“Life will give back to you whether you trust it or not,” Leigh said. “Life doesn’t require my approval or trust. It just delivers the way it does.”
Leigh learned that life doesn’t always give you what you want—life gives you what you believe. You can only see what you believe is there. The more you trust the process, the more you can stop worrying about what you are going to get back and just give, trusting the process of life where you know one way or the other, you get back what you have been giving out.
If you believe one of your employees is lazy, you can only see a lazy employee, and even if he takes extra time to perfect a report he’s writing, you see the extra time as procrastination, laziness, and failure to complete his work. This judgment gets in the way of his greatness and your ability to enjoy the potential that’s really there.
Sometimes a new manager will take over an old team and the productivity soars. Why? It’s because she didn’t believe anything negative about the new team. Instead she met with each team member and asked the questions, “What can this person contribute? Where is the particular greatness in this person? What does this person love to do?”
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Meet with yourself. Ask yourself what your gifts are and how you can best contribute to the overall good of the mission.
2. Meet with each person on your team. Take a lot of time with each to talk about his or her gifts. Some won’t think they have any, but you’ll find them by asking what they most love to do. Those are their gifts.
3. See the whole team as a beautifully harmonized network of contribution. Draw a map of your team on paper with a big circle for each employee, with their gifts written inside and lines of contribution connecting them to each other, other departments, and your customers. A giving system. Sit back and look at your paper and let it sink in: You are there to keep their channels of contribution (the lines on your paper) open and flowing freely. As a manager that’s your primary job.
CHAPTER SIX
INSPIRED IDEAS LEAD TO SUCCESS
So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.
—Dorothea Brande
Surveys of successful businesspeople who are asked the question, “When do you get your best business ideas?” keep yielding the same two answers: number one, in the shower; number two, on vacation. This helps prove the point that the best ideas come when you stop forcing your thinking. The straining involved with forced thinking is actually pushing ideas away. You are repelling that great idea wanting to just float up and announce itself. The solution is to gets your hands off your thinking process and let inspiration flow to you.
Once you learn to do this with yourself you can do it with your people. You can plant seeds and ask questions which they can then take away and contemplate. Don’t demand immediate answers. Don’t micromanage problems. Once you truly see the unlimited potential of your people and the limitless possibilities that life has made available for them, you won’t have to worry about how to think of good ideas. You’ll just let them roll in.
“So maybe we should take showers and go on vacation all the time!” a small-business owner said after looking at one of these surveys.
He was not far from the real answer; our best practice will be to get into that relaxed, hands-off state of mind that occurs in the shower and on vacation. The real answer is to learn to listen and recognize, to learn to be available for the ideas that are in us instead of trying to find them in a manual or guideline.
That’s the secret discipline involved with success. It’s in allowing yourself to step back and let it happen. It’s a tough discipline to learn at the outset, but it’s a rewarding one. It rewards you in large ways by helping a great career unfold. But it also rewards you in smaller, more immediate ways, too: For example, you can actually finish your workday with a low level of stress. You can learn what it means to do less and achieve more.
But I thought you had to think to grow rich
People keep trying to succeed through forced thinking because they’ve drawn a false conclusion about it. They spend all day thinking about something, and when that doesn’t get them the answer, they finally just stop thinking. But then, boom! Once they stop thinking, they get their brilliant idea! And then they credit the thinking. They don’t see that it was the stopping and relaxing that delivered the idea.
Here’s another example of how this works. Someone will ask you someone’s name and you know you have it on the tip of your tongue. But in the moment they ask you, you can’t remember it. Try as you might, you can’t think of it! You keep forcing your mind to produce, and it just won’t. But a few minutes later, when you’re talking about something else completely off the subject, the name will come to you.