Tag Archives: Anthony Robbins

Drive like you live? I bet you do.

27 Sunday Mar 2016

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“Total quality begins with total personal quality. Organisational empowerment begins with personal empowerment.” Stephen R Covey

Isn’t it odd? I’m sure that, like me, many of my readers have undergone training courses or courses of instruction in their professional and personal lives. Someone had taken the time to put together the information you needed; perhaps they had developed activation exercises to reinforce the input they had provided; and they had organised and developed said course in a way that led you from ‘haven’t a clue’ to ‘level of competence’.

Then you went back to ‘life’ and immediately started dropping the standards that had been made known to you. Life got in the way so instead of applying the new, professional levels of quality that you had been told about, you cut corners, saved time – or accepted the societal norm that applied and dropped to that level. In his programmes Anthony Robbins told about the US Marines dropping their high standards when they left the Corps, because ‘they adopt the standards of their new peer group’, and we all have a tendency to do that.

I notice it most as an enthusiastic driver; how teenage and twenty-somethings, newly permitted to drive having learned the rudiments of the skill, start

  • Raking their seat back while leaning forward;
  • Driving with one hand in the ‘cool’ position at the top of the steering wheel;
  • Deciding that indicating is not necessary; and that
  • Loud bass beats are.

The really funny thing about it is that what they learned to pass their test was the minimum standard expected – and they manage to go even lower than that. Then wonder how they ended up upside down in a ditch with their lovely car all battered.

That’s an example with which we are all familiar. But would I be even close to right when I suggest that we all do that, more than some of the time? I won’t waste time with specific examples, and to be frank I haven’t the time.

But since you know we do it, and you know that you can do better, why not start now?

Everything you do from now on, professionally and privately, do to the highest standard possible in the time available. (I use that caveat because life sometimes does interfere, but you have ake an honest assessment – is the interference there, or just a convenient handle upon which to hang procrastination?)

See what happens. See if the results you get are better for having tried just that little bit harder to live at the level of competence that you expect of others when they are serving YOU.

Because that’s the other funny thing.

When we drive badly as a matter of routine, we still expect everyone else to follow the rules, don’t we?

SAM_0868

Steering grip of Lewis  Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, pursuit trained cops, Kyle Busch.

SAM_0869

Steering grip of bone idle lazy wazzocks who have gone to sleep and are endangering us.

Which do you use?

Cogor – mihi.*

21 Sunday Jun 2015

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“Keeping a journal is a high leverage Quadrant II activity that significantly raises self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.” Stephen R Covey

I’ll confess that my own journal efforts have been stop and go over the years, partly because my struggles to fully comply with my values, beliefs and goals was beginning to make depressing reading, and partly because my paper planning system means that my ‘daily record of events’ outlines sufficient historical data for me to remember what I was doing and thinking when I made the entries. The other challenge is that in these days of digital memory making, the physical act of writing is surprisingly tiresome.

But that shouldn’t put anyone off writing their own history. (‘If a life’s worth living, it’s worth recording’, said Oprah Winfrey, repeating the words of Tony Robbins, who was quoting Jim Rohn, who was rephrasing Socrates ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’.)

Writing about what you think and feel, why you think and feel it, what caused those feelings and thoughts – and perhaps just as if not more importantly, what you’re going to do about it – can be immensely cathartic and ultimately developmental.

When you consider that what we do in the moment between stimulus and response, when we use our self-awareness, imagination, independent will and conscience to choose our response, then knowing from our self-analysis what is the right thing for us in respect of our values and integrity is important. And writing that personal journal serves us and enables, even empowers us to make better decisions. And the peace from making a ‘right’ decision, even when it may not immediately serve us, is incredible.

Another challenge with journal writing comes to mind – and that is, when you commit these thoughts and intentions to paper you create an obligation to yourself to act in congruence with those new decisions in the future. That, my friends, is how personal change comes about.

And it can be very, very challenging!

Which makes a blooming good reason to get started.

Grab a book, software programme or tape recorder – sorry, digital recorder – and start recording your life with the intention of making it even better.

Now – go on, Amazon awaits……

* Means I am obliged, to me.

“Are you getting enough?” Met needs, I mean.

