Translator: Daniel Moore Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
Raise your hand
if you’ve ever gotten to the end of the year and told yourself,
“Now what I need to do next year is to just try harder.”
Yeah? And then maybe next year rolls around and you say,
“No, no, no. I don’t count. Do over!
That’s right, I’m really going to apply myself this year.”
Then three years go by and you think,
“Wait a minute! I’ve been telling myself I just need to try harder every year,
and it’s like the harder I try, the more things stay the same.
What’s going on?”
Now, I don’t know if you’ve experienced that,
but if you think back to your to-do list, thing you were working at yesterday,
I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever looked down at your to-do list,
and there was more things on there than you had time to get done.
And like the worst part of it is it was all in your handwriting.
(Laughter)
And it’s frustrating.
There’s not physically enough time to get it all done,
and maybe you’ve tried working harder and faster,
and it seems like the faster you go, the farthest behind you get.
What do you do now? You’ve done all that you know to do!
(Sighing)
Today, we’re going to look at why trying harder won’t get you there.
I want to show you how checking things off your to-do list
is a dangerous distraction.
I want to show you what highly effective people are doing differently,
and we’ll look at how you can actually employ that in your life, today.
Since we’re going to talk about this for the next few minutes,
would it be okay if I share a little bit about myself?
My name is Jarrod Haning and I’m a classical musician by trade,
currently the principal violinist with the South Carolina Philharmonic;
and that has prepared me very well for my work as a performance coach,
where I train leaders in the thinking patterns of success.
Some people don’t know this, but when you’re engaged in making music –
whether it’s clapping your hands along to the beat,
or singing along to the radio as you’re driving down your car –
in that moment that you’re creating music,
you’re using more of your brain than any other time of your life.
This is well documented with MRI studies.
Now, this is why that matters.
I want you to think about that thing in your life
that you feel like you keep running up against,
the: “I don’t have enough time,”
“I keep running up against not having enough money,” and it’s gets frustrating.
There’re two truths I want you to notice about that.
Number one, you’re currently doing all that you know to do.
Really! You know how to pat yourself on the back, you’re not a slacker.
You’re doing all you know to do, you really are.
Number two: everything you’re doing makes sense.
Well, of course it makes sense.
If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be doing it, right?
What that means is a breakthrough in your situation
will, at first, not make sense.
If it made sense you’d have been doing it.
This is what Einstein was referring to when he said,
“You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.”
As a matter of fact, Einstein himself was a musician,
and credited his involvement with music for some of his bigger discoveries.
This hits at the importance of being able to access different parts of your brain
and learn how to think from different perspectives,
because that’s where your next breakthrough will come from.
You might have heard people say,
“What you need to do is leverage your strengths
and delegate your weaknesses.”
I’ve heard that too.
Or maybe they’ve said, “What you need to do is build up those weaknesses.”
I’ve heard that too.
In my work as a performance coach, what I found is that more often than not,
it’s: “Avoid your blind spots.”
Blind spots in our thinking are like blind spots in our car.
The only reason you’d ever hit something was because it was in your blind spot.
There was something about it your brain hadn’t seen yet,
and if you can’t see it, you can’t avoid it.
So, I ask that you let yourself off the hook.
If you keep running up against not having enough time or enough money,
there is a good chance
that there’s something about that situation your brain hasn’t seen yet.
So, I want to show you what thinking patterns look like on paper.
By printing up a graph of somebody’s thinking pattern,
we’re able to pinpoint right away
where the blind spot is that’s been tripping them up.
I’ll show you common patterns, what we can learn from them,
and how to apply that to our life.
So what I’m going to show you
is a visual representation of the work of this guy here,
Robert Hartman and his Nobel nominated value profile he built in the 60s;
and we’re going to look at some visual representation of that.
What we’re looking at here is different size circles.
The larger the circle, the greater is the clarity.
The smaller the circle, the fuzzier the thinking is in that area;
it’s difficult for them to understand life from that perspective,
to navigate from that perspective.
This big blue guy here, that would be like eagle eye vision,
just amazing!
But having a strength is different from using it.
I don’t know, maybe you took ten years of piano lessons as a kid,
ten years of dance lessons or karate,
but now that we grow up, we don’t use that strength.
