What do you do for a living?

How many people do you know, including yourself, may be, that find themselves in jobs where they feel inequitable   in terms of their skills and abilities and what the job really requires.

He must be quick to break those habits that can break him – and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.” (John Paul Getty)

Many people debate during my consulting journey and would say:” I agree that this is the job size and its right positioning, however, this is not my size or positioning!”

There are four types of jobs that you can do, as per Dr. Victor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy. The first ones are the hard to learn and hard to do. This type of job is like accounting or administration for a person who has no natural skill or ability in that area. It would be so hard to learn, and no matter how many years of experience you accumulate, it would be hard to do. Their work is always hard and seldom satisfying. How many people do you personally know that are in this trap?

A job that is hard to learn but easy to do is the second type. This can be a competency like Drawing Excel sheets with calculation formulas or conducting a surgery. It takes remarkable commitment and focus to acquire, yet once you have mastered it, it is quite easy to do, one time after the other. Regrettably, this type of job can become dull and boring and will stop stimulating you over time. It seldom causes you to draw out your potential and develop your talents.

The third type of job is a job that is easy to learn but hard to do. Like physical labor, like riggering, gardening, upholstery, Air Conditioning installation. It’s proportionally easy to become skilled at a physically challenging job, but it is constantly hard to do, no matter how extensively you do it.

The most significant category is the fourth, easy to learn and easy to do. You find yourself learning it so easily, and doing it so naturally, that you roughly forget when and how you learned it in the first place. Easy to learn and easy to do jobs are the best display of your likely and innate abilities and talents. This is where you exceed, get the best results, and earn the very most.

Obviously, you ought to explore continuously your activities and talents, in order to identify the things that you learn and do easily, these are the things that would stimulate you the most, and this is the job that would make you work eagerly, make the best results out of, and earn the maximum from.

It is true that no one would know your winners better than you, yet, if you do not make the effort to explore several jobs and see yourself performing them, you’d not be able to find your dream job. Once you do, and you start running your own business, you ‘d be focusing on the tasks that you’d like to do the most, and optimizing your productivity in them, while eliminating the jobs that you like the least, and this would ideally reach you to the next level.

An argument here would be that not everyone would afford to open their own business, and the above obviously wouldn’t apply to a regular employee, who has to fulfill and perform a job description as it is, whether they like all the tasks in it or not; let’s take a step back here, and recall… what made this person take the decision and accept a job that has several tasks that they despise doing? Was it the pay, the security or simply the “go with the flow”, maybe it was just “running away from a previous job that seemed to be unbearable or a previous horrible boss. This is where I put the focus on the decisions we make, this is what this whole book and methodology is all about, once the driver of our decisions is a negative trigger, we would haphazardly be going from one wrong decision to another, and that would lead us to probably worse scenarios.

I remember here the story of the Lion and the Gazelle, it says:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”

― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run 

One is running to survive, and the other is running for the exact same reason, but one is reactive while the other is proactive.

Explore your innate and acquired talents, what you like to do most, what you enjoy doing, and target your next job, do not work aiming to survive, as Confucius said: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 

DEAL WITH IT

To improve is to Change, to be Perfect is to change often. Winston Churchill

Change is inevitable, yet, most of the times, change is frustrating; having to leave a school that you know everyone and everything in to join a new one, having to change your laptop, your car, in order to buy a new one, changing work in either a promotion or a quit. With all the progress and light that these changes promise you, the thought of change itself still always holds a considerable amount of discomfort.

As everything we do in patterns result with a habit, flexibility, perhaps the best tool to manage change, is a habit that you can develop by practice. This habit of remaining open-minded and adaptable to new information and situations can make you form a pattern of positive reactions by looking for the opportunity in each “frustrating” and “upsetting” situation, and spotting what’s best for you in it.

Usually, it’s those people who can remain calm and keep their minds functioning consciously in the middle of an unexpected crash or problem that are considered to be superior.

