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THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

~ Your Personal Mission Controller – Self-Leadership That Works

THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

Tag Archives: COVID19

Buy this book – Be Like Russ.

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Posted by threeresolutionsguy in General, Uncategorized

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character, competence, COVID19, integrity, personal development, self help

Why did you pick up a personal development book?

You are on Amazon or you are in a bookshop, searching in the business or self-help section for one of a few reasons.

  • You’ve tripped over it by mistake. Could be serendipitous, and you’ve accidentally discovered something that piques your interest.
  • You have recently been introduced to the concept of personal development and are exploring available options. You are looking to be better than you perceive you are. This is your first foray in the well of wisdom. Good luck. There’s plenty to see, here.
  • This isn’t your first self-help book. You are an avid reader of this kind of material. You’re addicted to researching the solutions that all your previous reading hasn’t provided. I feel your pain, because I have been there. Like me, you’re into ‘shelf-development’ by accident.
  • You are already successful by all ‘normal’ societal measures but there’s something that you either can put your finger on and you think an answer might be found within these pages, or you can’t put your finder on ‘it’ and you hope to realise what it is as you progress through the chapters. You’d be surprised how many potential readers come under this description.

But do you want to buy and read it, yet? No?

Let’s explore further.

Do you know someone who you think represents your ideal? And why do you think that person is your ‘ideal’?

I had someone in mind when I wrote that question. He was a consummate professional, arguably a leader in his field even though when I really knew him he held low rank in the organisation for which we both worked. He was at the same time one of the most caring supervisors and individuals I had ever known. His name is Russ. I hope you know someone like that.

If you really study people like Russ, you will notice certain things. You’d probably notice that they possess six character traits, and in my book The Three Resolutions I argue that those six traits come under three pairings. Mastery of those pairings will enable you to emulate your ideal and thus become someone else’s representation of ‘great’. Oddly enough, if you look at disgraced celebrities and politicians you will notice the lack of some or more of the same six character traits that make for true greatness.

Do you want to know what they are? Better still, do you want to possess them yourself? Good. But wait a little longer before making the commitment.

What if I said this was a book on ‘the simple, quick way to success?’ Would you buy it then? I certainly hope not.

We should all strive to be the best at what we can do. That is the objective of much of the personal development literature out there, but I think there is one problem with a lot of it.

A lot of the books have a tendency to over-promises and under-deliver. They offer ‘massive’ success, ‘greatness’, an ideal that is all too often defined as rich, famous and accompanied by the lifestyle of millionaires. Which is not to say that isn’t a worthy ambition and that you should never, ever pursue such a goal.

Unfortunately, the sad, sobering truth is that we can’t all be at the top of our respective field, even if we can strive towards that goal. We can’t all be celebrities because don’t all have voices like Katherine Jenkins or Andrea Bocelli, we can’t all act like George Clooney or Tom Hanks, and we can’t all write like J.K. Rowling and Lee Child. We can’t all be immensely rich because there’d be no-one left to do the work that we do. Economics would make all millionaires ‘poor’ if that was even possible. We can’t all run the organisation we work for, because there’d be nobody in the shop floor making the widgets we need to sell in order to pay our salaries.

Which is not to say we can’t try. And I will argue that we all have an inkling of what is required, but many of us tend to avoid actually doing it.

The six character traits under the three ‘headings’ are easy to understand, I assure you. The challenge is that they can be surprisingly hard to do. True greatness doesn’t come about through just pottering at something – it takes some effort, at least. I can’t make it easier to do, sorry and all that. Any author/ trainer/coach who says s/he can, is a liar. A charlatan. A snake-oil salesman.

But what I can do is make it easier to understand the traits, systematically help you see how they inter-relate, and motivate you to do something about what you discover.

Are you willing to consider doing that? To putting in the effort to understand and then actively apply what you read?

Still not convinced? Okay, let me try another tack. What if you don’t buy this book, don’t study its content and leave your success to accident, to other people’s design, or to fortune? What do you think will happen? Could you win a lottery if you haven’t bought a ticket? Can you get a job you haven’t applied for? Can you have a beautiful garden you don’t plant, nurture and maintain? In fact, can you get anything meaningful without taking action towards that end? Without at least doing something? Everything in life requires input if we are going to get output. Everything.

The fact is that while there’s not enough room for everyone to be at the top because the bar is always rising (and what represents talent changes with the mood of the client!), there is no need to be despondent because there is one thing at which we can be best, and once we achieve that we can all have the potential to go for the bigger things.

The one thing at which you can be great is – being the real, best, most competent, nice, disciplined, healthy, slim, helpful, dutiful and ultimately Russ-like ‘you’.

And that’s where The Three Resolutions come in. I invite you to read about them while you’re stuck indoors – and before you’re set free and accidentally default to how things were before.

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The Daily Win.

14 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Uncategorized

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COVID19, discipline, donald trunp, impeachment, self-discipline, three resolutions

I’ve said it before, so I’ll say it again. All those Californian, rich(ish) personal development speakers and writers and their ‘Rise at 5AM and exercise’ freaks are invited to come and live where I do in South Wales, where it’s easier to pick up the dog eggs in the garden at 6AM because they’re rock hard with ice. Where the idea of a home gym is fine if you live with a spare room big enough for a running machine or static bike, said room being centrally heated to at least ‘bearable’ for that early effort. And where going to bed early so as to get a decent kip before getting up at 5AM isn’t easy because the road and neighbours aren’t 100 yards away and are living their noisy lives while you try to drop off. And fitness clubs remain an expensive luxury.

