It’s always amazed me that there are people who waste their time, even when learning something useful in school. As you may know, I run training programs for a very wide range of audiences, starting from as young as 9 years and as “young” as 76. The difference between those who actually apply their skills versus those who are in the “in one ear and out the other” mentality are very stark. In one group, there’s a lot of slacking. They don’t really take to heart anything that is mentioned by the teacher, trainer or instructor. They use everything as an excuse not to get started. It’s the cold airconditioning. It’s the bad weather. The teacher/instructor is boring. I don’t see any need for me to learn this. Blah blah blah, and the list goes on.

In the other group, I can see energy and emotion targeted in one direction: to accomplish their goals. It doesn’t matter whether they understand the entire course. In fact, they might actually be confused about 50% of the things that are learnt. They only need one thing they understand, to be able to use and apply immediately. Then they use it. They ACT on it. They take simple steps to reach their goals and when they reach their goals, they end up being much more confident of achieving the next step. Then they ACT again.

I remember one time when I was acquiring my accelerated learning skills. It was really difficult at first because I never was given the best way to apply those skills. After all, it was a generic training on how to use memory/mindmaps. It was easy to just give up. I remember moments where I literally forced myself to “just do it” (Nike should pay a commission here, ha). It became a discipline that I am proud of, because I’m quite certain that in most contexts, I learn far faster than most other people.

When I first learnt NLP (neurolinguistic programming), I discovered that it was a powerful skill. Yet, I also know that most of the people who learnt NLP with me in that class no longer use the skill. For me, I incisively looked at each skill component and started to practice. I analyzed my own situation and asked myself what was the most effective way to create the outcome that I wanted. I remember I had a period of my life where training was literally non-stop, and I was on the verge of being fatigued. One day I asked myself “what if I could believe that 4.5 hours of sleep was more than enough, so that I could last through these long days?” I applied a technique that was never meant for such a purpose, so that I could temporarily shift my beliefs and I managed to enjoy the tough period, before enjoying a much needed rest. It was a time where my NLP skill was useful for the context that posed a challenge to me.

Once I had confidence that one small area worked for me, I became more confident of my skills and continued to apply them. Sure, there’s a lot of talk about setting exciting goals and going out there to achieve greatness. But it won’t last long unless you start doing something. Anything to build your skill.

Remember the progression of the alphabet? You had to start with ABC. Before the number “12″, you had to learn the number “1″ and “2″. You needed basic building blocks. So, rather than rejecting everything you learn when you ask “why should I learn this”, change the question you have in your mind. Ask instead, “where can I use this, and how can I achieve mastery over this”. You will find a tremendous difference in your achievements.

We’ve heard the expression “knowledge is power”. In reality, knowledge, when not applied is nothing. Knowledge, when applied, gives you ultimate power.

In a recent training on Creating Customer Intimacy, I tabled the idea that all the communication tactics in the world would never enhance your ability to have customer intimacy. Most of us live in a world where we think we have no customers. But as long as you have to work with at least one human being in the world, that person is considered a ‘customer’. It could be a team member, your family, a boss, a friend. At the end of it all, we have to be very clear that in order for customers to want us, we need to make a special change to the way we do things.

In my personal view, there are three kinds of relationships you can build within any organization. The first is the relationship with the world. This is what a lot of people want to do. They go on Facebook and add friends. They create an advertisement to communicate with their intended customers. They build products to sell. These are external customers, whom we are obliged to deliver maximum service and value to.

The second is the relationship within the organization. They are your team members, bosses, peers and partner vendors or suppliers. The relationship here still needs to be clear: we have to build a partnership with each of them in order for the external customer to be satisfied, and to maximize their value. However, it is often not recognized that we are expected to maximize service to our internal customers.

The final core of this entire model is simply the concept of the self. You have to have  a relationship with yourself in order for you to know yourself better. There are many aspects of this that I have written about already, but the truth is most of us don’t know ourselves intimately because it is easier to hide from our emotions, beliefs, negative thoughts and patterns of behavior.

But if you were to see how the world is behaving, you’ll realize this: everyone wants the dollar, the bottomline and they focus on the external world. What if this doesn’t work? You aren’t getting your dollar, you aren’t building your followers, you aren’t creating the success you aimed for in your goals? It’s simple, really. It basically means the core of the executor – You – is not well grounded. You have not gone to the core and begun the process of deciding what you stand for.

From a personal development standpoint, this is crucial – we cannot ignore the impact of personal development on team leadership and business strategy. I know so many people out there who crave to start a business, want to make a difference, but they stumble upon so many different problems in their life that the fruits of their laborious labor are not worth consuming.

