Archive for the ‘Life GPS’ Category
3 Tips for Pacing Your Work for Lasting Success February 14 2012
There was a vastly underrated road trip movie last year starring Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. called “Due Date.” Downey plays an uptight businessman and Galifianakis plays a goofy but lovable stoner. They take a cross-country trip together. Hilarity ensues.
Whenever Downey’s character would explode in rage, Galifianakis’ character would say, “Hey, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.” It’s one of my favorite catchphrases ever. Not sure why I love it so much. Part of it was Galifianakis’ delivery, I guess. Part of it is the rhyme. The biggest reason it sticks with me is because I think it’s a great mantra for most leaders today.
Here’s my evidence for that. For the last seven years, I’ve run 360-degree surveys and self-assessments based on the leadership model in “The Next Level” with thousands of executives and managers. The lowest-rated item across that group for the past seven years has been: “Pace(s) myself/himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.”
In the 360 surveys, the colleagues usually rate the leaders low on that behavior, and the leaders’ self-assessments are even lower than those of their colleagues. By the way, the scores have gotten lower every year.
What’s going on? Here’s what I see.
3 Things Injured Yogis and Injured Leaders Might Have in Common January 13 2012
For the last two weeks, an article called How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body has been one of the top 10 most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website. When I checked this morning there were 734 comments on the article on the Times’ website. With approximately 20 million yogis in the U.S., the article has definitely struck a nerve (pun somewhat intended).
As many of the commenters point out, there are flaws in the way the article was reported. At the same time, as the article illustrates, you can get injured doing yoga. (This just in, you can also get injured running, lifting weights, doing Jazzercise or just about any other form of exercise.)
As I’ve written here before, I’ve been a regular yoga student for a little over a year now. Happy to report that I haven’t injured myself. To the contrary, I feel a lot better than I did before I started. Still, I can see how you could injure yourself doing yoga. Interestingly enough, some of the root causes of yoga injuries are the same ways you can injure yourself “doing leadership.”
Here are three things that can get you into trouble both on the yoga mat and in your leadership role:
3 Questions to Guide Your Year January 3 2012
I was away for a few weeks over the holidays. It was a nice break and it’s good to be back. One of the good things about being back is reconnecting with friends I haven’t seen in awhile. One of those is a friend from yoga. We gave each other a hug hello at class the other night and she said, “Well, here we are.” My response was, “Yeah, 2012, it’s the only year we’ve got.” (Unless, of course, the physicists at CERN figure out time travel this year.)
So, for now, this is the only year you’ve got. What do you want to do with it? I don’t have any idea what your answer is or should be. Only you do.
What I can offer is three questions to guide you this year that have worked for me, my family, friends and clients over the past 15 years. They make up the core of a personal planning model that my wife, Diane, and I developed for ourselves called the Life GPS®. Each of us complete a new Life GPS® every year around this time. Like the GPS app on your smart phone or the GPS system in your car, the Life GPS® is a great tool for setting a destination and making the adjustments along the way that you’ll need to get there.
Using the Life GPS® will be the subject of a book I’m writing this year. You can also read more about it in the chapter on Picking Up Regular Renewal of Your Energy and Perspective and Letting Go of Running Flat Out Until You Crash from my first book, The Next Level
For now, though, here are the three questions that comprise the core of the Life GPS®. Before things get absolutely bananas for you this year, I encourage you to take a little time to consider these questions and write down your answers on a single sheet of paper. If you refer to that sheet on a regular basis this year, I think you’ll like the results you get.
Here are the questions:
Put Your Own Mask on First November 14 2011
If you’ve flown on a commercial airliner, you’ve heard the flight attendants say something along the lines of, “In the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, yellow oxygen masks will deploy. Put the strap of the mask over your head and breathe normally. If you’re travelling with passengers who need assistance, put your own mask on first before assisting other passengers.”
That line came up last week in one of our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching programs. The lunchtime guest speaker was a fantastic executive who shared a lot of personal wisdom and stories about what it takes to make it as a leader over the long run. She told us that her older brother is a pilot for United Airlines and that, when the demands of life get her feeling a little frantic, he always says, “Remember, put your own mask on first.”
Her point, of course, is that you have to take care of yourself to effectively take care of others. It’s what I call in The Next Level
What does putting on your own mask look like in the rest of the world? Here are three ideas to get the conversation started. What taking care of yourself tactics would you add to the list?
Being Busy Makes You Stupid September 19 2011
Being busy makes you stupid. And when I say, “you”, I mean me. Heck, I’ll just say it out loud. Being busy makes me stupid.