07 Sunday Jun 2015

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“There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfilment. If these basic needs aren’t met we feel empty, incomplete.” Stephen R Covey

There are a number of ways that writers and philosophers have elected to describe these needs. The oldest that comes to mind is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which looks like this to the unfamiliar:

Maslow

In an obvious nutshell Maslow explained that a met need no longer motivates, and that we climb this pyramid in order of settled need, in the sense that once one is ‘secure’ in one level it is safe to seek settlement of the next. In his view, once we met our physical need (warmth, food) we climbed to security (home, fence, walls), then to social (family, friends, community), then esteem (now we probably truly seek work, which feeds the lower levels and our self-esteem), but when we came to self-actualisation he was talking about how we were living our values – how we are congruent with what we believe in, and are getting it.

Anthony Robbins writes of 6 Human Needs, with no hierarchy at all. No, I’ll amend that – there is a hierarchy of 2 levels. Level one consists of the survival needs of certainty (principles, reliable systems), variety (surprise, amusement), significance (self-esteem) and connection (relationships); level 2 consists of growth (the need to develop intellectually) and contribution (the need to serve others in some fashion). Robbins contends that the latter two, while not essential for survival, do make life worth living and prevent us from becoming obsolete.

And Stephen Covey writes of 4 Human Needs – live (physical), love (relationships), learn (develop intellectually) and leave a legacy (serve, be remembered for something).

The only significant difference for me in these illustrations is that Covey is of the opinion that we need to meet all 4 needs if we are to be truly happy. Robbins contends that we should meet his 6, but that we can cope with ‘just’ 4. And Maslow appears to suggest that we only ‘need’ the level we are at.

That’s why I like Covey’s four. He goes into this deeply and suggests first that we aren’t truly happy if even only one of the needs isn’t met. We can be safe and secure, wealthy, intelligent and have a loving family – and still feel unfulfilled (unless we serve that family). We can be wholly engrossed in work, providing a home and income – and forget our loved ones need us. We can serve, love our family and friends – and yet be losing our edge through reliance on everything around us not changing. In essence, Stephen Covey is suggesting that we are happiest not when we are meeting all 4 needs separately – which is routine for most successes and is arguably ‘enough’ for most of us – but when we meet all 4 simultaneously. If we can find a hobby, career, pastime, relationship (etc.) that provides income, connection, mental stimulation and service all at the same time, we will be most happy. That, for me, is the true definition of vocation.

Go find or rediscover yours.

Playing by ‘The’ Rules? Or are you?

18 Monday May 2015

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You and I already have A Way. We live in accordance to rules. I have previously written about how rules govern our behaviours, and how those rules tend to be set – by others such as our parents, our peers, our managers and leaders. We follow those rules by default or by design.

We have been ‘brought up’ to agree with or blindly adhere to rules of conduct set by some sort of culture, be it societal, familial, hierarchical or even anarchical. Or we have chosen to comply with such rules, although that could be proactive choice (meaning we gave it some thought), choice by fear (of being seen to be less than others, of punishment or disassociation), or perhaps choice by indoctrination (such as may be exemplified by the radicalisation of youths towards terrorism). As there can be no achievements or results without rules which define those achievements or results, there must be rules.

In his excellent work ‘Awaken the Giant Within’, author and speaker Anthony Robbins goes into great deal about how rules positively and negatively influence our success. In brief, the rules we apply to our circumstances dictate whether those circumstances please or upset us. Something occurs and we place a meaning on the event. That meaning is then subjected to analysis based on a rule we have elected to apply to the event. The rule then dictates our feelings and occasionally our actions in relation to that event.

For example: I was recently on a train, which was nearly full. A mother, with two small children was temporarily left without a seat despite my efforts to give her mine. As she stood for a few minutes (before deciding that she could sit comfortably on the seats with her children) I was gripped with anger because a man on the two seats behind her had annexed an empty seat with his bag – a bag he could and should have placed in the luggage rack above his head. 

  • Event – lady needs a seat and he was not providing her one.
  • Meaning – he was rude, selfish, and deliberately so.
  • Rule applied – she was entitled to a seat and he was effectively depriving her of such.
  • Result – I was getting angry despite the fact she was not making anything of it. I wanted to tell him off, I wanted the conductor to do something about it, and his failure was cowardice.
  • Action – in this instance I forced myself to avoid conflict – but even that made me angry because I wanted to create a conflict that resulted in this selfish passenger suffering a social consequence.