Recently, I posted on Facebook that a few of my graduates of my public programs had taken ideas, logos and frameworks that belonged to us, and had used it for their own profit. A number of very sympathetic people commented that we should take steps against them to protect our intellectual property. Of course, this is not the only time this has happened. But what makes me reluctant to threaten or sue is simply that I am using the same energy to take them down that they used to steal our ideas. It’s somewhat counter productive. It’s like this: the husband blames the wife for spending too much money. The wife blames the husband for not loving her. The husband gets angry and says the wife is irresponsible. The wife shouts at the husband saying he is unreasonable. Okay – you know very well that his kind of match is “who has the fittest lungs wins”. It’s silly, we know, immature… and yet millions of people do this every day!  I have to relook my own approach in training to promote the idea of partnerships because in many cases, past participants who want to do the same thing as us have forgotten that stealing is wrong. Stealing destroys trust and it prevents partnerships from ever happening. It’s like this: you date this person, and you don’t show up. You not only don’t apologize, you say that your date should be more reasonable to know that you are busy sometimes. You’ve just asked the person to trust you to do the right thing, then you stole that trust away. The next time you ask that person on a date, you can be quite certain that the relationship has changed.

If you always have the problem of quarrels and arguments in your business, it may be a sign that you are already doing things ineffectively. But to throw the blame to someone else, justifying that you are hurt, unhappy and disappointed is going to be just jaw-droppingly stupid (in my humble opinion). Partnership is the key and trust is the driver. In order for trust to take place, a sincere and clear communication must be made. Seriously, if you built all the trust you wanted but your level of competence is low, don’t expect the customer to say “yes I want your service”. If you created lots of competence but you break your customer’s trust, you may be great the first day, but not the subsequent days.

Balance this by looking inside, because unless you are congruent with the external world, it’s going to be hard to strive to achieve goals. Sure, we all have this “superhero complex” sometimes. Get over it! The world does NOT revolve around us and our dreams all  the time.

As Zig Ziglar once said, you can get anything in life you want, if you help enough other people get what they want. True partnership requires sacrifice, giving, not expectations and taking. It is this Beast inside of us that needs to bend, to change. Maybe we’ve been constantly thinking we were always right, aggressive and caring more about ourselves. But change is necessary. That’s when the Beauty takes notice and changes along. And then, the spell of Evil can be broken, and the Beast be transformed back to the handsome prince he once was. The classic story ends but our new journey begins with a question: can we make our partners fall in love with us and keep loving us?

I took a trip to Japan recently and was all the rave about the culture and the people there. I’d been asking myself why there was such a difference between Japanese culture and other parts of the world. I’ve been to Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Australia and the US.

While many of my friends tend to complain about service in most of these countries, I was personally pleasantly surprised by the level of service  especially so in Japan. The level of patience and “wow” service was quite amazing. For example, since it was the first time my family and I were in Japan, we had to ask for directions at the train station. For a beginner, the train network was quite confusing, with multiple providers and multiple stations. We had kind of sorted out where to go, when the officer at the station told us there was a faster way, and promptly refunded all our money and pointed us in the right direction.

Yes, these were competing train line providers. Yet, the focus was on the convenience of the visitor. Did this train line (Tokyo subway) lose out to the JR line? Well, not really. They did provide a great impression and also they created a positive for Japan overall.

Let’s draw a lesson from this: sometimes, providing good service helps the overall industry to win, not just the company alone. It would be really sad that an industry is avoided simply because of the bad press of a few companies cutting and slashing at each other.

It boils back down to the leaders within the organizations involved to be able to develop their people to think a little broader, beyond just the immediate term solution. In fact, the main thing is if you are constantly focused on the next 5 minutes, you won’t be able to proceed to create wins in the broader scheme of things.

Interestingly enough, Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, was quoted yesterday as encouraging a middle path amid the looming foreign currency war as part of the  G20 Summit in Seoul. This takes into account the fact that economically stronger nations could support weaker economies by strengthening their currencies a little where they could afford. I think this was quite interesting because it not only demonstrates the ability to avoid the black and white thinking approach, but also create wins all around. Would it be a sacrifice? sure. But it is something that will benefit everyone overall in the long run.

We all expect certain things to happen in our mental models of the world. So unless we are taught to take a different approach or a more creative stance, it is highly likely we will fall flat in our pursuit of excellence. In customer service, for example, we expect waiters to attend to us immediately. Brian Tracy goes on a fake tirade during his presentations and says “the reason why we are in the restaurant is because we’re hungry you assholes!“(and of course the audience responded with laughter) I’m certain the restaurant never gets the point because in many circumstances, they are a victim of their own success. The more popular they are, the more customers they get and the lower the quality of their food!

Once again, it points to the idea that we have to constantly upgrade and change in order to become better. Every level of success will present for itself an additional level of challenge.

