it reads,

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice THAT we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

When I first read this, it quickly brought to mind the message behind another book I recently read by Eckhart Tolle entitled, “The Power of Now”.  Tolle teaches that the richness of life can only be experienced by being 100% completely present in every moment.  It is like saying that yesterday is gone and tomorrow can only be experience when it finally gets here and becomes now.

I thought about these two sources and had a wonderful inspiration regarding how both messages fit together and could be crafted into a practical and useful idea.

Since Ghandi said, “We must become the change we seek in the world.”, and because modeling behavior is the spirit and center of any leadership effort, I decided to model something for you this week.  I decided to run a week long experiment where I strove to be completely, cognitively present in every waking moment and to notice everything I never realized I wasn’t noticing before.

I discovered two things.  First, it was not easy.  More importantly, it quickly became very apparent that I was noticing a change in the quality and nature of my listening.  We all know that as sales people we are supposed to listen more and speak less.  That is the way to understand a customer’s needs.  How many of us do that really well?  I know that I do not.  This week, however, was noticeably different.  I listened more, uncovered more and got so much more out of my interactions with people.  It did not take long to see that I could not notice the things I failed to notice before AND talk at the same time.

It was a great experiment and I encourage everyone to try it.  For my part, it will continue to be a useful practice to help improve both my sales skills and my interpersonal communication skills.

Think about it this way.  When was the last time you said, “I really don’t like that guy.  He listens too well and seems to care about my needs.”

Have a great week and start noticing everything you have failed to notice you haven’t noticed before.

It has to start somewhere

Hello everyone and welcome.  This is the first Monday Morning Motivational Minute story I wrote for my colleagues at work.  I was reading The 8^th Habit by Steven Covey, his follow-up to 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and was deeply struck by his description of the 8th habit.

  

The 8^th habit is- “Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs”.

I decided that he was absolutely right and the result was weekly stories to my coworkers designed inspire them.  I owe the original spark of life that eventually lead to this blog to Steven Covey and the actual name, Monday Morning Motivational Minute to my good friend Steve Shefter.

I strongly recommend that everyone read this powerful book because at it core, The 8^th Habit is about the boundlessness of the human spirit. 

This has special meaning to me because it is exactly what I am trying to do in the first place with these Monday morning segments.  Steven Covey recognizes something that I think we all understand intuitively.  He points out that the human spirit has an undeniable need to be significant and meaningful.  The problem is that this is easier to say than it is to achieve.  If it were easy, the world would be a much more perfect place.

Fortunately for us as human beings, fundamentally, our greatest natural gift is that we have a mind that gives us the power to choose.  The following words put that nicely into perspective.

“Between Stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.  In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.”

– author unknown

“Until a person can honestly say that I am what I am, and I am where I am, because I choose to be there, that person can not say with conviction – I choose otherwise.”

- Steven Covey

Everyone have a great week, make your choices, be significant and be the kind of person your dog thinks you are.