Goal Setting
Bright and early one morning, toward the beginning of the year, my Master Mind group met to discuss goal setting. Almost everyone I know thinks bigger, better and brighter at the beginning of a brand spank-in new year. My Master Mind friends are no different. It was 'Master Minder' Tom who stole the show that morning when he mentioned something simple. Positive thinking. (I'm sure he really said much more, but that's all I really remember! Sorry, Tom. Next time I'll bring the clay!)
"What a great way to think about life," I thought aloud at a stoplight at Broadway and Fairview Road after I left our group that morning. (Not a whole lot of options for entertainment at a stoplight but still, I remembered!)
For months, the thought of positive thinking clung to me. I diligently took moments like during stoplight-waiting and grocery-line-enduring to offer a prayer for a friend, to be thankful for something, to thank God for the blessings in my life or to notice something beautiful nearby.
A Little Discipline with those goals
But here's an exert from the book Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by Becky A. Bailey, Ph,D that will help make my point:
A mother walked several days on a pilgrimage to see Gandhi. She arrived and told Gandhi she was concerned about her son:
"He eats only sugar---no other food. I have tried everything to get him to eat healthfully, yet he refuses. Please help me."
Gandhi told her to go home, return in one week, and to bring her son back.
One week later, again she walked three days to return to Gandhi.
When the mother again found Gandhi, he took one look at the boy and said him,
"Stop eating sugar."
The mother was shocked.
"I walked nine days and that is all you have to say? Could you not have said this last week?"
Gandhi responded,
"I could not tell the boy to stop doing something that I was still doing. It took me one week to stop eating sugar."
Every week I receive phone calls, emails, Tweets, Facebook messages and have one-on-one conversations with parents, teachers and grandparents who are asking how I can help their child or how they themselves can overcome something. They are struggling to read/write/focus/speak...and I say *stop eating sugar*.
Okay, I don't say that. I'm making a joke of the academic, language, and behavioral disorders that can make positive thinking excruciatingly hard, but remember Gandhi's words: we must start with ourselves.
Are there any New Year's resolutions that you've long since forgotten? I raised my hand to that one! You see, I'm at fault for not always remembering to use my tools of release, focusing and dial setting, the one-in-the-same tools I expect my client's to master.
Thinking positive everyday
One last thing I must tell you. It's about my friend Tom. You see a while back Tom was diagnosed with cancer. Cancer is not a word that brings along much of a positive thought. And we would understand if Tom wasn't feeling too positive.
But that's not happening here! Tom, the one who set the think positive idea in my head back in January has remained true to his spirit: Thinking positive everyday. In fact, we all think--we all know!-- hands-down he will beat this cancer thing!
Positive thinking, has a lot to do with it. But, please, if could honor just one request for me, when you come upon those little moments like stoplight-waiting, and grocery-line-enduring, to lift up a prayer or send a positive thought for my friend Tom. It would be greatly appreciated.
And then *stop eating sugar*! Now don't you feel a little better?
4 comments:
Very good insights, Cathy! Makes me think of a post by Tom Peters in his "Pursuit of Wow" - here's part of it, below.
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One-minute excellence. I can sense the curling of your lips. While such a catchphrase makes me shudder, too, it contains a gem waiting to be discovered.
How do you go on an effective diet? How do you stop smoking? How do you stop drinking?
In short, you do it and it’s done. Then you work like hell for the rest of your life to stay on the weight-maintenance, non-smoking, or booze-free wagon.
A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
The idea is profound.
Suppose you’re a waiter and, for your own future’s sake (not because of pressure from the clowns who run the restaurant), you decide to set a matchless standard for service. How? You do it. Now.
Sure, you’ll be clumsy at first. You’ll get a lot of it wrong. You’ll need to read up, listen to audiotapes, take classes, tune in to online electronic chat rooms, visit other restaurants to collect clues. And you’ll need to keep doing such things to maintain your edge (as an opera singer or professional athlete does) until the day you hang up your corkscrew.
Nonetheless, you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest tonight. Simply picture yourself, even if it’s a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest waiter ever—and start acting accordingly. Put yourself in lights on Broadway, as a galaxy-class waiter; then perform your script with derring-do.
Does it sound wild? Silly? Naïve? Maybe, but it isn’t. The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.
The last 99.9 percent (I know it adds up to more than 100 percent—that’s life) is working like the devil to (1) keep your spirits up through the inevitable storms, (2) learn something new every day, and (3) practice that something, awkward or not and no matter what, until it’s become part of your nature.
What holds for the waiter also holds for the manager of the six-person department or the chief executive of the 16,000-person firm.
How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality? Less than a nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.
Once the fire is lit, assume you’ve arrived—and never, ever look back or do anything, no matter how trivial, that’s inconsistent with your newfound quality persona.
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Diana, thanks for bringing up the one-minute type of ideas. I like how they get right to the point and are easy to apply. So together we're saying "think positively and you can make it happen!"
I have to agree with everything in this post. Thanks for the useful information.
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Thanks for reading my blog, Alivar!
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