Back to Japan, I had a surprise also when we walked into a tempura bar. This bar is the kind where they will cook your order when you place it right in front of you, and was quite a novel experience. They got us to hang our jackets (we were experiencing 50 degrees Fahrenheit at night) and take off our shoes, which we placed in a shoe rack before getting to the bar. I’d personally already forgotten that there was a shoe rack in the first place, because I was enjoying my dinner. So when it was time to foot the bill, something strange happened. The shoes had automatically appeared out of nowhere, laid out in front of us at the foot of the place where we had left them. Of course, I processed it and thought ‘shoes don’t move on their own’. It was the attendant who had memorized what shoes we were wearing, and laid it out for us when we were leaving. I’m sure they had a system for remembering or else they wouldn’t have been able to handle the dozens of customers who were in their restaurant that night. Another point scored for Japan.

No matter where you are: a Prime minister in a G20 summit, a train station officer, a restaurant attendant or a public speaker running an event, we all need to strive for surprise – the ability to find a path that is more innovative to engage their audience/customers/suppliers.

Finally, shopping for shoes. My sister-in-law has tiny feet, so it’s impossible to find shoes anywhere in the world for her other than custom-made shoes. The problem for her is that she has had hers made and many of the shoes may look pretty but are not comfortable at all. Lo and behold, we chanced upon a shop that had SS sized shoes – size 20.5 to 22 (cm). These are the kind of shoes that your young teenage daughter might have at the kid’s department store. the only difference was the shoes were comfortable and good looking. Problem – each of them were over $200 a pair, a far cry from the traditional $20 Charles and Keith shopping mall sales. But, she went in to see how well the shoes fit anyway. Pair after pair, the attendant patiently brought suitable selections, in spite of a problem with language. Eventually, after going through almost 40 pairs of shoes, my sister bought five pairs. To be honest, I think we didn’t pay for the shoes, really. 90% of the cost of the shoes would easily have been attributed to the pleasant natured lady who attended to her, and it was worth it. Strangely, this seems to be a culture in Japan. Yet, in Singapore, we’re just scratching the surface of this, praising people who have GEMS programs in their company for ‘going the extra mile’. Wow. And here in Japan, they don’t mind going the extra few hundred miles… with a smile.

I figure this: attitude is something that we can never tell someone to have. I couldn’t go to an employee and say “improve your attitude” and it magically happens. But what can be done is to empower the organizational culture so that such behaviors and attitudes continue to shine. It’s therefore imperative that businesses constantly focus on bringing out the best in their employees through any form of training, coaching and mentoring. After all, one employee in the above case, could spend just under an hour to help the company earn over $1000 in shoe sales. Go ahead and crunch the numbers. Is that not proof of a decent return on investment?

Although I’m a trained MBTI administrator and have been teaching that stuff for quite a number of years already, I am still surprised by the fact that there are other dynamics.

If you get a chance to do an MBTI test (contact me if you need one official 16 page document) you will begin to notice actual differences in your day-to-day life. For instance, if you had gone on a vacation with a group of friends or family members, you might have observed certain differences in behavior. The introvert focuses more on a single thing, theme or place at a time. Sure, they might go shopping, but it’s within a single location. They tend to go deep. just like in relationships, they would rather spend time chatting over a long period of time with the same person, getting to know them better over time. The extravert doesn’t prefer to do this. They are broad in their social preferences, tend to jump from topic to topic in a social conversation, or location to location (most appear to enjoy guided tour packages), or idea to idea. But I also noticed that between the two, there is a commonality in terms of the way in which the two function.

I think there’s a difference between people who enjoy expending energy (EE) and people who enjoy conserving energy (CE). The difference between these two have certain implications.

Those who are EE oriented enjoy going out there, meeting challenges and using up their energy. These are the people who love feeling the thrill of the exertion, much like a workout. They finish, energy spent, feeling great about it.

Those who are CE oriented enjoy staying inside, reading a book, sipping on a cup of coffee. They are like in permanent standby mode, and exertion of energy is not a desired use of their energy. They do, however, enjoy keeping their energy within them. It makes them secure and pleasant.

Now, when EE’s are unable to expend their energy and when CE’s are unable to conserve their energy, they start to get irritable. EE’s who are forced to do window shopping, for example, may not be able to enjoy it much after a while because it’s literally the same thing over and over. Many EE’s need to explore different variations of shopping in order to expend their energies thoroughly in this activity. EE’s who are expected to keep their focus on a business plan may find it tiring after a while. It keeps them in good spirits when they are out there interacting with people related to their business, possibility giving them more ideas.

Conversely, CE’s who have to talk to business partners constantly may tire of it because throwing ideas back and forth may be problematic for someone who just wants to keep their energy secure. CE’s may be better off dealing with things that are much more single-minded in focus.

A typical introvert would like to conserve energy, as what we might have thought. Keeping to oneself and enjoying inner thoughts and reflections would be a wonderful introvert pastime. However, as an introvert, I might still have a preference to expend my energy. If you see me as a trainer, you’ll probably mistake me for an extravert because I’m enjoying myself and expending energy there.

