Attitude

Here's a story entitled, "What will my reward be?" I came across this as Author Unknown, so if you happen to know who wrote this story, please share it as a comment! Enjoy this story:

One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.

About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach, trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. "You aren't going to catch many fish that way," said the businessman to the fisherman. "You should be working rather than lying on the beach!"

The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, "And what will my reward be?" "Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!" was the businessman's answer. "And then what will my reward be?" asked the fisherman, still smiling. The businessman replied, "You will make money and you'll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!" "And then what will my reward be?" asked the fisherman again. The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman's questions. "You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!" he said.

"And then what will my reward be?" repeated the fisherman. The businessman was getting angry. "Don't you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!" Once again the fisherman asked, "And then what will my reward be?" The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, "Don't you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won't have a care in the world!"

The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, "And what do you think I'm doing right now?"

What is your ambition in life? What's the difference between laziness and contentment? What do you feel content about?

Here's a video from Robin Crow, author of Rock Solid Leadership. While I would love to tell you more about Robin, I think this video says it all. Enjoy!

Making Relocation the Catalyst for Life Changes and Self Growth

If you are being forced to relocate to another part of the country, or even another part of your state, you may not be feeling very happy about your move right now. You might even feel like the bumper sticker that says, "Why does life keep teaching me lessons that I have no desire to learn?"

I don't know why life teaches us lessons that we have no desire to learn. What I do know is that those times in life when we are faced with a hard lesson are the times when opportunity is always greatest. As Willa Cather said (somebody should make this into a bumper sticker too!), "Some things we learn best in calm, and some in storm."

Put another way, when life gives us a chance to learn a lesson, we have the chance to open a present. We don't know what may lie inside the wrapping paper. Does the package contain something exciting and wonderful? Or something boring and mundane? Or does it, perhaps, contain a book we've read before? Been there, done that, didn't want to do it again.

The thing about this present, though, is that what it contains has not yet been decided. You are sitting there, with a present in your lap, and as you unwrap it, you get to decide what that package contains. That's not the way opening presents normally works. But it is the way this present works. That's what is so magical about a life change like relocation. It truly will be what you make of it.

So how do you change your outlook from self-pity to excitement and anticipation of good things to come? Try these strategies.

1. Change your self talk. Scientists are beginning to study the effect that the thoughts you have in your brain have on the rest of your body. Have you ever heard of the placebo effect in medical studies? Sometimes, when doctors tell patients they are being given a strong medicine, the effect of each patient's faith in that strong medicine is so powerful that even the patients in the control group get better, or at least have significant improvement in their symptoms. (The control group in a medical study contains patients who aren't really being given medicine but who are instead being given, for example, sugar pills, or the equivalent depending on the treatment that is being studied -- so that doctors can see what the true effect of taking the medicine is compared to taking nothing.)

Placebo studies show us the power of thoughts in the brain to change actual, physical realities. You may be thinking that your job outlook does not depend on your thoughts. But, when your thoughts are positive, you behave different than you do when you have negative thoughts. You may see opportunities that you wouldn't have noticed if you were walking around in a cloud of self pity. You may think more creatively about your options, finding opportunities to learn new things that will help you to advance in your career, or you may suddenly notice that you are moving to a city in which there are many businesses that fall into your industry, giving you the chance to move horizontally, to a similar job in a company with a different corporate culture, if that is what you are looking for.

2. Set goals. Once you have started to think about what a positive change your relocation will be, try getting more specific. Visualize where you want to be and what you want to be doing, at set mileposts that are still down the road. Think of what you would like to be doing in a year, and what steps you will have to take to get to that point. Don't self-censor your dreams! You may think that your dream is unlikely to come true. That doesn't matter. In the words of Robert Browning, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what is heaven for?" Or, more prosaically, as Leo Burnett put it, "When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either."

Setting goals is a way of keeping your eye on the ball, so to speak. If your goal is to advance within your company, you will want to make sure to set yourself up to get the kind of experience that would be looked for by someone doing a job search for the position you are hoping to get. If you need additional education, you will need to find a way to make that happen. Start with your goal, work backward, and you will have a road map, or guide, telling you what steps to take at each stage of your journey.

3. Get more information. If your upcoming move is getting you down, it may be because you do not have enough information about the place where you are going. Getting information is a good way to put your worries to rest when positive thinking is not enough to dispel them. If there is some burning question on your mind that has you bothered, find out the answer. What are the schools like in the area? Is public transportation reliable? How are you going to keep in touch with the friends and family you are leaving behind?

One way to quickly change your own attitude about your move is to set aside your career for a moment and think about your personal interests. Do you have a particular church that you want to look for in your new neighborhood? Are there hobbies that you enjoy that you may find new chances to spend time, because of a neighborhood group or resources in a city that is different from the one where you used to live?

4. Find things that you can look forward to about the move itself. Do you love to travel by train? See if you can find a way to arrange your move so that you can go by train. If you are traveling across the country, think of it as a vacation -- a road trip that you are taking for fun. Even if the move was imposed on you, nobody is stopping you from having fun with it. Be a tourist along the way. Stop at museums in strange cities, or go to see the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, or the Smoky Mountains. Take pictures. Collect postcards. Document your trip in a scrapbook. You may feel that this is the last thing you want to remember. But guess what? When you start to act as though it is an enjoyable even that you want to preserve for posterity, that's what it will become -- a special time to spend time with your family, get to know them better, and see a part of the country that you may never have seen before.

