Lessons from EO Part 2 of 5: Covey’s Quadrant Prioritizing
February 3, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Most oftentimes we simply get lost with the tasks in front of us. We have an avalanche of things that need to be accomplished that we scatter over multiple post-it notes, scribble on the corner of a notebook page, and we feel overwhelmed by it all. By using a systematic prioritizing system created by the famous Stephen Covey, we can determine how we see our “to-do” list in a clarified and enlightened fashion.
Covey divided the things in front of us into four quadrants. Quadrant I items are both urgent and important. They are in short a crisis that must be addressed imminently to avert disaster. Hence, they are given priority #1. Quadrant II items are important but not urgent and represent what he terms “preparation”. Quadrant II’s represent our strategic vision for the future of what we should do but may not need to do today. Quadrant III items are urgent but are not so important in the larger scheme of things like checking your email and responding to various questions from your staff that need to be addressed. He calls this quadrant “interruptions”. Quadrant IV represents items that are not important and not urgent, which he terms “trivia”.
Obviously, priority #1 is to address and manage Quadrant I issues. However, we need to analyze our Quadrant I issues to determine how they went from Quadrant II to Quadrant I. What our goal should be is to make such an analysis so that we can more easily keep items in Quadrant II before they become Quadrant I issues. If we live our lives constantly in Quadrant I, something may be wrong. In short, Quadrant I items are “reactive” in nature and Quadrant II items are “proactive” in nature. Similary, if we have no Quadrant II items perhaps we are not sufficiently planning for the future and we should focus on defining Quadrant II items. If you are a business owner and can delegate effectively, you should try to move Quadrant III items over to a staff member to take care of it so that you can focus your priorities on Quadrant I and II items. Obviously, you must also recognize something as Quadrant IV so that you can properly ignore it and not give it Quadrant I and II priorities mistakenly.
When I am in Forum and we work on our presentations, we are trying to get the right balance of Quadrant I and II items discussed so that we are not always in a reactionary mode but can handle urgent and important problems when they arise. Using Covey’s 4 quadrants may help streamline your life if you find it currently chaotic and unplanned or reactionary in nature.
Lessons from EO Part 1 of 5: Accountability
February 2, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
I attended moderator training all day Friday at the Crescent Hotel in preparation for my being moderator of my Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Forum group. I was mesmerized by how much I learned, thinking I knew it all before going into it. The famed Ellie Byrd led the all-day session and stimulated fruitful thinking on topics I needed to know despite my waning energies in the late afternoon. ”Forum”, for those who are not aware of it, describes a small discussion group of the same 8 to 10 business owners that meet each month to go over business and personal topics of concern to them. I meet every month for 4 to 5 hours with the same group of individuals to help each other grow personally and professionally and whatever happens behind closed doors is held to the strictest level of confidentiality so that there is an impregnable safe haven for discussion and sharing. Forum has been affectionately referred to as “AA” for business owners, which I agree wholeheartedly with that appellation.
I have learned a tremendous amount from Forum, but I cannot share any stories from within our group based on the aforementioned confidentiality agreement. Nevertheless, the training that I received on Friday helped me define certain universal truths that can help individuals whether they are interested in personal growth or as business owners. I asked Ellie permission to write these blogs, and she graciously consented…so onward with our first topic.
I would like to think of accountability as a much more forceful and meaningful version of a “New Year’s resolution”. A New Year’s resolution almost carries a pejorative connotation in that most people fail in their endeavors in a relatively short timeframe. I myself am hoping for this failure in my fellow spin-class attendees so that I can more easily secure a bike without having to be there an hour before class time! However, a New Year’s resolution only is made to yourself once a year and usually over 1 or 2 items that have no definable metrics or external accountability. I am now reading Leadership Gold by John Maxwell, which will be the topic of either next week or the week after’s blogs, in which he says accountability means not trusting yourself but trusting someone else to be there to keep you honest.