They take a deep breath, relax, and weigh the situation accurately. They keep themselves calm and unemotional by asking questions and seeking information when things don’t work out as they expected.

Ineffective people have a tendency to be in a reactive-responsive mode of behavior much of the time. Instead of consciously and deliberately choosing their courses of action, they react to what is going on around them, and they respond to their emotions, sometimes blowing up and sometimes becoming depressed. They ride an emotional roller coaster. And the very best they can hope for, in this mode of behavior, is to get back to even, where they were before they became upset. The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz.

According to Fritz, the superior person concentrates his attention on his “future vision.” Whenever an unexpected change or setback occurs, the superior person immediately focuses his mind on where he wants to be at a future time. This future vision is something that he has planned and given a lot of thought to, so it is fairly easy to conjure up at a moment’s notice.

When everyone around them are drowning into skeptical investigations about who to blame, and formatting the perfect scenario for the conspiracy that might be tailored for them, Superior people tend to ask, “what do we do now?”, “Where do we go from here?”. They

keep themselves performing at their best by thinking and talking about a desired future

state. Focus your attention on the future, and you can greatly improve your ability to deal with change.

Think about any stressful situation you had in the near or far past, what was mostly the reason you felt frustrated? Most of your stress, sadness, and irritation comes from the fact that you were not in control at that particular moment or situation, or in any particular area of your life; the critical issue in dealing with change is the subject of control.

On the other hand, if you recall the times and places you felt the very best about yourself are those that you were in full control.

Home Sweet home is a perfect example of the above, it is that moment you reach the place where and when you are in full control, especially after a long journey of losing it. When you were outside, you felt you were in lack of control, as if you were moved by external forces, namely traffic, silly drivers, pedestrians, and of course running behind schedule.

Feeling back in control brings comfort and enjoyment, it is like that moment when you have finished an exam, or an assignment, or a project, and you feel like you are back in charge of your life.

 

Ultimately, in order to deal with change, you have to be always in full charge over the things you think about, which should come from your conscious mind since it is the only thing over which you have complete control.

Since change is inevitable and continuous, it is how you think about what is happening to you that is most important in determining how change affects you, and whether you use it to your advantage or let it work to your disadvantage. Brian Tracy

So what type of change do we fear? Is there an exclusive type of change that brings all the discomfort and fearful feelings in us? Indeed, there is; we are always afraid of what we will be worse off as a result, not better off. It is change that implies unpleasant surprises that makes us anxious fearing, here it is the fear of losing control.

In his book “No Excuses”, the legendary Brian Tracy brings to practice a very practical way to face fears, he called it the disaster report, he puts steps into destroying fear almost instantly by first “Defining the worry situation clearly, being completely clear about a situation brings immediate ways of its resolution; Second, Identify the worst possible thing that could possibly happen if the worry situation were to take place. A series of “would you” questions be asked here about losing a job, a relationship or money; after asking such questions, one would find that it’s probably not worth all the worry. The third step is to resolve to accept the worst possible outcome… DEAL WITH IT if it is meant to happen, how would you manage if the worst possible came into reality, putting a solid base of resolutions and contingency plans for it. Finally, Fourth, beginning immediately to improve on the worst, like the old saying, if it ain’t broke, fix it before its broken.

Tracy’s brilliant way of dealing with fear shows that having a purposeful and disciplined action in the direction of your goals is the only cure for fear or worry.  

In this part of the world, change is ongoing, it is like our daily bread an butter, things that are completely out of anyone’s control. In order to manage change, you have to deal with it, put self-direction, write solid and specific goals that enable you to plan for change, plan for instability and control your actions while it happens. We all know that in every situation, some unexpected disappointments and setbacks will happen, this is the nature of the market, and life; sometimes you lose in spite of all the efforts, sometimes unpredictable events puts down all your eagerness and enthusiasm to achieve something, yet, only the superior people know that all these setbacks, disappointments and losses are uncontrollable, are like rain in a sunny day, and reassure their plans constantly with perseverance to fit and use them into their own benefit.