Finally, my last and, in my opinion, most profound suggestion and challenge to those facing a tough move: make a list of all the things that you hate about this relocation. Then turn each negative into a positive. Suppose that you are moving from the Southwest to the Midwest. Yes, you hate long drives, but you'll get to stop in Chicago and visit the Field Museum. Yes, you dislike cold, icy winters, but you will love going to the lakefront in the summer. Yes, you got passed up for the promotion you wanted in your old department, but you are being given a chance to shine in front of a new group of people who don't know anything about you except that you were handpicked to come and be with them. Be your own spin doctor, and before you know it, you will find yourself believing the spin -- and really, truly making the best out of this move.

Art Decker is a division manager with Self Storage Company, which operates a group of websites, including a California self storage locator. Art leads a busy life and often travels from Texas to Washington D.C. As a result, Art has had the opportunity to witness many people amidst relocation and has paid attention to how and why some people have an easier time adjusting to a relocation than others do.

Karl Duncker, a German psychologist, investigated new ways to solve problems. His idea was that we often get stuck in our typical ways of thinking...making it hard for us to see a real solution. This concept, which he called functional fixedness and defined as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem", led him to create The Candle Problem. The picture below prompts his test:

In this problem, his subjects had to attach the candle to the wall, light it, and not allow any wax to get on the table. I'm not going to reveal the answer, because (if you're like me) you'd like some time to think it through. I'll post the answer in a couple days so you can mull over it.

It's easy to get stuck in the same way of thinking and miss potential new ideas and different ways of looking at life. Dan Pink uses this experiment and concept to draw a picture of motivation. Warning: he does reveal the answer to the candle problem. Please enjoy Dan's talk:

Today we have a special guest post from blog reader Bruce Hall:

Self-Discipline: Source of Achievement or Self-Delusion?

"No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined."

-Harry Emerson Fosdick

It's 5 a.m. and cold as a meat locker. Outside, the gloom of winter darkness presses against my sliding glass door. A few feet away, here in the house, the dining room table is filled with stacks of reference books. A freshly prepared steaming hot cup of coffee waits on the table, which I must drink quickly, or risking losing the advantage. To my left, a small black desk lamp casts a strong beam of light, which cuts diagonally across the keyboard of an elderly, painfully slow laptop. This is the destination of my writing pilgrimage every morning.

I quickly turn up the thermostat and slide into my chair, muttering something about resolve. I take a sip of coffee, unload a sigh, and begin to plunk keys. If a few coherent sentences take root each day, I might have a blog by the end of the week. Inevitably, however, questions arise. What if I can't? What if my goal is clearly untenable, and all I end up with is a bowl of alphabet soup? What if the whole thing is mere hubris? Whew! Well, those questions are traveling in dangerous territory, aren't they? Besides, I'll know more after editing, rewriting, and egocentricity kick in.

Writing is not a rare experience for me; however, my decision to blog once a week has bent some edges of confidence. That level of commitment raised the issue of strong belief. Would I be up to the task? Am I self-disciplined enough? Sure, why not, I reasoned. Self-discipline is in my nature, along with an ability to mobilize resources for achieving an ultimate purpose, regardless of time. However, since I also value goal setting, I impose a schedule each day. I consider topics, mood, and language. I dream about similes for emphasis and creating powerful metaphors. I began to drink more coffee. How can I not succeed?

On the other hand, even the best of intentions are easily submerged under comfy layers of heavy blankets, safe and secure in my bed from worldly responsibility. In the beginning, I found I did not want to get up. I was not interested in self-discipline, self-awareness, self-discovery, or any other possibilities. I began to imagine a wide variety of procrastination techniques. I even confess entertaining notions of mental telepathy or automatic writing; not resources I really want to draw upon!

Successful people share one thing in common: an ability to mobilize themselves and their talent to achieve goals. Accomplishment is not a passive entity. One must work at it. History reveals self-disciplined individuals with an impulse to connect their imagination actively in fields like science, philosophy, psychology, religion, art, and technology have led to extraordinary accomplishments.

So now I practice what I coach others. Every day, very early, I arise from bed, shuffle down the hall, feed my hungry, barking dogs, make coffee and worry about grammatical troublemakers.

Do you have an image of achievement to call your own? That's a powerful vision to carry around. Do you possess the strength, persistence, and perseverance to develop the skills and experience to make it real? That's equally potent.

The drive for accomplishment often requires overcoming deficiencies in knowledge, physical or emotional complications, dogma, criticism, and persecution. More than idle curiosity, more than love for wisdom, more than truth for its own sake, self-discipline is the force behind the power of purpose.

As described in The Neuropsychology of Self-Discipline, "It is your ability to systemically and progressively work toward the goal until you have reached it. It includes acquiring knowledge and skills. It is your ability to become positively obsessed, single-minded and efficient; to strive without giving up, to work consistently, day after day, until your purpose is fulfilled."

Admittedly, self-discipline is not easy. It takes time to master. It requires retraining the way you think and organize your life. Sometimes, when thoughts are distanced and convenient alternatives like fear, anxiety, and procrastination emerge, it's far easier to wander, call it quits, and walk away.

On the other hand, self-discipline can help you ask questions, seek answers, set goals, and achieve them. Most important in doing so, you will also discover how quite wonderful it is to know what you want in life, how to plan achieving it, and actively move forward in that direction.

Bruce Hall is a Personal and Small Business Coach in Port Angeles, WA. You can visit his website at http://brucehallcoaching.com.