Tag Archives: Unifying Principles

We don’t ‘live’ in years – why do we goal-set in that unit?

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

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This is a Rant.

Most goal-setting advice tends to focus on the setting of 1-, 3-, 5- and 10-year goal plans. Best Year Yet and YB12 go for a 1-year plan as their core idea while business-related goal-setting advice tends to go to the max. In general, all goal-setting programmes promote the setting of a long-term goal supported by medium- and short-term ‘goalettes’ that result in the longer-term goal being achieved bit by bit.

There is nothing wrong with any goals programme I have ever seen, in that regard.

What I DO find difficult is this: life has a tendency to bu66er up those plans. I think that there are two reasons for that.

Of late, I have committed to the provision of various services – speaking club, professional Institute, driver mentoring. Those services are over and above my proper job, which takes up three days a week. Those additional services take up half-days at a time of what’s left – and that’s just execution and exclusive of any preparation time.

To a large extent, ‘D: None of the above’ is the answer I would give to the question ‘Which of the following represents action taken in pursuit of your personal goals?’ The time I spend on planning and executing those activities impacts on any time I have available to focus on new ‘stuff’.

The obvious response will be that I should stop doing them and focus on my own objectives, but that is too easy an answer. The reason for my ‘future failure’ is plain, though: Those commitments represent my success with earlier goals and compliance with my values/unifying principles. In other words, my inability to be goals-focused now is a direct result of my success in the past. It’s my own damn fault!

How annoying is that?

But another thing about setting 1-year (etc.) goals is the fact that goal achievement is a rolling programme, not something ‘done’ by year end while no new goals are set, no new roles and responsibilities are discovered, and nothing happens to stop you.

Life gets in the way, and a completed goal almost automatically results in the creation of a new one that crosses that ‘1-year’ deadline date, which in turn establishes a new start-date for that goal while the others still rely on their own start-date. We don’t goal-achieve Jan 1st to Dec 31st and then start again. School years, the financial year, the Resolutions year, our new job, sports and social seasons – they start their ‘year’ all over the place, so the rationale for specific goals set in the currency of ‘years’ is flawed.

To paraphrase Orwell : Deadline dates Good – units of time Bad.

The answer? I suppose it is to stop thinking in terms of the year as a unit of time within which to achieve things. If we consider Parkinson’s Law (which states “Work expands to fit the time available for its completion”), then it is self-defeating to spend a year doing something which could be done in 4 months if we just worked better.

Abandon ‘year-long goal setting’ and  work more effectively. But be aware that in accordance with the philosophy in my book The Three Resolutions , any completed goal – particularly a professional goal – will result in new, welcome and occasionally unwelcome impositions on your time.

You can be as GRRRREEEEATT! as Frosties.

11 Sunday Oct 2015

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“When we exercise the courage to set AND ACT on goals that are connected to principles and conscience we tend to achieve positive results.” Covey/Merrill, ‘First Things First’

And this was brought home to me this week, in two ways.

First of all, I have been establishing a training and coaching business (see this page ) and the business model involves making calls to business to seek their help in my provision of a keynote talk on overcoming procrastination, a talk after which I invite the attendees to come to a formal programme. I may have mentioned before that I hate making telephone calls at the best of times, so making unsolicited calls at the end of which I may be rejected was, shall I say, challenging?

But I set the goals (probably months ago, to be frank!) to make said calls this week and, ennobled by a colleague’s own success in making an approach to estate agencies, I did the same. I made a list of local agents and worked through them.

I was not called names. I did not die a horrible death. I overcame my dread (okay, it’s not facing a horde of Zulus but I have been spared that horror because some braver men did it for me in 1879) and established a positive experience that will serve me in the future. I also salved the conscience that’s been shouting at me to act. Lesson taught, and learning accepted.

But there was an added lesson. As I was making these calls my son walked in on me. He is involved in a college course, part of which requires him to do 300 hours relevant work experience. He is a shy lad, but owing to the desire to get the work (farming) and the failure of the college to provide any meaningful assistance, he has had to overcome that reluctance to deal with people and he has spent the week touring farms, talking to strangers and asking them for help. He appears to have met with some success.

And the bombshell – having nagged him to get out and put himself about because that’s what we coaches do, he looked me right in the eye as I put the phone down on a call and said, “Now you know how I feel.”

Boom! Right in the conscience, son! Twist that verbal knife! (And impress me with your wisdom.)

And was he right? Damn right he was right!

