Tag Archives: “Charles R Hobbs”

Stretch yourself – be like Pregnancy Pants.

27 Friday Mar 2020

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“Sometimes things can go right only by first going very wrong.” Edward Tenner

And here we are. We exist at a time where the whole world has come to a grinding crawl, with the retail and hospitality industries taking a big hit. Which means that we, the citizens, denied our access to the dopamine of retail therapy and the opportunity to get away from it all suddenly find we have to find some other way of feeling good and ‘finding ourselves’.

Charles R Hobbs, of the original, non-Brian Tracy title TimePower, observed that when we go on holiday, the first thing we do on arrival is recreate the Comfort Zone that is home. First, we check the TV channels, and then we find out the wi-fi password. Is he right? Be honest.

Today, the comfort zones of shopping and the workplace have been denied to many, and to be fair that has resulted in a lot of imagination being utilised to cope with new challenges, which is arguably Mankind’s greatest skill. And as one esteemed philosopher put it, Mankind’s development has been the result of Challenge – Response.

The Challenge today is how to live in a confined space and feel happy, secure and productive for the period of the Lockdown. Of course, the nature of this lockdown is, shall we say, a bit like pregnancy trousers – there’s a bit of leeway that will expand and contract as needs demand.

Notwithstanding the ability or otherwise to do your paid work, we have a twenty-day window to:

  • Discover Kindle e-books, which can be in your lap in seconds and can feed your mind on a subject of interest to you.
  • Access on-line courses which can make you more employable.
  • Do all those jobs around the house that have needed doing. (My kitchen FINALLY looks organised.)
  • Talk to your partner and kids.
  • And your neighbours, whether they work for the NHS or not.
  • Telephone friends, neighbours and workmates using those unlimited minutes you’ve paid for.
  • (Personal favourite) Study The Seven Habits, First Things First and Principle-Centred Leadership and discover new ways of thinking – how to think, not what to think – an important distinction. All available on Kindle and, if you’re clever, very cheaply.
  • Read my blogs more often.

All of the above ideas, and any you can discover for yourself, will mean that you come out of the other side of this a better person, more organised, and possibly even more productive than before.

But, above all, doing something like those things will absolutely, unarguably and without fail MASSIVELY increase your sense of self-esteem – the value you place on yourself.

Go on – don’t just be a public hero like everyone else. Stretch yourself.

Win a Private Victory as well.

Use your intelligence – all four of it.

04 Wednesday Mar 2020

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“I have to live with myself, so I want to be fit for myself to know.” Edgar A. Guest

If we accept the Four Intelligences, specifically Physical, Emotional, Intelligence and Spiritual, then we must also acknowledge that the optimum way to live would be to have all four of them as fit for purpose as possible. Unfortunately, as I see so many people sweating themselves silly in gymnasia (at a time when sweating in a crowd is potentially harmful), what I see is a focus on the physical by people whose ‘other’ fitnesses are being neglected.

The gym bunny who spends as much gym time in front of the mirror as he does on the weights: the runner who is watching ‘Loose Women’ when she could be listening to a good book: the keen jogger who follows their session with a pie: the exerciser who interacts with no-one unless they have to.

All will be physically fit, but how much effort to they put into training their other endowments?

Don’t misunderstand me – there will also be people at the gym who do exercise their whole person. In the main, however, I’m guessing that the vast majority of us don’t exercise in all four areas as much as we could, although we do exercise 2 or 3 endowments to a reasonable extent.

I bemoan the fact that I am unwilling to exercise like a trainee Royal Marine, but I do read a lot, love my family and have a sense of what I want to contribute. Three out of four ain’t bad. And those three, along with the fourth, could benefit from more attention, occasionally.

How about you?

Are you exercising in one or two areas while neglecting the others? If so, it’s never too late to begin addressing your other needs to a degree that you will benefit.

Physical – just eat and drink less or more wisely, and park further away from your home. 😮

Mental – read widely, not just professionally. Good fiction, informative historical articles, and the like.

Social – get out more, contribute rather than just attend. Write a personal journal.

Spiritual – find some meaning on what you do day by day, write a personal mission statement and fully live in congruence with your values.

It is harder than ‘just living’ but the rewards in terms of self-esteem and, I would suggest, the respect from others that follow, are well worth the effort.

But be careful not to get caught up with false prophets and doom-cults! Make sure that what you learn and what you do are positive in terms of content and intent.

