Some clients tell me they consider me an expert in helping people discover their purpose in life. Of course, that’s very affirming. so I like it. And I really hope it’s true. After all, I’ve been helping people find their life’s mission since 1983, when I started working with Stephen Covey. That’s over three decades of nearly daily engagement linking the deep questions of life with the challenges of work, business and leadership.

I also have been the beneficiary of life’s rough stuff. I became well acquainted with many of life’s I-never-thought-this could-happen-to-me-catastrophes and persistent gut wrenching stress. I have swum in the stormy ocean of life’s great disappointments.

I find that the juxtaposition of my idealism and my life’s reality has pushed me hard on issues of faith, purpose and reconciling the existence of evil… all the big gnarly questions. I spent the better part of a decade submerged in introspection and angry meditation. Okay… I know real meditation doesn’t allow for anger yet I found that anger, frustration and despair are powerful motives to drive deep persistent meditation on the purpose of life.

Over the years I’ve also found the time to study the big thinkers from Plato to Whitehead as well as the world’s most persistent religions. Through workshops I have helped thousands of people draft inspiring mission statements and designed and conducted research with over 30,000 people to discover what they find most satisfying as well as what’s most difficult about modern life.

Well, a few days ago gave a TED-length talk to group of 50 leaders who direct ecology based nonprofits. I was told they wanted something inspirational.

As I thought about my work with nonprofit leaders, I consistently found that many are chronically stressed and upset.  Their frustration stems from being overmatched by the wealth and power of people who care so little for the environment that they take no responsibility for polluting, eroding and destroying our living spaces in the name of commerce.

I empathize with that anger, yet living life as a permanent underdog or even worse, a victim, is self-defeating. Shaking your fist at a mad world is initially good to awaken you but over time it will make you weaker.

I also find some nonprofit leaders burdened by their noble cause. It’s as if they’re doing what they think they should even though they would rather be doing something else. I found that people who try to use their personal guilt or even sense of duty as a primary motive will soon lose their good judgment and creativity as well as their zest for life.

I felt that what I wanted to do in the short time we had together was to lift these leaders’ inner burdens, melt some of their frustrations, and help them find their inner sources of optimism and joy. So I begin my remarks by saying… “If people I love asked me on my deathbed what I have learned that was really important, this is what I would tell them.”

1. All of us long to be valued.  I believe that is our primary human motive. Some people are really good at creating honest to goodness value in this world but many are not. Many people seek to be valued in all the wrong ways. They want to be famous, or rich or powerful. Insecure and selfish people still long to be valued and when they’re not they often act in awful and even evil ways.  I have found that viewing someone’s bad behavior as either an attempt to be valued, or reaction to not feeling valued helps me to stay calm and wise. Believe me, understanding people’s universal core motive doesn’t let anyone off the hook for being a stinker. It just makes you wiser in how you respond.
2. The purpose of life is to be compassionate toward all, all the time. I believe this to be the core truth of all 17 enduring major religions.  When the great authority on world religions, Dr. Huston Smith, was asked what he learned over his lifetime of studying world religions he answered, “To be a little kinder.”  The Dalai Lama has said, “Kindness is my religion.”  Loving kindness meditation is one of the most powerful personal tools to become free of biases, past hurts, and persistent self- criticism. It is simple to do. Take a meditative position, and with deep rhythmic breathing you simply create an inner intention for yourself, your loved ones, your circle of acquaintances and coworkers, and your enemies. Thinking of each one of these groups in turn you simply use your inner voice to pronounce your positive intentions.  You can simply say to yourself, “I desire to experience love, health, wisdom, success and happiness today.” Then you express the exact same intention for each group ending with your enemies. My experience is that you won’t have some room-shaking epiphany. Rather, slowly, overtime your view of everyone will change. And you will feel a new level of connectedness and contentment that will make you more calm, resilient, and powerful.
3. Your Mission is to create value by expressing your gifts doing whatever you’re doing right now. There are 7.4 billion people on earth today. I am convinced no one is extra and no one is the same.  Furthermore, all our circumstances and opportunities are different. Our mission is to use our unique personalities and talents to create value in every situation. I’m convinced that you do not need to do something amazing to be amazing. Every honest profession needs talented people who are excited to do their work in their own best way. Consider this; Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a glamorous lawyer. He litigated over 5,000 cases most of which were land disputes in rural Illinois. What set them apart was the way he approached his profession. He was honest. I won’t make any lawyer jokes here but being honest was a very distinctive quality. He refused to represent clients who wanted to plead innocent even though they were guilty. Lincoln got so famous for his honesty that he was elected President during our country’s darkest hour. My point here is critical to understand.  Lincoln’s personal mission wasn’t to become President like so many of the politicians we see. His mission was to create value through by amplifying his values in the circumstances he found himself.

