An 8-Point Gut Check for Grit

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Bill Zipp

The first month of 2012 is over, and the goals you’ve set for the year have now met the hard road of reality. How’s that going?

It’s a common misconception that the trajectory of goal fulfillment travels in a straight line. People are actually surprised when the cause they believe in so deeply and the targets they thought through so keenly meet repeated frustration and delay. But that’s not the way goals work.

Here’s the truth about goal fulfillment: it doesn’t really happen on the mountaintop, but in the valley. It doesn’t take place in the light, but in the darkness. It’s forged in adversity. To fulfill any worthwhile, meaningful goal one must possess a drive and determination to overcome obstacles in the way.

In short, you must have grit.

Not the grit of a gunslinger that the young Mattie Ross found in an aging “Rooster” Cogburn in the recent Coen brothers’ re-make, True Grit. But the grit that researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth defines as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” According to her research, this kind of grit outperforms both talent and intelligence in activities as diverse as graduating from military school and competing in the National Spelling Bee.

So here’s a series of questions for you, an eight-point gut-check for grit. Honesty answer each:

1. Do you seek out greater and greater challenges, always pressing the edges of the envelope?

2. Do you welcome adversity as a way to make you stronger? Do you “embrace the beast” as ultra-marathoner Lisa Smith-Batchen would put it?

3. Do you declare your goals to family and friends, colleagues and coworkers, creating public accountability for your actions?

4. Do you maintain internal emotional equilibrium in spite of the external circumstances of your life?

5. Do you look within for the solutions to pressing problems, refusing to blame those problems on others?

6. Do you keep yourself from always starting new things, changing goals before you’ve had a chance to see them through?

7. Do you remind yourself of the meaningful cause, the deeper purpose that fuels the passion for each goal you’re pursuing?

8. Do you celebrate, and celebrate well, when a challenging goal has been fulfilled?

Every question in this list is important, and every question should have an affirmative answer. Work on the no’s until they become yeses. It’s then that grit, true grit, will take root in your soul and the goals you’ve set for this year will actually get done.

How Do You Measure a Year?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Bill Zipp

525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year? That’s the question the Tony award-winning musical RENT asks in the opening scene of the second act. And that’s the question we ask ourselves as well at the beginning of every year. Twelve months, 52 weeks, 365 days, and 525,600 minutes. How do we make them matter most?

We make them matter most by doing this: Instead of asking ourselves what kind of year we want, we first ask ourselves what kind of life we want. Our days must be an extension of our drive to achieve what matters most.

The problem we have as human beings is that we assume because we are so busy that we are getting things done. That would be like assuming that if we are driving a car at 100 miles per hour that we are headed in the right direction. Not a very safe assumption. Never confuse activity with accomplishment.

“The consequence of living our lives at warp speed,” write John Loehr and Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement, “is that we rarely take time to reflect on what we value most deeply or to keep these priorities front and center. Most of us spend more time reacting to immediate crises and responding to the expectations of others than we do making considered choices guided by a clear sense of what matters most.”

Take the time to complete this exercise before the week is up. Write a one sentence answer to each of the following questions:

1. What kind of person do you want to be?

2. What kind of relationships do you want to have?

3. What kind of work do you want to do?

4. How are you giving back?

This is how you can measure this year differently.

You Are Your First Priority

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Bill Zipp

Yes, I know it sounds selfish, but it’s true. You are your first priority. And that’s where a lot of business leaders have got it wrong. Everything else, from minute-by-minute text interruptions to late night spreadsheet updates, gets their attention instead of taking care of themselves.

But let me ask you, why do airlines tell passengers traveling with children to put their oxygen mask on first in the event of an emergency? Because they want parents in a crisis to be supremely selfish? No. They do it because if a parent gets the oxygen they need to breathe, they’ll be able to ensure the same for the child traveling with them. In this way, their oxygen is top priority.

And so is your oxygen. If you don’t attend to the very important task of being healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, you’ll have nothing to give to those who are traveling with you: from colleagues to coworkers, family to friends.

This is not to say, of course, that you are your only priority. That would be like putting an oxygen mask on yourself and not the child traveling with you. Not only is that selfish, it’s criminal. Our own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, then, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. The end being to care for the other priorities of our life, both personally and professionally.

So let me ask you these questions:

Are you taking care of your body, eating right, exercising regularly, and sleeping well?
Are you taking care of you mind, learning new things, keeping it sharp and alert?
Are you maintaining emotional equilibrium, leaving enough margin in your days to rest and relax?
Are you attending to the deeper things in life, honestly seeking God in faith?

If you’re lax in any of these areas, not only will you pay a personal price, those traveling with you will pay a price as well, because, ultimately, you’ll have nothing to give them. You can’t pump water from an empty well. And if your well is empty, or nearly empty, it’s time to take care of a top priority: yourself. “Watch over your heart with all diligence,” the ancient proverb advises, “for from it flow the springs of life.”

Memo to Marketing and Sales: Get Married and Get Along

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Bill Zipp

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.6MB)

This podcast is 2 minutes, 36 seconds long.

To Thine Own Tribe Be True

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Bill Zipp

I’m part of few tribes. As an independent consultant, I’m part of a tribe of solo practitioners, “free agent nation” as we have been called, intently pursuing the American dream. As a father with all three of his children now in college or just out of college, I’m a new member of the empty-nester’s tribe. And as a man in my 50′s, having watched the demon of dementia ravage my father, I’m part of a growing tribe of middle-aged men seeking to get in the best physical shape of their lives.

So I’m on the alert. Anyone who can give me useful information on how to successfully build my consulting practice, to turn my house into the home of my dreams without having to move, and to get in shape without mortally wounding myself has my attention. My undivided attention.

Why?

Because they’re addressing the pressing needs of the tribes I belong to. They’re talking to me about the things I care about most deeply right now. And the more they do that well, the more I’ll follow them, trust them, spend money with them, and recommend my friends do the same.

This is the key to marketing today in the fragmented media world in which we live: narrowcasting versus broadcasting. Before there were hundreds of television stations, before there was satellite and internet radio, and before newspapers were killed by the web and the Yellow Pages by Google, all a person had to do to get new business was place an ad. The bigger the ad or the longer the run (or both), the more business you got. Those days are long gone. Gone, too, are the days of building a web site or starting a blog and having customers flock to you. Welcome to the post-web world.

To market effectively today you must first find your focus. You must know exactly who want to reach, you must know what tribe they belong to. Then you must know exactly what’s going on in that tribe. You must be able to answer this question with absolute clarity, “What does your tribe care about most deeply?” And finally, you must repeatedly address the things your tribe cares about most deeply, building a relationship where they begin to know, then like, then trust you.

To thine own tribe be true means this: consistently talk to your community in a way that meets their pressing needs, and your community will follow you anywhere. And that includes buying your products and services and recommending others do the same.