Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 33
January 29, 2019
Why Every Leader Needs Friends
And Why Most Have Fewer Than They Think
As leaders, we all want to be competent and successful. The problem is that our quest for success can be demanding. It can feel lonely at the top. But as a leader, you can’t afford to be isolated. You deserve a rich, full life—including a social life. Every leader can thrive by cultivating friendships, protecting time for friendship, and enjoying leisure time together. In this episode, we’ll show you how.
January 22, 2019
Encore Episode: 5 Leadership Lessons from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King’s efforts initiated changes that would transform American society. That’s why the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Day on the third Monday of every January. It’s a chance to reflect on what he meant for the nation—and what made his leadership so successful. In this episode, we’re going to explore the leadership legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
January 15, 2019
Ask Us Anything
Michael and Megan Respond to Listener Questions
Leaders make decisions, but clarity can be hard to come by. In this episode, listeners fire their most pressing questions at Michael and Megan. They bring practical solutions to the problems many leaders face, based on more than 30 years of business experience.
January 8, 2019
The 3×3 Goal Achievement Strategy
How to Triple the Likelihood of Achieving Your Most Important Goals
Leaders dream big. But too often, our greatest goals get lost in the whirlwind of daily tasks and interruptions. Today, we’ll give you three simple practices that will ensure your goals stay on track all year long. You’ll avoid the pain of seeing your biggest goals slip through your fingers. And you’ll feel satisfaction at seeing steady progress until they are finally achieved.
January 1, 2019
New Year, New You
How to Conduct an Annual Preview
High achievers love the start of the new year and the prospect of new goals. The problem is that fresh enthusiasm can evaporate with the holiday cheer. Diving back into the whirlwind can be stressful and frustrating. We don’t think your goal achievement should fluctuate with the seasons. In this episode, we reveal a simple five-step plan that will launch you into the new year with focus and energy. Listen to this podcast, and you’ll avoid the January goal slump, and make 2019 your best year ever!
December 25, 2018
When It’s Not a Wonderful Life
The Perfect Time to Get Some Perspective
I love watching the movie where a guy named George finds himself stuck in a crummy little town working in a shabby little office. Everyone else has moved away to bigger and better things. His hardscrabble life and years of sacrifice and responsibility chip away at his dreams of seeing the world.
Suddenly, a financial crisis leaves him nowhere to turn. Even his prayers seem unanswered. With no hope, he makes a desperate choice.
Once his family and friends discover the crisis, they pitch in and come up with the money. Problem solved.
But cash was the easy fix. George had a bigger problem, and he only came to the conclusion that it’s a wonderful life after he experienced the loss of something he loved. George Bailey’s bigger problem needed a special gift, which came wrapped in an unusual package.
What was the gift? In a word: perspective.
The holidays give that same gift for us. It even has our name on it. But it’s easy to miss amidst the flurry of other gifts and activities. Unless we look for it, our greatest gift stays unopened.
Broadening our perspective
The Texas Driver’s Handbook has a diagram that illustrates how when we sit in a parked car, we have a full 180-degree field of vision. When our car accelerates to 20 mph, our field of vision reduces to 66%. At 40 mph, our visual field shrinks to 20%. At 60 mph, our field of vision becomes barely wider than the space between our headlights.
The faster we go, the less perspective we have.
The same holds true in our journey through life. As we hurdle through life in the fast lane, perspective can easily get shoved in the trunk—or left behind. If we never sit still, we never see the big picture—only the immediate slice right in front of us.
That’s how the holidays offer us a gift. They toss a much-needed wrench in the wheels of our productivity. Clients and vendors close. Nobody answers our emails. Even shopping malls lock up on Christmas and New Years Day. Holidays force us to slow our pace.
They offer us the space we need to open our special gift.
Unwrap the gift of perspective
We unwrap the gift of perspective through reflection—which only time affords us. Looking at family photo albums or reading old journal entries, we see how many crises we’ve forgotten that seemed so overwhelming at the time.
Such reflection gives us a reason to press on, because it gives us the gift of perspective. Somehow we made it through the past, so we’ll make it through today.
Even reflecting on loss offers remarkable perspective. Getting really sick reminds us of the blessing of health. We may exercise, eat well, and get enough rest, but we shake the unwashed hand of one infected individual—and whammo! One little virus takes our entire body down for days. Sickness can make us grateful for health we had all along.
But some losses in life we can’t “bounce back” from—like a losing a child or a marriage or suffering a serious health issue. After healthy reflection, nothing we learn from these significant losses can replace what we’ve lost.
Nevertheless, loss in life offers us an invaluable perspective because it forces us to go somewhere we would never otherwise choose to go. There we have the opportunity to learn what we never would have chosen to learn.
Seeing the potential
I’ve opened some of these unwanted gifts in life. Like after each of my parents divorced and remarried multiple times; or after my alcoholic mother died tragically; or after losing a great position in my career—twice. And these are just a few I’m comfortable writing about.
I learned that loss gives us a crash course in growth if we choose to glean perspective. These deep griefs offer us gifts of a lifetime if we choose never to waste a significant loss. As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “These shall not have died in vain.”