What is accountability more specifically? Basically, it means that there is another individual holding you to your defined goals using measurable parameters on a more frequent basis than once a year. I myself have set forth 3 goals for 2009: 1. to be a more present CEO of all my businesses, 2. to move toward personal growth and self-awareness, 3. to continue to improve my personal health and body. Although these goals are not as definable as say, “hit a sales goal of 5 million dollars” or something like that, they work for me. Hey, I am very right-brained and work with less number targeted goals than some of my left-brained colleagues. Each month I report back to my Forum group as to my current action step, past action step, and how I have completed the step.
This is one level of accountability. Monthly goals are fantastic but to be very serious about accountability, we have to have defined metrics every single week that can be measurable and punished if not completed. One thing I learned from Ellie is that accountability cannot be forced across the board. Individuals who resist this second tier of accountability will not submit to it and will resent those who compel them to follow this level of accountability. Also accountability groups have been studied for optimal effectiveness, and Byrd found that a group of 3 to 4 members can create an optimal environment for personal responsibility, whereas 2 members or 5 members simply did not function as well. By allowing those willingly to subscribe to a deeper level of accountability permits the motivated to achieve more rigorous goals without inflaming the rest of the group who might not be as interested. This is interesting to me because I will be presenting this option next month on my EO retreat to my forum group as an option for accountability for us in 2009.
Outside of my forum, I shall be starting a weekly accountability group with my spa leaders, Linda and Phillip, looking for growth targets as I see that the newest of my businesses needs the most of my presence, and we are meeting today for our first accountability meeting. So for those of my readership out there who are interested in being serious about their own level of accountability for personal or professional growth, consider finding an “accountability group” that can push one another on shorter time intervals toward defined goals with measurable fines for those who fall short of the target. Obviously, you can adjust the time interval of accountability, fines, group size, and goals based on one’s own desire for accountability. Preferably you don’t just declare an abstruse New Year’s Resolution in your mind that you soon forget by February 1.
The Power of Now Part 5 of 5: Listening to the Inner Body
January 30, 2009 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
The inner body defines your inner self, what you feel when you are at peace. Yes, it is a feeling and not a thought. It is related to the outer body, but it is different. When we are in tune with our inner body, we enter the present moment fully; we enter the now.
We can start by closing our eyes, then concentrating on our breathing and feeling the breath enter our body without resistance. We feel the breath transform our inner body and how our body reacts to it. We are attuned to the present moment and live fully within it. Our senses are heightened and we are alert to our own self.
Our inner body is essentially immutable during our lifespan. We just need to be in tune with it. As our outer body fails us and ages, our inner body remains a constant. However, the inner and outer bodies are related. When we listen to our inner body fully and surrender to it rather than resist it, we actually slow down the aging process and increase our immune system. When we are at peace with ourselves and we feel it, we are in tune with the present moment and our outer body benefits from this deep surrender.
Surrender is the opposite of resistance. Resistance is a manifestation of the mind, i.e., when our mind controls our thoughts and our behavior. Acceptance of our condition is a requisite step. That does not mean we should permit an unfavorable situation to continue. However, if we accept it as a fact then we can free ourselves of any labels of negativity or positivity. We surrender ourselves without resistance and listen to our inner body that gives us true peace. We find inner joy when we are at peace and not in a state of drama, or fevered anxiety. Drama comes from being enslaved to the egoic mind. Surrendering to our inner body and being attuned fully to the present moment frees us and gives us focus and alertness to true consciousness. Don’t believe me?Try it. Get into the moment. Get in tune with yourself.
I really got a lot out of this book and it helped me truly try to enter the moment of now and to relinquish the egoic fears of the future or to be miserable with any past transgressions. Instead, living in the moment and being in tune with my inner body I achieve a deep sense of peace.