A typical extravert, on the other hand would be expected to expend energy, going out, talking to people. However, one might be an extravert and prefer to conserve energy. I’ve seen extraverts in a training room and sometimes, they are disgruntled employees. They keep a sour face, and are silent during the entire session, preferring not to share their input but when they interact during tea break, you can immediately tell that they are not introverts.

The point I want to make is that since we are both introvert and extravert, we must also have the ability to Conserve and Expend energy. Generally, we get things done when we expend energy. But why is it that a lot of the time, we hold back or procrastinate?

Reason #1: Fear of failure

When there is emotion or fear, the focus is on self-preservation and security most of the time. In this case, the ability to take action diminishes.

Reason #2: Belief that effort is insufficient

To some people, they even believe that they would need divine intervention and their pure effort is insufficient to achieve their goals. Based on research, though, it is more obvious that effort alone, coupled with the attitude of learning, is sufficient to develop a capacity to reach the end outcome eventually. People who believe this will always put in effort and learn from feedback.

Reason #3: Wanting to be sure, but uncertain of the strategy

This dilemma is common. For instance, you want to be certain of your business success, and yet you lack the business strategy. You want to get married, but not sure if you are going to marry the right person. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee in many cases. To be sure is to go through the mill and be as prepared as you can be, hopefully having necessary support in your life to keep you afloat during tough times. You can’t always have the perfect plan. Well… sure you can have the perfect plan, but whenever it goes into execution, you always throw that plan away.

Reason #4: Lacking in knowledge

This is different from the above reason in that knowledge is not strategy. Too much knowledge paralyzes. But, too little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing too. It ends up causing people to either make stupid decisions, or, in this case, prevent proper action. Learning is imperative, and I always suggest to people that they need to model the process.

Reason #5: Failure in decision-making

The tussle between head and heart has always been talked about. You have two minds, literally, and cannot make up your mind. Such failure of decision-making is mostly due to either emotional insecurity or the belief that making the most well-thought out decision in a rational and logical manner is the most important. Your decision is flawed because you failed to integrate head and heart. Some experts and researchers believe that the best way to handle this is by trusting your intuition (provided you already have the knowledge to back up the action).

In having said this, however, it is also important for you to know when to conserve energy. A lot of people have used up plenty of energy, feeling drained and unable to expend energy simply because they aren’t aware of when they should begin the conservation process, let alone the ways in which they gain and store energy. Introverts gain energy from withdrawal and individual activity. Extraverts gain energy from going into the external world and interacting with it socially and physically. As you continue to observe yourself and monitor your actions, you might come to greater awareness of your behaviors and begin on a conscious path toward personal transformation.

Recently, I added some content in my seminars regarding the difference between people who capitalize on their strengths versus those who merely work on their weaknesses. According to the Gallup Organization, in a book written by Markus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, “Now Discover Your Strengths”, it’s become apparent that working on weaknesses doesn’t necessarily reap returns. That made perfect sense. In other words, you really need to know your strengths in order to capitalize on them.

One thing began to bother me though.

Recently, in another piece of psychology research, I’ve also found that those who become masterful at something don’t necessarily need to spend huge amounts of time. They merely research all the mistakes that people make. I found that quite fascinating. It meant that the things I’ve always been successful at learning and providing results to back those up versus those where I’ve only learnt textbook knowledge from stems from this very idea.

Another additional point I’ve realized is that in order for us to make effective decisions, we cannot just rely on a logical strategy. In Master Your Mind Design Your Destiny, we outlined a formula for you to understand your emotional drivers. We all know, however, that emotions are not the only way to make decisions, but simply ignoring them isn’t going to work. I’ll give you an example. When you are totally rational about something, you end up being really good at suppressing your emotion. Trust me, I’ve been in Vegas the last few days and I can see clearly how people could keep playing until they lose their shirts. You are shown that you are winning credits but you never win more than you bet. However that ‘win’ registers as a pleasant feeling regardless. That’s odd, isn’t it?

When you learn from a mistake, you have the opportunity to foretell the future. You become the guru. It’s almost insane, however, that people are so obviously making the same mistake. They set out with good feelings to run a business or make money, but forget the skills and strategies they need to success. Worse, they forget to learn the mistakes that will kick them in the other direction so that they don’t fall prey to blindly putting their money in a place that ‘feels good’.

A lot of people who are in the helping profession are exactly like this. They can’t get past the problem of charging less than they are actually worth because the service itself generates positive feelings of success and well-being. That’s not what success is about. Success is about the collective learning effort – whether the end outcome is what you want or not. This is very difficult for many people to understand. Let me put it in a context that you could probably understand.

When I first started out learning neuro linguistic programming, I think Richard Bandler had already stumbled upon this principle – we learn far faster by doing and making a mistake than really just getting things right the first time around. The trouble is this: we don’t have a compatible state to be able to balance two very important forces.