 

In this example you can see how rules are applied to an event, and you can even see how rules can be applied to the actions considered as a result of the event – there wasn’t one rule being applied, there were several. The first rule was broken by the passenger when he failed to move his bag. The second was her unspoken rule that she didn’t care or wasn’t going to make a point. The next was the conductor’s failure to act based on his rules. The next was my rule that he should have acted. Then there was my rule that (in this case) conflict was not going to achieve a positive outcome and while it may have been called for and initially satisfying, the potential physical or legal consequences were not necessarily worth the ‘victory’ of being right.

Each party to the event had rules which they applied to their part of that event. Their rules were sourced personally (don’t start fights, don’t be pushy, I want to sit alone), societally (mind your own business, conflict achieves nothing), even corporately (don’t apply rules unless and until passengers ask, he’s bigger than me and I have no back up), and so on. In all cases, the rules applied were as real and valid to each individual as they were not valid to some of the others.

So there are two lessons here. One, be conscious of the rules you have set for yourself, where they come from and where they are taking you. If you don’t like the destination, consider changing the rules.

And the second lesson is: other people have rules, too. In their minds those rules are as valid as yours. Even when they aren’t!

One week left – then Change your Life.

23 Tuesday Dec 2014

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“The best way to influence your future is to create it.” Stephen R Covey

Two key processes allow us to live in keeping with what we consider to be important. The most well-known is the setting of goals, something covered in most personal development literature, including The Three Resolutions.

The less public process is the creation of a personal mission statement, the purpose of which is to state in clear terms how you intend to live your life, and why you want to do it ‘your way’.

Listen (again). It is 8 days to the New Year, a poor but accepted reboot period for most of us. It is always a time when people look at ‘what is’ and promise to do better this coming year. Most of us, and I include myself, fail within a week.

But IF you have a PMS and a set of clearly defined goals that flow from it then you have set a physical marker. If it is clear and exactly as you want it, it is a reference point and reminder to you what you have declared will now come to be. When you plan your week, or need to make a decision, the PMS is the source Constitution for those plans and decisions.

Tony Robbins once described his own ‘PMS moment’ in these terms. “When people ask me what really changed my life (—) I tell them that absolutely the most important things was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.”

That is what a personal mission statement is supposed to do. It is to design your future behaviour in your own terms and from YOUR perspective – not someone else’s. Discovering what you are ‘for’ leads to discovery of how you will achieve that purpose.

Here’s a thought. Celebrate the ‘destruction’ of your old life this week. Enjoy saying goodbye to largesse and inappropriateness by having that festive blow out. Have a ‘goodbye to the old me’ party. Then you have 12 months before you realise that, next Christmas, you don’t have to do daft things to have fun.

I cannot emphasise enough that you should write a personal mission statement. Do it before the festivities really swing into action. I’m not saying that you should stop enjoying the festivities and start your new life today. That is for next week. Just start drafting your future plan ready to implement it in 8 days’ time.

To have fun, you just have to live entirely in keeping with what you believe.

For further input on this subject, and goal setting, go here, spend $4.75/£3.09, and change your life immediately – or next week!

Too perfect to get it right.

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

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From the publicity blurb for “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande: “The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail.”

This reminded me of another story I read, and I cannot recall where (possibly Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins). It was about a young girl who told her Dad that ‘life’ in her world was so muddled. In seeking an explanation he set out her desk, everything nicely and accurately put in its place. “How is that?” he said. “Fine,” she replied.

He moved a pencil. “Now?” “It’s all muddled!” she responded. He replaced the pencil and moved an eraser. “And now?” “It’s all messy!” she wailed.

“I see the problem,” he patiently explained. “You have one way for everything to be perfect, and hundreds of ways for it to be wrong.”

Is this the case where you are? Has the purpose of your work now become secondary to the process – one of my favourite observations about modern policing and the criminal justice system is that it is all “Process at the expense of Purpose.”

Not only have we learned how to burrow down until each separate task can be quantified and assessed, we now find that we MUST do so – and hold accountable everyone below us in a hierarchy. You see, I’ve also noticed that this accountability rarely reads as quickly upwards as it does down. So when something goes wrong, the investigation focuses upon finding that one thing that wasn’t done right – in among the possibly hundreds that were – and hits the malefactor over the head with it. Like that child.

 

High Standards – a Cross to Bear?

31 Sunday Aug 2014

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When I was allocated a new position in the police service, I was also required to undertake an advanced driving course. Hitherto I had prided myself on being a talented driver, having tried my advanced driving test (failed twice); completed a racing driving course and done a few laps of Brands Hatch, and had a few amusing off-road type experiences. I’d even driven Land Rovers on tank courses. Over the years I’d read widely on advanced driving theory and practice and I felt I was quite skilled, even if my attitude stunk and I occasionally took the odd silly risk.

