John TV: Episode #53 ANCHOR

There are times where you need to move … and times you just need “to be held.”

John TV: Episode #52 DISTRACTION

What on your “must-do” list is really nothing more than a dis-traction?

Reflecting on a Dream

Today’s post is the featured article from the September 2011 issue of The Front Porch Newsletter. If you would like to automatically receive The Front Porch e-newsletter on the last Thursday of each month just click here to sign-up for your complimentary subscription.

Day-dreaming is one thing. Deciding to follow your dream is another. In my days at Arthur Andersen, I would often counsel our professional staff that it was paradoxically best to pursue a new opportunity when you are loving where you are. I reasoned that in doing so, it guaranteed that you were running to something rather than running away from something. Little did I know, I would eventually follow my own advice. People have often asked me about what was my most difficult challenge in pursuing my dream to become a professional speaker. My reply has always been the same … having to leave behind a firm, position and people I loved to pursue it. That was September 1996.

It is exactly 15 years later. It seemed fitting to stop for a moment and reflect.

More than pursuing a dream, I remember it felt more like being called to adventure. And “adventure” has proven to be a more fitting analogy. Dreams sound so, well, dreamy. You know … perfect. Adventures are full of surprises. Laced with challenges. You arrive in a dream and live happily ever after … unless, of course, you are in the midst of a nightmare. I suppose you can wake-up from a dream. In an adventure there is no escape. You simply live in the middle of the adventure day-in and day-out. Adventures have a way to form you and transform you if you let them. There are no givens … but adventures will give you more than you could ever imagine.

Adventures are rarely straight paths. More than likely, they provide you twists and turns … with highs and lows. It’s what adventures are made of. An adventure won’t cling to you … you have to cling to it. More specifically, you need to hang on for dear life. An adventure never lets you get comfortable, but will teach you to get comfortable being uncomfortable … if you are willing to be its student.

Most importantly, an adventure teaches you to take nothing for granted and to be grateful for everything and everyone along the way.

And as I reach this 15th year milestone I am certainly grateful.

I am most grateful for the people who have believed in me and my work. There are those who have hired me, encouraged me, prayed for me and inspired me. Each of them has been with me on this adventure. And I am deeply grateful for each and every one of them.

Adventures are similar to books. They have numerous chapters and while the chapters continue to change, each chapter builds upon all that has come before. So have gone the years of this adventure.

As I turn the page to another chapter of this adventure, I look forward to what awaits. We live in incredibly interesting times. Like an adventure, little can be taken for granted. But I also believe we live in a time of incredible possibilities if we choose to find our core.

Adventures demand numerous things from you … but nothing more than a dose of courage and your complete trust. Those who have helped me along this journey have given me both. Adventures give the gift of vulnerability … and leave you with no doubt you will need help along the way.

What is best about an adventure is when you feel the best is yet to come.

I begin this 16th year extremely excited and fully engaged in speaking with organizations who want to strengthen their core values. If there was ever a time we needed to return to our core … this would be it!

When I was first thinking about leaving my career at Arthur Andersen, to follow my “dream” into the world of professional speaking, I prayed I would meet someone in the speaking profession who could and would authentically give me a real inside look into that life. Those prayers were answered when I met Kevin Freiberg. Kevin and Jackie had me to their home, in San Diego, more than once as I pondered the decision. One day, after spending the whole day with me, Kevin said, “John, a lot of people ask me about a potential career in speaking and I tell about 95% of them not to do it. You are in that other 5%.” Yet, in his caring honesty, he also told me it would be much more of an adventure than a dream.

This Sunday night, Kevin and I are scheduled to have dinner together here in Chicago. Fifteen years later there is reason to celebrate everything that has defined that adventure.

John TV: Episode #51 INCREMENTAL

Inch-by-inch, step-by-step, moment-to-moment … makes a bigger difference than you could ever imagine!

John TV: Episode #50 FOCUS

Creating excellent customer/client/patient experience, simply put, is pretty simple.  Why do we prefer to make it so complicated?

The Love of Business

Today’s post is the featured article from the August 2011 issue of The Front Porch Newsletter. If you would like to automatically receive The Front Porch e-newsletter on the last Thursday of each month just click here to sign-up for your complimentary subscription.

Of all the nine years of articles I have written for The Front Porch, this one may seem to take the cake for being the softest, most touchy-feely, and syrupy

business articles I have ever written. I can already hear my loyal readers saying … then it must be really touchy-feely! But don’t be fooled. It may hold the greatest potential for the transformation of how you see your work, how you show-up in relationships, how you work on teams and how you serve your clients, customers or patients.

The most powerful tool you have is a gift that all of us have. I am convinced some of us have forgotten how to engage it or have lost sight we even have it. Like a skill, this gift can go dormant. To use it is a conscious choice … even when it is not easy to choose it. In the short-term, it might feel better to not choose it. But it will always work to your advantage toward winning … not only for you, but for all … because it knows no other result but for all to win.

It is called love.

That’s right. Love. I am not talking about an acronym for something like: Leadership, Ownership, Vitality and Excellence. I am talking about the emotion of love. Not romantic love (although there are many parallels) … but rather the love of business.

We develop many technical skills along the way. We are taught the ropes of time management, the management of people and the ways of leadership. There are matrix frameworks, and metrics to measure. There are gimmicks and gadgets … and role plays to model the way.