The first is “ecology“. A bad move, no matter how much you learn from, is going to have a negative impact tin the minds of other people who are working with you, or in your family, especially if they don’t understand the rationale of your actions. What’s worse is that some people might actually never have thought of the reasons for their actions. You fail to explain your situation, your intention and at the first sight of disapproval, you give up explaining. Sure, there’s not always enough time to explain sometimes, but it sure says a lot about you and your ability to convince someone.

The second is the “driver state“. In my trainings with Bandler, we’ve been told to emphasize the state of audacity and do things from a state of wanton curiosity. Now, that’s an emotional state that I’ve often forgotten about simply because of the feeling of fear or uncertainty. It’s definitely an important thing to consider because wanton curiosity enables us to learn powerfully from experiences. We discover challenges and we can go “hm! that was interesting” or “wow, I never knew that” and that enables the brain to absorb information far more readily and easily.

In other words, forward thinking skills and state management skills are critical for survival. This is especially so if we are proceeding further into the 21st century. We need to master the ability to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others in order to maximize our professional capacity.

I was having a ‘collective’ conversation with my wife over the last few meal slots we had at a seminar.. We were having a discussion about making changes to some plans we had and going to a conference, but there was a dilemma. We didn’t know how to make the decision.

I guess it’s common, right? I know a lot of people who kinda make decisions on a whim, or don’t make decisions at all. And I think the trouble with many people is that they can’t make decisions.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learnt is this: when you make a decision, you have to hold on to something that you can trust. It could be God, your gut or even confidence in yourself. But whatever the case, the decision has to be 100% owned and trusted by you.

We’ll explore why this is important in a bit. But let’s look first at the reasons why people can’t make decisions.

Reason #1: Under emotional duress

It shouldn’t surprise you that we make bad decisions under emotional duress, right? I mean, if you feel bad and you get married, don’t expect it to be a good marriage. I haven’t seen anyone feel depressed and invest in a good stock either. Unfortunately, unless there is a certain level of awareness, it’s quite hard to make out what you are feeling in the first place. Some emotions do drive us to get things done. The question is what kinds of emotions will you need to be in control of in order to get yourself to do the things you need to do? You need to know what kinds of  emotions that (1) drive you to go in the right direction, (2) the wrong direction and those emotions that (3)  get you to stay put.

If you’re angry at someone and you decided on a whim to take revenge, you would definitely get driven to act. However, that kind of action may not lead you toward the goals you desire, or create more abundance in the world. It is a ‘red ocean’ that is created from destruction.

Conversely, if you are angry at someone and know how to “stay put”, you would probably be able to create a lot more good out of the experience than taking revenge, even if you couldn’t use this feeling to move forward.

The ultimate experience would be to convert that anger into a different emotion in order to be abundance oriented: forgiveness and compassion. It’s not a difficult thing to do, but it is one of the most crucial abilities that define you in moments of darkness.

Reason #2: Head versus Heart of a Fragmented self

You’ve definitely felt this! Sometimes, when you are bogged down by a decision, you are basically in the mode where your head and heart tussle for a solution. It feels difficult to make a decision because both are equally valid when you weigh on the scales to decide. The main cause of this is inner fragmentation. There are definitely things that are holding you back, and some of them stem from past issues you haven’t cleared or haven’t yet come to a resolution to.

However, the reason why you have a problem is not because you can’t make a decision, but the fact that you are fixated around certain things surrounding this decision.

For example, there was a time in the past where my beliefs about money would interfere with my ability to charge money. I had this belief that in order to generate a decent amount of income, I would have to put in many more hours of work in order to generate that ‘well-deserved’ income. And that was something that prevented me from seriously taking advantage of many possible opportunities that came my way. I think if I counted all the lost and missed opportunities, I would have to admit losses of several tens of millions of dollars. These issues are readily settled through an active analysis and alignment of your own beliefs, values and identity, the process of which I will probably have to discuss in one of my webinars. If you haven’t already, head down to my main page and register yourself on my mailing list to be notified.

Clarity of Your Decision-Making process

There’s basically only two ways you can make a decision. One method is through a logical process. The second method is through an emotional process. Both ways are not perfect, and usually using only one method will really be flawed.

What I find to be useful not just in business but in one’s personal life is something called ‘Force Field’ analysis. Basically, you have something you’d like to wrap your head around, a business. In deciding, you list the pros and the cons on either side of the topic, and start listing points. You then weight the points on a scale of 1 to 5, each representing a level of importance for this point to you. Then, you total them up, as follows:

In the example above, I’ve listed only three for illustrative purposes, but I think you should seriously consider all aspects of your life (in NLP, we call this ecology checking) including the impact a decision will have in your family, your career, your lifestyle, your health and your personal development. If you haven’t got an exhaustive list of personal values, I’ll have a system up for you very soon so that you can clarify your direction and personal motivation more readily, and to also have this in alignment with your goals.

