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SuperOrder and High Performance Your Life:
By J. Michael Kelly, Esq.
One of the essential characteristics for high performance and exceptional gain in life is the control of one's emotions and personal habits.
Many highly talented people, with outstanding personality traits, a good understanding of what is happening around them, and years of hard earned experience, completely destroy the possibility for outstanding performance by failure to control their personal habits and their emotional responses. The same lack of control and insight destroys exceptional life performance.
Exceptional performance in any endeavor requires that the individual be able to deliver a better performance than their competitors over a longer period of time with a more focused delivery. There is no difference between the personality characteristics
that an attorney or a business executive must master, and those of an astronaut or super-bowl athlete. It is impossible to fail to notice that football games on Sundays are won or lost by 1/2 an inch, by one point, or by three seconds.
Joe Montana is one of the finest examples of concentration, poise and long time excellent personal habits, all of which allow him to deliver, under high-pressure situations, game winning passes, week after week, month after month and year after year. Life is exactly like that - it is only the last 3 to 5% of performance consistency that makes an exceptional life instead of an average one.
The personal characteristics necessary for excellence in football, war or tennis, and those which give an astronaut the capacity for exceptional performance on the Hubbel Space Telescope, hundreds of miles above the earth, are the same personal characteristics necessary for success in the real world.
As in all forms of conflict, the mind, in business, relationships, and life in general, is an individual's most important competitive advantage.
Parts of the mind can be gifted, such as a high I.Q., but many parts of the mind are subject to the individual's own control and training. Personal habits that can affect the quality of thought, such as the consumption of alcohol, lack of adequate sleep, substance abuse, overeating, obesity and poor physical conditioning, will all influence performance in a negative fashion during periods of high stress, at a time when the individual needs high performance abilities the most.
Lack of emotional control, unfocussed thoughts, and the failure to choose clear goals in specific time frames will all haunt an individual at the worst possible time.
One can choose to control anger; they can choose to control hysterical reactions to situations; they can be at choice with their reactions. One can choose not to drink; one can choose to eat moderately; and one can most certainly choose to engage in the discipline of some physical conditioning, even if it is as simple as walking on a tread mill, a stair-stepper or stationary bicycle. Disciplined personal habits give the mind a certain inner strength that says "I shall not be beaten."
That thought is not easy to come by; it is a hard won over years of education, discipline, concentration and hard choices. There are no lasting overnight successes. You see many fine actors who say, "Yes, I was an overnight success . . . after 20 years." The same is true in developing the traits, knowledge and discipline necessary to be an exceptional person.
The questions one must ask are:
- "Am I willing to pay the price to be an exceptional success? Am I willing not to drink?
- Am I willing to make the thought `I am a winner.' be a reality by developing stronger willpower, greater discipline and deeper knowledge of a field than my competitor?
- Am I willing to make "myself and my life" the standard for others?
- Am I willing to develop the habits of personal discipline that will make me calm and focused in crisis, much the same as Joe Montana when he leads a last-minute winning drive?
If you think that football is complex, think about the enormous number of traits necessary to be successful in life. In the National Football League, there are 24 teams.
On any given Sunday, there are fifty players on a side, and several coaches. In any given minute, a team can field 11 players. For example:
- How many competitors do you have in your business field?
- Hundreds? or perhaps thousands?
- How many coaches and books and tapes and seminars are available in your business, which will improve your performance?
- How many have you used or attended?
- How easy do you find it to reward yourself with a martini, a glass of wine or a fat steak after a hard day, instead of working out?
- Reading a book?
- Looking at the balance sheet?
- Working on a new brochure?
- Planning a marketing campaign?
This observation is not meant to be comforting; it is actually meant to challenge the context or framework within which you hold your personal performance. Were you the class president?
Were you the homecoming queen? Were you the quarterback of your football team? Were you a state champion long-distance runner or wrestler? The world of business gives you the opportunity to be a champion in an arena that lasts far longer than high school or college athletics. It gives you an opportunity to succeed in decades and leave a legacy for centuries.
Competitive Advantage:
Genetically, human beings can have two or three competitive advantages compared to other human beings. One, an individual can be blessed with physical beauty, or athletic dominance. These gifts from the genetic lottery can, if used wisely and acknowledged by the possessor of them, carry the individual to success in life.