Which is not to say that exercising is impossible. So far this calendar year, with the exception of the 1st and the 9th, I have exercised daily. Furthermore, with two exceptions, I have done so as soon as I got out of bed. Which, lucky me, is 7.30AM because I ain’t got a proper job.

I have a spin bike, a relatively inexpensive yet reliable (3 years so far) model. I have a mount (thank you Santa) for a 7” tablet through which I watch YouTube videos which inform, entertain or anger depending on the day’s choice. And a garden shed to put it in. There simply is no room in the main dwelling. You see, I am not a financial success like all those 5AM loonies. I am a moderate professional success on that I have always been employed doing work I enjoy, on the public purse in their service. So none of that ‘earn twice as much, work half as hard’ twaddle that Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield promote – which is valid for the entrepreneur or commission-paid individual but not the vast majority of us. If I wanted to earn twice as much as a copper I’d have had to work 76 hour weeks AND ask permission, first.

Each of us loves in his or her own circumstances, which do not necessarily reflect those described by such writers. Some do. Lucky them.

Back to me.

What gets me out of bed at 7.30AM, or more specifically onto the bike at 7.40AM, is The First Resolution. ‘To overcome the restraining forces of appetites and passions, I resolve to work on self-discipline and self-denial.’ I don’t want to ride a bike first, but it would be rude of a promoter of such a concept not to try. So that’s what gets me up. My Integrity. Doing the things I don’t like to do because (a) they serve me and (b) I said I would. If only to myself.

I should also be up front and state that it doesn’t work every day. If I don’t sleep well I’d make the next day worse, not better, if I self-flagellated with exercise before starting work. (I can always exercise afterwards, if I feel up to it.) But here, the point isn’t to apply self-discipline to the point of self-punishment. That’s a route to failure.

But I will also add that doing that exercise first, and educating myself while I do so, sets me up for the day exactly as Stephen Covey promotes in his books. He calls it the Daily Private Victory and to be fair, that’s as good a description of that process as any. It is (as he also puts it) mind over mattress. Long term gain over short term discomfort. Many cliches, all accurate.

I get up. I go out into the cold shed and exercise.

I win. The rest of the day is a breeze.

So much so, this took 15 minutes to write. In the flow. And with integrity – nothing I write is a lie to myself or to my reader. Whoever you are.

Be disciplined. But be disciplined early. Ish.

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Wipe away the Tiers with Proactivity

17 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Uncategorized

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COVID19, goals, seven habits, seven habits of highly effective people, Stephen R Covey"

What a mess we are in, and what a mess the authorities seem to be creating. I don’t know whether they are right to create fear about a virulent flu that is a threat, whether this is a gross over-reaction to an annual event (and will happen every year for the foreseeable future), or whether it is a failing effort to reduce greenhouse gasses using the annual plague as an excuse. All I do know is that it is creating havoc for people, like me, who ‘make plans’ only for the prevailing rules to change 24 hours later. And I am lucky – I have no business or formal employment to worry about.

I don’t want to get caught up in the stats and how they are skewed and interpreted to suit. An increase in ‘cases’ resulting from an increase in ‘positive tests’ which results from massive testing doesn’t tell you/me how many cases have required action above going to bed for a few days. No, this blog is about how to respond to these inconveniences.

Proactively.

Whatever kind of challenge presents itself, it creates a psychological anguish that is representative of the gap between ‘what should have been’ and ‘what now is’. It means that we believe that what we had under control is, for the moment, outside of our control. The key to an effective response is to decide to act within that gap, using our God-given personal endowments.

You see, whatever happens, we can control our response if we decide to do so. We tend to default to ‘Poor Little Old Me’ (PLOM) in the first instance because the change imposed upon us creates work, in the sense that as we can’t do what we intended, we have to apply mental effort – and occasionally physical effort – to regaining the control we had. But that’s life. We do it every day, but most days we are immune to the PLOM effect because we are familiar with that particular inconvenience.

Three days ago I booked an event in Kent which I know would go ahead because despite that area’s Tier3 status they were still holding events of the kind I’d booked. Then yesterday, the local authority where I live changed its rules and threatened to cock things up here, instead.

Initially, despondency. Then a moment of clarity and the decision to explore with the event’s organisers whether I can change my date and pay a slightly increased fee for a later, less threatened date. If they say No, I have a choice – wait and see what happens the week before the event (when the Tier gets reviewed as planned) and comply. Or, yes, I can choose to go in any case. If there are penalties, then I can choose to pay them. It’s up to me.

And that’s the other abiding truth. We can decide how to respond to any imposition or event that affects us. But we can’t choose the consequences. They are outside our control. We can anticipate and plan for the consequences we reasonably expect will occur as a result of our choice, but we can’t guarantee them. So (for example), in the event that I would have to bend the law to execute on my plan and go anyway, I can choose to risk the authorities’ wrath. Or I can decide to comply, wear the relatively cheap cost of not being able to go, and start a revolution instead. (I am soooo miffed.)

If you think you have lost control of events, simply decide to take it back.

Look at the event and consider alternatives. Talk to people, ask questions, and despite advice to the contrary look for loopholes that will enable you to come through on what you intended. That’s why they are there – to exercise the mind, to beef up your initiative, to make you better.

Or you can just be miserable. ‘Cause that’s easy.

By all means. explore the purchase of my book. No pressure.

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