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by
Henry Cloud
Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.
Psychology researchers Charles Carver and Mark Scheier make the distinction between “giving up effort” and “giving up commitment.” They point out how important it is to realize that giving up on some particular commitment doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give up on effort. Instead, that effort can be redirected to another goal worthy of your resources.
Our decisions might take business away from others or force them to deal with some rejection or loss. But ultimately they are responsible for their own lives, as adults have to be.
As adults, such people need to learn a new map that says, “I am not doing this ‘to you.’ I am doing it ‘for me.’ ” There is a big difference.
Another relational map is feeling responsible for another person’s pain when the enabling is ended.
There is a difference between helping someone who is disabled, incapable, or otherwise infirm versus helping someone who is resisting growing up and taking care of what every adult (or child, for that matter) has to be responsible for: herself or himself. When you find yourself in any way paying for someone else’s responsibilities, not only are you stuck with a delayed ending, but you are probably harming that person.
But sometimes the commitment to being a family gets interpreted in two destructive ways that often remain unspoken. The first one is that “we will put up with you no matter how you perform, and you always have a place here.”
They sometimes neglect their own growth, failing to recognize that they need to take responsibility for making themselves more valuable to this business or any other.
mutual interdependency
The great ones step up and make broad, sweeping changes to end some kind of misery and create a new day.
Peter Drucker used to say that the great leaders make “life and death decisions,” which, as he pointed out, were usually about people.
If you have a sense of powerlessness in your situation or a map that doesn’t let you act, you won’t make life-or-death decisions. Instead, you will tend to accept the slow death of morale, initiative, and sometimes even the business itself.
successful people and successful leaders all have one thing in common: They get in touch with reality.
The awareness of hopelessness is what finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment.
Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality.
Those that have the greatest difficulty abandoning things are often those unable to face reality.
“Perhaps that explains why ‘face reality’ was Jack Welch’s first rule of business.
“abandonment” of what was in the way of tomorrow.
When you are driving down a road that feels wrong, you finally turn around when you clearly see that you have hit a dead end. After the initial shock and discouragement, seeing the bare truth that what we are doing is leading nowhere will get us to change something.
It was a clear reality from which I could not go back. I saw that the way we were doing it could not bring about the future reality that we wanted. We had to change.
change or die.
She has chosen reality over comfort.
clearly grasping reality and making the necessary ending. Fearlessly. How do you do that? By getting hopeless about what is not going to work.
see that what you are doing has no hope of getting what you want. When that happens, you will instantly feel an epiphany. You realize that to get where you want to get, you must make a change.
It just takes a clear dose of the reality, over and over, to confirm that you are going nowhere. It creates its own discomfort, which motivates us to action.
But remember, to get there, you have to get honest with yourself and be ready to see hopelessness as if it is staring you in the face.
Do not be surprised by obsolescence: expect it and plan for it.
Hope buys time, and spends it. Hope is designed to give us more time, so that whatever we are hoping for can come to pass.
But it only came about because she got to the hopeless moment of her former way of operating. So sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself.
Dictionary definitions of hope contain two elements. The first is a “desire or expectation” for something in the future to occur. “I hope this thing turns around.” The second is usually “grounds for believing” that something in the future will occur. “She sees some hope because of next year’s product line.” The real problem is when we have one without the other: a desire without any grounds. That is hope based not on reality but on our desires, our wishes.
“Hope is not a strategy.”
What reason, other than the fact that I want this to work, do I have for believing that tomorrow is going to be different from today?
So here are the first questions to ask yourself about the anatomy of hope, no matter whether you are assessing a person or some aspect of business: • What has the performance been so far? • Is it good enough? • Is there anything in place that would make it different? • If not, am I willing to sign up for more of the same?
real anatomy of hope: • What reason is there to have hope that tomorrow is going to be different? • What in the picture is changing that I can believe in?
he does not invest in businesses, other than his own.
What kind of person deserves our trust, and when do we believe that someone can change?
This is often the biggest error that people make in determining whether to have hope or not. They forget to think about whom they are depending on to get it done.
We wrongly put our hope in some promise, belief, or wish that the person expresses, but ignore the clear reality of who they actually are.
Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden. Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future.
People change not only because of new information, but also by gaining new experiences that teach them what they need in order to make the future different.
Look at the degree to which you are having to drive the process.
look for this kind of hunger to make tomorrow different.
there was new truth to give direction to the energy that we were pouring into the enterprise.
where is the energy for change going to come from?
Who is going to drive the change? Without a dedicated change agent, change usually does not happen.
What will be the structure of the energy?
You need enough of a dose of energy to make it effective, and you need the right interval of time so the effects are not lost before the next bit of energy is injected.
Wise people 2. Foolish people 3. Evil people
You cannot deal with everyone in the same way.
wise people learn from experience and make adjustments.