If you’ve noticed, a lot of successful people do all of those things. Perhaps they’re on to something?

 

Have you found that person, yet? No, not that one – the other one.

01 Sunday Mar 2015

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“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Unfortunately, our chief objection is to hearing the truth. And we are also unwilling to openly admit such truth when we hear it, using what both Covey and Hobbs called Rationalisation – rational lies that we use to excuse our failures to act in keeping with our word.

But, oh, the growth when we allow ourselves to hear, admit and act upon such criticism. I remember being taken to task in a work appraisal in 2000 – it’s in my diary – at a time when I was fortunate enough to have the appraisal just before I was due to take a couple of days off where I would be alone for long periods of time.

I was able to spend that time considering what was accurate about the appraisal, what was a misunderstanding, and what strengths I had that could overcome the true criticisms. (There are times when I wish I could focus enough to do that again.)

My next appraisal was a reflection of what I learned in those few solitary hours. I also learned that if you get up too soon after anaesthetic, you wake up with a crowd around you.

Who has inspired you? I know that reading Covey’s works inspired me, I think that’s obvious from the blog. Have you found someone, personally or as the result of an accidental find in a bookshop or library, who made you stop and think, “Wow!”, to think enough to make changes and rediscover yourself and the way you could behave to finally, in some small or even magnificent way, achieve your goals? And if not ‘goals’, perhaps just to live according to what you believe?

If so, let me know.

If not – off to the library……..

Be a better Role Model by redefining that Role.

24 Monday Nov 2014

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“Identifying roles gives a sense of the wholeness of quality life – that life is more than just a job, or a family, or a particular relationship. It’s all of these together.” Stephen R Covey

Application of the Three Resolutions is not and cannot be done in a vacuum. You have to have something about which you can be disciplined, in respect of which you can be competent, and through which you can provide noble service. Roles are the means by which or through which we can do this. For working roles competencies are not only usually quite clear in general terms, but these days you will probably have a ‘job description’ and ‘personal characteristics’ document which management can bash you over the head with if you fail to demonstrate any one of the bullet points. In some professions there are also ‘National Occupational Standards’, reams of lists of competencies that someone with a particular job title will be expected to comply.

But just because work has them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also have them in our unofficial roles, like father, mother, husband, wife, friend or volunteer. They may not be written down and sub-sub-sub-categorised so that a third party can assess your compliance, but you can at least decide, in your own mind, what your expectations are of yourself in those capacities.

You are the one who can define your roles in life. You can define your role in a general sense or you can redefine it to your own, motivating title. You can be a mechanic, or a ‘client transport facilitation engineer’. One fixes cars while the other makes sure that their customer can get to work and live. You can be a ‘blogger’ or a ‘philosophy communications executive’.

It’s up to you – are you ‘just’ your professional/personal role title, or are you/could you be something ‘special’?

The ONLY Way to Win?

13 Sunday Apr 2014

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Continuing on the theme of ‘the ideal’, I am reading an interesting book at the moment called ‘The Only Way to Win’ by Jim Loehr. The book is looking at how building character drives higher achievement, and an early chapter addresses the question – is high self-esteem a consequence of achievement, or is achievement a consequence of high self-esteem? There is a lot of discussion about having too much self-esteem being as bad, if not worse than having too little because inflated egos need, well, more inflation!

But one relevant quote provided is that of Dr Roy Baumeister, professor of Psychology at Florida State University, who says, “After all these years, I’m sorry to say, my recommendation is to forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.” This is exactly the objective of applying the First Resolution.

The suggestion has often been that self-esteem is either a pre-cursor to achievement (usually good) or a consequence of achievement (occasionally bad). Here’s the discovery Loehr made – if achievement is required in order to gain self-esteem, then anyone failing by any degree loses their self-respect. Furthermore, when people get what they seek they frequently become depressed because having achieved it they feel that it was too easy, so creating doubt in themselves that they earned what they have – and so they go seeking more in order to get the self-esteem that eluded them because they decided – they decided – that they didn’t deserve the esteem their achievement should have provided them!

This relates again to earlier posts – is my goal truly mine? Is my ideal truly ideal? If I DO get it, will I be happy?

Now, referring back to Baumeister’s quote and to further utilise the philosophy of Dr Charles R Hobbs, author of TimePower , if instead of using achievement as a measure of self-esteem we use our desire and ability to be in CONTROL of our lives as our ‘self-esteem measuring stick’, could we be happier in the moment? Could we still seek to achieve but do so more happily, to the degree that provided we remain in control of that striving we stay happy regardless of the end result. We live in the now, not in the hope that we will live ‘when we get there’.