I am convinced it is not so much what we do, as it is how we do that matters. We need excellent janitors and flight attendants, and retail clerks, and doctors and nurses, and engineers and cartoonists. We also need moms and dads, and aunts and uncles, and sons and daughters, and good friends and neighbors…well, I think you get what I mean. Every honest profession and every role in life is a chance to create value for other human beings. We create value when we don’t go through the motions but when we express our highest and authentic selves to make things a little better, a little lighter a little more enjoyable.

The key is to be your best self. Use the good and virtue that’s inside you to energize your gifts.

We all have different gifts.  Some of us are analytical, some are visionary, some are optimistic, some are prudent, some are leaders, and some are supporters. Most of us are many of these things depending on the circumstances. The key to fulfilling your mission is to not wait for the right opportunity to be awesome. Just be awesome all the time.  Don’t make excuses and don’t apologize. Just give your gift to create value. That’s your mission.

What I’ve learned is this.  You’re designed to make your difference.  When you make your difference every day in a hundred little ways the future shifts.

What if the true purpose of life was not to change the world but to change yourself? And what if by doing that the world actually changed?

Please don’t wait to become a compassionate person. Please don’t wait to fulfill your mission. Just love all and give your gift.

One of the greatest leaps in productivity I ever achieved was directly caused by my first business going bankrupt.  Well, technically my sandal company, Beachcomber Bills, didn’t go through bankruptcy. The financial splatter from the business failure was so complete the judge said we were too broke to go through bankruptcy.

My failure to pull that initially successful business out of a crash dive forced me to get very creative very fast. I woke up one morning in my newly rented house (because I lost the one I’d owned in the financial firestorm) with the new big idea. I started consulting for companies that were a lot like mine helping CEOs succeed where I had failed.

Another moment of peak productivity occurred when my mentor Stephen Covey, literally gave up trying to write Seven Habits of Effective People. He, along with two editors, had produced three manuscripts that just lacked the energy that his workshops were producing.  My productivity breakthrough came when it dawned on me that a transcript of his daylong workshop could be polished into a manuscript that would become an all-time bestseller.

Here’s my point.  Productivity that really counts is not so much about winning our daily battle to complete our tasks and respond to urgencies. No, if productivity is really about producing uncommon value then the most important capability we can master is the mindset that produces insight and the skill set to bring that breakthrough idea to life.

So let me emphasize my point. There’s a big industry that teaches people how to be productive.  Productivity hacks are all over the Internet.  And they work.  I teach them all the time myself but not as stand-alone skills. A few years ago when I was creating a new presentation and productivity workshop called Work Like a Genius, my team and I looked at the brain science, behavioral psychology, and studies on human energy to create a science-based daily schedule that maximizes your physical, mental and emotional energy to consistently do great work.

But the big insight from the research is that the people who’ve really changed the world and lived the most interesting lives did not make their contribution primarily from the volume of tasks they completed.   Rather, we admire them for the insights they brought to life that improved our lives.

The mindset for super productivity has been studied by a large group of researchers like Duke University’s Angela Duckworth and Stanford’s Carol Dweck.  A distillation of this research reveals two essential inner conditions that drive super productivity.

People who are super productive are both discontent and confident.  Research on human drive reveals that deep inner motivation comes from the self-knowledge of WHAT you really want that you are unwilling to live without.  Confidence comes from knowing HOW you attack problems and overcome obstacles. Confident people don’t try to do everything themselves to accomplish a goal. They do what they are best at and recruit others to do whatever else needs to be done.

Angela Duckworth’s research emphasizes that deep discontent leads to creative persistence.  Something she calls ‘grit,’ which is a mental and emotional mindset that drives you to continually develop new ways to overcome persistent obstacles.  You literally wrestle a problem to death until you solve it.

