Category Archives: Transformational Consumer®

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What’s the Rush? The Essential Nature of Getting Urgent

My Dad is a planner. He is intensely practical, analytical and devoted to engineering his future. He has planned his life out, meticulously, decades and decades in advance, and has worked just that plan, for the most part. He’s that guy that runs the numbers, mostly in his mathematical genius of a head and on paper; if he were 20 years younger, he’d be your friend that obsesses over Excel spreadsheets. He plans his mother’s birthday parties with the same level of precision and forethought as he plans his fitness program, his vacations, monthly budgets and his long-term finances.

I would not say, though, that he’s one of those ‘analysis paralysis types.’ Starting at age 17, he worked the same job for nearly 30 years, got a college degree during his last few years on the job, retired and went back to work to get a second pension: check, check, check and check. He grew up next door to my mother, and they planned to get married after high school, start working, buy a house, have a kid seven years in, wait five years, have another kid, and send them both to private school – and that’s exactly what they did.

But on the list of words I would never think to use in describing my Dad, I’d put spontaneous, bon-vivant, pleasure-seeking and whimsical at the top. He’s just a responsible guy who I frankly, underappreciated for years, seeing him as overly strict, rigid and disciplined, until I matured enough to learn how many of my friends and colleagues craved precisely such reliability and structure in their fathers.

I’m old enough now to have gone through that inevitable cycle children go through, where your thoughts that you’re so much smarter than your parents transform into begrudging acquiescence that perhaps your parents might know a thing or two, which evolves into the deepest respect and, eventually, appreciation.

So, it’s not at all unusual when I’m considering my own future plans and big decisions for me to ring up my dear old Dad and walk through things with him – sussing out all the pros, cons, pitfalls and prep steps. (And, as I’ve gotten older and more experienced in business and in life, I’ve been honored to get more than a few of those talk-it-out-and-run-the-numbers calls from him, too!)

I recently made such a call to my Dad, and told him of a very major business move I was considering. The decision at hand posed the potential for both high reward and high risk, albeit a calculated risk I was well-poised to aggressively manage. The potential rewards, on the other hand, would be vast in both financial returns and plain old personal fulfillment – the latter of which is not a line item I’ve heard my Dad ever work into his own decision-making calculus.

So, I described the venture I was considering, explained why I was inclined to move forward, and then qualified that, saying, “But, I really don’t want to be hasty.”

And my gruff, mathy, deliberate, planning-obsessed 61-years-young Marine of a Dad cut me off, barking out the (rhetorical) question:

“How old are you?!”

I reminded him.

His next statement put me in a state in which I rarely find myself: the state of speechlessness. He said:

“You know what? You should be hasty!”

He elaborated:

“No one tells you guys this, but once you hit 30, it seems like you go to sleep one night, wake up, and you’re 50. Then it’s like you take a nap, wake up and you’re 60. So, if there’s something you feel like you need to do in this world or want to do in your life. DO IT. Be hasty. Of course, I want you to be smart – run the numbers, make the calls, read the contracts. And I know you’ll do all of that. Then be hasty – if you want to do it, do it, and do it now.”

As is so often the case, my Dad is right. Life is urgent. Possibility beckons. And so does life, your dream career, your idea, that business model or plan you’ve been cooking up, the marketplace. I believe that there are seasons for everything in life and in business: seasons to learn, to analyze, to cultivate and to harvest.

But when those seasons have passed, those who will realize the dreams, opportunities and visions that once existed only in the remotest corners of possibility are those who realize that there is no someday time slot, out there in the future, that is cosmically set aside for you to click out of playing small and switch over to the big game.

One of my favorite statements of this very principle comes from the credo you’ve undoubtedly seen emblazoned on bags toted around by yoga girls and runners all over town, the lululemon manifesto:

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you 2 steps behind. DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW!

