March 1, 2003

A free Ezine sent to you twice a month by Glen Rediehs, Ph.D.: Personal Coach, Corporate Coach, Organization Development Consultant

Web site: www.SolutionLeader.com

E-mail: Glen@SolutionLeader.com

Solution Leader Ezine will give you solutions for your personal life and the people side of your business. Every issue is filled with practical strategies plus a little humor.

Please forward this Ezine to anyone you think might enjoy it! It’s free!

If you received this Solution Leader Ezine from someone else and would like your own free subscription, click on www.SolutionLeader.com/freenewsletter.html. Subscribe -- it’s free! Try it!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!

9,788 PEOPLE HAVE SUBSCRIBED to Solution Leader Ezine in the five months since it started in October, 2002!!!!!

Please KEEP FORWARDING IT to friends and ENCOURAGING OTHERS TO SUBSCRIBE to this FREE Ezine!

Let me know if you have comments or suggestions. I invest a great deal of time preparing each issue and love to hear from readers. What do you find most helpful? What would you change?

In This Issue:

Overcoming Barriers to Achieving Your Goals (Part Five of a Six-Part Series)

A Little Humor

Thought for the Day

Are You Winning the Talent War?

In the Next Issue

Overcoming Barriers to Achieving Your Goals

(Part Five of a Six-Part Series)

Part One of this series challenged you to scale your level of satisfaction with different areas of your life and begin developing some goals.

Part Two showed you how to set goals that will actually work.

Part Three helped you produce an action plan that will get you what you really want.

Part Four told you how to put power behind your action plan – make it really work!

To see Parts One, Two, Three or Four, go to www.SolutionLeader.com/archives.html.

Now, the new stuff. How can you overcome barriers to achieving your goals? Change can be difficult. Unexpected obstacles to success can emerge. So, what do you do?

First, no excuses and no catastrophizing. If you slip in your progress, that’s all it is – a slip. You’re accountable for the lapse, but it’s not the end of the world. A slip doesn’t mean you were stupid to try to achieve your goal nor that you are doomed to failure. If you need to redesign your plan to make it work better, do that. Then just get on with it.

At this point, you have had some experience with your goal and action plan. Rethink your goal and redesign your plan if necessary. Check these things:

Is your goal clear, specific, positively stated, measurable, realistic, something you can control or influence, and something in line with your values? Did you write it down? Do you have a timeframe for completion? Is it just a wish (“Gee, I wish I could lose some weight this year”) or an action goal (“I will lose 24 pounds by the end of the year – two pounds a month”)? How deeply do you care about this goal? Will achieving the goal make a difference to you personally? Ask yourself, “How will I be better off?” “How important is this to me?”

Is your action plan built on your past successes or best practices from others around you and from self-help literature? Are the individual action steps small enough to be do-able and big enough to be meaningful? Are the steps in the right sequence? Do you need to add steps or take steps out? Do you have a timetable for completion of the steps and the plan? Have you lined up the resources you will need in order to accomplish your action plan? Did you write your action plan down – step by step and with completion dates?

Have you told key people in your life about your goal and action plan? Did you ask them to monitor your progress and keep you on track? Have you posted your goal wherever a reminder would help? Have you made a formal contract with yourself – written it out and signed it? Did you set up a feedback or monitoring system? Is it working? Do you need to revise it? Did you build rewards and/or penalties into your plan? Are the rewards and/or penalties sufficient and frequent enough to change your behavior? Are they appropriate?

Are “shadow beliefs” and negative “inner dialog” sabotaging your efforts? We all interpret the events of our life and come to some conclusions or beliefs about ourselves. Constant repetition of these beliefs can become a very powerful inner dialog – for better or for worse. A few failures can have you convinced that “I’m just no good at …” or “I can’t …” Is your inner dialog sabotaging your plan for change? Is there an “inner voice” putting you down and taking the energy out of your efforts to achieve your goal? Challenge that voice. Replace the negative inner dialog with positive, empowering positive inner voice.

Be gentle with yourself. Patterns of behavior take years to develop and they might not change overnight.

Revise your plan in any way you think will increase your chances of success. Then just get on with it!

WANT A LITTLE HELP?

Need a little help achieving the future you want for yourself?

It’s been my life’s work and my passion to help individuals and organizations create their own best futures. Let’s work on your future together. You can make it happen!

PLEASE CALL ME at 704-788-9184 or Email me at Glen@SolutionLeader.com.

A Little Humor

Tim's Goldfish

Little Tim was in the garden filling in a hole when his neighbor peered over the fence.

Interested in what the youngster was up to, he politely asked, "What'cha doing, Tim?"

"My goldfish died," replied the boy tearfully, without looking up. "I've just buried him."

The neighbor was concerned. "That's an awfully big hole for a goldfish, isn't it?"

Tim patted down the last heap of earth, then replied, "That's because he's inside your dumb cat."

Children's Deep Thoughts

“Deep Thoughts” submitted by children in a newspaper contest:

I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I don't have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life? -- Age 15

Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the things I cannot, and a great big bag of money. -- Age 13

For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That's what happens to cheese when you leave it out. -- Age 6

Who Is The Most Obedient?

The father of five children had won a toy at a raffle.

He called his kids together to ask which one should have the present.

"Who is the most obedient?" he asked.

"Who never talks back to mother? Who does everything she says?"

Five small voices answered in unison. "Okay, dad, you get the toy."