Innovative solutions to great problems don’t come from just being dissatisfied with the status quo.  You have to be very discontent.  Just ask yourself this question.  If your work and your life didn’t change too much over the next five years would that be okay?  If it is, you may not be discontented enough to be self-inspired.  So the first law of productivity is to get riled up over something you really want to change.

Be really clear that the outcome you’re seeking is what you really want.  High-achieving people can get so seduced by the psychological payoff for problem-solving that they can become over-invested in achieving goals that don’t matter. Don’t let that happen to you.

Productive people are also self-aware of HOW they succeed. Your HOW consists of three things:

1. How you act on your goals.  Some people just visualize the outcome and start working.  They’re confident they can figure it out as they go.  Other people are planners.  They create a plan with checklists and modify it as necessary. Ultimately both approaches must have flexibility built-in. Just be aware that to overcome the psychological resistance to start a project you need to understand whether your core orientation is ‘Doer’ or a ‘Planner.’ Both work.
2. How you learn what you need to learn to excel. Some people prefer to study.  Others want to ask experts and recruit their help.  And some just like to plunge ahead using trial and error as rapidly as possible to learn what works.  Once a project you start engages other people, it’s good to have all three types of learners on your team.
3. How you best interact with people.  Some people are natural collaborators.  Others like to work independently.  And some need to be in charge. Our research shows that interacting effectively with people requires the ability to inspire best efforts and align actions. The skills of inspiration and aligning group work are not natural to most people.  If you’re going to be super productive these are vital skills to master.

Oh yes, there’s one more thing super productive people do.

Anytime you want to do something out of the ordinary you will soon find yourself being the captain of a boat surrounded by a sea of skepticism.  As long as you keep the boat of your mindset watertight the toxic water of skepticism will not seep into your mind-boat and sink it.

Most people don’t fail… they give up.

I hope you’re really discontent.  The world we have created is not the best we can do. If you are discontent use that energy productively.  When you change your world the world changes…we all need the change only you can make.

The factors that define success have been studied and researched to a very fine point over the last 50 years. Success is not a mystery; it’s a 5-step habit:

1. The first step, Self-Vision, is the most critical because it’s how you define success. It answers your ‘WHAT’ question. What do you really want? This is nothing less than the intention you hold for your life. Many people spend their whole lives investing superhuman effort in achieving goals that are ultimately not satisfying. We can avoid all that. Today we have well researched ‘end of life’ studies that definitively tell us what goals will make us happy and satisfied as our lifetimes come to a close. (See “Triumphs of Experience” by George Vaillant) So as I laid out previously, take the time to reflect on (1) what you want to achieve through your work, (2) how you want to enjoy your life, and (3) the difference you want to make. The more clearly you KNOW what your soul desires the easier it will be to say NO to other people’s agendas and the zillion distractions we face each day.

2. The second step is self-inspiration. This answers your ‘WHY’ question. Achieving success will take you out of your comfort zone because soul satisfying success requires growth. Without inspiration it is almost impossible to transcend old habits, procrastination and general foolishness that gets in the way of your best life. Self-inspiration starts with motivation. Psychologists tell us that we are far more motivated by our fears than by our lofty desires. So the way I have come to teach this principle is that we are motivated by our fears and inspired by our dreams.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that the key to high motivation is to clearly define the things in your life that are unacceptable and ask yourself “What will happen if nothing changes?” So, if you are in a mind-numbing job that requires constant overwork resulting in relentless stress…what will your work life be like two years from now if nothing changes? It will suck, right? Then ask yourself “Is that okay?” If you have maladapted and expect nothing greater for yourself it means you have come to accept the un-acceptable. Stop that. Stop accepting your status quo. Your motivation to change has to come from your self-respect.

Once you are motivated to change, you can unleash the inspiration of your self-vision. Vividly imagine how good your work and life can be by doing intrinsically rewarding work with people you respect at a pace that is sustainable. Ignite a bonfire of creativity and commitment. It will inspire you to act.

3. The third step is self-initiative. This addresses the ‘HOW’ question. This means taking responsibility to get into consistent action. Be proactive. The world will open up when you put the key in the lock to your best future. Economist Richard Wiseman, author of the “The Luck Factor” outlines the three elements that unlock good fortune.