The Power of Now Part 2 of 5: Escape Your Pain
January 27, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
After understanding that our egoic minds that rule our every moment is the source of our problems, we must then understand the effect that manifests through what Tolle calls the “pain-body”. He conceives of emotions as being a bodily response to our egoic mind (sounds a bit like Ruiz, huh?). When our mind thinks a certain thought, our emotion is a bodily response to that thought. For example, anger is a consequence of our egoic mind thinking that we have been hurt or how we can then return the favor. Our bodily literally shakes when we allow the mind to transform into the body. If we are not associated with our mind but leave our mind and our related ego, then we enter a deep consciousness that we discussed yesterday that permits us to then separate us from emotions that may ruin us. In short, our egoic mind drives our pain-body.
The reason that Tolle talks specifically about one emotion, pain, is that he would like us to escape the deepest negativity which is intimately tied with mind and body. He says that in Buddhist thought, enlightenment is simply defined as “the end of suffering”. Understanding that the further that we enter a deep state of consciousness, i.e., by entering deeply into the now and by not engaging in fruitless mind activity, we begin to relinquish the pain-body.
Our egoic minds drive us by fear. Ultimately, the fear is of our own self-destruction, the most unstated fear is our own death. For example, we insist on winning an argument and to defeat the other person. We fear failure. We do not allow us to be vanquished. Our egoic mind drives all of this emotion and compels us into a state of constant fear. By living fully in the moment and experiencing the now, we can begin to let go of the fears of the past and the future that drive us. Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” What he was essentially saying is when you let go of hate and your own ego, you have no enemies. You no longer see enemies all around you because you cannot be hurt in that you have freed yourself from the ego and thereby extinguished the pain-body.
Tomorrow we will talk more specifically of how to understand “now” in terms of a universal concept, time. That is my favorite idea that Tolle has presented.
The Power of Now Part 1 of 5: You are Not Your Mind
January 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 9 Comments
I really enjoyed Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. I envision the book as a refinement to many of the ideas that I have been covering over the past few weeks to months, and I have achieved a much more profound self-awareness after reading it. As a reminder to my faithful readers, I am not interested in recounting the entire book but just select passages that have had personal resonance for me and for my own personal journey toward a more enlightened and pain-free existence.
His first chapter, “You are Not Your Mind”, addresses many of the concepts that were discussed by Ruiz in his books on Toltec wisdom, which I did not cover as explicitly in the past two weeks so this should be a great addition to some of the overall concepts from Ruiz but in my opinion even better articulated. Tolle says that our egoic mind is in a state of constant buzz. We are always focused on thinking in an incessant manner so that we drown out our own experience of the present, the only time that in fact we can enjoy and the only time that really matters. We look at our past and configure ourselves in relationship to it, thinking that we are a product of our past. In essence, we make the past alive and fail to live in the moment. Or, we are so perturbed with the future and the anxiety over what may or may not be, that we are not truly alive, or conscious.
We must let go of our mind, the constant buzzing noise that goes off in our mind and experience our present moment. He talks about “watching the thinker” meaning to disengage ourselves from our constant thinking, our application of our egoic state. By putting ourselves almost as a third person looking at ourselves in the thinking mode, we start to achieve a level of deep consciousness that we would not otherwise have in the spiraling rattle of thoughts that plague our very existence.
He also talks about truly feeling the moment. Get into the feeling of one’s own breath, the typing that I am doing right now on my computer, my sense of the operatic music that envelops me as I write. We live so far in the past or the future that we cannot even begin to enjoy and relish the now, the only time that we can truly experience and enjoy. We must divorce ourselves from always thinking and thinking and thinking and worrying and worrying about the future and reflecting on our past. We must live in the rich tapestry of the moment that is right in front of us. We must feel the moment, the only time that truly matters in many ways.
By doing so, we achieve a profound inner peace and calm, an enlightened state of consciousness that is devoid of the travails of over analysis and a hyper state of the cycling mind. Instead, we become hyper acute of our surroundings and where we are currently and by doing so achieve a much happier and profoundly peaceful condition. Stop for a moment and ask yourself as you’re reading this are you aware of your surroundings? Do you hear everything around you? Feel it? Sense it? Try this and do you sense a much more profound equanimity and tranquility? Tomorrow we talk about ridding ourselves of pain.