Thought for the Day

The Star Fish (Based on the story by Loren Eisley)

I awoke early, as I often did, just before sunrise to walk by the ocean's edge and greet the new day. As I moved through the misty dawn, I focused on a faint, far away motion. I saw a youth, bending and reaching and flailing arms, dancing on the beach, no doubt in celebration of the perfect day soon to begin.

As I approached, I sadly realized that the youth was not dancing to the bay, but rather bending to sift through the debris left by the night's tide, stopping now and then to pick up a starfish and then standing, to heave it back into the sea. I asked the youth the purpose of the effort. "The tide has washed the starfish onto the beach and they cannot return to the sea by themselves," the youth replied. "When the sun rises, they will die, unless I throw them back to the sea."

As the youth explained, I surveyed the vast expanse of beach, stretching in both directions beyond my sight. Starfish littered the shore in numbers beyond calculation. The hopelessness of the youth's plan became clear to me and I countered, "But there are more starfish on this beach than you can ever save before the sun is up. Surely you cannot expect to make a difference."

The youth paused briefly to consider my words, bent to pick up a starfish and threw it as far as possible. Turning to me he simply said, "I made a difference to that one."

I left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. I returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish in to the sea.

Are You Winning the Talent War?

There’s a lot of talk about “talent” these days – talent pools, talent management, talent mindset, acceleration pools, etc. Despite a sluggish economy and high unemployment, business owners and executives continue to cite hiring and retaining first-class employees as a big challenge. In a recent Conference Board survey, business leaders in the United States, Europe and Japan ranked competition for talent among their top five concerns.

The talent in your organization, your human capital, is like money in the bank. How well are you using and retaining your talent assets?

What is Talent?

“Talent” is used in two ways:

1. “Talent” is used most frequently in a very general sense. In The War for Talent, Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod define talent as “the sum of a person’s abilities – his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive.”

2. “Talent” is also used in a less familiar, but equally important, sense. In this second sense, it refers to the neurologically-based way people go about job (and life) activities. These natural predispositions are not the same as competencies, skills or abilities. Instead, they are underlying factors that drive how a person uses his or her competencies, skills and abilities. They are set early in life and endure. They cannot be taught. Everyone has such talent.

Here are two examples of “talent” in the second sense:

On the basis of Gallup research, Buckingham and Coffman, authors of Follow This Path, describe 34 “strengths” within four categories:

• Relating Talents – How a person reaches out to others and responds to others.

• Impacting Talents – How a person sets a course for individuals or groups to

follow and then gets them moving along that course.

• Striving Talents – How a person gets motivated to get things done and seek

accomplishments.

• Thinking Talents– How a person gathers, processes and makes decisions with

information and mental images.

In Pure Instinct and The Conative Connection, Kathy Kolbe proposes that we all have innate abilities or inclinations that she calls Striving Instincts. They result in four “action modes” – ways that we tend to go about getting things done. Every person shows more or less of each of these four modes:

• Fact Finder – The instinct to probe, investigate, deliberate, etc.

• Follow Through – The instinct to pattern things, systematize, integrate, etc.

• Quick Start – The instinct to innovate, experiment, challenge, etc.

• Implementor – The instinct to demonstrate, build, convert ideas into tangible

form, etc.

What Can You Do to Win the Talent War?

Pay attention to talent. Jack Welch (GE) and Wayne Callaway (PepsiCo) spent about half of their time on people – recruiting new talent, selecting the right people for positions, grooming high-potential employees, reviewing the talent pool, etc. How much time do you spend on talent?

In The War for Talent, Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod suggest five actions to win the war for talent:

• Embrace a talent mindset.

• Craft a winning employee value proposition.

• Rebuild your recruiting strategy.

• Weave development into your organization.

• Differentiate and affirm your people.

Coffman and Gonzalez-Molina, authors of Follow This Path, report that great organizations do the following:

• When selecting someone, opt for talent, not simply experience, credentials,

intelligence, etc.

• Look carefully for the fit between talent and role.

• Identify and develop talent instead of fixing deficiencies.

• Adapt roles to better suit employees’ strong points.

The talent in your organization, your human capital, is like money in the bank. How well are you using and retaining your talent assets?

Where have you seen owners and managers inspire and productively use the talent in their organization? How did they get that to happen? Send your stories, quotes, thoughts. As space permits, I will try to publish them. Send them to Glen@SolutionLeader.com.

WANT A LITTLE HELP?

It’s been my life’s work and my passion to help individuals and organizations create their own best futures. Let’s work on it. You can do it!

PLEASE CALL ME at 704-788-9184 or Email me at Glen@SolutionLeader.com.

In the Next Issue:

Celebrate Life and Your Accomplishments – Part Six of a Six-Part Series

A Little Humor

Thought for the Day

To Change or Not to Change – What’s Best for Your Organization?

In the Next Issue

Please forward this Ezine to anyone you think might enjoy it! It’s free!

If you received this Solution Leader Ezine from someone else and would like your own free subscription, click on www.SolutionLeader.com/freenewsletter.html. Subscribe -- it’s free! Try it!

To unsubscribe from this Ezine at any time, just click here.

Privacy Statement: We respect you and your privacy. Your name or Email address will never be sold, traded, rented, bartered, or given away. It will only be used by me to communicate with you – ever! Period.

You may share, replicate or forward this Ezine or sections of it as long as the attribution, copyright notice and contact information is included.

Past issues of the Solution Leader Ezine are available at my web site: www.SolutionLeader.com/archives.html.

Contact me at Glen@SolutionLeader.com. Got a suggestion for a future topic? Thoughts about the Solution Leader Ezine? Want to submit an article? Other questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you.

Find out more about me and my services at: www.SolutionLeader.com.