From the new book: Reinvent Yourself

Chapter Five       Being the Best You Can Be  

        How can you focus your mind and energies on becoming your personal best?

            In her book Visioning, Dr. LuLucia Capacchione, points out some of the possible barriers to focusing on your personal goals.

·        Knowing what you want but not knowing how to get it. Lack of positive example or experiences with success

·        Knowing what you want but being afraid to ask for it. Fear of failure or rejection, fear of disappointment

·        Knowing what you want but being afraid to have it. Fear of the unknown, fear of responsibility, inability to redefine yourself, fear of the envy or disapproval of others

·        Thinking you know what you want, but finding it doesn’t match with what your creative conscience says.  Inner split between material and spiritual values, between other people’s agendas and your real heart’s desire

·        Not knowing what you want and then not getting it because you don’t know what it is. Feeling you don’t deserve fulfillment, lack of focus.

Dr. Capacchione believes the way to overcome these barriers is to make a real commitment to a project, a relationship, or a spiritual path.  Visioning starts with focus and ends with focus. In short, “keep your eye on the prize!”

Some lessons about achieving your personal best in the world of business came from  Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., authors of one of the best selling business books, In Search of Excellence.  I met them at a New York hotel.  Both were dressed like senior executives of IBM and were as friendly as sales reps selling a new main frame computer system to General Electric.  Peters has a background in civil engineering, teaching and consulting. Waterman has a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and a long career in writing and consulting.

One of their book’s basic conclusions struck a chord. It dealt with managers of companies, but almost everyone can relate to the theme of reaching his or her personal best. 

   (Good managers) just don’t understand why every product can’t be of the highest quality. They just don’t understand why every person can’t get personalized service . . . They can’t understand why a constant flow of new products isn’t possible or why a worker can’t contribute a new suggestion every couple of weeks . . . They are seemingly unjustified in believing every product can be of the highest quality . . . They are seemingly unjustified in believing that service can be maintained at a high standard for virtually every customer, whether in Missoula, Montana, or Manhattan . . . but it may be the true key to inducing astonishing contributions from tens of thousands of people.

                                    From In Search of Excellence, Harper & Row

What they were talking about in the book is the concept of “zero defects.”  That is impossible for most of us to attain anytime in our lives. But by setting our goal at 100% for ourselves and our families, aren’t we much more like to score higher than if we set the mark at 60%?

Here is what Peters and Waterman told me was the key to reaching higher goals:

 “In the best run companies we found that management was giving much more authority and responsibility to individual employees, treating them decently and allowing them the opportunity to become ‘heroes.’ Because everyone shared in the creation of ideas, they were more likely to be enthusiastic in carrying them out. Most important of all, management must allow their staff the right to fail. Many ideas just don’t work. But if you punish people for well-intentioned failures, soon you stifle all innovation.”

Harold Geneen seconded that point when we talked several months later. “You have to make it clear in meetings that you are not going to shoot the messenger.”  Mr. Geneen had pursued his own distinctive path to personal excellence. When he was President and CEO of ITT, he managed a team responsible for 350,000 employees and 350 diverse companies. These included Avis Rent-A-Car, Sheraton Hotels and Hartford Insurance.

He said, “You try to make decisions that you believe are a little better than anybody else has made.  You apply business imagination to facts and come up with an idea that puts you ahead of everything that’s been done up until that time.”

He believes you must base your decision on what he called “firm, unshakeable facts.”  I asked him how he went about getting this type of information and reaching a (his term) “winning decision.” His suggestions:.

1.                          Maintain open communications. Encourage people in your organization to talk with each other – engineers to marketing people, research & development people to accounting.

2.                          Examine the source of the facts. Some reports you hear are based on what someone assumes. Or it could be a rumor they picked up in the hall.  This sometimes is reported as unshakeable facts. But the truth is there may not be any real facts there at all.

3.                          Level with the people you work with. Say “I’ve got to have the real facts, and you’re going to share them with me. Then we’ll make the decisions together.”

4.                          Follow-up is important.  You have to know how the decision is being carried out.

5.                          Remember that your decisions don’t always have to be perfect. No one bats a 1000.  If your decision is only 70% right, it may be a little more imaginative than what anybody else has come up with. That makes it a winning decision.

      At the end of our meeting, I told him about some of my own nascent business ideas. Then the CEO of ITT and some 350,000 employees surprised me by say, “Hal, if you need advice, give me a call. I would be happy to help.”

In one of my less than “winning” business decisions, I never called him.

Beverly Sills, one of the opera world’s most renowned celebrities, believes that lifelong quest of becoming your “personal best” should include art and music. It begins by not being self conscious about any lack of knowledge in those fields.

“The simple act of enjoying music is all that’s really important.  No one can convince you that a painting is beautiful unless your eyes see it as beautiful. It’s the same with music. If the human voice pleases your ear, then the voice is beautiful.

“It doesn’t really matter what the critic or the person sitting next to you thinks. The appreciation of beauty is instinctive, not intellectual.”

An important part of being your personal best is staying healthy.  Jane Brody, health columnist for The New York Times and author of Jane’s Brody’s Nutrition Book.

Here is what she told me.

“The reason you should develop good eating habits is to stay healthy for as many years as you have on this planet.  Diseases or other health problems that kill or ruin the lives of so many Americans are diet related: heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, kidney disease, diabetes. These diseases are all related to eating too much of the wrong foods and not exercising enough.  Good nutrition will also help you control weight whether you need to lose or gain pounds.”   She offered these suggestions:

·        Look for a restaurant with a good salad bar.

·        Avoid a lot of calories and fat. Order meats that are baked, broiled or roasted rather than fried or sautéed.

·        Practice portion control.  That old advice from many parents: “clean your plate” has made more people fat than any other three words.

·        If you exercise and eat sensibly, then you can still enjoy the occasional fling – even including apple pie a la mode. 

You can download the complete book, Reinvent Yourself, as an eBook (Adobe PDF file). Eighteen chapters in all with special "reinvent yourself" exercises at the end of each chapter for only $6.06. Click here to purchase.

Or order as a 166-page trade paperback book for $13.95 plus s/h. Click here.