Stop the Insanity: Look Inside Yourself for External Business Success (part 1)

The Failure to Achieve:

Too often in business, we see very intelligent and experienced people unable to work together as a team to achieve at a world class level. Groups like this can find it impossible to achieve even consistent mediocre results.

This requires leaders and managers to be the glue with teams to keep the focus on the right priorities.

More direct communication can help this issue greatly, however, this also leads to additional debate, disagreement and conflict.

The antidote to the disease is to work on the self awareness and maturity of your people. The internal development and maturation of people is the biggest factor in transforming a culture into a powerful group that can handle both large challenges and major opportunities.

However, most people must go through a process of “being broken” to develop their internal world so they can bring strength to interactions on a team. The multiple strengths from self aware and mature individuals on a team can then mold the culture into a powerful vehicle to achieve long term, never before seen results.

Before you break, strength is viewed as how much you can handle. We believe that true strength is about how much you can endure after you’ve been broken. It comes from the ability to continue even when you are unable to see an answer. Long term strength comes from how effectively you rebuild your internal view of yourself, your understanding of the world and your new interactions with the outside world.

The best military groups use this process. The best organizations use the hiring process, orientation, coaching and performance evaluation to do this.

But being broken can also feel cruel.

“Being Broken” in personal life:

Being broken in personal life is typically a series of events that causes transformation inside. It is an uncoached and haphazard process without a lot of protection. It is painful and high risk.

The process of being broken, learned from both psychological research and tempered by coaching work with thousands of leaders, is summarized below -

·      Before we reach brokenness and reach purity and know and can achieve who we are, we layer lie upon lie, deception upon deception, attempting to reassure ourselves we are ok.

·      However, we are not ok. We are trying too hard, talking too much, doing too much, and most of the activity does not matter other than as a distraction for us to keep up our appearances to ourselves and others.

·      We need to stop.

·      We need to realize we are not ok and that is ok. We must get to ground zero by clearing away the rubble, the falseness, the illusions, and rebuild what we believe without the taint of complexity, others needs, others wants, others perceptions, our false desires and our unrealistic needs.

·      We must become sick and tired of maintaining the illusions and falseness. We must become sick and tired of being sick and tired.

·      When we finally reach “home”, our true selves, initially we are unable to recognize the truth for what it is. Yet there is glory in that we see the illusions we have used to build a fake life, fake relationships and a fake self.

·      That is being truly broken: we are not able to see, feel or understand the truth of who we actually are. We are crystal clear that what we have been doing is false, unsustainable and does not work.

·      To be broken fully and completely, to get to ground zero, we must talk and share and empty ourselves of our past until nothing is left.

·      Then, we are able to recreate ourselves in a simple and focused manner. We become creatures that can live and breath with hope for a better future and begin to infuse love and care to all of those around us.

·      It becomes useful to forget our past, forgive ourself and others, and to truly love ourselves. We are able to live in the real world in a way that is both worthwhile and sustainable.

·      This is the way in which to live a truly wonderful life! It is also now a new definition of self esteem for ourselves: we are able to see ourselves as flawed human beings and at the same time hold ourselves in high regard.

·      The challenge of “being broken” is that this personal process is both high risk and very unproductive for an employer while it is occurring.

·      The process also produces a high percentage of failures where people end up worse off. They get stuck somewhere in the process and unable to get “home” to their true selves and a better definition of life and how to interact with the world.

The Better Option:

Our goal with your people is not to break them. Our goal is to provide them with an understanding of the world that will change their perspective.

We want to help them to get closer to “home” over time in a way that achieves both more enjoyment as well as better results.

While for some people it is incredibly painful, if the process is effectively coached towards both personal and business goals that matters to the individuals and the team, it dramatically lowers the risk and increase the speed of the results.

It is both about external behavior change as well as internal values transformation.

Towards that effort, we typically build 5 year goals with the organization, teams and the individual. Adding in both leadership and teamship training, we provide the skills needed to mold your culture into an engine that will effectively and efficiently drive towards the 5 year goals for everyone.

In order to determine what path may be best for you, we have 3 assessments that can done separately over time or in alignment with each other at the beginning of the process.

1.    The 3Rs Interviews.

2.    The Business Health Assessment.

3.    The Employee Culture Survey.

If you are interested in causing low risk, high impact culture change through self awareness, maturity and skill development of your people, email us at [email protected] or call me at 919-368-9008.