Five years ago I attended the Platform Conference in Dallas. Driving home from the conference, it struck me, I could create a membership site that gives virtual tours of the Holy Land for those who cannot go. But honestly? I thought, Yeah, right.
Two years later, I lost my job without warning. It caught me completely flatfooted. But I also saw the potential that fear had kept hidden. Fear of leaving an executive position in a place I enjoyed serving kept me from seeing my potential as an entrepreneur.
I realized how all the years behind me had prepared me for the path before me. Upon reflection, loss gave me a perspective—even an opportunity—I never would have had otherwise.
(And Michael Hyatt said it was after he broke his ankle and while he was stuck in bed that he started his blog—which laid the groundwork for his current business.)
Perspective stripped away the blinders of my limiting beliefs.
The gift that keeps on giving
I like that what was true for George Bailey was always true. The only thing that changed was his perspective. Of course, life is more complicated than a two-hour classic Christmas film. But the premise remains the same.
Perspective is the gift that keeps on giving, as long as we choose to unwrap it. The good news is we don’t have to suffer great loss to gain great perspective. But we do need to slow down long enough to give the road our full 180-degree field of vision.
The holidays have a gift for us: time to slow down and gain perspective.
Can you imagine just leaving one of your gifts under the tree?
How to Beat the Holiday Blues
What to Focus on Amidst All the Distractions
Nat King Cole. Pinatas. Swedish meatballs. Ravioli. Gingerbread houses.
These are things that come to mind when I recall my childhood Christmases. One might even say that these are a few of my favorites things, in the words of the old song from “The Sound of Music” that became an unlikely Christmas classic in its own right—a tune I would play every December as a crackly Barbra Streisand record spun on my plastic Fisher Price turntable.
My multicultural Christmases
Eagle-eyed readers might notice that these Christmas favorites draw from disparate traditions. Some are associated with the holiday across the United States. Others not so much. The greater Boston suburbs of my youth were not exactly a hotbed of multicultural diversity.
Yet many a Christmas we would gather in my grandparents’ basement. The children were blindfolded and each given a turn to take a few swings at a freshly made pinata. The papier-mâché creation was actually pretty hard. The task was made more challenging because aunts or older cousins would pull the pinata out of our reach using string.
Oh, by the way: my grandparents were of Italian, English, and Irish ancestry.
No lumps of coal
No matter how difficult, breaking apart the pinata was alway rewarding. Candy would fall to the hard basement floor, scooped up by children already on a sugar high. There would also be small gift-wrapped individual presents we would each grab off the ground, looking for our names. No lumps of coal were ever found therein.
Christmas has always been informed by multiple cultural traditions. This is especially true in the United States. But this Christian holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ comes in completely secularized and commercialized varieties, with wisemen, Santa Claus, reindeer, elves, the Grinch, talking snowmen, and everything in between.
In my family, the menu was similarly wide-ranging. My grandmother made ravioli with spinach and ricotta stuffing on Christmas Eve. It was served with turkey, Swedish meatballs, a wide assortment of homemade cookies and chocolate candies.
Just thinking about it brings to mind a “Sopranos” episode in which Paulie Walnuts describes a New Jersey Italian-American Thanksgiving meal: “Major antipast’ first. Then soup, meatballs and scharol then the baked manigot, then the bird.”
Sounds good to me!
Santa’s overworked helpers
Unfortunately, for some people Christmas is not the happy occasion it is for most who celebrate it. Instead of happy memories of their grandparents’ home, some recall estrangement, sadness and loss.
It may be difficult for them to visit or spend time with their families because of conflicts in the past or present. There may be brokenness or unresolved emotions. Or there may simply be a lot of hardship associated with buying all the gifts on a limited budget, getting those lights to work, finding the decorations in the basement, or putting up the tree.
My father used to reminisce about pouring himself a gin and tonic as he tried to assemble the toys. The instruction manuals were confusing. The pieces were small and hard to fit together. There was not much time before Christmas morning and his children waking up. No one ever said it was easy to be one of Santa’s helpers.
From the ordinary inconveniences of tracking down that scarce shopping mall parking spot while Christmas shopping to the deeper issues of tragedy and loss, Christmas can be stressful for so many. An American Psychological Association survey found that over 40 percent of women and nearly a third of men reported experiencing stress over Christmas.
Indeed, Jennifer Melfi, the fictitious psychiatrist—yes, from “The Sopranos”—dubbed the holiday “Stressmas.” Cute, Tony replied.
Depression is also an issue for people this time of year, especially those longing for the past rather than their present travails. In popular psychology, this has been called the “holiday blues.”
Finding Christmas again
Entering adulthood, it is easy to lose sight of the Christmas season entirely. Yes, you notice the lights and the commercials and the store displays and the holiday tunes playing on the radio. But no vacation from school beckons. The monotony of your work routine takes you right up to Christmas Eve itself.
The fond memories of that come from my childhood holiday traditions remind me of a simpler time, when joy could be found in the little things, even when they might not make sense in a larger context.