When we overcome our fears, however small and illogical, we make ourselves something better than we were before. It might only be a little bit ‘better’ but as Emerson said, “Little by little we build our power.” I remember my first public speaking effort. I was asked just to introduce myself. I got up and burbled for two minutes, then sat down – desperately wanting another go! That ‘little’ built so much power in two minutes.

Every time we leave our comfort zone, regardless of the results, we grow. So does the zone, so we have to stretch further the next time we want to leave it. Occasionally we don’t only enter the ‘stretch zone’ that sits immediately outside the comfort zone. Occasionally we are shoved mercilessly into the Panic Zone. And when we emerge from there, battered and bloodied (or even unscathed) we are all the greater for having been there.

Seek your greatness. Stretch yourself. Listen to your conscience and your Unifying Principles and, when the opportunity arises or life asks you to comply with them – do so.

It’s fantastic.

Obedience. Particularly liberating if you’re obeying YOU.

23 Sunday Aug 2015

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“Obedience is different to freedom. But it is not its opposite. You can freely choose to obey.”

“First rule of personal development reading: Don’t question the text. Let the text ask questions of YOU.”

“Your personal mission/vision statement: “A summons to you every morning, a checklist every night.”

Abbott Christopher Jamison

I’ve quoted three times this week because I found all three in a single holiday read entitled, “Finding Sanctuary.” Notwithstanding the fact that the book is written by a Benedictine monk (that UK TV viewers may know through the programme The Monastery) it is refreshingly short in religious content – so short that I felt able to reflect on the quotes from a secular, personal development perspective.

From a Three Resolutions angle, then, look at the three quotes. The first is recognition that just because a framework exists in life or work doesn’t mean that you are controlled by it – it means that you have a framework within which you have the freedom to act with conscience. If you are the creator of that framework, then you are obedient only to your own values and standards, and if you are doing a job you chose, then it will be what you make of it. You are free to obey what you choose to obey. If what you choose seems, to others, to be onerous then they may accuse you of blind obedience – but if you have chosen that obedience as a free man – then you demonstrate self-discipline, self-denial and character.

The second quote is a pointed remark aimed at those who see a book and question its content because of some invented or irrelevant reason, like the woman who picked up a book on leadership and glanced at the contents page, dismissively declared, “Huh! Written by a Mormon” and so failed to ask the better question, “Can I learn from what’s in it?” Or, as I might have bluntedly asked, “Do you have the intellectual capacity to get over your prejudice and actually read the book to see if religion is even mentioned?” (Smile…) I only respect the opinions on book made by those who’ve read and understood the content, not those who judge it by its cover alone. (And copying ‘The Secret’s cover design template doesn’t make your book good.) You don’t develop or learn or grow by pre-judging something based on a glance, tempting as that often is.

The last quote was the one that made me get out and go running while I was on holidays (hence my absence last week.) It’s a doozy. The quote is a profound reminder that once you have a mission statement or a set of unifying principles it’s a good idea to remind yourself in the morning what it says – treating is as a ‘summons to action/compliance – and then, at the end of that day, review it to check whether or not you lived in congruence with what you have stated you believe. Did you plan your day based on that mission, and have you demonstrated character, provided service, exercised self-discipline and executed on it?

Read more. It’s empowering.

Start 2015 as you mean to go on…..

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

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“Principle-Centred Living is not an end in itself. It’s the MEANS and the end. It’s the quality of our travel along life’s road. It’s the power and peace we experience each day as we accomplish what matters most.” Stephen R Covey

Do you live your life wholly in accordance with what you know to be true? Are you complying with the rules set by society, by yourself, or by principles? Is there an overlap between your rules and those principles you know to be true? I hope so.

None of us is perfect. Covey also wrote, “I believe that as human beings we cannot perfect ourselves.” I take that to mean that we have a duty, even a desire to continue to strive towards perfection but recognise that our limited knowledge, capabilities and experiences restrict us. We see perfection and often think we are nearly there – then we discover a new, better way to which we can aspire. We never get ‘there’ because we keep discovering that ‘there’ is a bit further away, yet again. That’s part of the beauty of existence, and is a constant.

(Spoiled only by the blame culture that instead of acknowledging that we are learning, takes any ‘failure’ to know in advance what could be done better as proof of conscious, deliberate incompetence. Which it isn’t. Now, back to the plot.)

But if you don’t know what ‘the’ rules are, how can you keep to them? We know the principles. They are extrinsic, they exist outside of us, are always true and always were. Our conscience tells us when we try and work in a way that spites them.

But our rules? Some never set them. They have them but they’ve been set by their upbringing and social mirror. They aren’t consciously held and can change or be broken in the moment subject to societal change and relationship issues. Some people have them and are diligent and compliant all of the time. I envy their strength.