The difference between average and superior is long term planning, so no matter unexpected events happen, they can make some barriers but never drift them from their main concentration, their concrete determination of getting what they want, of reaching the solid goals they have put from the start.

Yes, most goals stay in the level of wishes and dreams, because we don’t take them and ourselves seriously, I bet 90% of the people you know had very good new year’s resolutions, but no one made the effort to write them down, or to ever revisit them again, and eventually they ended up going with the wave of changes, living in anger and worry, loss of control. Dealing with change is as constant as change itself, the moment you surrender to it, it beats you, and we all know we can’t spend our lives crying over spilled milk, unfortunately we do. 

“The last great freedom of man is the freedom to choose his attitude under any given set of circumstances”. Viktor Frankl

Take Back your Time

It might seem to be very basic and cliche that time is money, but of course we all know so and we all try to get our priorities checked throughout the day. Most of us have daily and weekly planners, have set their priorities at work and in life, and work accordingly to achieve their oriented results; the question here is, where do 80% of us fail? Why is it that last year’s resolutions are still hanging somewhere either in our minds, or at the best case on a piece of paper in some drawer, we even forget where we put them.

The answer is simple, it was once said: ”in order to get something you never had, you have to do something you never did”; what we fail to do is the not only the objective planning of our time, but also, the execution of those great plans. It’s known that on paper, all plans look great, astonishing and achievable, theory is easy, but practice is what makes it perfect, and this is the hard part.

Poet Carl Sandburg metaphoric description of time as money count said: “Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you”.

I read once a quote that said, time is the most valuable gift you can ever give to someone, indeed, it is, add to this, time cannot be bought, cannot be sold, it can only be given; so your decision on how to spend time is really a make it or break it to your life, your daily consumption of minutes and hours will reflect greatly the style and norm of your life, and it definitely makes you the person you are today.

  Some questions would reflect this on the spot, for instance:

How are you spending time at work?

Well again, we revisit that tiny little “comfort zone” of ours when evaluating time, we are what we repeatedly do, and we tend to get indulged in our daily “subconscious” routine of time wasters, and myths about tasks and importance and priorities, this majorly results from our wrong perception of priority setting and delegation.

Vilfredo Pareto’s famous 20-80 rule, is the rule of priorities that I encountered about 15 years ago, and ever since I apply it on basically everything in my life; it said that by focusing your attention on the top 20 percent of all your priorities, you would get an 80 percent return on your efforts, answering the question again “How are you spending time at work?” will reveal now what is going wrong; the amount of time you spend on others priorities, tasks to be routinely done, and of course time wasters that are all around you.

One of the major time wasters, statistically, is social networking; Facebook is the most frequently used social media platform with visitors spending an average of 6.75 hours each month browsing through its pages. Tumbler and Pinterest users spend about 1.5 hours on the media per month, while Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus visitors spend 21, 17 and 3 minutes respectively. Social networking increased from 2.7 hours to 6.9 hours over the period ranging between 2006 and 2012, while watching TV on the Internet increased from 6.3 hours to 23.1 hours. As for phone, email and mail, people used to spend 5.7 hours in 2006 but the numbers have dropped to 4.8 hours. Watching TV offline experienced the biggest drop from 71.1 hours to 59.4. When it comes to socializing in person, the time decreased from 22.8 hours to 21. Taking care of household members also decreased from 15.9 to 15.3 hours.According to surveys, only one third of workers plan their daily schedules, and only 10% of those follow through and complete what they have planned. According to time management expert Alec Mackenzie, surveys show that most executives don’t get to their most important tasks until mid-afternoon. Actually, most of the low-priority tasks get in the middle of their days schedule, and they do them to tend to get a sense of accomplishment about their days.

The above indicates the amount of time an average worker would spend on social media only, not to forget the social activities, office gossip and other interruptions and time wasters.