What does a snowball have to do with a pinata or the baby Jesus or the songs you know by heart? Nothing—except for happiness.
We can’t go back to our childhood. But something we can do is reclaim our lost joy in simple things.
Generosity Pays
We all know intuitively that generosity is right. But it turns out that generosity also provides some very tangible rewards for the giver. In this episode of the Lead to Win podcast, we uncover three benefits of generosity that span all of your most important relationships both at work and at home.
December 18, 2018
How 4 Leaders Keep Their Eyes on the Prize
Keeping Goals Visible Is a Constant Struggle
Goal visibility is one of the key but often overlooked components of goal achievement. So as 2018 draws to a close, I asked four business leaders how they keep their goals in front of them once they’ve been set. They all had different ways of doing it, yet they all make the effort.
Maybe one of these strategies will work for you. If so, then you’re likely to be reflecting on a number of personal and professional victories come next December.
Seek accountability when setting goals
“Even for the most self-motivated individuals, accountability pushes us to be better,” says Kristi Porter, nonprofit consultant and founder of Signify. “When we know someone is going to ask us about our goals and we have to report our progress, we want to know we’ve done the best we can.”
Porter is a member of a mastermind group in which everyone states their goal for the next two weeks at the end of each meeting, with plans to update the group at the next session. While Porter acknowledges that her individual progress doesn’t hinge upon the progress of her peers, sharing with them forces her to keep her own goals front-and-center.
“I don’t want to be the only one to show up not having done anything to accomplish what I stated,” Porter adds. “If I continually let my efforts slide, it hurts my business and doesn’t show that I value [the mastermind group’s] time and energy in being present. It’s like a healthy form of peer pressure.”
Regularly review goals with team members
Keeping everyone at work aligned on the same goals is just as important as keeping those goals top-of-mind. Horst Schulze, co-founder and former president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and founder of the Capella Hotel Group, knows this first-hand.
Throughout his career, Schulze has focused on refining the customer service experience in hotels and resorts — a goal that cannot be accomplished without the buy-in of the managers, housekeepers, chefs, and other employees who have daily access to guests.
“Service always implies caring,” Schulze says. “If we settle for lesser goals — meeting the budget, for example, or safeguarding jobs in a tough economy — we will miss the most important work. It is excellence in service that secures our future.”
To this end, Schulze outlines his customer service goals with a list of 24 Service Standards that is given to all staffers. At the beginning of every shift, each team has a 10-minute standup meeting, during which the team leader discusses one of the standards and how it applies to a current guest challenge. “Keeping these goals and guidelines front-and-center is invaluable to each member and each level of our teams,” Schulze says.
Knowing that everyone is on the same page also gives Schulze the confidence to empower each team member to achieve the goal of excellence in customer service. Any staffer can spend up to $2,000 to solve a guest problem or issue.
Schedule goals and goal-related tasks
Being aware of goals and what it will take to accomplish them is one thing. But Jameson Sharp, owner of BlackBeard’s Media in Kansas City, Missouri, knows that if goals and goal-related tasks aren’t scheduled — just like workout sessions or client meetings — they’re not likely to be completed.
“In 2016 I had just started building out and accepting new referrals for advertising and video marketing projects,” Sharp says. “I was absolutely swamped running two companies and managing 15 client accounts, and as I continued, a major problem revealed itself. Although I was focused on day-to-day operations and maintaining the momentum, I began to notice no growth and was forgetting to keep my first business on course. So one day I questioned myself: Why was this happening?”
The problem, Sharp discovered, was that he wasn’t following his schedule, a schedule that includes a daily rundown of goal to-dos.
“I write down my goals in the margins of my daily schedule the night before,” Sharp explains. “If I don’t keep referring back to my daily schedule and see the goals and tasks throughout the day, those smaller goals become less important, and will be pushed aside to a later time. The consequences of not referring back to your schedule and goals leaves you vulnerable to procrastination and, ultimately, to goal failures.”
Keep goals in constant view
If that which is out of sight is also out of mind, it makes sense that goals should be readily visible at all times. So Brianna Rooney, founder and CEO of Techees, writes her goals on post-it notes and sticks them to the side of her computer. She starts with 25 goals and narrows the list down to her top five before placing it in constant view. She encourages her team members to do the same.
“We work in front of our computers all day long so that’s where we put [the post-it note],” Rooney says. “I find that having it at work motivates you to do better work. Eight hours a day it stares at you, and I look at it every day, at least 20 times a day. It’s extremely motivating for me.”
The motivation has paid off. In addition to achieving a number of professional goals (she is a recruiter for software engineers), Rooney has reached some personal milestones as well.
“This year I finally bought property out of the country,” she says. “I talked my husband into taking the leap to take our two little kids to Mexico. We stayed there for 80 days in the summer, and I got the itch to buy. The last week we were there we ended up seeing some properties. We got home; I put my post-it back on my computer; and I kept staring at it. Within a day or two I got in touch with the realtor and made an offer. Within a couple weeks we were signing paperwork to move forward.”
