Be Your Best

Recently, I was able to meet someone that I have read a lot about and idolized growing up — Bob Bondurant.  Bob Bondurant is a racing legend and a race car driver who raced with Shelby American among other teams — he won the 1965 World Championship and many other races over his career.  Bob raced Corvettes in the late 1950’s and early ’60’s, and then joined Carroll Shelby’s Shelby American Team in 1963 and raced the famous Shelby Cobras.  He then later raced with Ferrari.  Bob also was a consultant for the famous racing movie “Grand Prix” starring James Garner.  After a serious crash at Watkins Glen in 1967, Bob started the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving which has trained over 250,000 students, including many professional racers and celebrities.  Bob today remains a leading authority on advanced driving and professional driving instruction.

So why bring up my meeting Bob Bondurant and how can he help you in your career endeavors?  There is one very simple, but powerful, principle that Bob Bondurant conveyed to me that he has utilized throughout his career and he has always symbolized to me.  It is something we can all benefit from in our careers, and could be the most important single ingredient in achieving the results you are looking for.  It is focused passion.

Focused…

When you listen to and watch Bob Bondurant, you see and hear a person that has an incredible ability to concentrate and focus.  His legendary racing wins and incredible driving talent further demonstrate his unique ability to create a laser beam focus on what his mission is.  In the 1960’s or even today, making one little mistake due to distraction going 160 mph on the race track meant disaster or death.  Bob has had the ability to block out every distraction when needed in order to accomplish his goals whether those be racing wins or in business.

Passion

Bob Bondurant is about as passionate of a person as you will ever meet.  Bob has been racing bikes and cars ever since he can remember, and just ‘oozes’ passion for racing.  His focused passion drove him to become one of the best race car drivers in the world (these guys in the 1950’s and 1960’s did not make the kind of money drivers make today for the risks they were taking—so it truly was passion that motivated them).

If you want to be successful at anything, it is logical that one way to get there is to look at others who are already successful and copy what they do.  Bob Bondurant’s focused passion is something everyone should consider copying to help achieve your goals.  Obviously passion isn’t really something that is learned or forced, but it can be ‘found’.  There are all kinds of ways to make a job or project more interesting or challenging or motivating — to instill or find the passion inside you.  Without the passion, ultimate success cannot happen.

On the other hand, focus, as a part of focused passion, is something that can be learned and a skill that can be continuously improved.  The ability to work without distraction is a very powerful tool.  Some of us are naturally able to focus our passion better than others.  For most of us though, it is critical to work hard at honing the skill of intense focus since 2x — 3x the results can be accomplished in distraction-free ‘zones’.

Bob Bondurant has that combined laser beam focus + intense passion that has created tremendous success on the world stage.  Very few of us will ever race at 160 mph, but we can all copy a race car driver’s focused passion to be more successful!

 Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

I had to opportunity recently to meet Cal Ripken Jr., aka the ‘Iron Man’ of professional Major League Baseball.  Cal was dubbed the Iron Man because he played in a record 2,632 consecutive Major League Baseball games, and broke Lou Gehrig’s streak of 2,130 games.  I have never been a big Baltimore Orioles fan, or even a die hard baseball fan, but I did pay attention to Cal Ripken Jr. because of ‘the streak’.  When he broke Lou Gehrig’s unsurpassable record of 2,130 games played without ever missing one, I thought that was an amazing accomplishment.  Especially when you consider he is playing at the highest level of professional sport.  I listened to Cal do a presentation where he spoke about his childhood, his family, baseball, the ‘streak’, and life in general.  I was fortunate to meet him after the talk.

Cal said that breaking the Lou Gehrig consecutive games streak was never one of his goals, not even as he got close to it.  His primary goal always was to ‘be the best baseball player there ever was’.  Ironically, that may be why he did end up breaking the record.  He took a lot of risks primarily to be the best player he could be.  He trained and played in ways that put his health at risk where he could have been more defensive or protecting.  He also told a story about breaking one of his ribs playing basketball before the last season.

8 Key Traits to Persevere and Exceed Your Goals— from Cal Ripken

Cal said that Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees once asked him “how did you do it?” at an All Star Game in Colorado, and Cal did not have a good answer for Derek.  It disappointed Derek when Cal said “it just happened”.  This got Cal thinking more about it. 

