HOW TO COMPOST YOUR FAILURES

I lamented that I’d let weeds take over my flowerbeds. I didn’t have garbage can space, and my composter died in a windstorm, so I was left with a pile of uprooted weeds. They screamed failure to me.

That is, until God whispered, “You can compost them right there. They can mulch the dry soil. Provide natural fertilizer.”
I thought about that a moment and realized God was telling me something compelling. In essence He was saying, “Compost your failures.”
Truth: Your failures, whether they’re relational, vocational or ministry-related, are fodder for future growth. They are not wasted. Used properly and with the right perspective they become the very thing your success feeds off.
But how can we compost our failures? Four ways:

1. Use your situation to exercise your optimism muscle. As Thomas Edison famously said, “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” See your failure as an opportunity to change the way you talk to yourself.
Instead of saying, “I’m a loser” (which is not true), compost the failure by saying, “I’m closer to the next goal” or “At least I know that tact doesn’t work.” For more thoughts on this, read this quick post about killing catastrophic thinking.

2. See the failure as a holy redirection. Here’s where a healthy view of God’s sovereignty over your life benefits you. Perhaps the failure was God’s way of redirecting your focus.
In one period of my writing career, I focused quite a bit on marketing techniques, none of which worked for me. Over and over I’d try proven techniques only to fail, fail, fail with absolutely no return-on-investment for the effort. At my lowest point, I realized that if I had performed all the right marketing steps and succeeded, I would’ve taken glory for it.
Instead, I learned to redirect, to first lay every effort before Jesus, to let Him be the director of my career. My failures resulted in His much needed redirection. Your failure may be a beautiful gift, as it uncovers the idols in your life.

3. In the failure, be proactive and ask a coach or trusted friend to look at the situation from the outside. You may have a blind spot you’ve not been able to detect, something that’s held you back for years. You may have failed several times in the same way.
A trusted business coach will be able to ask the right kinds of questions to help you discern what needs to change in your life. If you’re willing to grow beyond your issue, you’ll no longer sabotage your success.

4. Realize that long-lasting kingdom success comes when God shows up in your weakness. We wrongly think that to be successful in life we must perfect ourselves, walk through all sorts of self-improvement hoops. But the beauty of the gospel is that God’s strength is only made perfect in our weakness. (See 2 Corinthians 12:9-10).
When we are strong, we push out God. But when we are weak (which is often the case in the midst of failure), God can show up. He can move through us to change lives. He can do the impossible. Remember the old quote, “When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and breaks him.”

Failure is a gateway to new things. It’s the stepping stone to new life. Seen properly and discerned rightly, our failures will be the very things we look back on with affection, thankful for a God who lets dreams die, composts them, then creates wildly beautiful life from their death.
Question: How have you seen God use your failures?
Posted By: http://michaelhyatt.com

Posted in Leadership

Leadership Moment: Be Extraordinary

Posted By: http://www.danielharkavy.com

Posted in Leadership

Why the Rich Get Richer

…and the successful become more and more successful.

I have to confess something to you. While you can definitely glean ideas, tips and important distinctions that will accelerate your progress, there are a few advantages that do separate the superachievers from everyone else that are not easily accessible.
Advantages you cannot simply find in a magazine, book or CD/DVD program, unfortunately.
These three advantages are access to Counsel, Connections and Strategies.

Let me explain briefly.

Counsel—The best in the world have the best in the world advising, consulting and coaching them. It is one of the greatest ways they gain advantage over their competitors. The best golfer, tennis player, baseball pitcher, singer, even surgeon, CEO and top entrepreneur all invest in highly paid advisors and coaches. Why? This is a massively critical point about high performance.

There is a phenomenon called unconscious incompetence, meaning, you don’t even know when you aren’t doing something correctly or to the best of your ability. It takes someone outside of you to observe, identify, prod and counsel you in order to bring awareness to the adjustments needed take your performance to the next level.   A top CEO once said to me, “You can never pay too much to rent someone’s eyes, mind and experience.”
If you want to take your life to the next level, you, too, will want to seek out the best advisors and coaches to help get you there.

Connections—It is not just who the top achievers in the world know and have access to; what’s far more critically valuable is the high-achieving reference group this provides them. As human beings we raise or lower our performance to match the expectations and performance level of our reference group. As Stephen Covey pointed out, if you take a walk with someone whose pace is quicker than yours, it will be uncomfortable at first but you will ultimately (and unconsciously) match their pace. The same is true if someone’s pace is naturally slower than yours—you will slow your pace to match theirs. The power of associations has been written about many times, but this is one of the great limitations most success seekers have in being able to raise their game and change their life—they aren’t connected to a reference group that can help them reach their goals. This is why the ubër-successful join country clubs, symphony groups, boards of charity organizations, private dining clubs and other exclusive groups where they can mix with other like high achievers. Then they unconsciously raise their respective game keeping up with each other.
If you want to take your life to the next level, you, too, will need access to a high-performing reference group to associate with.