One cannot change oneself from 5'2" to 6', no matter how intelligent they are, nor can they turn a homely physical appearance into great beauty. Individuals are given the opportunity and the chance to enhance the gifts from their maker or the genetic lottery, depending on their belief system.
In one of my writings, I said that "your mind is you most important weapon."
It is more than you most important weapon, it is, if you have a good one, a dominant competitive advantage, and must be cared for exactly as you would a fine computer or good body.
My observations regarding the human mind only refer to its raw computing power, analytical ability, data storage and retrieval capacity. The mind must be adequately rested and fed. The human mind works far better when not placed in the condition of overload with useless data input. Examples of useless date input are as follows:
Mindless arguments, romance novels, television sit-coms, etc., it is unquestioned that television sitcoms are written for people with an eighth-grade education, vocabulary and outlook.
Canned laughter is added to the sound track to elicit a humor response from the watcher. Thousands of hours are wasted on television, which could have been utilized to train the mind to be more effective in its analytic capacity. Information could be gathered in order to give the particular individual a competitive advantage in life.
In striving to be a high-performance individual in anything that you do, it is essential that not only are you physically, mentally and psychologically prepared, you must be emotionally prepared.
My observation is that if your emotions are not under iron control, they will destroy your ability to think and analyze in any situation you are in.
To put it another way, if you are analyzing a business situation with revenge in mind, versus a cold analysis of a situation on its own merits, your analytical powers will be blunted, diffused or blurred.
If you are attempting to create a business from a survival mode versus an "I shall not be beaten" mode, the survival drive will, to a certain degree, blue or diffuse the cold analysis of what you need to do.
Almost all of the people you can think of who have been significant business successes, and almost all of the stories of people who have been significant successes in their life and living, have had the ability to have uninterrupted time to focus on a problem, strong concentration to be used in the uninterrupted focus on a problem, and an analytical ability honed by clear and concise thinking.
You cannot analyze a problem without having significant data about the field of the problem, which you are looking at or thinking about. Thinking about a situation or a business without a significant amount of experience in the specific business or that specific circumstance will eliminate the possibility of a sure decision.
Many brilliant people get into financial deals or business deals they should never be in because they are brilliant and think they can think their way through the conversation or deal points structured by an individual who knows everything about a particular deal.
Donald Trump is an excellent example of that. Ivana Trump's lawyers thought they could think their way through the financial real-estate trap that he set up for her, and she ended up with about $20 million instead of $100 million. In other business transactions, the joke "there has never been a real-estate deal put together that a doctor couldn't understand" is only partially a joke and probably true most of the time.
When I analyze successful people, men and women, the heart and soul of their success is controlled emotions. Emotions that are not triggered by past failures, past wounds, past hurts or past insults, real or perceived.
If you are living life with your emotions either out of control, or available to be triggered by circumstances that you live in, it means you emotions will be driving your life, versus your life driving your life.
Or, in other words, your emotions will be misdirecting your life rather than your consciously chosen goals directing your life. That is true in living, in loving, and in business. It is most certainly true in law.
The second clear specific performance item, including defined goals and objectives and standards is the condition of your mental and physical being. Since your mind is your most important weapon, to the extent you mind is interfered with by alcohol, substance abuse, emotional outbursts, or anything else that will interfere with the laser sharp perception of the situation, you will be impaired.
The only question is how much will you be impaired. This particular analysis may go even further. To the extent that your body is in as good a condition as it can be in; and that you are certain that you picked the right food to fuel your body and your mind, you get a certain competitive advantage.
To the extent you make certain you get enough sleep, as opposed to doing other activities, you get a certain competitive advantage.
On the other hand, should you choose not to take excellent care of yourself, you take away from your competitive advantage, each and every time you abuse yourself, so physical/mental plant of which you are in control of to be a better competitor in business and in living, you are reducing yourself from being a better competitor in business and living.
It is unquestioned that alcohol abuse, substance abuse, overeating and failure to get enough rest will all affect you emotionally. Bad emotions make for bad decisions. Uncontrolled emotions are bad for relationships between human beings.
If your emotions are uncontrolled, you will become untrustworthy to the person you are in business with or relating to. The one thing that is crucial to any relationship is predictability, to a certain extent.
