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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Henry Cloud
Read between
June 15 - June 15, 2024
given your abilities, resources, opportunities, etc., are you reaching your full potential, or are you drifting toward a middle that is lower than where you should be if you were getting the most from who you are and what you have?
Reality sometimes makes us face things that hurt, and that can be a very good thing.
you have to know the standard you are pruning toward. The gardener knows what a healthy bud, branch, or bloom looks like and prunes with that standard in mind. The same thing is true in business and life—we have to have a good definition of what we want the outcome to look like and prune toward that.
both businesses and individuals will begin, gather, and have more activities than they can reasonably sustain.
Our responsibility is always to “embrace the negative reality,”
if you change and become a person capable of executing necessary endings, you will not only have better business performance, but you will also be less likely to raise failure-to-launch kids or be stuck in some other area of life.
Endings are easier to embrace and execute when you believe something normal is happening.
Events are processed in predictable, negative ways: first, as personalized (I am a bad salesperson); second, as pervasive (everything I do, or every aspect of the business, is bad); and third, as permanent (nothing is going to change).
The map that makes people feel responsible for other people is one of the most ending-delaying maps there is.
“I am not doing this ‘to you.’ I am doing it ‘for me.’ ” There is a big difference.
The great ones step up and make broad, sweeping changes to end some kind of misery and create a new day.
what is not working is not going to magically begin working.
False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity.
sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself.
In the absence of real, objective reasons to think that more time is going to help, it is probably time for some type of necessary ending.
There had better be good reason to believe that someone is going to do better.
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?
Here are nine objective factors to help you determine whether you can have hope that tomorrow will be any different from today: verifiable involvement in a proven change process, additional structure, monitoring systems, new experience and skills, self-sustaining motivation, admission of need, the presence of support, skilled help, and some prior or current success.
Change must be structured for many reasons, but one is the way the brain works. Old patterns get reinforced unless a new discipline is introduced to override the old patterns.
The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.
“Correct a wise person and he will be wiser still.”
the fool adjusts the truth so he has to do nothing different. He is never wrong; someone else is.
It is the same with any kind of problematic behavior of a person who is not taking feedback and ownership. The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that finally make him feel the pain instead of others.
A problem is something in someone’s performance or behavior that you need to end; it is specific and objective and isolated.
A pattern exists when there are problems but they do not stand alone as isolated issues or occurrences.
There is a difference between strengths and character.
Make your heart and mind feel the reality today that is surely coming tomorrow. And remember, both the hazards and the opportunities must be felt.
vision empowers necessary endings.
Set a deadline for whatever it is that you need to change, and you focus energy and time together.
It is likely that seasons are going by or branches need pruning and you don’t know it, because of a lack of measurement.
If stalled out is normal now, create urgency so that action is the new normal.
Even though you want a particular result, you hold it loosely, do the right thing, and then don’t let your worry stand in the way.”
you can’t do the prudent thing if you cannot stand for it all to fall apart.
Detachment from any one outcome is a common trait that all great performers have in common.
The truth is that they are stuck, you are getting unstuck, and you cause them to look in the mirror and face themselves.
In business and life, we have to be our own bad guy at times and say, “No, you can’t have that” or “Do that.”
These are difficult conversations to have, and if you are not clear in your own head what you want to make absolutely sure you have said when it is over, chances are you won’t say it.
“I understand that this is frustrating to you and that it is hard to hear. But I want you to understand what I am saying here, and need to make myself perfectly clear. This really is an issue, and it is not going away, and I need you to hear that.”
there are few better contexts to execute endings than in situations that are unsustainable.
for the right tomorrow to come, some parts of today may have to come to a necessary ending.