Strategies & Systems—The top performers in the world have the strategies and systems that allow them to execute at a much higher level than other businesses or people. Most people are constantly floundering, guessing and don’t have a proven plan or strategy to follow at all.
Richard Branson said, “Once you created a success of one business you can create a success in many more by following the same set of principles.” The key is to know those principles.

If you want to take your life to the next level, you, too, will need to know the proven key principles and strategies complete with execution systems.  But how, where, who? Exactly. That’s why I created this…
Having discovered that these three advantages are what continually perpetuates the rich and the successful to becoming even more so, over the past year I have been carefully designing and putting together a HIGH-PERFORMANCE FORUMthat launches in January. It is only available to 24 hand selected people. If you’d like to be considered or to learn more go here.

Summary, however you do it, to gain the advantages of the rich, powerful and super-successful:
1) Seek the best counsel, coaches and advisors you can obtain.
2) Find and immerse yourself in a network of high-achieving relationships and associations.
3) Learn the specific strategies and systems that power the best in the world in becoming the best in the world.
Posted By: www.darrenhardy.success.com

Posted in Leadership

FIVE LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM STEVE JOBS

Whether you’re a “Mac or PC,” the recent passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at the age of fifty-six from pancreatic cancer provides a salient moment of reflection for any organizational leader.

Jobs’ legacy and impact on the world is likely to stretch far into the future compared to the brief thirty-five years of his professional career, which took seed in his family’s garage when the idea of Apple was planted with Stephen Wozniak in 1976.

Beyond his cultural and technological contributions, Jobs offers leadership lessons that can be gleaned from his own words. Below are five lessons from his quotes. They provide insight into the Steve Jobs’ “operating system” for life.

1.The Risk Lesson. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” The very nature of innovation requires a stark departure from the status quo and deviation from the norm. The best leaders have the vision to understand that fact and the tenacity to lead an organization to that future state despite organizational inertia and resistance.
Jobs did this time and again as evidenced by the introduction of the Macintosh home computer in 1984, his subsequent departure and return to the company, right up to the latest iteration of the iPhone.

2.The Succession Lesson. “…Some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”
Succession planning is one of the most important roles that senior leadership takes to ensure the long-term viability of an organization. The best companies and leaders strive to achieve this internally by ongoing talent assessment and pushing that planning below the executive level to ensure a funnel full of high potential individuals.

Apple’s current CEO Tim Cook went through a similar grooming process since joining the company in 1998, collaborating with Jobs ever since in preparation to lead.

3.The Mission Lesson. “Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Many leaders are more inclined to lead with their head or their gut instincts, rather than their heart. Such an emotive mission simply seems too soft and may even be considered a weakness to traditional, hard-nosed leadership sensibilities.

However, Jobs’ illness forced him to live from his passion and creativity, which produced revolutionary product innovations, growth and profits for the organization.

4.The Team Lesson. “So when a good idea comes, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and—just explore things.”
In virtually every area of life, teams make better decisions than individuals. While Jobs had a reputation of being difficult to work for, he routinely admitted to only hiring senior executives who were competent, smart, and “loved” Apple—so that they would put the interests of the organization ahead of their individual interests.

The company’s success, high employee retention and consistent recognition as one of “best places to work” are proof of his team-centric philosophy.

5.The Perseverance Lesson. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Jobs is often referred to as both a genius and modern-day Thomas Edison. Interestingly, Edison’s driving perseverance is exemplified in his famous quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.”

Few would disagree that Jobs embodied Edison’s quote, and perseverance is a requisite skill of all effective leaders.

Not only did Jobs lead an extraordinary company, he led an extraordinary life—and we’re the better for it. If you’re not familiar with details of his background and intriguing upbringing, consider reading the new biography by Walter Isaacson. It is currently #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Posted By: http://michaelhyatt.com

Posted in Leadership

Leadership Moment: You Need Vision to Plan

Many lead­ers are now in the process of cre­at­ing their plans for 2012. In this Lead­er­ship Moment, Daniel explains why you must review your Vision before you put your next Busi­ness Plan together.

Posted By: http://www.danielharkavy.com

Posted in Leadership

THE POWER OF INCREMENTAL CHANGE OVER TIME

I have always been fascinated by the power of incremental change over time. Most people underestimate this. They think they have to take massive action to achieve anything significant.

I am not opposed to massive action. I have used it myself to achieve certain results. But it causes most people give up before they ever start. They just don’t think they can make the investment.

For example:

• I have a friend who needs to lose fifty pounds. He can’t seem to get started. Why? Because he thinks he will have to go on a radical, unsustainable diet.
• I overheard a man at the coffee shop complaining to his friend that he hasn’t taken a family vacation in years. When his friend asked why, he said, “We just don’t have the money.”
• One of the guys I mentor confessed that he had never read the Bible all the way through. When I asked why, he said, “You mean, other than the fact that it’s about 1200 pages long?”

