Leading and the Act of Loyalty

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  
The act of leading is more than being the visionary, or acting thoughtfully for others.  It is predicated also on how loyal and unconditionally helpful you are to others.

In many ways people cannot follow you if they can’t trust where you’re coming from.  

Great ideas are best acted on when others in the room know where you stand with them.  Teams stall when they don’t know what to expect from you.

Ways loyalty drives others

  1. When others feel you truly respect them.
  2. When you create a clear vision.
  3. Going out of your way to help.
  4. Taking interest in what people want to do.
  5. Being consistent

Servant Leadership, unconditional positive regard, and thoughtful patience are all specific behaviors that can engage your loyalty to others.  

Each time you consider the little things with others, you amplify your influence, and enlarge your leadership footprint.  

Getting More Clarity in Our Lives

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

 
Photo by the Author 

The idea that we can do more in less time is an alluring idea.  Multi-tasking is often the instant fix we crave to deal with the real feelings of being overwhelmed and overcommitted.  If we take a deeper look, the feelings we have are more a part of misguided priorities and moving away from better clarity in our lives.

The Multi-tasking Myth: Clarifying your vision and values

Starting out with a clear definition of what you are (your role), and what you want to do (your values), is the beginnings of real clarification.  

The reasons we feel we need to multi-task is that others have defined our roles and values, and we have let them.  

The reasons multi-tasking doesn’t work is because it isn’t aligned with a clear vision, and tasks are not grouped in a way where energy expended maximizes getting things done. 

Creating your Clarity – Learning to Say No

Another reason that clarity is lost, is that reasonable boundaries in our lives and work are not developed.  

In order to create more clarity, you have to decide on the reasonable limits needed to really succeed in your roles.

 The ‘being everything to everyone’ idea is another example of going down the wrong direction faster.

Developing and Maintaining Real Clarity

  1. Define who you are and what contributions you want to make.
  2. Define the ways you want to serve others.  Clarity without service, is like having empty goals.
  3. Reinforce and reflect daily on whether you are staying on track.  You know that you’re off track when you’ve fallen into many things that don’t get closure in your life.
  4. Keep clarity by evaluating things you do.  Are you allowing yourself to say no?

Having clarity means we are focused on things that have a defined beginning and end.  

Energy is focused, and distractions are minimized.

5 Ways to Make Things Better Everyday

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  

Photo: By the Author

When you have a lot of demands, it is inevitable that “self delaying” or procrastination creeps in.  It seems the more you do, the more things are still there.  Remaining focused on important things becomes quite a chore when you’re so busy being busy.  How do you make things better when it seems all you’re doing is chasing your tail?

  1. Reflect on why things are not better. It may your mindset.  Things may actually be OK,  but you are simply unsatisfied with the repetitive patterns in your life.  A lack of satisfaction and reasons for it, is the first path to explore to make things better.
  2. Look at what is sapping your energy. How you are managing your energy on a daily basis is another key answer in making things better.  Are poor habits, overeating, lack of activity, avoidance behaviors or sleeping impacting you? These are valuable clues to self improvement.
  3. Engage a improvement plan, act on something everyday.  Making things better may require you to implement one courageous act everyday.  Just that one deliberate act puts you on the path to better results.
  4. Adjust your mindset. Be faithful to yourself and act.  Self-talk, personal affirmations and rewarding yourself for making a piece of your life better, is important for keeping motivation high.
  5. Generate everyday change by documenting what is better.  Just a 15 minutes at the end of your day noting your personal victories creates the mindset for the next day.  Keeping these accomplishments in front of you gives you the momentum for the next day.

Making something better is a daily adventure.  Resolve in 2016 to make a daily effort to improve something small everyday.

Going for the ‘root cause’

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  

Don’t be afraid to look at what you really think about a problem

Change is misdirected when the causes of the problem are vague in the first place.

How many times have you reacted to something, but haven’t thought through the bottom line drivers of the problem?  Making changes as a way to respond are better formed when the deeper root causes are known.

Years ago in management training, I was introduced to the quality management concept of Root Cause Analysis.  The idea is that you get to the actual driving forces of quality problems and defects in your work.  The idea is pragmatic, but not always practical at the same time.  It takes time to really find out why and with what you are doing wrong.

Sometimes, you have to detach yourself from the environment you’re in to get to the deeper causes of a problem.  

Ways to go for the root causes:

  1. Back away from the problem for a while.  Backing away does not mean avoidance.
  2. Think deeply about what you think the bottom line is…what is your intuition and heart saying to you?
  3. An educated conscience will tell you what needs to be different. Those that are more in tune with themselves, can reach clearer definitions of the root causes.
  4. Write down what you really think.  Sometimes it might be a hard pill to swollow, but a reality that needs to be faced.
  5. Consider different options and conclusions.  Test them out and seek further validation through trusted colleagues.

Reaching the root, means you have to ‘dig in the dirt’.  There is often a lot of debris that needs to be cleared.

The 4 Stages of Influence

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

Influencing others is a humble and respectful enterprise.

   
Influence is an easy to understand but hard to implement strategy in interpersonal relationships.  The opposite is ‘resistance’, and a close cousin is ‘change’.  The confusing thing is that the meaning of influence sometimes gets mixed up with ‘manipulation’, a less than desirable behavior.