If you have a high degree of predictability, and someone's expectation of you is a high degree of predictability, and you fulfill that expectation, you have long term trust and ability to build relationships, businesses and organizations.
On the other hand, if your predictability, which means how you react to situations, time after time, is random (one time the reaction is good, one time the reaction is bad), you become untrustworthy on a level that is unacceptable to anybody who is looking to be a highly functional individual.
Being partnered with a business partner or a life relationship partner who is unstable emotionally, or who is emotionally driven by past failures, wounds or hurts, is dysfunctional in and of itself, if you say you are into or looking for high-performance on your own.
The expression "what do you want" does not allow your own agenda to have priority. Your reasoning is not understood by a person who has their own reasons why their emotions are uncontrolled. If you are a result driven person, then you must control your own emotions in order to produce a good result on a consistent basis.
Consistency is what customers are looking for, what clients are looking for, is what friends are looking for and what lovers are looking for:
- Consistency, consistency, consistency.
There are many different kinds of fidelity.
Sexual fidelity is but one of them. Emotional fidelity, being true to who you are and true to who you are trying to relate to is another one that is as important as any other kind of fidelity, because if your business partner or life partner cannot trust your reactions to situations, and you cannot trust how they will be, it will, sooner or later, fray the relationship or fray the thought about the relationship, which is all you have in the first place.
A low tolerance to frustration is another fatal flow in living, lifestyle, relationships and business. One must have extraordinarily deadly, deep patience in order to succeed, and the extent that you see an individual who has a low tolerance to frustration, you see an individual whose emotions are triggered by events.
Life just happens, and if you can't handle life without being frustrated by it, you will guarantee yourself a long unhappy time, and continued failure.
When you are flying, it is not good enough, in a crisis, to give your best analysis, you must give the correct analysis, or you will die. Life is exactly like that. Your best analysis, but the wrong one, is as fatal as a totally wrong analysis, arrived at without giving it your best effort.
Air Crash Principal Applicable to Divorce
There is a principle, which is taught to pilots and annunciated by the NSTB (National Safety Transportation Board) after investigating thousands of airplane crashes. The principle is as follows:
FATAL AIRPLANE CRASHES ARE ALMOST NEVER CAUSED BY A
SINGLE OVERRIDING PROBLEM SUCH AS HAVING AN ENGINE
FALL OFF. FATAL CRASHES ARE ALMOST ALWAYS THE RESULT
OF A SERIES OF UNRELATED SMALL PROBLEMS DEVELOPING THAT ARE DEALT WITH IMPROPERLY AND ESCALATE INTO AN IRREVERSIBLE FATAL CRASH.
Put another way, the principle can be clarified as follows:
A SERIES OF SMALL, UNRELATED, IMPROPERLY DEALT WITH PROBLEMS WILL
SYNERGIZE INTO A LARGE POTENTIALLY FATAL PROBLEM AND BECOME TOO LARGE TO BE EFFECTIVELY DEALT WITH.
In divorce cases there are a large number of unrelated small problems that, left to themselves, will develop into a significant problem for the person going through the divorce.
The only person who has the talent and ability to identify the problem; choose which sequence of actions are best to deal with that particular problem; and prevent the unrelated small problems from synergizing into a difficult situation, is a highly experienced divorce attorney.
Parties in a divorce are almost never in the mental condition necessary to see the problem, sequence the response properly, and select the proper action.
Supplement to the Air Crash Theory:
I am operating on two theories regarding organization. The first is that you must be operating on a road map, which is a Vision Statement. The second is that you must be clear about excluding things from your life that do not support your Vision Statement, Mission Statement or Goals.
If you view your life as a continual organizational task, and the degree of success which is achieved is related to the degree of organization, task sequencing, and order that you are able to impose on it.
The degree of certainty, which you exercise and create precision, certainty, accuracy, predictability and responsibility from this strategy, both financially and physically, is essential. The certainty of the location of your documents, your possessions, your tools, and the everyday objects necessary to support your life, from paper clips to pots and pans, from wills to bills, and all other items that effect your life.
The second principle that I operate on is as follows:
I read a science fiction book, quite a while ago, and there were small short stories in it. One of the short stories in it was called "The 10,000,000,000,000 Names of God"; and the story based itself on the following.