But in 2001 I went on this course, run by a ‘proper’ pursuit trained police Grade 1 Instructor, and my eyes were opened wide to new thinking, better observation skills and, one could argue, a higher expectation of what was expected of an advanced driver.

(For the purist I was an ‘intermediate’ advanced driver – not driving the full-blown Volvo T5s, BMW 535s etc. but a Volvo S40 area car. My take – the road’s the same shape and the pedals are in the same order, the rest is pursuit responsibility, familiarity with a slightly faster vehicle and even higher expectations. But traffic officers have a tendency to be a bit anal about their abilities/training so I dare not say all that out loud.)

Anyway, as a result of these higher expectations and a slightly more mature desire to comply with the new training and associated skill levels, I drove to the new system until I got to the point where I couldn’t drive the ‘old way’. My attitude still stinks a bit but the car control part is much better, as is compliance with protocols like observation skills, lane discipline, indicating, and so on.

The reason my attitude stinks is because I am very much more aware of the s**t skill levels of the ‘average’ motorist around whom I have to negotiate. The non-signaller, the ones who pull out on roundabouts in your path without signalling or accelerating swiftly enough NOT to get in the way, the lane hogger who switches his brain off on arrival in the middle lane and stays there from London to Edinburgh. And the phone user – a***holes whatever excuse they might think justifies potentially fatal consequences. You know the type – in fact, you may be one. (In which case change your attitude or get off my site! 🙂

At the same time, not driving related, my ‘high’ standard of verbal skills and the ability to write using sentences, correct grammar and punctuation means that the inability of others to do so, particularly when some of them are (on paper) cleverer than me – gets on my nerves. And the reading of Stephen Covey and Anthony Robbins on how we can reactively allow our environments to condition us to act in a certain way has made it abundantly clear to me why people use the word ‘obviously’ seven times a conversation and why teenagers say ‘like’ a lot; in fact, on holiday I heard a man use the word three times in one sentence – and that was three times in a row in one sentence!

Unfortunately, having (or at least striving to have) higher standards makes it abundantly, abundantly clear how low other people’s standards have become. Let me be clear – their standards are not necessarily low by intention (although they often are), it’s usually because they give no thought to how they are conditioned by their surroundings and the people in them, or they excuse their lowering of standards (driving being a very good and common example) because they aren’t being tested or examined any more. The lack of accountability for higher standards results in them being socially permitted to drop their standards to the common level.

Remember the Anthony Robbins experience with the US Marines I mentioned in an earlier blog? In one audio recording he described how he was asked to coach US Marines on leadership and motivation, and in doing so he was told that the men and women present were at the peak of their performance ‘lives’, and that when they left the Forces their standards slipped. When Robbins tells the story he opines that the reason their standards slip is because the expectations of the veterans’ post-service peer groups – new colleagues, friends, communities and society in general – are lower, and so the new standards displayed by those veterans are a reflection of the lowered expectations of the new peer group. In the Marines expectations were very high. Outside, they’re more ‘whatever works in the moment’.

One of the objectives of application of the First and Second Resolutions is to develop the self-discipline to behave in accordance with your higher values and to become exceptionally competent (expert?) in your chosen field of work – and competence can include competency in ‘routine’ life skills. To develop a higher sense of personal integrity as you discover what is important to you, to strive to act in accordance with those needs, and to achieve them at the highest possible level.

And that’s why it is annoying when I see what goes on around me. I see people capable of better who either don’t, or won’t, seek to behave at the higher level of competence or character. People who just let life dictate to them whether their behaviour is acceptable, convenient, just enough or even dangerous. Instead of taking action to make sure that they dictate to life what their standards are and how they will keep acting in their accord.

I’m still trying – are you?

 

Blog Part

I was rather pleased to discover that  I lost 6lbs this week, which means I lost the holiday weight gain (as expected) and a further 2lbs as well, meaning that I am now only 2lbs above my 2009 Half Marathon weight. That means I am ‘only’ 7lbs behind my lead measure of 210lbs by tomorrow (September 1st), and will hopefully be back on track by the 1st of October. At worst, I’ll be at target weight by Christmas provided I continue losing weight at the planned rate.

The running continues, although I was remiss twice this week – I still did the 4 runs I promised myself I would do every week in acknowledgment that occasionally life intervenes in your plan.