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Bibliotherapy Session: How to Start a Business When You’re Broke

 

How to Start a Business When You’re Broke

In this Bibliotherapy Session, Tara helps you shatter excuses and eliminate obstacles to getting your business off the ground, quickly.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future

The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Kickstarter

Kiva

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Bibliotherapy Prescription: How To Get Unstuck

Stuck is transformation’s enemy #1.

That’s because stuck is, qualitatively speaking, much more defeating and depleting than even stasis or inertia. Stuck indicates that you have a goal, or a new venture or an old habit or pattern you want to change, but can’t seem to make it happen or know exactly what to do next.

Stuck is hitting the same walls over and over and being derailed. Again.

Getting unstuck – and maintaining the ability to move through life and work freely and easily – involves a number of mindset resets and ongoing practices.

Unstuck is not a one-shot deal. It’s an approach—a worldview that takes constant cultivation.

To get you started, I’ve prescribed some deeper-dive resources for getting unstuck and staying there.

Get unstuck. Download the PDF.

 

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Change Your Routine, Change Your Life

Title: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Author: Charles Duhigg
Publisher: Random House, 2012; 400 pages; $28

The Power of HabitMany of us crave to change something about our behavior. We want to eat less, spend less, watch less TV. We wish we could exercise more, save more, spend more time with our families. If you’ve ever tried to make any such changes in your own life, though, you have probably already encountered the subject of New York Times writer Charles Duhigg’s new book, “The Power of Habit.”

It’s not at all strange for dieters to find themselves autopiloting to the bakery or the bag of chips, nor for smokers to spend decades trying to overcome the sheer force of the cigarette habit.

Duhigg takes a hybrid approach to illuminating the power of habit, and how we can all use that power to change our lives and our organizations.

He breaks down the science of habits into the essential findings that hold the keys each of us can use to understand and systematically transform the habits that largely drive our lot in life, while offering a series of vivid stories from the business world and from the individual lives of relatable people to illustrate and inspire.

Here are four of Duhigg’s compelling takeaways for readers who seek to assert control over their own behavior and the outcomes they achieve at work and in life:

1. Habits are a result of the brain’s constant mission to save effort. The number of impulses, functions, operations and outputs the brain must calculate and create just to execute an action as simple as brushing our teeth or backing our car out of the driveway is stunning, Duhigg points out.

In order to have the opportunity to rest or to think about other things while we’re moving through our daily lives, our brains are constantly unconsciously on the prowl for ways to save effort. (This also allows us to operate with smaller brains than we’d be able to otherwise, handy for getting our heads out of the birth canal.)

Habits are created when our brains create a mental/behavioral autopilot switch for a given chunk of actions.

2. A simple, three-step loop is responsible for forming every one of our habits. Duhigg teaches readers that first always comes a cue, which is “a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.” After the cue comes the physical, mental or emotional routine, which is followed by a reward, “which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.”

After being repeated over time, these cue, routine, reward loops became ingrained — so much so that the cue-reward link creates anticipations and cravings that render the routine a permanent habit.

3. There is a golden rule of habit change. Duhigg declares a rule of thumb that scientists, football coaches and 12-step programs all operate by, which is that “you can never truly extinguish bad habits.” Rather, says the golden rule of habit change, “to change a habit, you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward but insert a new routine.”

The game-changing, life-changing, potential of “The Power of Habit” is that it readers on a deep dive into the realm of precisely how to understand their cue-reward associations and replace old, destructive habits with new, desired routines.

4. Focusing on a single “keystone habit” is essential to successful change. Duhigg shows examples ranging from Alcoa to Olympian Michael Phelps, to an everyday woman who stopped smoking and debting and turned her life around very quickly, using these stories to illuminate the power of focusing on implementing a single keystone habit or “small win” to drive much broader change initiatives.

“Small wins,” Duhigg explains, “fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.”

For those who truly crave to change their habits, their teams’ routines and their lives, this book offers well-founded hope and simple, concrete tools that have been proven to work, over and over again.