There was a computer genius in San Francisco, and several high-ranking Monks from Tibet came to him and talked to him about buying a super-computer and asked him to generate a program where the program would say the 10,000,000,000,000 names of God, so that you had a program that repeated and repeated with all of the small variations of Krishna, hare krishna, hare rama, etc.
What the Tibetan Monks didn't tell the computer genius was that their religious belief was that when the last name of the 10 trillion names of god was repeated, the universe would cease, as it should, and all would become nothing.
The rest of the story went that the computer genius bought them a super computer and then he and the monks figured out that it would take about a year and a half for the 10 trillion names of god to be printed out by this computer.
And about one year and a half, minus one day, the computer genius figured out that actually what was going to happen was when the 10 trillion names of God had been printed, the universe was going to end. And as he looked out the window after he had this particular revelation, the sun started to dissolve in front of him.
Now, how I relate to this story is if you are ordering your universe, and revealing whatever the blocks are that are in your universe, as you get closer and closer to order, you get more and more empowered; but even if there are 1000 things that flatten, you have flattened 999, it is still out.
So, the effect is nowhere near as great at 999, as it will be when you put the last 1000th thing in place, or in order, or put it in sequence, or tasked and protocol.
I am thinking about how to take the living circumstances of people and order them, or the living circumstances of my clients, and order it to such a degree that the orderliness of their lives gives a different force to their part of the confrontation, or the contest, or the dispute.
It is interesting to me that at 999 out of 1000 things flattened in your universe, the effect is not very great, although there will be some effect; but, at 1000, there is some kind of transformation (the 100th monkey syndrome); so the part of the task is identifying the living tasks, sequencing them, and taking a look at, if you have a life, what is it that you really need to deal with.
What I know from my contact from the program is that some leaders didn't have to do anything other than think about fine problems, so there was one of the few people in the world, really, who was handled in a way that his creativity would be, to a certain degree, unleashed. He didn't have to think about anything but those specific issues and items that came up, most of the time.
That is part of where the incredible or remarkable results came from, is because he had some of the very finest thinkers and people around him in life, so that the results actually came out of this synergy which existed in two ways.
One is they were very direct, intelligent people who had very specific tasks that they were accountable for, they had consequences if they were not accomplished or fulfilling them; that there were specific measurable results put into a time framework of "by when?" That strategy just happens to be how General Motors runs also.
When you take an industrial paradigm, about what makes Hewlett Packard great, or Motorola great or Xerox great, and you take the principles of that, and apply them to human endeavor, versus an endeavor to manufacture cars, manufacture chips, etc., you can get an extraordinary result, because humans are much more malleable, and they don't stamp the same way an automobile fenders does.
When people get into a confrontation or event where everything they have in life is at stake, ["everything" means that kid, your life, your emotion, your money, etc.], then you have the breakdown of monumental proportion, which will, absolutely, allow you a breakthrough of monumental proportion.
The event is so great, so unmanageable in general, and the fog of the anxiety, fear and risk of emotion so clouds individual's judgments, that they actually deteriorate the situation far past the necessity of how much it would normally be deteriorated because they are not ordered, they don't have tasks, they don't have sequences called get up, brush your teeth, get a breath of fresh air, read an affirmation, or whatever else they choose to do.
That technology also works for the garage, the living room, where they are going to fix things, including "Drawer five is where the screwdriver is." It’s a simpler version of the fact that the leader never had to know where the screwdriver was, and there was that whole period of years when he never drove, everybody else did. Lastly, if you take a look at the time of absolute brilliance which was exhibited, it was then.
In our current time, Microsoft is an excellent, far reaching organization. Please note that it gets attacked because it is being excellent; because it is going to be the best in the business. People can't stand that.
Bob Dylan said a great thing in song . . . he said, "People are always trying to get you down in the hole they are in instead of trying to climb out of their hole."
I have found this piece of wisdom to be a great insight, particularly through operating with people in the middle of the breakdown of dissolution, a custody dispute, or a relationship breakdown; this major stressor gives them the opportunity to super ordinate their lives through this event. When opportunity knocks, the brilliant people see the paradigm shift, recognize the opportunity as being an opportunity and open the door.