Loehr used an example of a schoolboy wanting to be a doctor.

“I’ll be happy when I get my school exams done with,” becomes “I’ll be happy when I get my medical degree” becomes “I’ll be happy when I finish my doctor training/internship” becomes “I’ll be happy when I can be a consultant” etc etc. Such dependence on achievement to assuage one’s self-esteem is fraught because one failure along that route means ‘the END!’, despite the potential each step provides. And in circumstances like that example, we won’t be happy until we are far too old – and too tired – to enjoy the success we sought.

Indeed, while we are striving we tend to use what we achieve as we go along to influence everything we do – for example, we spend money in a way that serves each step and doesn’t necessarily serve the end in mind; we nurture or stifle relationships that serve/obstruct our goals; and we dress, eat and live ‘in the expected way’.

(Don’t get me started on how we are taught to avoid stereotyping when we all, ALL OF US willingly comply with stereotypes to get what we want, either consciously or subconsciously. In my country, we say it’s easy to spot a conservationist/social worker/Guardian reader, and have you noticed how people being interviewed in the media are often wearing suits but have taken their ties off to look ‘media cool’. Well, they’re not. I digress.)

Anyway, I asked the question that perhaps every goal-orientated person should ask at the off – “What responsibility or consequence will arise from my success?” Not just the award, prize, wealth or immortality, but what goes with it.

Fame – and the media interest in your private life? Perhaps you seek a Professorship – and the subsequent need to lecture, write, and be approached for authoritative opinion ad nauseam? How about professional status – and the realisation that you will have to earn a living at it 60 hours a week for 50 years? All the time having to spend time with colleagues you don’t trust rather than spending time with the family you love? (BTW, earning millions while your kids don’t know what you look like is NOT the only way to bring up happy kids. Try earning only £1million and spending time with them instead.)

So – great self-esteem is something you deserve to have NOW. It comes from having great self-discipline and exercising self-control. You being in charge means you recognising and deciding whether the consequences of your dreams are what you expect and want them to be, and to adjusting your sights and plans accordingly. Make sure the Important Things are YOUR Important Things.

Incidentally, after I read the paragraphs in Loehr’s book I texted all my kids and told them how proud I was of them regardless of their achievements.

Covey’s THIRD Circle

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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We are all familiar through one source or another with the concept of the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. They were introduced by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and in a nutshell they are explained thus: The Circle of Concern contains everything that concerns you but about which you either can’t do anything or you choose not to. Occasionally it contains what Charles R Hobbs (in his own pre-7 Habits book ‘TimePower’) would call

• things we think we can do nothing about, but we can and don’t, and
• things we know we can do something about, but won’t.

Let’s not even go there because we know we all have things that come under one of those headings.

The Circle of Influence contains the things which concern us, and about which and upon which we can exert some level of influence – we can do something about them, if we want to. Again, as Charles Hobbs might put it, the things we think we can do something about, and do.

For the life of me I cannot understand why everyone who quotes Dr Covey invariably stops there – at Circle 2, so to speak. Because (pardon the grammar) Dr Covey wrote about a third Circle.

In the follow-up to the 7 Habits he wrote that effective weekly goals are in our Circle of FOCUS. This Circle contains what we are concerned about, that are aligned with our Personal Mission Statement, and are timely – of the moment, now, urgent AND important. To quote Dr Covey, “To spend time and effort in any other Circle diminishes our effectiveness. When we operate in our Circle of Concern we basically waste effort on things we have no ability to control or affect. When we operate within our Circle of Concern we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Circle of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.” (First Things First, p.151)

Remembering that ‘good’ is the enemy of ‘best’, perhaps a little more thought should be given to deciding, when we plan our weeks and set our goals, whether they lie in our Circle of FOCUS. And decide that if they do, then focus is what they’ll get.

Like you I have difficulty with such a focus, because life gets in the way. For example, in the middle of my writing this I was interrupted by a phone call, and that call was interrupted by another (no message on an unidentified number, thanks a bunch). As it was, the first call was in my Circle of Focus so no harm no foul.

Personal planning enables the Circle of Focus. Haphazard To-Do lists only expand the other two circles. Focus, people – FOCUS!