But there is little on love. So why is it surprising that so few ever become effective at the love of business? Beyond an emotion, love is a choice. It comes alive when we choose to use it.

But, bottom-line, it just doesn’t feel like business.

I get that. That is because, in the justifiable attempt to create efficiency and profitability, we have often made business simply a transaction. Transactions lack emotion and they certainly lack any element of love. I propose where there is lack of emotion there is lack of genuine engagement, long-term loyalty or the potential for anything really meaningful.

In my book, Silent Alarm, Jack Turner (the main character) is recovering from a terrible accident of his own doing. His recovery in his hospital bed gives him more than ample time to think … deeply! Jack is given numerous doses of insight and wisdom along his path of recovery. One of his insights is that “Genuine relationships are God’s greatest gift … love is what matters.” While Jack learns how to reflect more deeply, he still is a very successful professional. He can’t help but to find a way to relate his deep level of thinking back to the practical aspects of his business life. This lesson was no exception.

Jack thought of all the workshops he had attended in his career: negotiating, customer service, team-building, handling tough clients, effective communications, and more. Jack thought it was strange that these workshops represented so many ideas and strategies for developing skills, but that no instructor had ever mentioned love.

He thought the best workshops could be presented in no more than fifteen minutes. He laughed as he imagined this scenario: “You want to give incredible customer service? Love them. You want to retain your employees? Love them. You want to build better relationships with tough people? Love them. You want to have effective teams? Love your teammates.”

I am convinced it sounds so absurd, so un-business like, maybe even unprofessional … and, of course, so touchy-feely and soft because we have never learned or have lost our capacity to do it. We often tend to blow-off and belittle that which we cannot do.

What if our capacity to achieve was limited only to the extent of our capacity to love?

One of my favorite leadership authors, Tim Sanders, captures the practical professional application of the love of business in his book, LOVE: The Killer App. He aptly suggests that love is not an option if you want to make the most of your professional journey … it is a requirement.

Love won’t always solve the short-term business challenges we face, but the challenges we face will evolve our capacity to love if we consciously choose to let them.

The most important skill we can possibly develop, at the core of a business and in the culture in which it operates, is our individual and collective capacity to love. It has the ability to change everything … including your life.

John TV: Episode #49 GENUINE

In being a leader of substance, the only spin that works … is being genuine!

John TV: Episode #48 KINDNESS

So … what “kind” of person are you?

The Habits of Hanging On

Today’s post is the featured article from the July 2011 issue of The Front Porch Newsletter. If you would like to automatically receive The Front Porch e-newsletter on the last Thursday of each month just click here to sign-up for your complimentary subscription.

We live in a world of rapid change. Yet some would say, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Change can be deceiving. Change can be a very surface-level thing. Like white-washing. Like a façade. Employees become immune to the next “flavor of the month.” Unfortunately, leaders do too.

More critically, change can deceive us from understanding what we are really hanging-on to.

In fact, change can tighten our grip unknowingly encouraging us to hold-on tighter beneath the surface of change. We can become quite effective at appearing to change when nothing has really changed at all … and most everyone knows it. Certainly, leaders often undermine the process because they want change and they want it now. I am reminded of the advice a dear friend of mine learned from her grandfather:

Nothing really great happens very quickly.

I think of the generations upon generations who would invest in building a cathedral they would never see actually completed. It would be hard to imagine in today’s world. A case could certainly be built that speed and volume are the enemy of meaningful change.

But what if the real undermining enemy of meaningful change had nothing to do with speed … or volume? And what if it didn’t have as much to do with the leader as it had to do with every one of us? What if it simply had to do with our tendency to “attach” to anything and sometimes everything … especially certain things? On the surface, attachments can seem beneficial. It often seems synonymous with great things like commitment, passion and reliability. Our attachments, however, may very well create a facade of these noble characteristics just the same as the motions of change establish a deceptive white-washing for meaningful change.

Our attachments are a paradox.

If you have to hang-on to something then you really don’t have that something at all. In other words, it is forced rather than real. I would suggest this is true in our most critical relationships, it is true in employee engagement, and it is true in our loyalty. And sometimes what we hang-on to in turn begins to hang-on to us. This makes meaningful change really hard to come by.

It is when you are free to go, but you decide to stay … that your choice to stay is real. It is also true that when you are free to stay, but you decide to change that the choice to change is real. The success of meaningful change may have less to do with the pitfalls of rapid forced change than it has to do with our arms of attachment … our habits of hanging-on.

It may be another dimension of why our core values are so critical. While we tend to be attached to behaviors, wants and needs …. our core values are just a way of being. Grabbing values is like trying to grab air or water. You can be in it, absorb it, and benefit from it … but you just can’t attach to it.

Maybe the leader’s drive to force change is driven by the actual need to unleash the solid grip we hold. Rather than forcing change, a leader may be more effective by modeling detachment.

If you have read this far, you might be thinking … so what’s your point?

I am half thinking the same thing. But then I remember … we are so attached to the concept that every article must have a point. If your mind, at this point, is simply wandering and wondering … then you may have just taken your first step on your way to detachment. And it is there that you just might find what really needs to change!

John TV: Episode #47 REALLY NEED

The seeds of your needs are planted in your core values.  If you don’t know your core … your needs and wants get intertwined.  You end-up needing what you WANT rather than wanting what you NEED.  Discover your core … and your needs will be revealed.