It was one of those typically spectacular sunny March afternoons in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Tops were down on many cars and the golf courses were buzzing with activity. It seemed as though everyone was outside. Everyone, that is with the exception of seventeen business leaders engaged in an enthusiastic leadership conversation at the home of Bob Ditta, former President of Dental Services Group.
George Obst and Bob Ditta, former Chairman and President of Dental Services Group
George Obst, DSG former Chairman, and Ditta were there to contribute to The Leaders Institute, a collaboration between the Fountain Hills Chamber of Commerce and John Hersey International. It’s mission is to provide business leaders with an opportunity to tune into a high level leadership conversation by exposing them to a variety of businesses and business leaders. The opportunity today was for these local leaders to learn from two leaders that led their team to purchase the Dental Services Group business and then grow that business, in a highly competitive category of 14,000 Dental Labs serving 118,000 Dentist, to double it’s size in fourteen years, without acquisition.
When Obst and Ditta, along with two other DSG executives, purchased the business through a leveraged buyout, it consisted of 34 Dental Labs across the United States doing approximately $30 Million in annual revenue. When the group sold DSG in 2005 it’s revenue’s were in the $60 million range.
This Livingroom Leadership session covered topics like:
the 4 original partners are as different, behaviorally speaking, as different could be. How were they able to allow those differences and still run a successful company. George Obst offered that the solution was a clear delineation of responsibilities, largely tied to the individuals strengths. Ditta added that there was a remarkable consistency in values. Each of the partners was committed to growing the business through employee relations and development. Unlike many of their competitors, DSG took on training, at all levels, like no other company. The strategy was to help the employees learn more and achieve higher levels of knowledge and competence in their jobs. The belief was that it would actually lead to significantly lower turnover levels, more loyalty and thereby increased customer support and service. It worked!
Creating Your Own ceremonies. Each year DSG spent gobs of money to put on it’s annual leadership meeting in Scottsdale (where else?). The teams would arrive with great expectation, primarily for the awards dinner. A pretty extravagant affair for nearly 300, the recognition awards always stole the show. Obst and Ditta agree that “recognition has always and will always be the key to motivation and employee loyalty.” Obstencouraged all the Leaders Institute participants to create ceremonies, even if they were solo-preneurs.
Performance accountability and reviews. Everyone at DSG, from the person working on a bench crafting, grinding and polishing the caps ordered by our dentists, to the Chairman and President, had annual goals. And, the leadership team, some 65 strong were trained to manage to those goals. Every employee had an annual review and the subject of goals was always discussed. As Bob Ditta put it, “Goals don’t lie. You either achieved the goal or you didn’t. If you didn’t, the why is relatively unimportant. How we can do better next quarter or next year is the key.”
Educational goals. Everyone in the company had to have an educational goal. What were they going to do to get better at their job? DSG was willing to invest in these classes and seminars because, in keeping with the values of the 4 partners, training and development would pay dividends way beyond the cost.
Listening. Listen to your customer, listen to your prospects, lost customers and employees. Then have a system in place where what you have heard can be acted upon. This is the bullet to excel, be the best. You will hear and observe everything you need to dramatically improve on a regular basis.
Dental Services Group implemented strategies that were way ahead of the competition, at the time. We look at these strategies as sound, basic leadership habits that work every time. Well, I don’t know about every time, but these sure did work for George and Bob and Dental Services Group.
The meaning of our life is closely related to the personal purpose we discover in it, most certainly one larger than oneself.
In the course of our life, we never stop looking for who we truly are, for our reason for being; it is our way of being the leaders of what we may become. We are as big inside as our world is outside, and we look without end for the next frontier on self-improvement and self-knowledge. The more we dig inside ourselves, the more we grow.
Developing your personal purpose involves a journey of discovery and learning. It is not a problem or situation you have to solve. It can take you many years and countless hours of reflection to define what is truly valuable and significant in your life, however, one thing is certain, your purpose in life is tied to your vision and values.
In order to advance in your search for your purpose you have to ask lots of questions:
- What’s in my dream list?
- What does this list say about my inner desires and purpose?