Ultimately, you will have a well thought-out system to allow you to make a proper decision. The reason why this is important is also that the force field analysis does not just take into account your pro and con list arbitrarily – it allows you to explore the importance of each pro and each con from the perspective of your values and what you believe to be important to you by assessing the level of importance of each item on a relative scale.

I hope this is at least the start to clearing out what is important to you and how you can make better decisions. I’m aware that it isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a start. There’s so much more that one will need to do in order to gain effective control over the decisions we make in our lives. Without that kind of clarity, our lives will be lived in slow motion. With proper clarity, we can accelerate the pace with which we achieve our success!

I’ve spoken time and again that the ability to succeed comes from the individual’s ability to balance. So let’s talk about the elements of balance and why it is so important.

The Reality Of Paradox Is… The Paradox Of Reality

In my previous introduction to the Principles of Personal Transformation, we are made aware of the concept of paradox as the reality. Paradox is essentially a contradiction of truth, and is always in existence because of perceptual realities. For instance, there may be a time where you are in pursuit of a goal. The paradox of your reality could be (i) you did not realize that you already encompass that goal in your daily being and your daily living, (ii) doing things to pursue that goal cause you to move further from the goal instead.

Introducing Balance As The Stabilizing Factor

The principle of balance comes in to enable an individual to be grounded. I have found that sometimes, neither pursuing nor staying the same enables the achievement of the goal. Balance can be achieved at various levels, including personality balance, propulsion/motivational balance, role expectation balance, and awareness balance.

Why Balance?

The entire universe flows in a balance, and it is the natural state of any occurrence in the world that we know. Let’s take for instance, the example of the water cycle. In a systemic view, the water cycle is never ending and stable. If you think of yourself as a droplet of water, you might be in the sea, evaporated into the atmosphere to form a cloud. Precipitation occurs and you drop onto elevated plains into streams that ultimately trickle back to the sea once again. This cycle is balanced.

What happens when the cycle is imbalanced? What if evaporation occurs faster than precipitation? You will end up with a world like Venus, with constant storm systems, accumulating thick dense clouds that trap infra-red radiation from the sun. This imbalance is the effect of a combination of factors that are causing global warming.

But if we take this analogy and look back at the process of individual growth and the achievement of success, one thing you will eventually realize is that success is based on the stability of various factors. You’re like the overheated earth until you learn to control your impulse to do various things. The ripple effect is the way to create the calm, and by extension to this analogy, the problems you encounter in life will be the path toward your growth.

Personality Balancing

In the MBTI, a psychometric tool to assist an individual in the process of self-discovery, we come to learn of various different personality types that converge around the balance of preferences. These opposites include (1) Extraversion and Introversion, (2) Sensing and Intuition, (3) Thinking and Feeling, and  (4) Judgement and Perception.

Interestingly, the tool suggests that, at our best, we are able to utilize our two best functions that are a combination of these preferences. Take for example, the ISTJ type. You have the Dominant function of Extraverted Thinking, which in this case enables you to share your thoughts in a logical fashion with ease. You have the Auxillary function of Introverted Sensing, which allows you to reflect upon the details of information that you receive.

In counterbalance, we have our two least developed functions. If these are not matured, we may end up utilizing them in ineffective ways. The Tertiary function is the Feeling element that, if not well developed, forces us to express or experience feelings that are not easily articulated, and the Inferior function is Extraverted Intuition, which in its inferior form, would cause an individual to express negative feelings and paint a doubtful or negative future.

In both, we can predict that our limitation comes from the inability to utilize these functions well. In fact, when our energies are strained, and the dominant and auxillary functions are used up or exhausted, we end up being forced to use the other two to balance up our personality. In such instances, our capabilities are severely diminished unless we are able to recharge ourselves and manage the psychological stressors in our lives to resume functioning as a regular human being.

The challenge of balance comes first of all in awareness of these psychological mechanisms for mental homeostasis.

Motivational Balance

It seems odd to think that motivation could be an imbalance, but it is absolutely evident in the lives of people who are highly successful, or in the lives of people who are highly deranged (and some say they are one and the same types of people).

I’ve met many successful individuals who have achieved their success because of a certain underlying motivation to compensate for what happened in the past. So, I can easily predict that someone who is financially successful today probably had a pretty tough childhood from a financial point of view. It’s not so surprising that something like this happens, though. After all, the problems we encounter in childhood merely create salience for the thing that we miss the most.

Here’s an interesting question though: once the psychological compensation has been achieved, what happens next? You could speculate that the individual has no longer any need for such drive anymore. In fact, if this is the only motivation, you will find that the individual has to consistently experience poverty in order to keep pushing the envelope of financial achievement. In the end, this individual consistently makes big wins and big losses, possibly in business and in other financial aspects of life. If everything else remains status quo, that’s still fine. The danger occurs if or when this adversely issue affects other elements in the person’s life.