What these people don’t realize is that they could make small, daily investments that would soon lead to big results. Here are seven examples to get your creativity flowing.

1. Losing Weight. Earlier this year, I lost eleven pounds in six weeks. A friend of mine lost 83 pounds in a year. Both of us did it using LoseIt. We didn’t do much other than record what we ate daily. By becoming aware of what we were eating, we made healthier choices.
2. Paying Off Debt. One of my friends paid of $15,000 in debt in less than a year. She didn’t do anything radical. She simply setup a budget, took opportunities to make extra income, and cut back on gourmet coffee and other non-essentials. She used Dave Ramsey’s “debt snowball” to pay off her smallest debts first, then the larger ones.
3. Improving Profitability. In a publishing division I used to run, we decided to improve our margins by 2% over one year. We chunked it down to one-half percent per quarter. We focused on targeted price increases and expense control. It dropped over a million dollars to the bottom line that year.
4. Writing a Book. I have used my blog to write several books. I mapped out the book and then wrote it one 500-word post at a time. Using this method, you can write a 50,000 word book in 100 days. At my pace of about five posts a week, that takes just twenty weeks. Plus, you get great feedback along the way.
5. Running Long Distances. When I started running, I could barely walk a mile. Then I discovered Jeff Galloway. I started running for one minute and then walking for two. Gradually, I increased my distance and the time I was running. Within a year, I was able to run my first half marathon.
6. Reading the Bible. The bible is a big book, no doubt. But in less than 15 minutes a day, you can read the entire Bible through in a year. Here’s an online plan I used for several years. Currently, I am reading through The NKJV Daily Bible (Thomas Nelson).
7. Saving Your Marriage. I had another friend in a really bad marriage. On the advice of his mentor, he started practicing “5 for 5.” He simply walks in the house after work, moves within five feet of his wife, asks her about her day, and listens for five minutes. Though a small start, it has now grown to 30 minutes a day. Their relationship has reversed course.

I’m convinced you can do almost anything if you are willing to clarify your goals and then make the incremental investment over time to achieve them.

Posted by: michaelhyatt.com

Posted in Leadership

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

This is an amazing speech by Steve Jobs. You won’t agree with everything, but it is still a fascinating, challenging speech. One of my favorite quotes:

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

Posted in Leadership

WHAT DRIVES YOU AS A LEADER?

I have always been driven to achieve. According to the Strengths Finder Assessment, achievement is one of my top strengths. I don’t know whether I was wired that way from the beginning, or my propensity toward achievement came out of my upbringing.

As a kid growing up in seven different countries, I always found myself as the new kid on the block. I discovered that one of the quickest ways to get noticed was to achieve. The more challenging the achievement, the better. Most kids want to be noticed and I was no different.

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate just how critical it is to know what “fuels” the things we do. And it’s not as obvious as you might think. In my case, I know it’s not bad to achieve great things. But what’s driving that achievement?

I’ve seen leaders who operated within their strength areas—but for unhealthy reasons. It might not show right away, but eventually the unhealthy drive starts to show its cracks.

Here’s a short list of destructive fuels that leaders often use, even in the church:

• People pleasing
• Power and control
• Image Management
• Financial success
• Jealousy

Unhealthy drive is like using steroids to enhance your performance—you get nice, short-term results but with tragic long-term consequences. Get it wrong and you leave a lot of pain and hurt in your wake. Get it right and watch how God brings renewed life.

Here’s a list of four questions that I work through when I am not sure what is really driving me:

1. Am I using my strengths for the good of the project or the organization, or am I mainly seeking affirmation from outside sources like my boss or peers?
2. What is my true motivation for working on this project? Is it for the sake of others and the bigger picture or just to elevate my own status?
3. Does what I’m trying to do line up with who God designed me to be? I’ve had to step away from getting involved in some attractive initiatives, just because they were so far off from who God made me to be. Although the success of the project would have been great, I know that I would have been achieving for the sake of achieving, not out of being faithful to God.
4. If this project fails, how much of my sense of self-worth is in it? I know this seems sophomoric, but at a basic level it’s core to leading from a healthy place. No matter how far I fall, I know my identity and worth is still rooted in God’s unchanging love.

Unhealthy achievement (or the unhealthy pursuit of anything, even when you’re using your unique strengths) can take its toll on you. I make sure I’m in relationship with people who know me. I have a small group that has an open to door to call me out when I need to be called out. They know my dysfunctions, confront me when needed, and keep me grounded.

The challenge is to first be candid with yourself about what fuels you and then replace it with the only fuel source worthy of a Christian leader—love of God and love of people. Anything short of that is a cheap imitation of the real thing. It never pays to run on anything else … ever

Posted By: michaelhyatt.com

Posted in Leadership