1. Open your mind.  There are many paths to your self-vision. Don’t get trapped by the mistaken notion there is only one company you should work for or even one profession that will satisfy you. When you open your mind you will see opportunities for learning and experiences that will be useful on your journey. Exercise wisdom and discernment to distinguish between being sidetracked and open-minded. I have found virtually no life experience is wasted if you stay focused on how to leverage it in the pursuit of your genuine dream.
2. Engage new people and tell them what you’re up to. Wiseman has identified this habit as being the single most important activity for people who want big, beautiful opportunities.  People you know well probably already know what you want and what you can do. They are already providing all the help they can. It’s the big ring of people known as the ‘friends of your friends’ that you want to talk to… and also strangers. Research confirms your best opportunities will come from meeting new people.  If you express your goals and dreams with clarity and confidence they will often think of someone else you don’t know that you need to meet because they can help you.  In the college class that I teach on career changes I challenge students to tell 100 new people in 100 days what their professional dreams are. What these students experience is a massive increase in new opportunities. So please try it for yourself.
3. Pay attention. Pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t. Pay attention to what is helping you get closer to your dream and what is a waste of time. Your daily experience is full of clues that serve as Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs that will keep you from getting lost in the forest. Follow the breadcrumbs. Stop doing what isn’t working so you can increase your energy for step number four.

4) The fourth step is self-investment.  This is the ‘DO’ principle. It means you are going to ‘over invest’ in learning what you need to learn to be able to do what you need to do to become extraordinary. Most people will just try to keep getting what they want by just continuing to do what they are already doing.  But real success comes from making a ferocious commitment to what is necessary. By ferocious I don’t mean that you put your personal life on hold, ignore your health or ditch your loved ones. What I mean is that you must simply focus virtually all your working energy on the few activities that will make the most difference.

You must still live a balanced life. Research shows that the social support from intimate relationships and the benefits of fitness and hobbies will make you more creative, productive and successful than if you just become a mono-maniac.  So the over-investment I am talking about is simply over-investing your work time, attention and effort in the key activities that will drive your success.

S-Strengths.  You need to over-invest your motivated talents in what you are trying to accomplish. Your motivated talent is something you enjoy doing that gives you a high return on effort. If you are clear on what your strengths are, ask others who know you well what they most admire about you and what they think you do really well. You might be surprised.

G-Gaps. What needs to happen for you to be successful that you probably are not going to do? For instance I have been diagnosed as a hyper-visionary. I am a volcano of new ideas. But I tend to get scattered. Sustained focus is not my strength so I need to find others to team with to fill in my gaps. Everyone has gaps.

O-Opportunities. What opportunities do you have right now that you need to seize to keep moving in the direction of the success you’re seeking? Right now there are people that you should follow-up with who will help you meet the people you need to meet that will be a booster rocket to your success. Act on your opportunities and you will have more of them.

D-Distractions. I have found it’s helpful to make a list of internal and external distractions. Internal distractions arise from an undisciplined mind that quickly leads to external distractions. For instance if you were spending more than 30 to 45 minutes today on recreational social media that is valuable time you could be spending learning and doing things vital to your success. By writing down your habitual distractions your awareness will disempower them.

So the summary of step four is to use your strengths to invest in opportunities with increasing velocity. Enlist others to fill in your gaps and change any distracting habits.

5) Grit. This is the ‘Review’ principle. This means you are constantly reviewing what is working and what isn’t and re-investing in your progress. Researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth has isolated that the most potent success factor of all is GRIT. Grit is simply creative persistence. Persistence alone will lead you to drown in the ocean of Einstein’s definition of insanity. (Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.) Creative persistence means that you remain locked on your self-vision but you are constantly employing thinking agility to make course corrections that will enable you to overcome the inevitable roadblocks that suddenly appear around blind corners on the road of life. Grit is primarily an act of Will. (Ok, that was a pun I could not resist.)

The 5 evidence-based success factors; Self-Vision, Self-Inspiration, Self-Initiative, Self-Investment and Grit will transform your life. I know because it transformed mine. Go for it.

I slid in to the airplane seat next to Henry. I hadn’t seen him in six years and he looked 16 years older. I had done an innovative marketing engagement for him that I had thoroughly enjoyed. He was smart, charismatic and purpose-driven. A perfect client. I asked him how he was doing, to which he flashed a wry smile and uttered a single word… “bankrupt.” That’s a rough word. The word is like an axe–heavy and brutal. I responded by asking, “How is that possible?” Let me tell you his surprising answer in just a minute. But first let me tell you some of the most common reasons we make stupid decisions. They don’t just apply to business…they can easily apply to making a mistake buying a house or choosing a mate… or even the right pair of running shoes.