If you look at it from a higher perspective, we already abuse half, literally half, of our time not only by the above time wasters, but most importantly by the amount of time we spend doing things that are not only non value added, but also activities that limits our evolution.

I refer to taking back time here as to pause, think and decide on what activities you will cut off spending time on, activities that are considered to be in the loop of our daily rituals, the amount of time spent on TV, Video Games, Social Media, etc… and on the other hand, the people we interact with, the friends we surround ourselves with, the environment we indulge in. think of:

• ·        What am I spending time on daily?
• ·        What could be a better alternative for spending the same amount of time?
• ·        Who am I spending time with?
• ·        What’s in it for me? Fun, intellect, emotional satisfaction?
• ·        What and who stimulates me?

After answering the above, you’d realize the time wasted, on activities, people and thoughts, from your daily life, the same time that you can invest in; the most important question here is again:

what’s in it for you?

Integrity: part of "Decisions Make Destinies"

To be truly honest with others, you must first be impeccably honest with yourself. You must be true to yourself. You must be true to the best that is in you, to the very best that you know, to your potential,  off-sides, and limitations. Only a person who is living consistent with his or her highest values and virtues is really living a life of integrity. Think of it, how many people around you have this issue of lack of buy-in to what they say, which is basically driven from their acts on the other hand. When you commit to living to your values, you will find yourself continually raising your own standards, continually re-defining your definition of integrity and honesty.

We all have small lies, no one is perfect, I know is some situations we all flaunt things that are against our beliefs, and we think that we are doing the right thing because this is the norm; well if you come to think of it, it is indeed the norm, but it is not NORMAL though! Simply not walking your talk makes this gap between your self-image and your self-ideal grow bigger, hence decreasing your self esteem and letting go your values.  You can tell how high your level of integrity is by simply looking at the things you do in your day-to-day life. You can look at your reactions and responses to the inevitable ups and downs of life. You can monitor the behaviors you normally take on in and you will then know the person you are.

The way to demonstrate high integrity is high-quality work. A person who is totally honest with himself or herself will be someone who does, or strives to do, excellent work on every possible opportunity. The totally honest person recognizes, sometimes unconsciously, that everything he or she does is a statement about who he or she really is as a person, and that makes the difference between a regular job done, and an extra mile walked.

Two colleagues can have the same job description, doing exactly the same tasks, one of them however, always exceeding the expectations of the stakeholders, being it the clients, the superiors or the fellow employees, and the other is just doing what he is asked to do; it makes the whole difference. Throughout my training and coaching workshops and seminars, I meet both kinds, and I am always asked about what makes one employee exceed another, and this is always the case, Integrity.

When you start your day earlier, stay a little later, work a little harder, start to pay attention to little details that you didn’t focus on before; you are starting to practice integrity in your workplace. And whether you know it or not, your true level of integrity is apparent and is obvious to everyone around you. Perhaps the most important rule you will ever learn is that your life only becomes better when you become better, inside out and not the other way around, life is lived from the inside out.

At the very core of your personality lie your values about yourself and life in general. Your values determine the kind of person you really are. What you believe has defined your character and your personality. It is what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, that tells you and the world the kind of person you have become. Mind it goes both positively and negatively; in my last seminar before launching this book, titled also “Decisions Make Destinies” I had one intervention from one girl in the audience stating that it is not about “what you know” nowadays, it’s about “who you know”, claiming her sincere belief that nowadays if you want to get a job, you have to know someone, and she expressed this demonstration as she is currently working as a waitress, which has nothing to do with what she is studying, and that even this waitress job that she took was by the factor of “who you know”, and she was debated by another young woman who applied for the same company, same job, every week, and just by this persistence that she got the job of her dreams, and that matches her qualifications and studies. Guess what, they are both right! If you see it internally as the first lady does, you will always be after “who you know” which won’t help a lot as you get to demonstrate your work afterwards, I mean, who wants to hire someone who lacks skills just because of this factor, unlike the second lady, who, with only her persistence, have the drive not only to get the job, but also to demonstrate her values in it every day.

