It was October and the Indians on a remote reservation asked their new Chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Chief who had been brought up in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets, and when he looked at the sky he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like. To be on the safe side he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.

However, being a practical leader, he decided to find out the real answer. He galloped away on his horse, went to a public phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, “Is the coming winter going to be cold?”

“It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,” the meteorologist at the weather service responded. So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.

A week later he called the National Weather Service again. “Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?” “Yes,” the man at National Weather Service again replied, “it’s going to be a very cold winter.” The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.

Two weeks later the Chief called the National Weather Service again. “Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?” “Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”

“How can you be so sure?” the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, “We’re never really sure about our readings, but the Indians always seem to get it right, and they’re collecting firewood like crazy!”

Moral: Sometimes we try to find the answer to a situation by looking around to see what everyone else thinks. The reality is however, that we have the strengths and abilities to solve our own problems most of the time, through application of our own skills and knowledge.

I have discovered that in order to plan, I have to release my directed thoughts and go into a mode of free daydreaming. During these reveries, I can envision myself putting together materials that I would need to build a boat, a plane, or a house, or a beach cottage.

Over the years, I have done all these things. I learned how to do things with the help of library books and talking to other people who knew more than I did about a project. I would start at the beginning, stick with the work, and finally complete the project.

Some things have taken afternoons, weeks, months, even years to build. In those projects, I have discovered an indescribable freedom and contentment of the heart and soul that is hard to come by any other means.

My family and friends have encouraged me, cheered for me, and listened to me talk about my work. Some have even helped me from time to time… To start on that journey, to construct something, is to believe that I can and will do it. When I have made the dream a reality, then I am contented, joyful, and proud to share it.
https://books.google.com/books?id=oBGPCnjH3b0C&dq

Through self-belief and persistently applying our skills and knowledge, we can accomplish things that would have seemed impossible when we initially believed in our ability to effect change for the good.

A man walked into a bar with a dog and said to the bartender, “My dog can talk.”

“I tell you what,” said the bartender, “If your dog can talk, I’ll give you a free round of beer.”

“OK,” said the man.

The man turned round and asked his dog, “What does sandpaper feel like?”

“Ruff,” said the dog.

“What covers the trunk of a tree?”

“Bark,” said the dog.

“What do you have on top of a house?”

“Wrooof,” said the dog.

“OK,” said the bartender, “Take this beer and get out of here.”

The man and the dog went to a park bench where they sat silently sipping the beer. Eventually the dog turned to the man and said, “You know, I don’t think they liked our show, but I’m not sure why.”

Moral: You may sometimes feel like you’re not getting anywhere, but that could be because you are only exercising a very small set of your full capabilities.

The authentic self is the you that can be found at your absolute core. It is the part of you that is not defined by your job, or your function, or your role. It is the composite of all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom. It is all of your strengths and values that are uniquely yours and need expression, versus what you have been programmed to believe that you are “supposed” to be and do.
https://books.google.com/books?id=uX0iRnO1nSAC&dq

You may get a much warmer welcome by doing things that you are not expected to be able to do, instead of just doing the things that people think you can do.

The lion walked up to the mouse and roared, “Who is the king of the jungle?” The mouse squeaked, “You are, you are.”

Then the lion walked up to the fox and roared, “Who is the king of the jungle?” The fox barked, “You are, you are.”

Then the lion walked up to the elephant and roared, “And who is the king of the jungle?”

The elephant picked up the lion by the tail, whirled him round his head and dropped him in a bush. The lion poked his head out of the bush and said, “There’s no need to get in a bad mood just because you don’t know the answer.”

Moral: There is more to leadership than assuming that you’re in charge. This may impress mice and foxes, but is not always an effective management technique.

High-quality leadership involves leaders…

• Being clear about personal and organisational goals
• Monitoring their [team members’] achievements
• Changing processes to [allow their team members to reach their goals]
• Having a simultaneous ‘push’ to get things done together with a charismatic ‘pull’ [to persuade their team members that “they can do it”], and
• Fully involving staff through consultation

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/19051/1/131216-pdg-short-guidance-for-practitioners-en.pdf

True leadership means inviting other people to come on a journey with you. The journey may sometimes seem perilous and challenging, but ends with a sense of personal accomplishment and triumph for everyone involved.