Assumption and Fact:
When a person is giving you a report, or relating to you his version of what happened, on any specific item, event or condition, the questions you need to ask are these:
Is the observation an assumption?
An assumption has no basis in fact?
An assumption is what somebody thinks or feels?
Is the observation a fact?
If it is a fact, what evidence are you drawing on to make certain the statement is a fact?
An example of fact and evidence is as follows: It is daytime outside; I can see the sun?
What is the agenda that the reporting person has in reporting the item, condition, event or complaint?
When you are looking at the agenda of someone, are they protecting an already entrenched position, protecting their territory, or are they putting out a version of what actually happened that will either get them the position, the rule, or the job that they want in the future, or will it eliminate work for them in the future?
·What is the purpose of the person in giving the report. The purpose should hardly ever be ascribed what the person says it is for. An example of this is:
"I want to tell you this, man to man."
"I want to tell you the truth."
"I am only telling you this for the good of Mr. Jones."
"I am fully for the firm, and it is hard for me to tell you this, but I am going to tell you this anyway."
"I have come to a realization, and I need to share it with someone."
If you are not looking for unalterable facts versus events that have various versions available in the reporting, then you will not be able to give deadly accurate advice and analysis. When three people see an automobile accident, there will be three different versions.
It is very hard to make decisions based on that kind of personal observation on an event that can be interpreted with emotional overlay, self-interest overlay, or ignorance of the topic or the tactic.
If someone has an opinion about a principle, we should ask :
What are you basing that principle on? You must determine what evidence you are looking for in order to make the decision as to what tactic or activity you are going to recommend or undertake.
I am sure that when we are talking about situations that exist, there are overworked, overemotional, under-informed and incompetent observations, which, when all mixed together form a brew called "I think this is what ought to happen."
Accurate Analysis Demands Assumption Versus Fact Decisional Critera:
It is essential that you verify what the individual who is communicating the information to you did to verify the accuracy of the statement or data.
It is essential that you not only verify the authenticity, but ask hard questions about the experience of the individual in the field, or in interpreting data, such as they are passing on, to be certain that it is accurate or consistent with what their experience is in that area of business or life.
It is essential that you get hard evidence to verify the success of the individual in the field, or the acknowledgement by other individuals who have an excellent reputation in the field, that this person is an expert; that there is hard evidence by way of papers written that have been acknowledged as accurate; business transactions closed successfully that indicate the individual is successful in that field of endeavor.
The difficulty with analysis of information is that people who have absolutely no educational courses or experience in a field attempt to understand information transmitted and make money, value, or time commitment judgments in areas or businesses in which they have no experience in whatsoever.
Individuals rarely acknowledge their lack of understanding of analysis and/or their lack of information in any field.
Individuals simply "speak" and "pass on" incorrect, fuzzy, inaccurate, assumption driven information. Individuals do not have, as their own personal standard, the refusal to pass on any information, which has not been verified by them as accurate; or that the source they got the information from has been verified with hard evidence, or unalterable fact standard.
This self-imposed standard of what should or should not be passed on is based on what you would be willing to live and die for if it were true or not true. It is based on an understanding that when you communicate something as being true and accurate, without verifying it, you are participating in misdirection and confusion.
If one wishes to be a person who makes a difference, a person of consequence; a force, in and of themselves; they must be certain that all of their utterances be true and accurate, or they must not make them.
To say "John is a nice man." after having just met him is not accurate. An accurate communication is "I have just met John, he was nice to me for the 10 minutes we met."
Promoters, producers, entrepreneurs all have, as their basic stock in trade; their essential, most important characteristic, the ability to communicate assumptions, hopes and dreams as if they were unalterable facts; and as if they were real; as if they were rock solid, steel hard, impermeable, and written in accordance with the laws of the universe. Nothing is ever farther from the truth than that.
Unsophisticated people take information given from careless, commission driven individuals as if it is true; as if the promotion or product works; as if 3% of the population of (fill in the blanks) North Dakota, the United States, England, New York City, will purchase the product, and you will make .5% of that.
There is a reason there are so few billionaires and millionaires out of 250,000,000 people in America. The pinnacle of making $150,000 per year, out of the 250,000,000 in the United States is small. 1/10th of 1%, 1/20th of 1%? There are no instant, overnight winners, except in the random choice of the lottery.
