| “You can have anything you want if you will give up the belief that you can’t have it.” – Dr. Robert Anthony | |
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| “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I coach leaders from sunup to sundown Monday through Friday and have been doing it for more than 8 years.
For some reason, this year has been filled with tons of “Light bulb” moments for me. In these moments, I have had some profound breakthroughs that I know to be absolute truths. I am confident that if you internalize these lessons, you will see great results.
It’s almost as if as soon as I hit the 8 year mark Obi Wan Kenobi sent me a text saying, “CJ, the force is strong within you…”
I’ll share some from time to time in this space.
I’ll start with one that hit me especially hard this week. I’ve noticed that some leaders want to focus on what went wrong during the past week, month, year, etc. Conversely, I have others who will briefly learn from their experiences and then go forward.
Guess which leader has more success?
I’ll admit that it’s tempting to replay past events over and over as if this obsession will change the past.
It won’t.
There is zero value in dwelling on your mistakes.
Leave the past in the past.
CJ
| “You won’t realize the distance you’ve walked until you take a look around and realize how far you’ve been.” – Anonymous
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Last night at dinner, I placed a bunch of broccoli on my daughter’s plate. Her immediate response, was the same as always – “That’s too much, I could never eat all that broccoli!”
I countered with my classic – “I have a lot of faith in you Corinne, you can do anything you chose.”
I’m OK with my daughter seeing a plate full of broccoli and seeing a problem with no possible solution – she’s 4 years old. However, at some point ( I think I’ll wait until her 5th birthday) I want her to change the way she thinks and recognize that she is responsible for finding a solution to life’s challenges.
Unfortunately, most people still approach problems like my 4 year old. They see every difficulty as an insurmountable challenge and instead of looking for the solution they spend all of the energy putting together a list of excuses why they won’t be successful.
The simple truth is that there are two types of people in this world – those that find problems and those that find solutions.
Guess which one makes more money and has more success?
Which one are you?
CJ McClanahan is the Founder of reachmore, which teaches small business owners how to build a business that runs without them. For more resources on business leadership, please visit reachmore’s seminars
| “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” – Juhann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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Have you ever changed lanes in traffic and been startled by a loud horn from someone that you just cutoff?
Unless you ride the bus to work, this has probably happened to you on multiple occasions.
The problem we all have as drivers is that there is a small area that you can’t see in your rear view mirror called your “blind spot”.
What most people don’t realize is that they also have blind spots in their personal and professional lives.
These are areas where we have (and often have had for a long time) deficiencies we don’t realize.
For example, in my first few years in business I would attend many networking events. Rarely did I meet anyone interesting and often left the event wondering why I had wasted my time.
One evening a good friend and client of mine (Larry) walked up to me and said, “Why don’t you just go home?” When I asked why he suggested I leave, Larry told me that, “Everyone can tell you don’t want to be here. You stand in a corner with this awful look on your face like you are better than everyone else. Do you think people want to talk to someone like that?”
Initially, my feelings were hurt. However, now I was aware that the reason I wasn’t getting good results from networking was because I was a jerk.
I changed my behavior and built my business attending these events.
Where’s your blind spot?
CJ McClanahan is the Founder of reachmore, which teaches small business owners how to build a business that runs without them. For more resources on business leadership, please visit reachmore’s seminars.
I had lunch with an extremely talented CEO the other day.
It was the first time that we had met and as I often do in these meetings, I asked him about his background, both personal and professional.
Throughout our conversation, he talked about a handful of lessons that had shaped his career and led to his success. These lessons often came from a mentor or a good book.
What I found interesting (and typical for most of the highly successful people I have met) is that he attributed most of his success to a handful of very simple lessons that he had learned over a 30-year career. It was these “turning points” in life that provided him with the knowledge and confidence to achieve his dreams.
The same is true for each of us. Our success if is a direct result of the decisions that we make and the decisions we make are based upon our knowledge and experience. Thus, the better your knowledge, the better your decisions and ultimately your results.
Unfortunately, most people undervalue learning. As you probably know, the average adult reads less than one non-fiction book per year.
As a society, we have convinced ourselves that we are too busy to learn.
I would argue that our ability to process and interpret information is a key competitive advantage in a commoditized world.
What are you doing to improve yourself?
| “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” – Pericles
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