Because once you have gotten rid of all of this limitation, weakness, anger, and sadness, you’re back into possibility. You’re enthusiastic once again about ideas and innovation and the very things that move this organization forward. You are truly focused on solutions. Problems are just the process that allowed you to perfect your path.
Soon you’ll have a different definition of personal power. You’ll realize that if you are truly powerful, you can let go. You can forgive. You can release. You can deflect. That’s the real power.
Greatness is within you. There is nowhere you need to look to find it. It is already inside, waiting for permission to express itself. If you knew you already had something, why would you go looking for it? The trick is to remember. Remember to let go of all the negative ways of thinking that are obstacles toxic to your success. Remember to allow your success to take its natural course and happen for you. The success you find will be greater than you ever imagined possible.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. The next time you feel a conflict with someone, write down two things you appreciate and admire about that person and sit down to resolve the conflict by telling them these things first.
2. Take mental and physical notes about everyone who works with you so that you become more and more aware of each person’s loves and strengths. Start a notebook about this, and don’t forget to include yourself in it.
3. Begin noticing your own thinking throughout the day as you lead and communicate: Which thoughts bring you down? Which thoughts lift you up? By practicing this step you will begin to understand that it is always your thinking that creates your feelings, never other people.
CHAPTER TWO
REDEFINING SUCCESS FOR YOURSELF
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children…to leave the world a better place…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your first job as a hands-off manager is to manage your inner life. It is impossible to mentor others toward success if you haven’t done it within yourself. Hands-off management begins at home in the mind of the mentor.
So how do we make sure we become successful? Most people never succeed, because their definition of success always includes some change in the outer world, and the outer world is so hard to change. So you might begin by redefining success for yourself. And you might find that the definition itself is already inside you—not in some book or audio recording.
Sometimes you’ll read or hear something that seems profound. It feels as though it could make a difference and shift your awareness about how life could work for you. But you also have a funny feeling about it. You may be thinking, This is something I already knew. If you are reading a book and a certain paragraph rings true, you may underline it to read it again. Then you get that familiar feeling again: This is something I already knew.
This is a sign that your life’s purpose is already inside you! You don’t have to seek it out. If you had no awareness of what your life’s purpose was, how would you have known that those words could apply to you? If you didn’t have an innate and natural understanding of your potential, how would you have been touched by those words?
When a group of people are reading the same thing, they’ll each respond to different passages differently. Reading groups always experience that. People think it’s because they just have different tastes and preferences, and they don’t think beyond that. They don’t realize that what calls to them from the book is resonating with something already inside them. It’s the energy, spirit, and force that’s within communicating: What you’ve just read aligns with who you are.
Once you wake up to this inner resonance, you will know when things have meaning for you and how you can use them in a way that will benefit your life.
This inner tuning and intuition is at the heart of hands-off management. You don’t need to get your hands on the world to shape and manipulate what’s already perfect inside you.
You can even go one step beyond that if you’re open to it: You can realize, “If I can recognize it by reading it in a book, then I’m not learning it from the book, I am being reminded of it by the book. And if I’m being reminded of it, it must already exist someplace inside me.”
So if it already exists, would it not be possible without the reading and without the external exercise, to just let it come through?
That’s the key to a hands-off life: Find a way to let the best of what’s in you naturally come through.