The propulsion system created by motivational imbalance can be really powerful. Ultimately, the individual needs to recognize that this energy will eventually die down and the need to keep moving in the same direction will have to be fueled by a different motivation, something that does not have a negative precedent. To illustrate, someone who has become motivated to seek out a new love because he was spurned in his earlier days in dating may find that this pattern not only makes him a very popular ladies’ man, but also results in a lot of heartbreak for him if he gets disappointed by the attachment. If he does get married, he will have to re-investigate his entire experience of love and heal his initial experience of being jilted or dumped, or else he may find his marital experience just as daunting or fearful.

Balancing Role Expectations

Expectations are very powerful motivators. They can be subtle and yet influential at the same time, as depicted by research done on the Pygmallion Effect: a teacher who expects her class to be an intelligent group of students often finds evidence of their intelligence.

Now, as we progress in the world, it becomes more apparent that we will need to see our roles in balance. The teacher is the student. The leader is the follower. The master is the servant. In fact the more you pursue the latter, the better you will be in the former role.

How does this work? Mostly, through the simple process of understanding and empathizing. After all, the teacher who knows how a student thinks and behaves is most likely the one who is best able to help the student learn the way they do. A leader who is also a good listener and good team player will better be able to earn their team members’ respect. I’m not suggesting that you simply leave yourself to the mercy of your students or your team members. That would be a blatant act of imbalance. Instead, learn to balance by recognizing that it is always best that you are able to take on a dual role in order to play your present role better.

In your quest for success, never underestimate your role as an achiever and as a failure. I don’t think you’d be surprised that  we can learn as much from success from achievement as we can from failure. To be able to balance such thoughts requires a greater sense of awareness of self.

Balance In Awareness

Most of the time, we function unconsciously. The more unconscious we are, however, the more ‘expertly’ we conduct a particular behavior. Such habitual adaptations are required for us as human beings. After all, you would expect behaviors like breathing and blood flow to be unconscious activities of the autonomous nervous system.

Achievement does not stem from the unconscious – it is maintained by the unconscious. If you had made a choice to exercise on a daily basis, you would have had to get this choice into the conscious mind first through awareness building.

In modern change management, there is a model for this known as the Commitment Curve. I figure that if organizations need to analyze how advanced their change is in their context, individuals should too.

In this modified commitment curve (NOTE: the terminology is still limited to the original text in the model, but after a cursory search on Google, I still can’t find who to attribute this model to), I’m suggesting that awareness needs to be established from the point of contact, although most of us will only gain awareness after an experience. Hence, it is important, in my opinion, to constantly keep reviewing your experiences in order to reflect upon how it impacts you, so that you can regain conscious control over it.

This, obviously, must be balanced properly with the ability to act. Reflection can only get you so far. This is where you begin to seek important reasons for you to build up some motivation to get you to do things.

So… How Much Of What Is Enough For When or Who?

Okay, so it finally comes back down to the question of what you are balancing for, under what circumstance and the like. In reality, other than the level of awareness you have of yourself as you go about your daily life, you may not be able to predetermine what you have to do. For instance, you might go about setting the goal of making $1m, and begin your journey. We all know that making a million is more than just setting a goal, but let’s say you did do this, and went about experiencing knocks from Reality. You would now have to reflect upon this in order to take an honest view of what you really need in order to accomplish this goal. Most of this is experienced at the point of contact. Until you are brought to awareness as to what it means, you might have a hard time understanding what went on.

A former student of mine was really excited to go into business. However, for him, he started a venture with several partners only to find himself being sidelined and unable to progress in the company no matter how motivated he was. Dejected and disillusioned, he started to play the blame game. His partners were at fault, not him. The economy was at fault but not him. By bringing him down to earth and letting him realize that the issue is not about fault finding but to look at how one’s behaviors could have contributed to the result, he began to improve. Initially, it was quite a rude shock because he had always believed that what he did was always for the good of his company. Of course, I believe he had positive intentions. To his partners, however, the path to hell is paved with such intention. Ultimately, it was the problem of his behavior in the company (he tended to be overbearing and oblivious to others’ feelings). He realized that he had a lot more to learn. Many of his beliefs were limiting his progress as a leader in the company. For instance, he believed that as the leader in the company, others should follow what he said. His predicament became obvious when the seven partners in the company began to do the same. So who do you follow?

“The Answer Has Always Been There… You Were Merely Asking The Wrong Questions…”

I think we go about assuming that things turn out wrong because of something we had done. Many turn on negative conclusions about this such as shame or guilt or even anger. The principle of balance merely tells us to play with paradox a little more. What if the outcome we face was meant to be? I think that this will skew your emotions differently. If you were meant to fail, then you already have an answer to the question you had failed to ask in the first place. This is where ultimate learning takes place, and will ensure that you learn the necessary lessons in order to progress toward your success. Balance the interpretation that you had just got “bad results” with the view that it was the result you were going to get for failing to ask an important question prior to such an outcome. When you realize that failure is always a predetermined path caused by behaviors that are incompatible with your direction of success, you might begin to balance yourself with slightly better grounded information, knowledge and resources in order to hone yourself. That would be the ultimate aim for achievement, since no success can be possible without “you”.