To really become wise we need to practice open-mindedness and humility.

To really become wise we need to practice open-mindedness and humility. This goes against our brain design because we are designed for decision efficiency. We like certainty and routine because we do not have to put a lot of energy into creativity or problem-solving. And our brains are energy hogs that are about as efficient as a jacked-up Hummer blasting down the road gulping gas by the gallon. The energy our brain requires is provided by both oxygen and glucose which is often in short supply since we spend most of our days sitting on our body’s largest muscle which inhibits blood flow to our brain.

To make matters worse our typical way of eating drives glucose cycles of fullness and hunger which makes our reasoning unreliable. There is a growing body of evidence that we make different decisions when were hungry or full. Thinking is so exhausting that Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman tells us that in order to conserve energy we simply put our brains in park a lot of the time. And when our brains are out of gas it makes us stupid. Here’s how. Our brains have developed all kinds of shortcuts or hacks to reduce the energy and effort that wise decision-making requires. Here are a few…. (These thinking errors come from researchers at Duke University and University of Pennsylvania. HBR, May, 2015.)

Excessive optimism–this occurs when we overestimate the likelihood of success of getting what we want versus the effort we need to make to get it.

Excessive optimism–this occurs when we overestimate the likelihood of success of getting what we want versus the effort we need to make to get it. This leads to the companion problem of overconfidence. In business I often see leaders argue for a new strategy because they don’t know what they need to know about the effort it will take to make that strategy work. These leaders constantly under estimate the difficulty of developing new products, opening new markets or changing the company culture to be more customer-focused. If the idea sounds good and passes their “gut test” they are all in and expect everyone else to be as well. We can individually suffer from excessive optimism when we make the mistake of believing that our noble motives will result in making magic happen and then become very discouraged when we realize hard work is the magic of magic.

Attribution error and confirmation bias is perhaps the most common human error of judgment.

Attribution error and confirmation bias is perhaps the most common human error of judgment. That’s when we come up with a story that lays out a cause and effect logic that is the basis of the success formula. Then we look for evidence that our formula is correct. The problem is we subconsciously discount contrary evidence. I’m always frustrated when motivational speakers claim that passion is the one necessary element for success. This advice is often given to people thinking about mortgaging their houses or spending their retirement savings on their great idea such as inventing a fishing pole that turns into an umbrella or a new app that alerts you when you’ve passed gas. (I am not making the app up, it’s in development.)

As evidence, the speakers often produce a series of edited anecdotes of the entrepreneur who invented Beanie Babies or rubber clogs and became rich. What they don’t present is something I call ICE which stands for Invisible Contrary Evidence. ICE shows that there’re plenty of people who lost their homes and life savings pursuing passionate ideas without a lick of business sense. The longer I live the truer it is that almost nothing truly great is accomplished without preparation, deep commitment and monster levels of creative grit. If all that sounds risky, and a lot of work it is, it’s exactly what our brains don’t want to hear. What we want to hear is that we have arrived at a secret formula that makes success easy and we have the evidence to prove it. Most often if the new initiative is something we want to do we will accept very flimsy evidence like spreadsheets based on untested assumptions or success stories masquerading as proof.

Because of all that we’ve invested we cannot face walking away.

Escalation of commitment. This bias occurs when we’ve already invested a lot of time, effort and perhaps money to make something work. Because of all that we’ve invested we cannot face walking away. So we tell ourselves just a little bit more is what we need to get this huge rock up on top of the mountain. This misjudgment often happens in business but also in relationships where one of the people has become uncommitted and their desperate partner frantically invests more time, more effort and money to pull the relationship out of a crash dive.

While I am not suggesting that we give up on relationships that hit rough patches I am suggesting that we all remain clear-eyed and open-minded about what’s really going on when someone becomes unresponsive to our sincere efforts at loving them. These three mistakes of judgment are very common and there are scores of others. We mostly make them because true open-mindedness requires consistent seeking of diverse points of view, verifiable data and the consideration of new personal futures. This requires oceans of personal energy. That was Henry’s mistake. When I asked him what caused his bankruptcy he answered “lack of sleep.” He told me that he had come across an article claiming many human beings could teach themselves to get along on four hours of sleep per night. So that’s what he did…for three years.