We’ve a skill we’re not using, and that’s where we see the vertical axis.
You see this green guy down low showing that there’s excellent understanding
but a tendency to disregard the importance of it.
We’re measuring this things across three main areas:
how you relate to emotions, to taking action, and to structure.
Let’s say these three people were lost in the woods.
The person with a high value on emotion would say,
“Well, how do you guys feel about this?”
The person with a high value on doing, on action, would say,
“We’re lost, we need to start going this way now,”
And the person with a high value on planning would say,
“Hold on, hold on! Let’s at least be sure who is going in the right direction,
or we could make this worse. So we need to think about this for a little bit,”
which annoys the action person, “No way, no time for that.
We’re burning daylight. Hustle up! let’s go!”
As I flip through some of these, notice that they are very unique.
The way people look at the world and understand,
and value what they understand,
it’s almost like a fingerprint as unique as they are.
Now right here, we’re going to focus on the top part of this graph.
When we talk to somebody and say,
“Are there ever more things on your to-do list than you’ve time to do?”
They say, “Oh yes!
– Okay, have you tried working harder and faster?
– Oh my gosh! I’ve totally tried that.
– And what happened at the end of the day?
– Man! At the end of the day I returned a hundred emails,
had 27 phone calls, three meetings. I even skipped lunch.
– Okay, what did you get done?
– Oh! … What I did was I had 100 emails and 27 phone calls …
– Okay, what did you get done? – Well…”
It’s this feeling that no matter how busy they were,
they didn’t move the ball forward,
and tomorrow they’re just going to have to do it again.
Notice about this thinking pattern: there’s a high priority on action,
get things done right now, hustle up.
When these persons look at their to-do list, they start checking off.
“It will take 30 sec, I’m going to start with that,
then I’ll do this one two min, that’s only 10 min.”
They start checking off those small things because it gives that immediate hit,
that feeling of “I’m getting things done,” but as you know, that’s an illusion.
It’s a distraction,
because no matter how many of those small things you’ve done,
at the end of the day, it doesn’t give you the feeling that you made a difference.
For these persons, as you look over on the left,
they have a tendency to disregard
the importance of how people feel when they are talking to somebody,
because it’s so clear to them what’s going to make a difference.
A voice in the back of their heads goes:
“Look, I understand how you feel, I just don’t care.”
(Laughter)
Right? Because for them moving the ball down the field is all that matter.
On the right side, they have a tendency to devalue the importance of planning.
You say to this person, “What’s been your experience with delegating?”
They say, “God! By the time I teach them how to do it,
I could just have done it myself.
By the time they do it, I’m going to redo it. It’s a waste of time.
– Well. What’s been your experience with planning
in this system that we’ve laid out for you to run on?
– A total waste of time: by the time I fill up this paperwork,
I could actually have gotten something done.”
Drop some nuts, and you can start to think why we call this shape:
“The chevron of stress,”
because it’s like trying to solve a bad strategy with stubborness.
Have you’ve ever found yourself driving to a new location,
and after a while you feel:
“Maybe I’m on the wrong road, I should be there by now”?
You get that feeling “Oh! I could be lost!”
What this person does is drive faster,
but you can’t fix being on the wrong road by going faster.
It just makes the problem worse.
So let’s look at things you can do that will make a difference.
What I’d like you to do is to think of somebody in your own life
that you respect, you admire, you look up to this person.
They are unbelievably successful in so many areas.
They’re successful at work, at home.
They’re successful in their community.
They just got it together and it doesn’t matter
how much money they make or projects they’re invested in,
they still have time for you.
You could interrupt them in the middle of the day, they’ll be at calm, at peace.
They’re not struggling to catch up, not hustling, not sweating.
They have a few minutes to share with you.
… The kind of person that’s been a mentor to you in the past.
As you think of this person and who it’s been in your life,
you notice that it’s like
their hair isn’t messed up when they wake up in the morning.
I mean their kids take out the trash without being asked to it, yeah.
You got it? You got what I’m talking about here.
When we talk to that kind of person,
this is what their thinking pattern looks like.
Notice that they have a tendency to value people and value planning.
Notice that there’s a low emphasis on taking action.