“What traits would someone have to have to break that record?”  Cal developed his original ‘list’ of 8 traits that made it happen, and this eventually led to writing the book “Get in The Game”.  The list was modified slightly for the book, but here is his ‘original’ list of 8 traits he gave in his talk.

1. The Right Approach—Personal Mission Statement

Cal talks about having a personal mission and sticking to it, even when other people or you question it.  Never doubt it.  Cal said he only doubted himself one time, when he was in a batting slump.  He asked Rick Sutcliffe, Pitcher and teammate if he should just put the streak to rest.  Rick said “You will end up in the obituaries if you don’t show up.  Your fielding is phenomenal and I need you on the field regardless of your batting.”

2. A Strong Will to Succeed—Internal Drive

Cal talks about having the ‘fire within’.  Cal had the fire early on (a bad temper), but indicated that his mother was the one who helped him channel that temper into positive action.

3. Passion—Love What You Do

Cal indicates that passion is what carries him through the ‘bad times’ and tough circumstances.  Loving what you do makes it all worthwhile.  Cal, like all of us, had plenty of bad times.

4. A Love to Compete

Cal sees loving to compete on 2 levels: competing with yourself and competing with your teammates.  Most people do not know that Cal Ripken Jr. was developed as a 3rd Baseman, and playing shortstop was a temporary move by coach Al Weaver.  There was always a young buck shooting for his SS position.  Cal would always share all the tips and information he had when training, but once they started executing, Cal was competing with them like the enemy.

5. Consistency—Ability to Perform Every Day

One thing that is lacking from a lot of people is the ability to perform consistently, every day.  Because Cal Ripken Jr. was on the field every day, he actually began calling the pitches for his pitchers vs. the catcher.  This was an indispensable contribution to the team.  Frank Robinson, coach at the time, was going to write Cal out of the line up before he broke Lou Gehrig’s record due to a hitting slump, but he simply could not that because Cal did so many great things.

6. Sense of Conviction—Thick Skin

Cal did not hit his goals because everything was handed to him on a silver platter. Whether it was  the press giving him a hard time about the ‘streak’ or his father getting fired as Manager of the Baltimore Orioles after just 8 games, Cal shook it off and saw things through to the end.

7. Strength—Physical and Mental

Cal feels you must have strength, both physical and mental, to exceed your goals, but the ‘connection between the two’ should be the primary focus. Cal used mental strength to his advantage.  He actually would share private/secret information with certain opposition team players that would cause his team to get ‘out’, in order to gain their trust, and get important information back that would help win the game.  He was big on ‘picking battles wisely’ to preserve his strength.

8. Life Management– Achieving Balance

Cal talks about trying to “bring control over things you cannot control”.  Don’t just let things happen, be proactive.  He became well known as someone who could ‘manage his managers’ and was able to manage the media.  He did this by establishing trust first, providing them value without expectations in return.  When faced with the impossible situation of either missing the birth of his first child or ending the consecutive game record streak early, Cal said to his wife: “Honey, you can count on me, I will be there and not have any regrets.  But, is it fair to our son that his birthday will be stamped as that day the streak ended?”

We can all learn a lot from Cal Ripken Jr., the ‘Iron Man’.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford - Success Coach

We all know that setting goals is a good practice.  From my own experience and my time around other people, I can say with confidence that most people rarely do enough goal setting compared to the tremendous value it brings.  It has been proven over and over by the experts, gurus, and I have seen it with my own personal experience as well as watching other successful people — setting goals works.

So why do most not do enough goal setting, do it too infrequently, or worse yet, do not really do it at all?

Answer: It’s hard and many times it is painful.  Both of these factors we humans try to avoid as much as we can!

It’s Hard: setting goals requires that you free your mind from distractions, create some real focus time alone, and you are often assessing what your life means to you.  How often can and do you put yourself in position to have distraction-free, focus-on-your-personal-goals time?  It’s tough.

It’s Painful: with myself, when I am trying to set or reset key goals, I find myself quantifying what I have achieved in the past up to now, which in some cases is short of what I set out to achieve (measured against a previously documented goal or a goal that was in my head but I never wrote down).  This can be a painful process if you do not remind yourself that just the process itself is a success, regardless of the outcomes.  You will reach certain goals and others are stretch goals.