Thinking with concepts

In our everyday lives, it seems natural for us to talk about the things that are processed by the company that we work for. We go to work and we talk about insurance policies, home-loans, phone-plans, children’s board games, magazines, fast-food meals and stocks and shares.

When we have these conversations, we take it for granted that we are talking about real and factual things. We do not see that there is any difference between talking about a loaf of bread and talking about the financial position of a public limited company.

The reality however is, that when we talk about anything that is meaningful to us, we have already formed a concept in our minds about the nature of the thing under discussion. That means, we have translated the actual item into an abstract concept that represents to us the inherent nature of the item.

Without this ability to create abstract concepts in our minds, we would be unable to make value judgments or think about how different things fit together.

Concepts are like the air we breathe. They are everywhere. They are essential to our life, but we rarely notice them. Yet only when we have conceptualized a thing in some way can we think about it. Nature does not give us instruction in how things are to be conceptualized. We must create that conceptualization, alone or with others. Once it is conceptualized, we integrate a thing into a network of ideas (as no concept stands alone).

We humans approach virtually everything in our experience as something that can be “decoded.” Things are given meaning by the power of our mind to create a conceptualization and to make inferences on the basis of it – hence, we create further conceptualizations. We do this so routinely and automatically that we don’t typically recognize ourselves as engaged in these processes….

…it is precisely this capacity [to create concepts through which we see and experience the world] of which you must take charge in taking command of your thinking. You must become the master of your own conceptualizations…

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life, Richard Paul, Linda Elder
FT Press, 24 Aug. 2013, page 99

Our ability to create concepts within our minds is the bedrock on which our reasoning rests. The concepts that we form in our minds determine the value judgments and logical associations that we can subsequently make.

In reality, therefore, before we even begin to think about a problem we have already determined the way that our thoughts will proceed and the possibilities that we will be able to identify, by choosing to conceptualise the items at hand in a particular way.

 

Accurate concepts

When we transform the things in the world around us into abstract concepts, we make qualitative decisions about how we will view these things from now on. The subtlety of these decisions is as nuanced as life itself, however it is possible to identify some basic choices we make when deciding how to decipher reality.

Personal or impersonal: Some ideas are close to our feelings, other ideas we hold at an arm’s length. We can choose to relate to something in a close and personal manner, or we can choose to view the same thing impartially and from a distance.

For instance, a worker in a factory may relate to their work with pride and satisfaction, but it is likely that an accountant in head-office will relate to the worker’s output from a purely financial perspective. The worker sees the inherent goodness in what they produce, the accountant perceives the commercial usefulness of the same thing. Both of these conceptualisations are valid; the worker has adopted a personal view and the accountant has adopted an impersonal view, of the same reality.

The accountant’s impersonal conceptualisation is fitting for their job, their impersonal approach enables them to determine the correct course of action needed for the financial wellbeing of the company. Were they to be passionate, they would be unable to make decisions that could involve cutting a particular product or service, for example.

However, the worker’s personal perspective is fitting for their job. Because of their personal involvement, they will apply the best of their skills and knowledge to ensure that they can take pride in the quality and robustness of their work.

Important or trivial: We can conceptualise something as having minute relevance to ourselves, or as being overwhelmingly important.

For example, some people may ignore a minor skin blemish, but other people may pay thousands of dollars to have it invisibly removed. Alternatively, some people may feel it is important to prevent the destruction of natural habitats, but other people may feel this is a minor detail in improving farm productivity.

Our decision to spend time and energy on something, often depends on how significant we think the thing is. Subsequently, it is important to realise how our initial perceptions influence our subsequent course of action. Otherwise, we may pay too much attention to something insignificant, or too little attention to something that could have great potential.

Controllable or uncontrollable: Sometimes we perceive that we have influence over something, at other times we live with an attitude of “that is just the way things are”. That means, we may choose to view something as being under our influence, or we may prefer to feel that it is unalterable and that nothing we could possibly do would have any bearing on the outcome.

For example, we can view the variable quality of manufactured goods as something that is due to natural circumstance and that is beyond our control. Or we can view the variable quality of manufactured goods as something which we can improve on using precision technology and equipment.