We call this shape: “The leadership V” and here’s why.
It doesn’t mean that action doesn’t matter, nor results.
For the effective leader, what it comes down to is “Who needs to be doing it?”
Because you see, as long as you’re doing the work,
that means that your business is falling behind.
As a matter of fact, the more you personally are doing the work,
the more you personally are going to be doing the work tomorrow.
Because as long as you’re doing the work,
it means systems aren’t built to support you;
it means people aren’t being invested in to come alongside and support you.
When the effective leader goes to work, they’re choosing between building systems
and handing those systems off to people they have invested in.
Notice I said “invested in”, it’s not about delegating.
You delegate something to someone who doesn’t want to do it,
you just created another problem you’ll have to solve.
For the leader, it’s about “What does this person want?”
and “How can I speak to them in such a way to haul out that feeling,
to bring it out to the surface
so they can see how their mission aligns with our vision?”
“How do I speak to them in a way that emotionally they want to say yes?”
“If I need to deliver a correction, how do I say that
in a way that they don’t feel under attack, but feel safe and like,
‘Thanks for telling me that, I’ll get on that next time’,
and we don’t have to deal with any kind of defensiveness?”
The leader is concerned with building emotional bank deposits in people,
speaking in such a way that it builds high value relationships;
because when you do that, those people start to come to you,
“Do you have anything working on? Is there anything I can help you with?”
But when those emotional bank deposits get low, they leave, you have chase them.
“Would you help with this? Could you fit that in please?”
and it feels like pushing a ball up the hill.
I don’t know what’s going on in your lives,
whether it’s that book you try to find time to write,
the project in the community that you want to get launched;
but if you look down at your to-do list
and find more things on there than you have time to get done,
I’d like to tell you about the first rule of hole digging: “Put down the shovel.”
So, what I want you to do tonight when you go home,
is to ask yourself two questions:
“Did I plan today, even if it was five minutes?”
and “Did I build relationships?”
Your power will be found in planning and people,
and if you’ll do those two things, you’ll soon find your road to success,
feeling like you’re out for a Sunday drive.
(Applause)
Raise your hand
if you’ve ever gotten to the end of the year and told yourself,
“Now what I need to do next year is to just try harder.”
Yeah? And then maybe next year rolls around and you say,
“No, no, no. I don’t count. Do over!
That’s right, I’m really going to apply myself this year.”
Then three years go by and you think,
“Wait a minute! I’ve been telling myself I just need to try harder every year,
and it’s like the harder I try, the more things stay the same.
What’s going on?”
Now, I don’t know if you’ve experienced that,
but if you think back to your to-do list, thing you were working at yesterday,
I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever looked down at your to-do list,
and there was more things on there than you had time to get done.
And like the worst part of it is it was all in your handwriting.
(Laughter)
And it’s frustrating.
There’s not physically enough time to get it all done,
and maybe you’ve tried working harder and faster,
and it seems like the faster you go, the farthest behind you get.
What do you do now? You’ve done all that you know to do!
(Sighing)
Today, we’re going to look at why trying harder won’t get you there.
I want to show you how checking things off your to-do list
is a dangerous distraction.
I want to show you what highly effective people are doing differently,
and we’ll look at how you can actually employ that in your life, today.
Since we’re going to talk about this for the next few minutes,
would it be okay if I share a little bit about myself?
My name is Jarrod Haning and I’m a classical musician by trade,
currently the principal violinist with the South Carolina Philharmonic;
and that has prepared me very well for my work as a performance coach,
where I train leaders in the thinking patterns of success.
Some people don’t know this, but when you’re engaged in making music –
whether it’s clapping your hands along to the beat,
or singing along to the radio as you’re driving down your car –
in that moment that you’re creating music,
you’re using more of your brain than any other time of your life.
This is well documented with MRI studies.
Now, this is why that matters.
I want you to think about that thing in your life
that you feel like you keep running up against,
the: “I don’t have enough time,”
“I keep running up against not having enough money,” and it’s gets frustrating.
There’re two truths I want you to notice about that.
Number one, you’re currently doing all that you know to do.
Really! You know how to pat yourself on the back, you’re not a slacker.