Rarely does anyone hit all the targets they set for themselves.  In fact, it could be argued that hitting or exceeding every goal is not even the most important element.  Things always change on the way to achieving a goal, so what the goal started out to be may transform over time to a different goal altogether.

One Answer…

One Answer to make the goal-setting process easier is:

“Micro Goals”.  The concept of micro-goals for me was learned when I read the book: “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  However, I am sure many others talk about this same concept.  Good book and a recommended read, but it is a little dry so I suggest doing the audio book version read by the author.  Micro Goals are miniature versions of Goals.  In practice, they are chunked down goals that are much easier to create than the typical ‘annual’ or ‘life’ level goals.  For example, a Micro Goal might be: “Complete these 2 items before the 5:00 pm today” or “finish writing X report in 1 hour from now” or “hit 0 red lights on my drive home from work”.

The Significance and Value of Micro Goals

Micro goals are huge because they allow you to be in goal setting mode all day long, every day.  They do not require the time, energy, and focus that big-time goal setting does (which also should be done).  Micro Goals allow you to do a couple of key things: a) keeps you focused on the right activities, b) allows you to experience more goal-met successes, and c) they provide you with the opportunity to get into the ‘zone’ more often — which means you enjoy the challenge of reaching/achieving a goal more often.

What’s the difference between a Micro Goal and a Deadline?

I look at a micro goal as something you set for yourself, whereas deadlines can be placed upon you.  Yes, they are very similar.  In fact, a micro goal, just like a larger goal, should have a defined deadline or timeframe.  I like to think of the micro goal setting process as part of your overall Goal Setting Process, and that you are proactively creating these Micro Goals constantly for yourself.  Deadlines are part of micro goals and bigger goals, but they can also be something that is set by others.  With that said, setting deadlines for micro goals or big-time goals is critical.  Goals or micro goals without deadlines or timeframes are goals you will likely never achieve.

Deadline ‘Leverage’

Setting the timeframe or deadline may be the hardest single aspect of setting goals or even micro goals.  It may also be the most important aspect.  This is the part where personal accountability comes into question.  No deadline means no accountability.  No accountability means the high likelihood of weak results or failure to accomplish the goal completely.

Deadlines or timeframes are the ‘lever’ that swings goals and micro goals into action.  Once you stick a completion timeframe on a goal, it has a whole different importance, urgency, and feel to it.  One tip for setting a timeframe, and this applies to both bigger goals as well as to micro goals, is to be as specific as possible with the deadline.  Instead of ‘by end of January’, you want to say ‘By 5:00 pm Friday, January 31st, 2010’.  Even with a micro goal, be more specific than “today” — try to assign a very specific timeframe like “complete X Report by 11:30 am today”.  Super specific deadlines allow the brain to clearly understand and engage ‘by when’ and fights off our natural instinct to procrastinate.

Give the micro goal-setting process a try.  It takes some discipline, but the results are well worth the effort.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford - Success Coach

I have to be about as guilty as anyone out there with the use of ‘No’, ‘But’, or ‘However’ in a sentence when I am communicating with people either written or verbally.  Something I was reading recently talked about the use of these 3 words at the beginning or middle of a sentence being something you really do not want to do — and to understand what kind of impact that makes with other people you interact with.  It can have a significant impact.

Why Not use these 3 words?

Essentially, by using these words when communicating, you are telling the other person or people that you disagree with them — even when you may not be disagreeing with them.  You are conveying: “You are wrong, and I am right.”  Of course, how many people like to be told “You are wrong”…. not very many.  At work? At home? 0.

This got me thinking about how often I use these words at the beginning or key point of a sentence when I am communicating, so I started to tune into this a little bit closer.  WOW!  It’s unbelievable.  Even though I don’t feel like I would use “No”, “but”. or “however” all that much, I do.

Some examples where I caught myself (and there were probably some instances that I did not catch):

“I think that is a good idea, but have you thought about….”

“I really like what you have done on this, however, I am not sure you…..”

“No, I am thinking it would be better to….”

“I agree with what you are saying, however, there is one other problem….”

Why Is It A Problem To Be Disagreeable?

We are generally taught not to be a pushover, and ‘don’t just agree for agreement sake’ — right?