No one ever puts person A with person B and makes a million dollars.
One cannot live their life based on that all you have to do is have the idea, put the idea together with the right person and then you make it.
The way to check your specific business ability is look at your personal benchmarks such as your:
Bank account
Tax return
Car you are driving
Soles of your shoes
House
Lving circumstances
What you spend on luxuries
Monthly life-style costs you
Quality of the overall individuals that you are doing business transactions with on a regular basis
Net worth
Gross worth
How many employees you have
What acknowledgement has been given you professionally in your field
Look at what whether or not you are considered a teacher in your field (most importantly, not a self-anointed leader, a self-anointed teacher or self-promoting speaker)
It is an unrelenting, remorseless, deadly accurate assessment of your own ability, experientially, professionally, intellectually, and educationally, to assess the specific information given you that you are being asked to either transmit, pass on, or make a decision on.
The major failure of individuals in analyzing incoming information is to step back and examine the examiner; or to analyze the analyst.
The question you must ask yourself is "What is the basis for my personal ability to accurate analyze this data?" The major problem with that question is that hardly anyone will say
"I do not have the proper education, professional experience, specific experience in this field, or intellectual capacity to make an accurate analysis."
All promoters, producers, and transaction purveyors are highly skilled at sounding as if they know what is true about the data the sellers are transmitting.
There was a famous statement made ten years ago that people should get into gold stocks, because gold was going to go to $642.13 an ounce in six months, based on the current condition of the world's economy. Never happened, didn't happen, couldn't happen, won't happen, not this century is the true fact about gold at $642.13 an ounce.
One should check to see what it means when someone says I am the President of the United States Gold Standard Company. The immediate question should be:
How long have you been involved, exclusively, in the sale of gold?
What are your company’s revenues?
Where are your reserves?
What professional organizations, regarding gold, are you a member of?
What professional qualifications do you have to deal in gold?
Give me five people with whom you have dealt in gold with in the last one-year who will give you references.
What is the name of your banker?
Will you allow me to contact him for a reference? (Bankers now only give references only at their peril if the information is inaccurate.)
What is the name of your attorney?
What is the name of your accountant?
Will you give me a release so that I may talk to them about your qualifications to handle the transactions that you are proposing I invest my money in, my time in, or pass this information on to my friends, clients or acquaintances about?
The major impediment to accurate information processing is not allowing myself the thought"I don't know anything about this at all; I cannot truly understand it; I don't understand the vernacular of the transaction; I need to have a professional analyst review it.
Doctors, lawyers, and wealthy people all have lost billions of dollars by failing to assess and acknowledge their inability to truly understand the intricacies and subtleties of almost all deals.
It is also essential to clearly ratify and get in writing the authority that the individual has who you are speaking to.
Will the principals of the proposed transaction be bound by the individual who is giving you the presentation sales pitch or the conversation? Do you think for one moment that you have the ability, ever, to analyze a contract with boiler plate phrases in it, that may be perfectly clear to you as a lay person, but have significant legal meaning which is totally unrelated to the actual words you read?
I am a 34-year, highly-experienced litigator. I don't handle contracts. I have been teaching at the USC Law School for more than 10 years. I do not consider myself competent, or the appropriate person to analyze any contract. If I don't you shouldn't,
Require that the presenter of the data, facts, or deal, qualify himself, and that you are granted the authority and release to check the individual's qualifications, so that you may see how financially successful, or transactionally successful they have been in their life.
I know that when highly speculative, or questionable deals are constructed, it happens that they take 50 or 100 people who are going to sell the deal, put them in a room, and educate them as to how to communicate the deal in the most attractive possible terms; educate them about what they can and cannot say, and then turn them loose.
After the presenter of deals or transactions are turned loose, there is absolutely no regulation on what they say with regard to words, because they are not written down, they are not recorded; and there are always two versions to what they mean.
Beware of P.O. Boxes, individuals who work out of their home; people who cannot afford a secretary; individuals with answering services only; deal presenters who will refuse to take you to their living quarters. Look at their clothes, look at their shoes; look at their car.
What is the motive for the person giving you the information? It will always be to move you to do something. Either to part with time, which is money in a different form or money, which is worth money.