- What activities and work energize and excite me?
- When am I my best self, most happy and alive?
- What are my special talents and strengths?
- How do I want to be remembered when I die?
- What would I like to tell about my life when I’m older?
- What would I like my family, friends, colleagues, and partners to say about me after I’m gone?
- Did I contribute to society?
No dream should stay unaccomplished, no book unwritten, no love concealed, no bright idea discarded. If anything, we all should live determined to find our purpose; this should be our strongest motivator to be our best and never give up.
It is not easy to state your purpose; after all, how easy is it to put in words your deepest inner beliefs and thoughts? It can be truly frustrating; however, it is worth it. Once you get there, you will have more clarity and will feel stronger emotions and passion for your purpose.
Once you know what your purpose in life is, use affirmations to strengthen it in order to center on realizing your reason for living. Use quotes that inspire you and energize you, and consider these too:
- Support it with your work
Does your work support your purpose? If not, try to find ways to fit your purpose within your job before you decide to leave it. Talk to your manager about aligning your purpose with your responsibilities; make a list of the positive good things your work offers you and review it regularly. Stay in the loop about opportunities to practice your purpose within the organization and your team. Once you start looking for the good things, you will find a huge amount of them all around you.
- Support it with your family
Talk to your family and write a list of family values and mission. Everyone has to contribute with their idea of the perfect future for the family. Find common ground and a comprehensive view of what you want your family life to be.
- It is not about setting goals
It is a common confusion to think of goal setting as the tool for envisioning your best life and identifying your purpose, however, goals are merely stages in the journey. In order to make your purpose a reality and to advance towards your dream you have to set goals and reach them, but these goals are a means, not an end. Goals have a beginning and a conclusion, while the process to find your purpose never ends.
- Be authentic
Your purpose must be yours, do not let external influences manipulate it. It is about what you wish, not what others think you should do or be. Forget about impressing anyone, you are the only one who should be positively affected by it. Keep it to yourself.
- It is a process without end
You whole life you must work to refine the expression of your values, vision, and purpose. It never stops, like the need for food; it is something you require, something you live on.
- Spend time alone
Learn to meditate. Get some time to be alone, to be still, to reflect and to look for spiritual connection. During this time, between 30 to 45 minutes, you will clarify your values, mission, and vision, because you will be listening to your inner self.
To most observers, the transformation that a motivational speaker can effect on a person seems like an apotheosis — something divine, unaccomplishable by mere mortals. Top executives of major corporations think of a motivational speaker as able to read people and coax or cajole them to perform better in their chosen fields — and thereby improve the effectiveness of their company as a whole — but no one seems to be able to pin down how this change occurs.
An effective leadership speaker will cause people who listen to speak in terms of ‘waking up’, or the speaker having ‘reached into my soul’, and inspire the speakers to ‘put their all’ into their endeavors. Such a consultant will put forth workshops and presentations that change those who experience them on a profound mental and emotional level.
When an assignment is completed effectively, efficiently, and profitably, it is because the motivational factors behind that assignment have been properly evoked. This can and does happen by accident or coincidence, but it is the job of the professional motivator to ensure that it can happen on demand.
Quite often, a company’s managers create a negative emotional atmosphere within their workplace for reasons that vary from personal failures to a perceived prejudice on the part of their superiors. These negative vibes create a motivational vacuum that is all but invisible to upper management, but can ruin a company’s effectiveness. The motivational consultant’s job is to overcome these unknown emotional hurdles and achieve an upbeat atmosphere capable of effective work.
The motivational speaker isn’t teaching his listeners anything that they don’t already know. Rather, his goal is to ‘retune’ his audience to be more attentive to their latent talents and ingrained abilities. By offering a variety of methods to develop and measure one’s inner spirit, and thus enhance one’s overall level of motivation, a leadership speaker can inspire a person to view — and tackle — his problems from a different perspective.
The most effective motivational speakers are able to get an audience of thousands to stop focusing on their problems and start focusing on their opportunities; to see the nadirs of their lives as the prequels to the zeniths which will follow. This causes the audience to view ‘tomorrow’ as a source of hope and success rather than dismay and drudgery.