But many are like me. They set their rules (values, Unifying Principles, codes of conduct – the term matters not), and then try, try and try again to keep to them. We occasionally fail but realise we have done so and try again. But at least, having set them, we can strive for that ‘perfection’ until we recognise a better way. Those who don’t have them can never reach ‘perfection’ because they don’t know what it looks like. In fact, because they don’t know what they are they wander aimlessly about, wondering why their lives aren’t what they want them to actually be.

That’s why I maintain that identifying a set of values* is a better way to live, and again encourage the reader to spend some time identifying their own rules and principles, the guidelines for their behaviour and future success.

Because if you know what your rules are, then provided they are aligned with principles (like truth, fidelity, honesty and integrity), complying with them will bring you peace.

Happy New Principled, successful, values-driven 2015, everybody!

 

*For help and advice on doing this, see my book at Amazon or here.

Bringing Behaviours into Line with Values – or Bringing Values into Line with Behaviours?

19 Sunday Oct 2014

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Just musing the other day I considered one of my favourite Hobbs concepts, which is that of Congruity. He describes Congruity as being a core element of successful self-management, and used this diagram to show what he meant.

Consider these two Circles. One is representative of how we behave and the other is representative of our personal values, those things and states of being we consider to be important. In this diagram the two circles are quite far apart although there is an overlap. This illustration shows someone whose behaviours are often quite separate from what they believe in.

Congruence

Hobbs (and Smith and Covey) all agreed that the ‘ideal’ state of being is when the two Circles wholly overlap, when what we say and what we believe in is completely demonstrated in how we act. When we walk our talk. Hobbs called them ‘Unifying Principles’ because when what we valued became our behaviour, we were unified. We had integrity.

This got me to thinking as I traipsed around London looking at the self-help (ugly term) sections in the better bookshops – which activity comes first, the chicken or the egg? In our efforts to improve, do we or could we first choose Values or Behaviour?

I concluded that there are 5 approaches to this concept.

  1. We can do nothing about any of it.
  2. We can accept the values that we have learned over the years, and behave in accordance with those values.
  3. We can identify our values, and then ignore them whenever we decide it is convenient to do so.
  4. We can identify what our behaviours are first, and then identify what values our behaviours represent.
  5. We can design our lives by making a conscious decision on what our values should be if we are to get what we want in life, and then act in their accord.

Taking each in turn:

  1. We can do nothing. Many who decry the self-help drive are those who live in the moment, who give little or no thought to what their values are and who would probably have trouble identifying more than three if they were pressed. This isn’t necessarily bad but it isn’t the best. But their lives are often dependent upon circumstances rather than intent.
  2. We can accept the values that we have learned over the years, and behave in accordance with those values. This is probably the most common state of affairs. This is what Covey called ‘determinism’ in various forms, but the crux of it is that when we live like this we are ‘being lived’ by our upbringing and by the standards of those with whom we spend our time. This is fine if the people we spend time with are not unprincipled, dishonest, unfaithful, or demonstrate any of the other self-destructive and undisciplined behaviours that we know, in our conscience, will not serve us or anyone else. It may suit you because the people you mix with are disciplined people of great character. If this is so, you can identify your values from theirs, and live accordingly. But then you have still made a choice by not choosing – see 5.
  3. We can identify our values, and then ignore them whenever we decide it is convenient to do so. This is a poor way to live, and is possibly one great cause of personal stress and/or guilt – the knowledge that we are deliberately not living according to the rules that we actively set for ourselves.
  4. We can identify what our behaviours are and then identify what values apply. This is the life of the person who can misbehave, err, pre-judge and generally act as he or she feels because whenever challenged they will find an excuse for what they just did. It’ll be ‘freedom’, ‘liberalism’, ‘identity’, or ‘to put it to the man’. It is willing defiance of authority just for the sake of establishing their independence, while wholly ignoring the interdependence of life. It is the telling of rational lies.
  5. We can design our lives by making a conscious decision on what our values should be if we are to get what we want in life, and then act in their accord. This is the only sensible option and the one representative of a higher intellectual approach to living (in my opinion), but it is often the hardest one to carry out. First of all, identifying the values themselves can be difficult because finding the right words with the right meaning can be problematic. Then, assuming we’ve defined our identified values appropriately, we come up against the obstacles of peer-pressure, societal norms and our own convenience when trying to execute on them.

Hobbs called them Unifying Principles, most others call them Values. One writer called them ‘valuables’ but I suspect he’s one of those who uses different terms for the same things just to seem (annoyingly) different while not actually being different, but I digress.