Alternatively, we may see the pollution in the city that we live in as something which is an inevitable part of living an urban environment, or we may see pollution as something that we can eliminate through petitioning to change local traffic regulations.

If you perceive that you have influence over an outcome, but in reality you don’t, you may waste your efforts and achieve no results despite a lot of hard work. If you believe that you don’t have influence over an outcome, but in fact you do, you could miss out on an opportunity that was easily within your grasp.

 

Feeling your way

When we assess reality, we have to decide whether we are seeing something new, or if we are seeing something that we can categorise according to prior experience and knowledge. There may be some aspects of an experience that we can categorise in accordance with our previous knowledge, and other aspects of the experience that we discern as new and original.

Sometimes the best way to perceive what is genuinely new and fresh in what we are seeing, is to connect to the experience and let it wash over us. We can then retroactively think about the way the experience made us feel, and see if we tasted something new.

We set every new fact or impression in the framework and light of our existing knowledge, and this “apperception,” as it is called, is a large and vital factor in all our knowledge.

We thus see things, not only as they are, but also as we are. The mind itself is an active and determining agent in forming our knowledge. Every one thus sees his own objects and creates his own world. It is these differences in minds that make the immense differences in the things men see. When Turner showed one of his sunsets to a friend and the friend remarked that he had never seen such a sunset, Turner replied, “Don’t you wish you could?”…

These… constructs are the representatives in our minds of the realities of the objective world, and therefore it is of the first importance that they represent them accurately… Any inaccuracy or error in them… may undermine and ruin our whole structure of thought and life.

The Psychology of Religion, James H. Snowden, page 29
https://archive.org/stream/psychologyofre00snow/psychologyofre00snow_djvu.txt

The best way to understand the nature of new things that we see and experience is to let them talk for themselves. If we approach new experiences with an open mind, we are likely to be able to discern the true essence of what we are looking at. However, if we approach new situations with preconceived ideas, we are likely to see what we expect to see, and miss new insights that we could have gained.

 

Take away

It can be a struggle for us not to project what we expect to see, onto what we are actually seeing. By keeping an open mind, we can discern the subtle innuendoes that hint at the true essence of what we encounter. However if we retrofit new experiences into what we are expecting, we may miss new vistas of growth and opportunity.

One day, I received a cutting from a Chinese business magazine. It had interviewed a famous visitor from the West, one of those rare people who has influenced almost everyone’s life all over the globe. He had been my student some thirty years earlier; he became the venture capitalist who was the first to invest in Google, Yahoo, eBay, humble start-ups that eventually changed the world.

He was asked who had been the greatest influence on his career. He named me, and gave this reason: I had taught him that things are not what they appear to be.

It is unusual for a teacher to be understood by a pupil. But he saw precisely the true measure of my ignorance. Every time I encounter an object, a person or an experience, I do not see only it, but also how else it could be. I am always asking myself: How could it be otherwise?…

The process of creating something useful and beautiful out of what I learn does not resemble building a house out of bricks that have been ordered in advance. It is more like painting a picture which gradually takes shape. As I add and subtract colours and contours, each opens up possibilities that I did not imagine beforehand, and I rush off to deepen my understanding of them, and research new territories, which in turn open up new vistas and new meanings for the too naive or simple thoughts I began with.

The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future
Theodore Zeldin, MacLehose Press, 2015
https://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0857053671

Life is full of opportunity, but in order to be able to connect to this flow of energy, we may have to draw back the curtain of assumptions that we live safely behind.

Career growth and happiness

It can sometimes seem that there is a conflict of interests between our personal lives and our career development. Perhaps career progression will only happen if we short change our personal lives, or maybe our personal lives will only work out if we sacrifice career growth.

All too often…, leaders and managers become so consumed in climbing the corporate ladder, or working to ensure that they do not move down the ladder, that lose focus of what is really important in life…

Can you really be successful in the office and at home? Can you be successful at both without shorting one or the other?.. Are you willing to sacrifice family for professional achievement? Some folks are.. How many times have you heard someone say, “I wish had spent more time with my children when they were growing up.”?..

Is the price worth it? Assess your personal situation and decide where to place your dedication and determination.

