in this issue Technically, It's Not About Technique About Jim Schaffer & Associates

Technically, It's Not About Technique

You've just finished your fiscal year (for some of you, Q3), taken a nice long break over the holidays, and it's now time, as Van Morrison said, to Hard Nose the Highway.

What. . again? After a year like 2002? Whether you judge yourself as having done quite well or not so well at work last year, it's time to crank it up again, and chances are you're not exactly sitting there feeling like Rocky on the top step of the Philly Art Museum.

In fact, you might be scrambling for big ideas. "What IS it that's going to get me where I need to go in the months ahead?," you plead to the gods of business fortune.

Here's a radical prescription for business as we head into 2003: Let's stop looking for external techniques that we can use in the marketplace altogether! If you're on this newsletter list, you've already been successful as a manager, salesperson, or customer service representative. Chances are, you've had enough training in your career to provide ideas for at least two lifetimes worth of work.

Bill Bridges, the well-known author of Transitions and Jobshift, believes that ". . we associate development with learning and adding to what is already there. . . but there is an older wisdom that tells us that it is by unlearning and stripping away what is there that we grow."

It is time to realize that we already have within us the ability to rise to any challenge we are confronted with in the current business arena. We actually need to forget some of what we know and learn to listen to those inner voices to be able to formulate new answers for situations we haven't encountered before.

But how can you hear yourself with everything going on around you in the business world today? I'd like to begin this year by offering you four broad principles that, if practiced, can not only bring you effective results in 2003 but are capable of transforming the rest of your careers:

1. Be Grateful. Start your business day with an expression of gratitude, in whatever form it takes (I will be offering a visualization for this in a future newsletter) Try this for a month or two and you'll be floating on a cloud. Try it for a couple of years and it will permanently transform your career and, indeed, your entire life.



2. Be Quiet. Notice I didn't say silent — that might bring your career to a screeching halt. I mean internally quiet, with a deeply experienced sense of spaciousness and ability to listen and see things clearly, as they are.



3. Surrender. Again, I'm not suggesting that you hide in your office, re-reading old issues of The Industry Standard. But most of us became successful by being good control freaks. Maybe it's time to loosen our grip and let go of our fears, judgments, ideas of how the world should be, and elaborate stories we weave about events that occur. It's time to stay in the present moment and remain open to what arises.



4. This Too Shall Pass. Know that whether you're struggling with a particularly nagging problem or enjoying the adrenaline rush of success, the situation has already begun to change. You'll be much more effective if you can learn how to watch it evolve. The more you cling to pleasure and try to avoid pain, the less energy you'll have for acting skillfully as things unfold.