Limitations

What are limitations? Aren’t they offsides too? Aren’t they things that we believe we can’t do? Or things we believe stop us from reaching where we want to go? How many limitations do you have? I believe every one of us has infinity of limitations facing them.

Limitations also begin to nurture inside us throughout our journey of life, from outside and inside, Anthony Robbins said it well: “its upon our potential that we take action, and from the results of our actions generates a certain belief in our potential”, taking a look at this, during our journey, makes perfect sense on limitations, since belief in potential can be as much negative as positive it can be.

Limitations are results of bad experiences, either ours or surprisingly the experience of our entourage. You’d think of a brilliant idea, and even before putting it into further thinking, some internal sound would interfere your creativity to whisper sadly “it won’t work”.

Limitations are creativity killers; they are the very single reason for the failure of our brilliant and crazy ideas. I just can picture if everyone on planet earth submitted and surrendered to their limitations, I would be writing this book of mine on stones, or even not writing it basically. The evolution of the human being was a series of creativity activities that consequently prevailed his limitations.

In one of my public seminars, I was pointing that point when I addressed the audience with the word imagine…

Imagine I had an extra eye in my finger, what could I do?

You could see easily more than 70% of the crowd with a perplexed look on their faces, what the hell could someone do with this? Why is he asking this question? How could this be? This can never happen, etc…

Then I proceeded: You see you surrendered immediately for your own and other’s limitations, even coming to think of it as I said “Imagine”, but you missed the fact that this idea came across a lot of persons who invented things that you use now, and most of you have on them, the camera, with all its types!

A +25 Billion dollar company called facebook originally started with the word “imagine!”, a happening world cup in Doha, Qatar, in 2022, the first football world cup version to be organized in the middle east, in an Arab country, started with the same word. Many of the things you use on daily basis, your lifestyle shall we say, started with the word “IMAGINE!”

It’s very common to hear statements like “it won’t work”, “who do you think you are?”, “are you crazy?” daily, we don’t often hear the opposite of these statements from our entourage; I guess they are giving us a bad legacy… their limitations; they are transferring their bad experience, and their own failures for us to take lessons from. Amazing.

We grow up being a small piece of moving meat, and then our movements get more and more conditioned with our bodies, we learn baby steps, then we walk, start talking, saying whatever, then we learn our so called “mother tongue”, which eventually was created by man to help communicate, then slowly but surely we begin to get more and more conditioned by the things we can do, are allowed to do, things that are forbidden, and it comes without saying, things that we can’t do.

We begin to have our internal limitations, being raised by our parents, the friends and family, the society, and our very own experiences. I remember I used to adore playing piano, by instinct, at the age of 6 or 7, I put my fingers on that old piano my dad bought so that my older brother starts to learn to play, and that he never did, and I started playing absolutely any tune that I heard, without even learning the notes or anything related formally to it.

I can see now the conditioning my father did to my older brother, getting him a piano, I remember his words back then to his friend: ”I want him to play piano”, may be he got what he wanted as Shady, my older brother, started to learn eventually how to play, but after a little while, that piano was merely touched. My parent’s conditioning didn’t stop there, few years later, as they saw me getting better and better in playing, they got me a piano teacher, thinking that this would make me go the next level, unfortunately, as playing piano was now a three times a week lesson, that teacher built inside me a huge limitation that I did not notice before, which was that I am left handed! I played the main tunes with my left hand, and when the lessons advanced into playing the tunes with my right hand, and use the left hand playing the Accord, I gave it up, and soon enough I stopped not only going to the piano lessons, but also playing the tunes I used to like before.

I can’t ski, I tried many times and it didn’t work… I am a nervous person; I get to an aggressive state easily… I am a shy person; I can’t even initiate a conversation… I can not do more than one thing at a time…I can’t stop smoking, I am addicted to it.