Modeling and Benchmarking Supply Chain Leadership, page 87
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1420083988

Does there have to be a contradiction between career growth and achieving personal happiness, or is there a way to find harmony between these different facets of our existence?

 

Naturalness

One of the most important ingredients of a successful personal life, is the ability to be natural and spontaneous. For example, we often find happiness when we allow our thoughts and feelings to wander wherever they want to go. In our working lives however, we tend to assume a stricter and more self-conscious mode of existence.

Two of the factors that persuade us to leave our natural selves behind when we enter the workplace are:

• Time pressure: In our personal lives, our feelings and thoughts develop at their own natural pace. In the workplace, on the other hand, our activities are timebound. Work must happen within its allotted time slot, otherwise the downstream processes that depend on our output will come to a stop.
• Conformity: In our personal lives, we value self-expression and search for our unique individuality. In our work life, on the other hand, we conform to the ways of thinking, feeling and doing of the company that we work for, so that we can blend into the workplace dynamic.

The need to meet targets on time, and the pressure to conform to the company’s way of thinking, pushes us into a task-focussed frame of mind which can make us lose touch with our natural selves.

Children have a natural grace which asserts itself easily, but which is rarely seen in the sophisticated adult except in persons with a great natural sweetness of mind. Innocent moments are of greater value in the adult – they bring a more complex being and a wider knowledge into balance than in the case of the child – but such moments are infrequent of the difficulty experienced by a mature person in coming to terms with a complicated world….

The child shows an interest in the minute details of objects. He wonders at things and is fascinated by them. The cultivated adult, on the other hand, fails to observe much of what goes on about him, subordinates his activities to his interests, has little left to wonder at, and is too confident of his knowledge of things to find them fascinating…

William Blake, page 14
https://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0521097355

If we lose the naturalness that is essential to our personal lives, we are likely to make decisions that could adversely impact the relationships that are crucial to us.

How can we make sure that our natural freshness is not dulled by the daily grind?

 

Thriving from challenge

When we encounter pressure to perform, we experience a sense of uncertainty. “Will we be able to meet the challenge, or will we fall short?”

There are two ways that we can respond to this quandary. We can either feel exhilarated, and rise to meet the challenge that has been put to us. Or we can feel dismayed by the expectations that have been placed on us, and tense ourselves up to desperately try to meet our targets.

The experience of uncertainty can vary: it can be an exhilarating challenge to be confronted and resolved – it is exciting and makes us feel edgy and alive, and delivers us a sense of satisfaction and mastery when we resolve [the situation]; or it can be anxiety provoking and stressful, making us feel impotent and unable to predict or control our world and what will happen to us in it.

…if we believe our resources to deal with the demand[s placed on us] are adequate, we feel a sense of [excitement that makes us meet the challenge head on.] if we believe our resources are inadequate, we feel a sense of threat that [makes us shrink away and ignore the challenge as much as possible].

Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology: Collection: Volumes 1 & 2, page 65
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1446269000

Being upbeat about the challenges we face, releases our inner aptitudes and enables us to grow from the challenge. If we feel overwhelmed, on the other hand, our feeling of inadequacy makes us close up, and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two ways in which a positive frame of mind provides us with the abilities that we need to win are:

• Finding new possibilities: If we feel secure in our capability to ultimately solve the problem, then we allow ourselves time to look around for new ideas. If we feel threatened by the challenge, however, then we can’t afford to admit that we do not already possess the tools and knowledge needed to solve the problem, as this would make us feel more threatened. Subsequently we may try to force a non-optimal solution, using the knowledge that is immediately available, instead of looking for fresh insights.

• Intuition: Intuition happens when we allow ourselves to park a problem in the back of our minds. Our subconscious then makes the connection between our understanding in other areas and the problem that we are faced with. If we agitatedly turn the problem round and round in our minds however, we will never experience the deep understanding that comes when our background thought processes are allowed to free-wheel.

 

High energy balance

If we grow to meet the challenges that we face at work, this releases energy that grows our natural vitality. The positivity that this creates provides strength and dynamism in our personal lives, which in turn becomes the the base from which we can approach new work challenges with confidence and optimism.

This positive feedback loop can become the gateway for us to operate at an entirely new level.