Influence is generally regarded as the ability to change something or someone because you’ve built the trust needed to make it happen.  Influence just ‘doesn’t’ happen, so how does it occur?

The 4 Stages of Influence 

Those that influence the best are those that have the most humility.  

  1. Letting yourself be influenced by others.  When you open yourself to learning, listening and replying, you have begun the process of influencing another.  Going where someone is communicates their importance to you.
  2. Engaging in trusting actions.  It’s hard to influence others without being trustworthy yourself.  This step takes patience and time.  If you’re rushing this, then you’re likely engaging in subtle manipulation.
  3. Having a valued skill or behavior. A component to influencing another, is having knowledge, skill, or behavior that others legitimately value in some way.  Using this in ways that help others is often the glue that builds your ability to build influence and build confidence in your actions.
  4. Showing humility.  Those that influence the best are those that have the most humility.  A person that makes a lot of noise around themselves, creates a shallow outcome of manipulation.  Influencing others is a humble and respectful enterprise.  One meant to build others up, rather than build one’s ego.
  • Which steps may you be using? Which ones are absent as you work with others?

The Process of Regaining Confidence

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

Photo by the Author

Regaining confidence is not an external event.  Those that are waiting for something to happen to feel better, may end up disappointed…

If you feel a lack of confidence, it’s best to start out with yourself first.  That’s where the problem really resides.  Things happen, you make mistakes, and you may lack the right skills.  

Finding the Path to Confidence

  1. Be Real: Face your weakness – it’s what you need to do differently, not what needs to change.
  2. Work through people: Find those that believe in you.  
  3. Deliver value, build confidence in others, receive credibility.

It’s not what happens, but what you decide to make happen.  Acknowledge your weaknesses, and build a plan to mitigate them.  If you take the ‘minimal’ path, you will remain at an unsatisfying level.  The motivation you generate will repay you in ‘confidence’.  Others will gradually engage and reinforce what you have become.

The Importance of Rediscovering Your Roots

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  
Photo by the author 

A friend once said to me: “As things change, sometimes people move toward you, and sometimes they move away from you.”

As we develop, we form new interests.  As we form new relationships, new and different patterns of life take hold.  Some good, and some create a distraction. Over time some relationships shift, and we find find ourselves moved away from the aspects that brought us confidence in ourselves.

Making an exercise in the rediscovery of our roots, can be a powerful direction that brings us back to more effectiveness, renews our sense of well being, and helps us cope better with life challenges.

Here are some of the ways, connecting with our roots can make a difference in our lives:

  1. We connect with important past relationships that were positive and played a part in our development. Often times the busyness of life takes us away from people that contributed a lot to who we are today.
  2. It helps us reconnect with things that worked for us in the past.
  3. We find new energy from things that brought richness in our past.
  4. We can solve current difficulties using “tried and true” approaches, that we have abandoned at some point.

Ways to connect with our roots:

  • Call up a friend or associate you haven’t seen or talked to for some time.  You might be surprised how good it makes you feel.
  • Engage a rewarding hobby that enriched your life in the past.
  • Remember how you solved problems before.  Use those techniques again.
  • Write and reflect on your problems.  Remember what really helped you get through.

The Rewards are there…Rediscover something that you “moved away from.” Locate what meant a lot to you in the past and reengage it.  Reexperience some of the joys it brought you, and learn to cope with existing problems, using things that worked in the past.

The Strategic Advantage of Tenacity and Resiliency

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  
Photo by the author 

Sometimes going through the same path can seem unappealing.  Repetition is mind-numbing at times.  Reframing your path as tenacity and resilience is a fresh way to look at your efforts.

Your efforts have a meaning if they are important to you.

When repetition is unproductive:

  1. When the efforts don’t contribute to something higher than yourself 
  2. When they don’t align with what you see as important 
  3. Mis-directed meetings 
  4. When your heart is not in it
  5. No results…

Resilience is combining thoughtful repetition with a mission despite the hardships encountered.

Ways to make your behaviors and actions mean more – and create an advantage:

  1. Do more that matters.  Define what that is.
  2. Examine whether the hardship is tied to important values or a mission.
  3. Is your activities wearing you down, or are they creating “tired but rewarding energy.”

Too many activities are a result of distraction, survival, and reaction.  If any of these exist, it’s probably time to find a new path. Embrace repetition, when it is getting you closer where you want to go.

Taking On Worry By Being A Better Problem Solver

| Brian E. Dick, MA, MBA, LPC

  

Photo by the author 

If you worry a lot, then you probably need to get into more problem solving skills and behavior.  Humans are tied to knowing, and when something isn’t quite known, there is a tendency to gravitate toward anxiety or worry.  Obviously this does little to change the situation.

Worry squelches and cuts off your ability to use problem solving.  Working through something may require different levels of problem solving.  Often cutting through a problem means you have to think it is possible to solve it.

A problem solving process

  1. Define what is really the problem.  Use one or two words to label it.
  2. Think of all the evidence you have that “won’t support” your original worry.
  3. Come up with exceptions when the problem didn’t exist.  What was happening? 
  4. Gather if needed other expertise, resources, or skills that will potentially solve the problem.
  5. Choose your options and apply one or more approaches.

Worry is only an unproductive dead end to a problem. It never leads to everything except more distress.  Moving effectively through worry requires a commitment toward constructive action and determination that other solutions exist.