Read the above and jot down your limitations, after you finish, re-read them and think…think who is saying this inside you? Is it you? Or your limitations? Is it possibly someone who implied this once to you, or made you think of it the way you are doing now? think of your comfort zone, and put a line under each limitation you plan to overcome, take it baby steps out of your comfort zone, face your fears, your doubts, and as you got them into your system, so long ago, get them out now. 

Decisions Make Destinies - Application & Practices Workshop - June 25, 2011, Lebanon

The Power of the Subconscious Mind

In my weekly TV segments nowadays, I am speaking about the power of the subconscious mind, intending to highlight the importance of this ultimate power, your subconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious one, as in millions of times. By learning how to train and use your subconscious mind, you will be able to break bad habits, control your behavior, fix your belief system and get rid of unwanted emotions.  The subconscious mind has many governing rules; the following is an explanation of each of these rules:

 

Rules of the Subconscious Mind

Have you been to a horror movie lately? If you have, then you must have noticed how your pulse raced in fear and horror despite being in no real danger. In simpler words, because your subconscious mind does not differentiate between real and imagery situations, it assumes that you are facing a real threat rather than a merely imagery one. Now, with such knowledge, you can start using it to your benefit. Suppose you had to give a presentation. If you properly visualize your presentation a couple of times before you actually have to present it, your subconscious mind will more or less believe that you've performed so well in your previous 'presentations' and is thus more likely to keep up the same level of performance in the next one; the real one!!

The subconscious mind does not differentiate between visualizations and real situations

Have you ever wondered why time always seems to fly whenever you're doing something fun? It's because you don't keep looking at your watch every few minutes, something you would have probably done if you were in a situation where you bored out of your mind. Consequently, you'd be experiencing the passing of time 'unconsciously', and because the subconscious mind doesn’t have a sharp sense of time, you'd feel like you've hardly spent any time. The same would happen when you're asleep; when you go to sleep, it is only your conscious mind that is in fact sleeping while your subconscious one stays awake. That’s why you feel like you've hardly had time to sleep when you wake up.

Your subconscious feels that time passes faster 

If you have a longstanding belief, it will definitely be more difficult to alter than a recently formed one.

The longer the subconscious mind believes something, the harder it will be to alter this belief in any way

If you think that you are going to do badly in a presentation, your pulse and breathing would start to race as soon as you start talking. These physical changes are caused by that one thing; the idea or thought.

Every thought causes a physical reaction

If you are sure that you are going to fail an exam, you will indeed fail even if you have all it takes to succeed. Your thoughts and expectations serve as the master plan for your subconscious mind, so whenever you think of something, your subconscious mind will do its best to make it come true.

What you expect tends to be realized

If you believe that you were not good-looking and someone makes a remark confirming your suspicion, you would probably be convinced beyond doubt that what you believe is true. That in turn would make altering your belief much more difficult.

Finding proofs to your held beliefs serves to strengthen them

If you are afraid of the dark and you passed into a dark room, you will definitely feel fear, apprehension and anxiety swell within you, even while you try to convince yourself that there is nothing to be afraid of. This is the result of the subconscious mind being more powerful than the conscious one; it will dominate your thoughts and basically "win" any conflict with your conscious mind.

The subconscious mind always prevails in conflicts with the conscious one

Up until the fifteenth century, people believed that the earth was flat. When it was proved that the earth was a globe, the people of that time simply accepted this new fact, replacing the old belief with the new one.

An idea, once accepted, will remain firmly in place until it is replaced by another

The greater the conscious effort the lesser the subconscious response: This can be best explained by the example of someone suffering from insomnia(inability to sleep). Consciously trying to sleep will only make this person even more awake. By avoiding conscious effort and thinking of anything else instead, he/she would find that they will eventually nod off.

Suggestions can be used to "program" the subconscious mind: This is the main idea behind hypnosis, namely sending suggestions to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind accepts all suggestions that are sent, providing the absence of the conscious mind's supervision.