You’re doing all you know to do, you really are.
Number two: everything you’re doing makes sense.
Well, of course it makes sense.
If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be doing it, right?
What that means is a breakthrough in your situation
will, at first, not make sense.
If it made sense you’d have been doing it.
This is what Einstein was referring to when he said,
“You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.”
As a matter of fact, Einstein himself was a musician,
and credited his involvement with music for some of his bigger discoveries.
This hits at the importance of being able to access different parts of your brain
and learn how to think from different perspectives,
because that’s where your next breakthrough will come from.
You might have heard people say,
“What you need to do is leverage your strengths
and delegate your weaknesses.”
I’ve heard that too.
Or maybe they’ve said, “What you need to do is build up those weaknesses.”
I’ve heard that too.
In my work as a performance coach, what I found is that more often than not,
it’s: “Avoid your blind spots.”
Blind spots in our thinking are like blind spots in our car.
The only reason you’d ever hit something was because it was in your blind spot.
There was something about it your brain hadn’t seen yet,
and if you can’t see it, you can’t avoid it.
So, I ask that you let yourself off the hook.
If you keep running up against not having enough time or enough money,
there is a good chance
that there’s something about that situation your brain hasn’t seen yet.
So, I want to show you what thinking patterns look like on paper.
By printing up a graph of somebody’s thinking pattern,
we’re able to pinpoint right away
where the blind spot is that’s been tripping them up.
I’ll show you common patterns, what we can learn from them,
and how to apply that to our life.
So what I’m going to show you
is a visual representation of the work of this guy here,
Robert Hartman and his Nobel nominated value profile he built in the 60s;
and we’re going to look at some visual representation of that.
What we’re looking at here is different size circles.
The larger the circle, the greater is the clarity.
The smaller the circle, the fuzzier the thinking is in that area;
it’s difficult for them to understand life from that perspective,
to navigate from that perspective.
This big blue guy here, that would be like eagle eye vision,
just amazing!
But having a strength is different from using it.
I don’t know, maybe you took ten years of piano lessons as a kid,
ten years of dance lessons or karate,
but now that we grow up, we don’t use that strength.
We’ve a skill we’re not using, and that’s where we see the vertical axis.
You see this green guy down low showing that there’s excellent understanding
but a tendency to disregard the importance of it.
We’re measuring this things across three main areas:
how you relate to emotions, to taking action, and to structure.
Let’s say these three people were lost in the woods.
The person with a high value on emotion would say,
“Well, how do you guys feel about this?”
The person with a high value on doing, on action, would say,
“We’re lost, we need to start going this way now,”
And the person with a high value on planning would say,
“Hold on, hold on! Let’s at least be sure who is going in the right direction,
or we could make this worse. So we need to think about this for a little bit,”
which annoys the action person, “No way, no time for that.
We’re burning daylight. Hustle up! let’s go!”
As I flip through some of these, notice that they are very unique.
The way people look at the world and understand,
and value what they understand,
it’s almost like a fingerprint as unique as they are.
Now right here, we’re going to focus on the top part of this graph.
When we talk to somebody and say,
“Are there ever more things on your to-do list than you’ve time to do?”
They say, “Oh yes!
– Okay, have you tried working harder and faster?
– Oh my gosh! I’ve totally tried that.
– And what happened at the end of the day?
– Man! At the end of the day I returned a hundred emails,
had 27 phone calls, three meetings. I even skipped lunch.
– Okay, what did you get done?
– Oh! … What I did was I had 100 emails and 27 phone calls …
– Okay, what did you get done? – Well…”
It’s this feeling that no matter how busy they were,
they didn’t move the ball forward,
and tomorrow they’re just going to have to do it again.
Notice about this thinking pattern: there’s a high priority on action,
get things done right now, hustle up.
When these persons look at their to-do list, they start checking off.
“It will take 30 sec, I’m going to start with that,
then I’ll do this one two min, that’s only 10 min.”
They start checking off those small things because it gives that immediate hit,
that feeling of “I’m getting things done,” but as you know, that’s an illusion.
It’s a distraction,
because no matter how many of those small things you’ve done,
at the end of the day, it doesn’t give you the feeling that you made a difference.