Such leaders never trivialize or deny the problems facing their audiences, but re-frame them as prospects for positive change. By making this change in the minds of the audience, the motivational speaker changes very little in the listeners — but he creates the ability in each individual for that person to change himself…and therein lies the true miracle.
As the economy continues to struggle, and unemployment is at an all-time high, I find myself speaking to groups of people that are confronted with economic realities harsher than anyone in America has faced since the Great Depression. These folks have often watched their homes, cars, and certainly their savings slip through their fingers, and many of them feel that their once-stable lives are out of their control. I speak to each group for their own specific purposes, of course, but in many cases I find myself weaving a second message into my original: a message of attention.
Back in early 2002, business for motivational speakers was slow. The 9-11 disaster had stolen a lot of the power of hope and motivation, and as a whole, we had moved from serving people to searching for people to serve. I attended a gathering of some of the top names in professional speaking. We talked about how hard things were for us and for the country, and the irony of the need for hope spiking just as the demand decreased.
An expert took the stage, someone who was supposed to tell us how to survive. Instead, she told us that there “was no problem”. She told us about professional speakers that were overbooked, and had more clients than they could serve. She pointed to the need for hope, and told us that we were paying attention “incorrectly”.
The concept has been in the public sphere for centuries, under a variety of different names. The most current ‘phenomenon’ surrounding this simple concept is called The Secret, but in fact there’s no secret to it.
As a group, our attention was focused on the problem — on the lack of business. Our attempts to get more clients were focused on our own empty calendars. The busy speakers paid attention not to their own schedules, but to the needs of their clients. They approached each call not from a ‘please, I need you to hire me’ perspective, but from a ‘how can I assist you?’ point of view.
Her words moved me deeply. I knew, intellectually, that we create in our lives that which we focus on the most. If you devote your attention to your problems, they will multiply. If you pay attention to your successes and blessings, they will multiply.
So what does of this have to do with the people I talk to today? Simple: most of them are paying attention incorrectly. The economic realities that we face today are challenges — but every challenge comes with opportunity built-in. Instead of focusing on the fact that your job is tenuous (or even already gone), focus on what you can do with your time and skills if you’re not locked in to your current position.
One personal friend of mine lost a valuable job as a sales director for a major international entertainment company – and his response was to relax, cut back (of course), and start doing what he had wanted to do since his college days — play with Photoshop. Today, he makes good money as a well-known freelance Web graphics designer. By focusing on the opportunity that his change afforded him, he turned a disaster into a success.
Leadership speakers have known about this basic psychological tool for generations, but as my story above demonstrates, even we lose focus from time to time. Everyone does — the important part is to recover quickly and shift your attention back to the opportunities as firmly as you can.
As we all know, not only crazy people talk to themselves. We all spend the whole day talking to ourselves, even if we don’t realize it. Self-talk is like having a radio in our heads. We hear it wherever we are, and more often than desired, this voice is a non-stop reminder of how unlucky, bad, or silly we are. This character in our heads is an expert in getting us down through pessimism and criticism.
This voice can make us feel worthless and can leave us without control over our lives. It can convince you to not go for that one chance with that girl or boy, not to apply for your dream job, or not bother to make that positive change your life needs so much. Our inner critic feeds on the fear and the doubt it produces in us, but it is up to us to let it take control. We can easily control the radio in our heads to play the stations that work for us instead of against us.
There is a way to change the station to a more positive one every time the negative tries to take control. Follow these 3 simple steps, and turn the voice in your head into your biggest admirer:
1. First, be aware of that negative voice talking to you and what it is saying. Observe the self-talk inside your head, truly listen to it; commonly we don’t pay attention to our thoughts, they just come and go automatically, and equally control our lives. You must gain awareness of what that voice is saying. Is it saying the same thing over and over again? How is it making you feel? Most of us don’t focus consciously on what our inner voice is saying; we simply accept its judgment as the truth, and this is where many of us get stuck, sometimes for our whole lives. Negative self-talk is, in most cases, only trying to deceive us with feelings of fear and doubt. What it says is not true. Learn to recognize who truly is in control of your life.