What is the gradient of the relationship, or the quality of the relationship you have with the individual? How well do you know them? Do not be misled by people who say they love their wife; by people with children, by people on school boards. These are meaningless and, at times, protective colorations and disguises.
Beware of people, at all times, asking you for your friend's names and telephone numbers. Your telephone numbers.
Remember, if you are a person of consequence, an individual of quality, one who makes a difference, when you give a person the name or phone number of a friend of yours, you are putting your stamp of approval on the person who will be contacting them.
They will say, "I am a friend of Jane's." "I am a friend of Bills." "They gave me your number because I have something wonderful to tell you."
They fall on unsuspecting or unsophisticated ears, and that is not a responsible thing to do.
Many people have false, deceitful resumes and printed background histories. You must, in any deal, verify truly, that someone was Class of '71 Harvard; Class of '68, Miami Law; Class of '58, Stanford Economics (the courses like economics, etc.) People are improperly in awe with supposed developments in educational backgrounds.
Verify all representations; check with unalterable facts:
The reason it is so difficult to get into the habit of writing down appointments, telephone calls, what you did day by day by day, is that the mind knows that you will unconceal its sabotage, and that is the last thing it wants you to do. Accurate written time-dated contact, task and observation record, unconceal your daily and weekly activities.
A personal review of these activities will allow you to track your effectiveness, your competence and your habits; which, again, is the last thing that the imp who lives in your mind wants you to do.
This is also why you must have your tape recorder and a notebook, because the mind will absolutely disappear any unconcealing thoughts you have, when and as they occur, as fast as it can.
This disappearing overrides hard knowledge that one may have from courses, consciousness exercises, etc. The mind is a better hider than the self is a bring forwarder.
One must have as their purpose in a relationship/partnership that they not disturb their partner, create upset around their partner, be sharp with their partner.
An intelligent, mature view of the partnership/relationship is that if you are around an individual 10 hours a day, or 24 hours a day, or seven days a week, all of the imperfections and less than perfect visions and performances will come up. It should be a choice to ease those human miscues, to make the person who made the miscue comfortable.
The preceding paragraphs addressing assumption and fact from strangers attempting to get you to part with time, money or both, is dwarfed by the deadly effects regarding your performance, your integrity, your goals, and the execution of your life plan by your own individual assumptions regarding information that you use to operate on.
The individual you need to be the hardest on with regarding the assumption of fact as I am discussion here, is yourself.
If you can hold yourself to the same meticulously accurate data that you act on, change your decisions or positions on, plan on or plan with in your dealings with other people, than your level increases immediately in the realm of effectiveness, force and integrity.
If you take no action, and change no position that you have until you have absolutely, unequivocally verified the information upon which you are about to act, your performance and the reliability and consistency will be accelerated and enhanced 10 fold.
This is not a comfortable standard. This interdicts our own chatter and background conversation about how close we are to our dreams, or how well we do. It is essential to not know how well we do, but how well we are actually doing.
By examining our own performance in the bright light of hard evidence, unalterable fact, and outside verification from an acquaintance of ours who is remorseless, and has remorseless compassion about reporting to us about reporting to us about our current state of mind, our current actions, or our current performance, we will be enormously enhanced.
Inviting such difficult examination is not a human trait that many people exercise. It is far too uncomfortable; it is far too easy to live with our dreams, miss directions and inaccuracies with ourselves rather than be a stand for accuracy, integrity, and truth in our own self- assessment.
It is far more difficult to assess someone else's truth, accuracy and integrity when we are not rock solid, steel hard grounded in those standards ourselves. Horsepuckey purveyors get fooled by other horsepuckey purveyors. Birds of a feather flock together.
If you lie down with dogs you come up with fleas.
All of these are observations, which need to be reviewed when taking a look at ourselves. The reward for being difficult with ourselves is that we become far less available to be fooled by anyone else.
If we are true to ourselves, and the standards by which we are being true to ourselves are the ones described, we will become a person to be reckoned with, and more importantly, someone who can be trusted and looked to for an accurate reading of what is happening at the moment. That is an enormous gift to your business associates, your friends, and most importantly, to yourself.
SuperOrder and High Performance Your Life:
By J. Michael Kelly, Esq.
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