Looking back on it he said that it was this lack of sleep that caused him to make snap decisions and big bets that turned out to be totally wrong. He said it also made him cranky and unwilling to listen to his most trusted executives. As he got more and more fatigued he became more socially isolated even from his family. He became convinced that he alone was right and that other people simply didn’t “get it.” At work he cut back on meetings and just started making unilateral decisions in an effort to speed up his success. All that happened he said was that he “accelerated off the cliff.” He went on to tell me that one of the benefits of failure was he had time to sleep. Once he regained his mental energy he began to see more clearly the mistakes that he made and why he made them.

With the advent of brain scans and a lot more scientific interest in sleep we can now surmise that Henry was on to something. For instance, scientists now believe the largest single factor in student performance is not IQ, social background, or stress…it is the amount of sleep they get. Some studies show that a regular 15 to 30 minute increase in sleep for students who have chronic sleep deficits translates into a complete grade jump from B to A. (There are many, many sleep performance studies. Here is a start.)

To summarize, most of the sleep research says about 96% of human beings seem to need at least 7 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night to be at our best.

To summarize, most of the sleep research says about 96% of human beings seem to need at least 7 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night to be at our best. And most restful sleep happens in any 7.5 hours between 10 at night and seven in the morning. While there are exceptions you are probably not one of them. One of my closest friends has a great deal of trouble sleeping. He considers sleep a nuisance. There’s so much he wants to do and learn that he doesn’t feel he has enough time during the day to get it all done. He’s committed to me to change his ways…at least his sleeping. He is finally convinced that he will actually learn more and do more by investing more time in simply sleeping.

 

In the recent Republican debate candidates were asked what woman they want to see on our $10 bill. This turned out to be a real stumper. After a bit of hemming and hawing Jeb Bush sheepishly blurted out Margaret Thatcher. Although he admitted that he knew that the late prime minister was not an American citizen she was the most exemplary woman he could think of. Okay, right there, that’s what’s wrong with how most men evaluate leadership. Let me explain.

Last year the global consulting firm PwC asked mostly male business executives which leaders they most admired. The highest-ranking male was Winston Churchill and the highest-ranking female was Margaret Thatcher. Both these leaders are classic, extreme practitioners of hard power. Hard power behaviors are exactly what they sound like­­ – setting aggressive goals, a ruthless commitment to results and make-no-excuses accountability. Hard power political leaders often glorify war and personal sacrifice in the service of high ideals. Hard power is high on action, low on empathy. There’s no question that hard power is useful and even necessary at times. But it is very one-dimensional. It is best exercised in very simple situations where the law of untended effects will not sabotage the results of black-and-white thinking.

In this month’s Harvard Business Review the cover story is called The New Rules of Competition. The article lays out how the interconnectedness of global markets and the disruptive power of new technologies are making decision-making and strategic execution extremely challenging. Indeed, it makes the argument that no decisions are simple anymore.

A growing tide of research from places like MIT and McKinsey & Company is finding that soft power skills of social intelligence and holistic thinking combined with collaborative wisdom is a far better way to create effective strategy and drive results in today’s fog bound world.  I have written extensively about brain research that seems to validate that women’s brains are better designed to deal with complexity. MIT researcher Thomas Malone calls it Thinking Versatility. He has run over 156 experiments proving that women’s thinking versatility is better at complex problem-solving than male-dominant linear thinking.

Nevertheless, thousands of years of male dominated leadership have created an automatic bias that we associate decisiveness, risk-taking and confidence with successful leadership. It is sobering to note that Hitler, Stalin and Mao all exhibited an evil brilliance for hard power leadership. So perhaps there is more to leadership than simply imposing your vision and issuing orders.

The most effective leaders I have worked with are SMART Power leaders. They are mentally and emotionally ambidextrous. They mix the strengths of being goal driven with powerful social empathy and a core desire to make life better for others.

When we’re looking for people to lead our country in a complex world we should be looking for wisdom, open-mindedness, empathy and strength, not just bravado.