2. Second, assess your inner voice. Learn to recognize the forms it takes: maybe it gets nervous, mad, or frightened? Maybe there is a hint of a positive voice trying to gain strength over the negative one; if there is, you should be proud. Try to focus and listen to that background positive chat more and more every time you hear it. With practice, you will eventually hear it all the time. The most important thing is that you are aware that your inner critic is just a habit of your mind and that you can easily change the station to listen to a different tune, one that makes you feel good, energized, and proud about yourself and your life.
3. Now, after consciously recognizing, listening, and evaluating your inner critic, you can start replacing negative talk with positive one. Give the good talk space to speak, and encourage it through positive affirmations, until you feel the change inside yourself. Affirmations are very powerful; these energize you and prompt you to act positively. If you feel resistance, try this: As soon as you identify the negative talk nagging you with something like “I can’t do anything right”, instantly change that into a positive affirmation, like “Everything I do turns out right”. This is a very powerful exercise because it allows you to assess how each statement makes you feel, and you will want to continue giving yourself bigger doses of positive talk every time.
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We hear it all the time; so many people so sure about their intention of focusing on what they truly want. They are so certain, their attitudes are so positive, and yet, nothing seems to happen. “I have done it all, BUT everything is the same”, Stephen says. He is fast to point out that he hasn’t moved a bit in the direction of his dreams.
We must remember that our language is directly linked to our thoughts; thus, we have to pay attention to what we say and how we say it in order to understand a great deal about our way of thinking. Right there, where Stephen said ‘BUT’, is the key.
One has to make it a conscious habit to catch one’s words. This could easily be the only opportunity you have to actually catch your true thoughts, because the only reason you could catch yourself is because you are going to say it out loud, otherwise, it would just stay back there, in your subconscious. The subconscious is happy to grab everything you pay some attention to, whether it is valuable or not, thus, in order to refine its choices, you could refine your language.
In our vocabulary there are millions of words, however, we use a small amount of those millions regularly. The amount of words we use depends directly on our upbringing and education, and one thing is certain: no matter how we were raised or what kind of education we have received, in order to be successful in life we have to be conscious of the words we speak and learn to differentiate what words are meaningful and which ones are pure junk.
No matter where we come from, there are certain words everyone should eliminate from their vocabulary if they want to make their life big, and want to make it big in life. These words are:
- But
- Don’t
- No
- Never
- Can’t
- Should
- Try
- Might
- Want
- Hope
All the words above express some kind of doubt, incapability, negativity, unwillingness, and lack of control. Let’s take ‘hope’ for example; ‘hope’ is a major success among people. People love what ‘hope’ stands for; nevertheless, this word is normally used to express desperation, more than real hope.
If you think this is trivial, think again. Remember, our words are tightly linked to our thoughts; whatever you say is deeply entrenched in your mind, so, when you consciously keep out of your vocabulary certain words, you are making yourself think in a more positive way. As everything, changing your vocabulary needs training, and it may seem difficult at first, however, if you learn some new great words to substitute the less positive ones, it may make it easier to switch:
- Yes
- And
- More
- Chose
- Intent
- Plan
- Can
- Will
- Trust
- Allow
Start using these words more in your daily conversations and you will experience MAGIC, there you go! Another great word!
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Many successful writers have talked about incredible ways to prioritize our tasks, organize our days, and get the best out of our time by focusing on what is truly important for our success in life.
All this makes a lot of sense and even sounds wise. Many of us try to apply it to our lives in an attempt to become better human beings and professionals; however, there is one little, or maybe not so little, thing called procrastination.
An important part of the active population of the world suffers from procrastination, a condition that makes us ignore behaviors and actions that could enhance our lives and change them for the better. In order to get over this condition, one must find its root, which in many cases seems to be fear. Some studies have established that there are three aspects that influence procrastination:
- Confidence in oneself, an issue guided by fear
- The need for immediate fulfillment, due to early programming
- Impulsiveness, trait of immature behaviors designed to meet early needs
Basically, it is different for each person; it depends on his or her upbringing and how he or she has developed ways to fulfill his or her basic human needs.