Negative patterns of habitual performance occur as a result of your learnings in the past. It’s interesting to note that in the process of arriving at success, we will always meet with obstacles and barriers. Such challenges are the things that lead us to the next level of success, provided we are able to pick out the lessons from our past.

The Reason For Old Habits

No, it’s not your fault that you have habits. They are unconscious patterns formed because you absorbed them without incisively assessing whether or not you wanted them.

A lot of the time, the old habits are created due to a lack of proper interpretation. Why do you procrastinate? You might have interpreted this as a trait that you have rather than a habit that can be changed. Consequently, you attributed it to something that cannot be changed. However, from my experience, changes can happen even for deeply rooted problems.

You might even think you don’t have a choice. In reality, choice is an ultimate power that we have. You can choose to accept or reject your habits. Unfortunately, many people do not realize they have such skills and strategies, and therefore, success in getting rid of old habits seems to be nothing more than luck.

Coaches and Creating New Habits

Old habits are created because we have not been able to surface these patterns of awareness in ourselves. It is necessary, therefore, at the initial stage to make use of coaches in your journey until you reach a stage where you can conduct your own ‘self-coaching’. Coaches will be more aware of your states than ourselves because of the are not mired by the experiences we have. They will see patterns surfacing more readily as an observer.

Skills To Deal with Old Habits

There are a number of skills you can learn to build new habits and move away from old ones.

• Visualization
• Emotional state management and anchoring
• Resilience
• Strategy development
• Pattern detection

All of these are skills that can be developed when you learn about neurolinguisting programming and the techniques that are associated with this powerful methodology. For example, pattern detection enables you to observe your behaviors, think about what you do, and begin to craft strategies for change. We all exhibit patterns in our life. By observing and detailing the reasons why you exhibit such patterns, you will be able to discover your own inner motivations that got you to this habit in the first place. Visualization techniques can then be applied to help you create internal habits and convert them into unconscious patterns of behavior.

Habitual Shifts

The trick is constantly having reminders about what you must do in order to create maximum change. My suggestion is to find your internal fuel, your reason for wanting to achieve your goals. This will push you to be constant in your quest for success.

My personal ‘fuel’ is to create changes in people so that they have a more balanced way of thinking. It comes from a long time investigating my skills and talents. I suggest that you do this too by developing new skills, honing your talents and working with coaches.

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Sidney J. Harris

You could say that I enjoy my life. I love being busy, my moments alone, sharing time with my loved ones and enjoying being in those moments. There is however with a tinge of regret, that there is little that I can do for those who do not open themselves to being remolded.

Yes, I do re-programming stuff.

Mind stuff.

Get you to change and get your best life yada, yada.

But one thing is for sure – not everyone is ready for it. To be ready to take action often means you have to leave behind the you that is not worthwhile. There are many instances where people have told me “wow you’ve done so much” or “wow you have accomplished so much” but failing to realize that they themselves have accomplished much but taken those for granted. Maybe you spend lots of time with family? Maybe you spend lots of time helping out as a volunteer. Or better still, you spend lots of time being patient. That trumps almost all the “things” I’ve “achieved”.

To be open to remolding requires courage. It means that what you’ve done so far is not your best you. Not only does Sydney Harris make a point, I’d like to extend it by saying that “it is regret for the best person we did not become that is inconsolable“. In my previous post, I talked about the metaphor of the sword smith and the process of making a strong blade. You don’t just wait for a strong blade to fall from the sky. You need to find the right material, the right fire, and then hammer with all your might. Some people consider this process of purification a spiritual process as well, and I’d agree.

In becoming a better person that you were yesterday, you have to be open to being remolded and hammered. Life is your remolding agent. Just like the river bank can’t say that life is unfair for letting the river cut through it (it simply happened), you can’t say life is unfair simply because you were betrayed, or accused or whatever. It just is.

(Hint: Don’t be too conceited to think that things happened, good or bad, because of you. )

Everyone has their path to walk – through the fire. When it comes, welcome it. When you feel the singeing flames, don’t stop. Keep going. The sword smith (the universe, God, whatever you believe in) will continue his work. If it’s not pure, another flame will come. The singeing stops when you are purified, so keep on walking.

I thought I’d just share this with you guys. It’s from the Princeton site, and I guess part of this resonates with me. What is our manner in life – to be wealthy and nasty… or wealthy and kind? It really does make a difference, and simple advice comes at a good time for those of us in the cut-throat world of business.

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As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans — plodding as we are — will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!