For these persons, as you look over on the left,
they have a tendency to disregard
the importance of how people feel when they are talking to somebody,
because it’s so clear to them what’s going to make a difference.
A voice in the back of their heads goes:
“Look, I understand how you feel, I just don’t care.”
(Laughter)
Right? Because for them moving the ball down the field is all that matter.
On the right side, they have a tendency to devalue the importance of planning.
You say to this person, “What’s been your experience with delegating?”
They say, “God! By the time I teach them how to do it,
I could just have done it myself.
By the time they do it, I’m going to redo it. It’s a waste of time.
– Well. What’s been your experience with planning
in this system that we’ve laid out for you to run on?
– A total waste of time: by the time I fill up this paperwork,
I could actually have gotten something done.”
Drop some nuts, and you can start to think why we call this shape:
“The chevron of stress,”
because it’s like trying to solve a bad strategy with stubborness.
Have you’ve ever found yourself driving to a new location,
and after a while you feel:
“Maybe I’m on the wrong road, I should be there by now”?
You get that feeling “Oh! I could be lost!”
What this person does is drive faster,
but you can’t fix being on the wrong road by going faster.
It just makes the problem worse.
So let’s look at things you can do that will make a difference.
What I’d like you to do is to think of somebody in your own life
that you respect, you admire, you look up to this person.
They are unbelievably successful in so many areas.
They’re successful at work, at home.
They’re successful in their community.
They just got it together and it doesn’t matter
how much money they make or projects they’re invested in,
they still have time for you.
You could interrupt them in the middle of the day, they’ll be at calm, at peace.
They’re not struggling to catch up, not hustling, not sweating.
They have a few minutes to share with you.
… The kind of person that’s been a mentor to you in the past.
As you think of this person and who it’s been in your life,
you notice that it’s like
their hair isn’t messed up when they wake up in the morning.
I mean their kids take out the trash without being asked to it, yeah.
You got it? You got what I’m talking about here.
When we talk to that kind of person,
this is what their thinking pattern looks like.
Notice that they have a tendency to value people and value planning.
Notice that there’s a low emphasis on taking action.
We call this shape: “The leadership V” and here’s why.
It doesn’t mean that action doesn’t matter, nor results.
For the effective leader, what it comes down to is “Who needs to be doing it?”
Because you see, as long as you’re doing the work,
that means that your business is falling behind.
As a matter of fact, the more you personally are doing the work,
the more you personally are going to be doing the work tomorrow.
Because as long as you’re doing the work,
it means systems aren’t built to support you;
it means people aren’t being invested in to come alongside and support you.
When the effective leader goes to work, they’re choosing between building systems
and handing those systems off to people they have invested in.
Notice I said “invested in”, it’s not about delegating.
You delegate something to someone who doesn’t want to do it,
you just created another problem you’ll have to solve.
For the leader, it’s about “What does this person want?”
and “How can I speak to them in such a way to haul out that feeling,
to bring it out to the surface
so they can see how their mission aligns with our vision?”
“How do I speak to them in a way that emotionally they want to say yes?”
“If I need to deliver a correction, how do I say that
in a way that they don’t feel under attack, but feel safe and like,
‘Thanks for telling me that, I’ll get on that next time’,
and we don’t have to deal with any kind of defensiveness?”
The leader is concerned with building emotional bank deposits in people,
speaking in such a way that it builds high value relationships;
because when you do that, those people start to come to you,
“Do you have anything working on? Is there anything I can help you with?”
But when those emotional bank deposits get low, they leave, you have chase them.
“Would you help with this? Could you fit that in please?”
and it feels like pushing a ball up the hill.
I don’t know what’s going on in your lives,
whether it’s that book you try to find time to write,
the project in the community that you want to get launched;
but if you look down at your to-do list
and find more things on there than you have time to get done,
I’d like to tell you about the first rule of hole digging: “Put down the shovel.”
So, what I want you to do tonight when you go home,
is to ask yourself two questions:
“Did I plan today, even if it was five minutes?”
and “Did I build relationships?”
Your power will be found in planning and people,
and if you’ll do those two things, you’ll soon find your road to success,
feeling like you’re out for a Sunday drive.
(Applause)
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