As a child, Susan commonly felt she had no power over her controlling father; thus, she procrastinated to feel in control and to feel free. Eventually, Susan learned a different and positive way to feel powerful, but this was only possible after she identified where the problem was.
Roger is a senior executive at a marketing firm. At one point he was so overwhelmed by work that when his boss asked him to handle a new assignment he became extremely anxious. He was so scared of not being able to do it right that he just avoided the project. He procrastinated.
People mistakenly confuse procrastination with laziness; however, laziness does not encompass a dose of guilt, while procrastination makes the person feel extremely guilty, and he or she punishes him or herself. It eventually becomes a vicious cycle, because the more the person punishes himself or herself, the more they procrastinate, and the more they procrastinate, the more they punish themselves, leading to a complete self-esteem crisis.
The good news is that there is a way out of this negative behavior, and here we show you 4 steps to get you there:
1. You have to recognize that procrastination is not something you ‘caught’ yesterday. You have to be willing to go deep into your life to find the root, and a good way to start is to try to identify when it started affecting you.
2. You have to allow yourself to act in spite of the emotion. You can have negative feelings, everyone does, but the difference lies in whether you let those feelings rule your behavior or not. We shouldn’t let emotions guide our actions, but we commonly do, especially when there is fear or guilt involved.
3. You can start small. Think of what you could do, a small task, that would get you started and out of procrastinating. It can be the smallest thing. Let’s say you have been neglecting cleaning the attic. You can start by making a list of everything you remember is in storage there, next, think of what you would like to do with some of the stuff; maybe you would like to give some furniture pieces to your daughter, or donate a box of books to your community’s elderly home.
4. You have to be aware of distractions. These can control you if you don’t control them. Honestly think about what distracts you from acting on your goals. It could be something like checking your inbox, soap opera time, or playing solitaire to ‘relax’, only you know what excuses you make up.
Each small step you take will make you feel stronger and better, and if you can imagine how good it will feel to get there, you can certainly get motivated to complete the task.
Maybe the most important thing is to learn to forgive ourselves. We are human beings, and when we have to overcome a condition such as procrastination we have to understand that it takes time to heal and that we deserve to be kind to ourselves.
Now you are ready to start your journey; do not waste another second! Get going and start living!
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Many of us should put a little thought into what it is that we want to achieve by proving that we are right and, thus, that others are plainly wrong. Most of the times what happens is that we win a quarrel but lose an acquaintance, even a friend. We seriously should stop to ask ourselves why is it that we deviate so much from our goals when we feel challenged or afraid.
Every intelligent professional knows that when we deal with people, be it to provide a service for a client, negotiate a contract, or motivate an employee, if we make them feel worthy they will care a lot for what we have to say; however, as soon as they utter a word in the wrong direction, it is very difficult for us to stop ourselves from letting them know how wrong they are, with the inevitable consequence: our power to inspire is gone, and we are just left with a discussion between our hands.
This is possibly the most common way to boycott ourselves, as human beings, and our businesses. Maybe we are just being human; maybe it is in our nature to be foolish, so, how do we move beyond needing to be right to the point where we truly show we care for others and our business?
There are studies that have tested thousands of communicators and identified a common practice among the most successful ones. These people work to not make others be wrong. And, how exactly do they do it?
These successful communicators lowered their expectations of the others’ behaviors before meeting with them. As it turns out, this lowered the chance of making a big deal out of what was said during the climax of the conversation. These communicators consciously decided to arrive to a meeting not to make the person be wrong but to focus on the areas where he or she was knowledgeable and had a good point. Eventually, when the time came and these people showed less than perfect understanding, the communicators were able to react calmly and get the best out of the situation.
This may not sound ‘business professional’ to some, until you stop to think that it is much better than the alternative: putting yourself into a communication fight to prove who is the cleverest, most intelligent, and wisest person in the room. You can be right, but you most definitely don’t need to make others be wrong to prove it.
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