Some women who changed our country who deserve to be commemorated on a $10 bill are Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony (and many other suffragettes), Rosa Parks, and Eleanor Roosevelt.  It is not the fault of women that men cannot think of great women leaders. Our primitive bias that mistakes overblown arrogance for genuine leadership has made us blind to the new possibilities created when women lead using their own strengths.

So what can you do?  Be the leader you would like to be led by. Be wise. Be open-minded. Be empathetic. And be strong. SMART Power leaders are in short supply… just look at the people running for president!

 

This past week I led a strategy retreat for an amazing financial institution that provides capital and counseling to small business owners. Their mission is to help entrepreneurs build their businesses, increase employment and help their communities thrive. They operate aggressively throughout California and Arizona and are looking to spread their wings nationally.

Their strategic question was “How can we offer more relevant products and services to help our clients be successful?”  I love to work with organizations like this who understand that the purpose of business is to improve humanity using the disciplines of capitalism. Ah… very refreshing.

I use the same process framework whether I am helping leadership teams create a new business strategy, or with individuals who just want a new life strategy. It’s based on the synthesis of years of research and practice on the key factors that produce fulfilling success. I stress the word fulfilling for a reason.

We all know people who have been quite successful in making money for achieving fame but are nevertheless miserable. That’s because neither money nor fame on their own are soul satisfying. Success without meaning is empty. We are meaning seeking beings. We can’t help it.

Today, we live in a great age in which most of us can enrich ourselves by enriching others.  By “enrich” I mean the BIG definition of that word. We can enrich people’s health, knowledge, capabilities, opportunities, emotional and social lives. We can enrich people’s happiness and enjoyment of life. When we invest our talents to improve others’ quality of life we improve our own. There has never been a better time to seek success by creating genuine value for others. For my client leadership team they wanted to increase their self-worth as they help small business owners increase their net-worth.

This is very fulfilling to me as I have a high interest in helping  wise-hearted others understand the science-based framework for success so our culture can achieve escape velocity from the forces of fear, bias and toxic self-interest.

Science of success is summed up in the word K(NO)W. Just for fun I pronounce it K-NO-W. It means that to be successful you have to know what your soul really wants and say no to everything else.

It turns out this is not very easy. You live in a culture in which you are bombarded with as many as 5,000 selling messages every day telling you that you will never be happy or successful if you don’t buy something or change your appearance or your job or your home or your car or whatever else crazy advertisers can think up. You also probably work in a hierarchical structure in which being a boss is almost always considered better than being great at what you do. We are constantly told it’s better to fit in than to stand out. Yet the people we most admire stand out the most.

I find that leaders have it extra tough. CEOs are told by their board and the idiots of Wall Street what success is. I found this creates a dense fog that often takes months to dissipate as I continually ask my clients “But what difference do YOU really want to make? How do you define success for you?” Many don’t have a very clear answer.

And my work with women convinces me that women have a very hard time with self-directed goal clarity.  In most organizations and most families men set the agenda and women are expected to make that agenda work.  Until very recently women who have their own life visions were considered un-womanly.

One thing I’m quite sure of is that you will never feel fulfilled by spending your life fulfilling other people’s goals.  I’ve never seen it. So if you’re interested in authentic, soul-satisfying success here are the five steps I use.

I call it SMART Power.  It’s smart because it uses the five forces that make human beings powerful and effective.  These are the forces of (1) inspiration, (2) intellect, (3) emotion (4) social connection and (5) physical energy and vitality.  When you ignite all of these human forces your power to succeed multiplies. I assure you this is not mumbo-jumbo.  It’s exactly how I help individuals and organizations transform.

I want to explain this process carefully so I’m only going to explain step one, Self-Vision, in this blog.  I will follow up with the other four steps in next week’s blog.  So let’s get started.

(1) Self-Vision.  The foundation of success is to KNOW. You simply need to know what you most deeply desire to achieve. This is not trivial. You must set your direction on a set of goals that you find intrinsically meaningful. I ask people to literally visualize their best possible life two years from now. For most people this is not easy. It requires self-reflection.

Time strapped leaders often suffer from vision dyslexia. They are unclear and unsure. I am frequently retained by CEOs who are concerned that their leadership teams seem confused and lacking in confidence. I am quick to point out that their teams’ confusion is simply a vivid reflection of their own.