I realized this in a conversation with my wife on Friday night. We were out for a long, relaxed “just the two of us” dinner. Of course, we had scheduled that months in advance because of our calendars. Anyway, there we were, relaxed and focused on the conversation. She’s starting a new business and was telling me about her plans and what she has already accomplished. I was blown away. One reason for that was because she’s got a totally awesome plan and is executing it with precision. The other reason is because, until that moment, I wasn’t aware of about 80% of what she’d been up to in the past month.
I know that makes me sound like a jerk. Maybe I am.
3 Danger Signals That Your Integrity is at Risk June 1 2011
Some recent news stories, one in particular, have caused me to pull out my dictionary to look up the word, integrity. (I like to use the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language because it offers the roots of the words all to the way back to the Indo-European roots.) The primary definition of integrity is steadfast adherence to a moral or ethical code. The Latin root is integer which, in this context, means whole and complete.
So, if you have integrity, it means your approach to life is integrated. Everything is whole. By that definition, the recently resigned coach of the Ohio State University football team, Jim Tressel, doesn’t have it. As a thoroughly reported and sourced article in the current issue of Sports Illustrated points out, Tressel has at least an eight year record of willfully ignoring violations of rules in which Ohio State boosters gave his players sweet deals on cars, free tattoos, marijuana and other favors in exchange for football memorabilia and the opportunity to hang out with them. When the story came to a head a few months ago, Tressel let his players take the fall and denied any prior knowledge but documents now show that he knew and tried to cover it up.
None of this is what anyone expected from a coach known for his button down, sweater vest demeanor. In addition to his winning record and national championship title, Tressel was admired by many for conducting pre-game quiet times with his team to study humility and other virtues. He kept a prayer request box on his desk and was praised by retired NFL coach Tony Dungy for his integrity.
It’s not my intent to pick on an easy target. My point is that the cumulative pressure to win whether it’s coming from your fans, your shareholders or yourself can make it is easy to compromise your integrity. The person you thought you were or want to be can get buried by the decisions you make that don’t square with that ideal. Using the Tressel story as a case study, here are three danger signals that should tell you you’re putting your integrity as a leader at risk:
How Are Those Resolutions Working Out for You? January 14 2011
As I wrote in a post, Leadership Lessons from Yoga, a few weeks ago, I’ve been a regular at my local studio since last October. On January 2, I realized that if I wanted to get a space for my mat in class, I needed to get there earlier. The studio was packed to the walls. It stayed that way for every class until a couple of days ago when things started thinning out. Last night, January 13, there was plenty of room.
My guess is that there’s an algorithm that correlates the extra space at yoga with the annual new year’s resolution attrition rate.
You know how it goes. “This year, I’m going to…” Fill in the blank with the change you know you need to make. I know more and more people who have sworn off new year’s resolutions. It’s easy to understand why. When you make a resolution, you’re making a promise to yourself. In the absence of any support system or process change, those promises to yourself can be hard to keep. And breaking a promise to yourself feels really awful. It’s easier and less painful to just not make the promise.
Yesterday, I spoke with 350 people who joined in a conference call on Charting Your Course for 2011 with a Life GPS®. My goal was to share a process for mapping out your goals and actions in a way that is realistic and achievable. In my own life and in working with leaders over the last 10 years, I’ve learned that the success rate for big promises made without a process of ongoing support and follow through is pretty low. As the late, great coach John Wooden once said, “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur… Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens and when it happens, it lasts.”
That’s why I’m creating an opportunity to join me in creating and following through on your own Life GPS® this year. You can read all about the offer here. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to do so.
May big things occur for you this year.
Chart Your Course for 2011 with a Life GPS® December 30 2010
For each of the past 15 years, my wife, Diane, and I have taken some time in January to map out our course for the upcoming year. We use a planning tool we created together early in our marriage that we call the Life GPS®.
While it takes its inspiration from the Global Positioning System, GPS in this case stands for Goals Planning System. Much like the GPS you use when travelling, the Life GPS® helps to get you where you want to go by clarifying the desired destination and outlining the steps you’ll need to take to get there. Sure, you might drift off course from time to time, but having things laid out in a Life GPS® can get you back on track and raise the chances of reaching your desired destination.
Over the past 10 years, hundreds of my executive coaching clients have used the Life GPS® to help them reach their goals in their lives at home, work and in the community. Next month, for the first time, I’m offering an open opportunity to create your own Life GPS® with some coaching and guidance from me. Because I believe in the Life GPS® approach and have seen how it helps people reach their goals, I’ll be conducting a complementary teleseminar on January 13. I’ll walk you through the model, share a process for creating your own Life GPS® and fill you in on plans I have to support you in staying on track throughout 2011.
Here’s a link to the registration page for the Life GPS® teleseminar. I hope to hear you on the call and ask that you share this information with any colleagues, friends or family members who you think could benefit from it.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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