Why should we care if we are disagreeable?  The key here is not what you ‘really’ are, but what you are ‘perceived’ to be.  Nobody likes or overly respects people who are “disagreeable people”.  You know the type — they never agree with anything.  They think the opposite of what you think every time.  This topic is not about your actual position on issues and whether you actually agree or disagree with someone (because many times you are simply trying to convey another idea), but rather your effectiveness at communicating, negotiating, and relationship development.  The goal is to be perceived as an open minded person, willing to listen to ideas, non-confrontational, non-defensive, etc…  This is the type of person that people like to interact with and more fully respect and admire.

So what is the Remedy?

“Thank you.”  Yes, it’s pretty simple to improve your perception as an open-minded person.  Just change your words (not your opinion).  Simple, but not necessarily easy.  Once you begin to catch and monitor yourself using “no”, “but”, and “however”, you simply replace “no …..”, “however, ……”, and “but, ………….” with: “Thank you, that is good information.” or “Thank you, I had not thought of that.” or “thanks, great input.”

If you absolutely cannot avoid disagreeing in some way, then…

…a good way to handle this is to say “thank you, that gives me something to think more about” or “thanks, I appreciate your idea and feedback.”

In practice this is fairly difficult to do.  It is easy to give up on making this change.  However, [whoops did it again] if you chip away at it, you can steadily rid your vocabulary of these words.  People will notice the difference.  It won’t be overnight, but over time you will be perceived as open minded, someone who people can bounce ideas off of, and a person who’s opinions are respected.  It’s kind of ironic —- the reason we use these 3 words is the natural tendency to win with our ideas.  By not using these “win-oriented” words to ‘win’, you…win.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Todd Gifford - Success Coach

If you think about what you do that creates great success for you, it typically ties into things you do on a repeated, consistent basis.  Whether it is creating substantial Cost Savings and Productivity Improvements at work, achieving or maintaining good health or fitness, or creating great relationships with people — it involves actions that you implement frequently and consistently.  The words discipline and regiment come to mind as a driving component to achieving this consistent and frequent action.  However, for me and others that I see who develop mastery on particular area, these consistent and frequent actions have literally become ‘habits’ or built-in personal routines.  The successful person implementing action on a frequent/consistent basis makes it look nearly effortless (as if it is somehow way easier for them to execute it than for anyone else, even when it really is not).

Success and exceeding your goals is largely driven by how many successful habits and consistent routines you have working for you.  If you rely on single shots of effort to achieve success, or effort relying on a reminder system, you will rarely achieve big success.

So, it would stand to reason that improving your ability to create new habits is essential to being successful and hitting your goals.  Creating habits is a lot like anything else you set out to be come good at — there is a method to becoming good at creating ‘habits’.

30-in-30

Most experts agree that it takes about 22-30 days for a person to develop a habit.  Let’s call it 30 days to develop a habit just to be safe.  Whether it is developing a habit to read books every day, putting in place an exercise routine, stopping smoking, or whatever it is — it takes about 30 days of repetitive consistent action to build it into a habit.  Sounds relatively easy until you actually dive into doing this.

30-in-30 is a process of creating a habit from scratch, whereby you complete the habit you are trying to form every single day for 30 straight days, without fail.

This Habit developing process is not limited to simple, one-dimensional things like drinking more water.  It applies to literally every skill or talent imaginable.  In other words, if you wanted to learn to play the guitar, the objective would be to first develop the habit of learning to play the guitar.  If you do not develop this habit first, you will likely never reach mastery of this skill, because you will be fighting the battle against your habit of “not” learning the guitar.

So, with the learning to play the guitar example, 30-in-30 would be getting 1 hour of practice on the guitar every single day for 30 straight days, without fail.  After 30 days, you will have developed the foundational habit to practicing the guitar that will take you towards mastery OR you will quickly decide that you really do not want to learn to play the guitar!

Your Massive Productivity Time Zone(s)

Just about every expert says that your most productive time is early in the morning, and therefore you want to be working on your most important projects early in the day.  However, I have found with myself as well heard from other successful people that you can have multiple ‘high productivity time zones’ during the day, and everyone is a little different.  The key is to determine when those best time zones are for you — and then leverage the heck out of those time slots.  It can literally transform your ability to get much more done.  If you don’t understand when these ‘hot’ time zones are, it can really work against you.