“Unifying Principles”. To wholly mix up philosophical terms, the objective is to live in accordance with your own identified and defined, timeless, understood, self-evidently true and extrinsically existing ‘truths’, rather than constantly bob and weave between doing the right thing one minute and having to make excuses the next.

I’m still trying. Are you?

Weekly Challenge

Decide which of the 5 you are compliant with, conclude number 5 is the only sensible option and make sure you identify and define your Unifying Principles/Values if you haven’t already done so.

For those who have done this, watch your behaviour throughout the week and see if the circles are, or are not overlapping!

Blog Part

Mixed week. I have been running in accordance with the plan with the exception of a day off to rest a twisted back, only to try to run on the same twisted back the next day. Interestingly, running on the twisted back made it better. The weight loss continues, but we’ve just spent 2 days in London – stuck with Slimfast on the first day but eating in a diner meant a risky calorie load – or not, I just don’t know yet!

Yesterday I was able to provide service for my Institute with two business meetings so I’m glad I can still contribute despite ‘retirement’.

Self-preservation through Unified Living

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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Living your values, it is generally accepted in the personal development field, is the best way to ensure high personal self-esteem and life-long happiness. Charles Hobbs (TimePower) and Hyrum Smith (FranklinCovey) both specifically address how living in accordance with your highest universal principles – your own set of genuine, conscience driven rules and standards – is the best way to feel successful, because it is intrinsic (part of you) and no dependant on outside approval, social acceptance or material wealth. Living your values means serenity and peace. And violating them brings anxiety, guilt and even depression.

How do I know this? From experience, that’s how.

A couple of days ago I was merrily driving along, using the correct driving principles as taught to me by skilled police drivers, and adhering to the speed limit when a chap drove up behind me so close I couldn’t see his headlights. Considering we were in a 30mph limited road which was on the approach to a roundabout this seemed a bit silly, but I didn’t bite. I just raised my hand in a circle, separated the finger and thumb, and indicated thereby that perhaps the driver may consider pulling back a tad. He did so, and I gave him the thumbs up. Just as he accelerated hard and overtook so that he was still on the wrong side of the road as we came to the bollard at the roundabout entrance.

Now, if I had been proactive and used the stimulus/response gap to think ‘he’s a nutter so I’ll give him space’, things would have been fine. However, in that instant, I chose the ‘oh, we’ll see who can get to the gap first then, shall we?’ reactive technique. As it was, there was just enough – by inches – space so that no collisions occurred and I was able to add a verbal description of the driver through our mutually open car windows before we went I our separate directions.

And for the rest of the day I felt really off.

I felt off because I had failed to act in accordance with my unifying principle ‘I demonstrate high levels of skill and patience in driving.’ I felt off because I had not considered that circumstances like this lead to potential confrontation and while I am not fearful of ‘it’, confrontation is such an open ended activity. If I win the immediate confrontation I have no guarantee that it stops when it is over, especially these days when violence and revenge and utter stupidity seem to be the watchword of people whose first response is reactive thuggery, rather than being dragged slowly towards that end. Would I find that he would torch my car, find out where I live and threaten my kinfolk? If there had been a rumble, even if I had won what could the legal consequences have been? Was I prepared for them, did I want or need such inconvenience? And if the road hadn’t been wide enough, was I prepared to spend money and time repairing my car because I was reactively miffed?

Over the remainder of the day (and my reaction still irked me at bedtime) it occurred to me that, occasionally, it is not the highest ideals that we find hard to live up to, but the tiny ones. Say we choose to study, and do so diligently towards a professional qualification. It’s hard, but it’s doable. At the same time we resolve to be patient, and then someone jumps into the front of a queue and we go nuts. In many ways the patience objective is the easiest – easy to understand, easy to see ourselves doing it, easy to define – but the stimulus to challenge it can be too sudden and we have no time to think (correction, we do not take the time to think) and so we fail.

It’s a lesson we should all consider to be valuable. We have failed, so next time we won’t. It’s a demonstration that we are compliant with both the First and Second Resolutions. We discipline ourselves to be patient, deny ourselves the counterfeit sense of righteousness that the offending behaviour can engender within us, and our character shines through (with some competence in patientology).

Next time – just drive off ahead of the tailgater, or let him go. Let him offend and endanger someone else – I am too important to me and to my family and friends to suffer because of my own ego.

As are you.

Blog Part
Only two pounds lost this week but the running programme continues apace (see what I did there?). This weight loss means (if it continues at 2lbs per week) I may miss my 1/9/ target but as the months differ in lengths I anticipate that any slide back will be compensated for by 1/10/14. The diet remains easy to comply with, too.