For these leaders, I ask them to paint me a detailed picture of what their optimal leadership success would look like two years hence. I ask them what impact they personally want to have on their customers, their employees and society. I often get into mental-emotional wrestling matches because leaders tend to regurgitate corporate vision statements, financial goals and other superficial answers because they have become too busy to have a high level of self-awareness.

So I have to ask them challenging questions, like… “What difference do you really want make?” or as a leader “If your children understood what you do, what would make your children most proud of you.” I’ll also ask them what leaders they most admire and why they admire them. They usually come up with the typical names of high profile successful people like Steve Jobs or Winston Churchill or even Elon Musk. Then I ask them why they admire them. The answers are usually that they are visionary and strong.  I point out that we admire people who know what they want and are focused on producing it. But it all starts with KNOWING. Knowing the difference you, your deepest intrinsic self, is longing to make.

When I work with individuals, I follow a similar process. I ask “Of the people you know well, whose personal life do you most admire?”  What elements of their lives would you like to incorporate into your own?”

Having a clear self- vision as to what constitutes your best life or the leadership impact you want to have is absolutely essential to your success. It’s that vision that creates an ever-present “intention” that changes how you look at everything.  It opens your mind to previously invisible opportunities and warns you of hidden pitfalls.

It changes the conversations you have, the people you spend time with, the TV shows you watch, the articles and books that you read. When your self-vision is clear it becomes the operating system of your daily life. Every decision is either taking toward fulfillment or wasting your time. Without clarity you could also be trapped in habits that sabotage your success.

One bad habit is paying attention to people, problems and situations that take us off track. We live in a very complicated age that is saturated with people who are requesting or even demanding we pay attention to them. All this noise makes us deaf to the voice of our unique vision.

Remember your true vision is always positive.  It isn’t about relief from the things in your life you don’t want. It is a picture of you living and leading your best life. It isn’t a wish or a tangle of emotional longings. It is a clear direction with a set of goals that are calling for your focused effort.

So for now, practice self-empathy. Please, go for a walk on the beach, in the woods or some other place in nature and reflect on how you want to specifically invest your time, talent and energy to make your work and your life a reflection of your highest and deepest desires. Finish these three questions:

1. What I want from my career is…
2. What I want out of life is…
3. The difference I want to make is…

If your future were painted on a mural, what would I see? To paint that picture what needs to change in the next two years?

This past Sunday morning a three time world surfing champion, Mick Fanning, was nearly eaten by a great white shark during the finals of a major surf contest in South Africa. It was watched live via the web by hundreds of thousands of avid surfers including me and now by millions on YouTube.

The attack was frightening, ferocious and freaky. I know a bit about the shear panic of being stalked by a shark. Once at Rincon, California I was chased out of the water by an 8-foot shark. So scary I had to rinse out my wetsuit. In Samoa, I paddled to shore faster than a cartoon character when a tiger shark cruised by. As for the direct great white shark attack on Mick…I am so grateful that it ended without any injury. Amazing!

When Mick was interviewed a few minutes after he escaped he broke down in tears so grateful for his family, friends and life. Perhaps nothing is so clarifying about what’s important in life as a narrow escape from a violent death…or in my case a long, bumpy life with more than one sobering health scare caused by my uninsurable heart. My times of greatest fear and greatest discouragement have taught me the most about life.

Here are the life lessons that hit me hard watching Mick’s brush with physical obliteration:

1. My deepest purpose is to love as big and as wisely as I can, and learn what I came here to learn…which is constantly emerging.
2. Always live in daily balance with a sweet rhythm of love, work and play. (I have to do this in order to do #1.)
3. Wake up each morning with a direct intention to improve someone else’s life that day.

Most of the people I coach and train have difficulty with number 2. But let me assure you it is possible to live a lifestyle of inner harmony and outer joy. It takes a powerful intention to do so and focused attention on the opportunities that will create the life rhythm you need. Millennial-age young people get the central importance of this. They have looked at the lives, stresses, and follies of their elders and want something more. And you know, at the core, nothing is more important to your inner integrity than # 2. It is the only way to live so that if you die unexpectedly, you will have no regrets.

Debbie and I are on a meditation and hiking vacation in the Tetons right now so that’s it for today. 

Those are the spontaneous thoughts that flooded me as I watched the horror of a shark attack and took a few minutes to contemplate what life lessons I have learned that I want to hang on to.

Live your life so that you love your life.