One way to figure this out is to look historically at the times of the day where you: get a lot of stuff done, have a lot of good ideas, have the most satisfaction at work, and seem to be able to concentrate the best.  This could be early in the morning, but then again very late in the day.  It could even be in the evening or over the lunch hour.  No matter when it is, identifying when these ‘massive productivity time zones’ are is step one.  The next step is to carefully guard those time zones and create distraction-free focus time in those zones proactively.  It might only be a 2 hour slot, but research has shown that you can accomplish 2x—5x in these high productivity time zones vs. during ‘normal’ time periods.  We have discussed ways to guard these ‘golden’ time slots in the past, but it is difficult.  No one else might understand that these time zones are what they are to you.  In certain cases, it makes sense to let people know when they are, so they stay clear.

Protect and maximize these productive time zones — then reap the benefits of exceeding your goals.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford

Eventually, just about everyone is involuntarily involved in a major disaster at some point in their lives — and hopefully not more than one or two.  My wife and I experienced and survived Hurricane Iniki when we lived and worked in Hawaii.  Very scary.  This past weekend, we experienced first hand another major disaster — the massive flooding and Dam Break at Lake Delhi.

Just like a Hurricane, there was advance warning that there was going to be a problem coming.  However, you really never know exactly how bad that problem is going to get.  Unfortunately, it got pretty intense, and much worse than anyone expected.  It was beyond comprehension.  The warnings were communicated at about 11:00 am on Friday July 23rd.  By 3 PM, the water was 4 feet above normal.  By 9 PM, the water was 6 feet above normal.  By 5 AM the next morning, the water was 10 feet above normal, and rising.  By noon, the water was 14 feet above normal, and still rising.

When I woke up to the situation (I had actually slept a little better than I had anticipated I would), I immediately went into a mode of ‘Decision-Action’, and ran outside to check on the status of our neighbors.  Water was all over the place, and some houses were already 1/2—2/3 under water.  I went to the house that was closest to the edge of the rising flood water and ran inside to begin helping remove their furniture and possessions.  When that house was done, we moved on to the next house in the path.  And so on.  Then, immediately off to get sand bags.  For about 5 straight hours that day, there was no delay between making decisions and taking action, which is what ‘Decision-Action’ is.  Decision and Action were fused together.  There was no time for over-analysis or doing more research.  And things do get done quickly and efficiently in this mode.

Your Threshold for Decision-Action:

Your ‘threshold’ for Decision-Action is the point at which you move into a mode where there is essentially no delay or time between a Decision and Action.  You make a decision, and boom, you are instantly taking action on that decision.

Why is this Decision-Action concept important?

Essentially, the more you can operate in Decision-Action mode, the better, in terms of achieving goals and objectives, or solving problems.  Most of us are rarely fully in this mode, or are in it a very low % of the time where the stakes are medium-to-high at work or in our personal lives .  Super successful people typically have a lower threshold for Decision-Action, and operate in that mode a much higher % of the time vs. the average person.  Consequently, more stuff gets done.  More Cost Savings get implemented, more Suppliers get reduced, more innovations get introduced and completed, and more problems get solved.

Decision-Action is not about short-cutting or sloppy analysis.  Analysis and research happens before the Decision.  Decision-Action is about taking action immediately after the decision has been made.  How many times have you made a decision and then delayed taking action or possibly never taking action — and then you missed an opportunity or the result came much later than it could have or in smaller amount than it could have?  Yes, it’s possible that taking immediate action after the decision can result in a negative outcome occasionally vs. waiting.  However, studies have repeatedly shown that taking less time between decision and action results in far more positive outcomes than negative.

If you can lower your threshold which puts you into a decision-action mode more often, you will get more done, achieve greater success and results, and reduce your stress.

How do you lower your Decision-Action threshold?  The simplest way to do this is to increase the sense of urgency for more things you are involved with: create more self-imposed deadlines (shrink and define the time allotted to complete tasks and projects), think about the negative consequences (pain) of not getting something done vs. the positives, and create more shorter term goals (always written down).

Just starting to focus attention on this concept of Decision-Action, and becoming more aware of when you are making a decision but then waiting to take action, will improve your results.

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford