Message of the Day - Don't Waste Your Positive Thoughts

Good Morning,

 

I started listening to the updated version Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s classic ‘The New Psycho-Cybernetics’ (http://www.amazon.com/New-Psycho-Cybernetics-Maxwell-Maltz/dp/0735202850) today. This work was originally published in 1960 and has been the foundation of much of the Self-Help industry since then.

 

One of the concepts which caught my attention out of the gate was when Dr. Maltz talked about how people’s self image changed after having plastic surgery. For example: a person with a defect on their nose or face who has been introverted and shy became more open and extroverted after they had the plastic surgery to correct the defect. The surgery only changes the body; the change in the self image was made by the person themselves.

 

Think about that for a moment.

 

The person with the physical defect did not have to wait for the surgery to change their self image. That was always within their ability.

 

This means that we too can change our self image whenever we want to. We do not have to wait for a surgery or some other life-changing event to change our viewpoint of ourselves. We can do that now.

 

This also brings up a very important point that Dr. Maltz shared. If we have been having problems in some areas of our lives, then we need to change our self image before we can make any lasting changes to our lives. This means reading a book, listening to a tape, or watching a video may give us some ideas and make us feel good about ourselves. These positive thoughts will not, though, have a lasting impact on our lives if we do not change our self image.

 

If we feel we are a loser or have bad luck, then thinking positive thoughts is not going to change the fact we feel we are a loser or have bad luck. The positive thoughts will come, and we will feel good about ourselves, but this will be superfluous as our self image will eventually overpower the positive thoughts. Which is why we often hear folks say “I tried thinking positive, and it did not work. You see, it doesn’t work!’

 

If we do not change our self image, how we see ourselves, then no new technology, information or whatever will have any sort of lasting impact on our lives. In effect, it is just wasting time and teasing ourselves.

 

I encountered this with my book. I was sending messages of the day out for over two years and several folks asked me to write a book. I thought that was well and good, but I felt I could not write the book, that I was not capable of this. So every time I put my mind to work to plan out the book; it would go nowhere fast. I would get ideas and thoughts, but they would not go anywhere, I would just sputter. It was not until I decided that yes, I could write a book, that ideas for the book came together. I had to change my image of myself from being incapable of being an author to being that person.

 

I received a lot of support in the way of emails, phone calls and moral support, and these helped, but it was my changing my belief in myself that allowed the goal to be realized.

 

Do not waste your positive thoughts until you have changed your self image, otherwise you could very well be spinning your wheels and setting yourself up for another fall.

 

Have faith, as you can make this change, I know you can.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - Can't we just agree to be accountable?

Good Morning,

 

My family and I had a chance to visit a great indoor water park this past week. We arrived shortly before 11 AM in the morning and as we pulled into the parking spot, two school busses rolled up to the main entrance. So we all hurried a bit to beat the crowd. As we came to the reception area to purchase our tickets we overheard the busses had 66 children and 15 chaperones.

 

We entered the water park, and it was alive with activity. There was water pretty much everywhere from gigantic slides to huge jungle gyms with water dripping, spraying, and being poured everywhere. We scoped out a table and chairs for our stuff and a place to rest between rides or swims. Next to us sat two tables taken up by parents from the bus trip: some of the chaperones.

 

For a majority part of the day time they spent at the park, some three hours, about seven people stayed at these tables and talked to each other. From that vantage point you could only see about ¼ of the park due to everything going on throughout the park. My point being these chaperones could not chaperone from where they were sitting.

 

As I looked on from time to time, it made me wonder what was the point of having chaperones if they were not going to do anything but hang out and talk amongst themselves. Didn’t these people have an obligation to watch the children they were supposed to be chaperoning?

 

Then I wondered what was the lesson that these parents were giving these kids. The kids were probably told that adults were necessary to chaperone kids. That would seem to mean that they sit in the bus with the kids, and keep them all behaving during the bus ride, and then the adults disappear at the water park and the kids can do whatever they want, leaving the park lifeguards and attendants to ride herd on the kids.

 

So, the adults who were accountable for the kids, being chaperones, were sort of accountable, when they were on the bus and maybe before the water park, but not at the park.

 

This may all be nit-picking at a point I thought to be interesting. Or then again, if children’s beliefs and values come from watching and mimicking people they respect or look up to, then when we agree to do something, we should do our best to do it. So the lesson we give to the children is one that we want them to learn.

 

Accountability is a huge lesson to learn for kids today, but I often see kids who do not show it and worse may not even know what the word means.

 

When we agree to be accountable for something, we need to do more than just agree, we need to live up to our obligations.

 

Young eyes are watching us, and learning from us, lets be sure to give the right lesson.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - Osmosis and ESP

Good Morning,

 

My current read is a break from the seriousness called ‘Soaring Above The Madness: Surviving Office Politics without losing your mind, your job or your lunch’ by Miriam Drennan and Joel Anderson (http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Surviving-Office-Politics-Without/dp/1558539794). The book drips with sarcasm and humor and caused many a good laugh. There is though, some food for thought found within its pages.

 

In the section on communication, the book references being able to communication through Osmosis and ESP as a means to effectively communicate with our coworkers and bosses. While this sounds funny, it is a something that we actually do today. We assume that other people know what we are talking about and what we mean when often times we do not convey our ideas in a manner they understand or worse at all. Sometimes we just think about something and expect others to simply understand what we want.

 

For example, Karen and I had an argument about communication last week. During the conversation I pulled out a notepad and started a to-do list and we agreed upon each item on the list. Mind you, I had said I would use a to-do list many times and had not, so this was my failure. The morning after the list was made Karen left a check written to her on top the pad with no instructions on what to do with it.

 

So here I had a detailed list of what steps I needed to do and how, and then I had this check sitting there with no instructions. I assumed I would deposit it, or should I cash it. Or, do I deposit some of it and cash the rest of it, but into what accounts? The communication through osmosis was not working, and neither was the ESP. My morning headache seemed to be creating static on the ESP line anyway.

 

Later I was informed of the request in detail. Using communications of talking, Karen and I made a list of to-dos with clear instructions, and the following day, I did them, as requested and in the manner agreed upon by both of us.

 

Using the communications of osmosis and ESP, I was lost. I tried to guess what was wanted, but in the end I did nothing until what time that I could clarify using communication of what was wanted and needed.

 

If I had gone ahead with my hunch I would have caused myself double or triple work and probably had another argument.

 

As communication through osmosis does not work that well, it may be best for all of our sanity to use a dose of verbal, non-verbal and inflective communication (what you say, how you say it and your body language) to clarify what we want.

 

How many times do we try to communicate through osmosis or ESP (when we feel that someone should understand what we are saying or feeling or meaning when we have given no indication, verbal or otherwise) and get upset when people just don’t get it. Worse yet, when our friends, family and co-workers do pick up on our communication through osmosis and ESP and we come to expect it. Then when something big comes along, we simply assume it will all work out because we have this osmosis/ESP communication down, and WHAM, it all crumbles apart.

 

In the end it all worked out due to traditional communications.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - Leadership to the Next Level

Good Morning,

 

My current read is “Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership” by Steve Farber (www.greaterthanyourself.com). This is a combination parable and real life look into the concept of GTY, or Greater Than Yourself, where we work to help someone become greater than we are at something. In the process, we end up improving ourselves as an added bonus.

 

This is done by investing our time wisely into helping someone who wants to improve themselves to get better by using all of our knowledge, resources, networks, and ability to help them improve. I love the concept of helping others, and it makes sense to invest time into one person and making that person a project. In the end, the person who was your GTY project can turn to and do the same for someone else, or even to us if they are better at something that you want to improve upon.

 

Imagine a world where we all had a vested interest in people becoming better at all different parts of life, be it leadership, reading, swimming, raising kids, Microsoft Word, or whatever. The love that is involved in helping others and in turn helping us would make it a much better place.

 

Steve Farber points out three steps in the Greater Than Yourself process:

 

1. Expand Yourself – Find ways to increase your knowledge, skills, networks and resources. The more that we have, the more than we can give to others in the way of knowledge, training, networks and resources.

 

2. Give Yourself – Here is where you take someone under your wing and put your all into helping them improve. This is not merely coaching or mentoring. It goes beyond that. It is investing the time to improve others (the suggestion is tithing your time to helping others become greater, like using 10% of your workday allocated to helping others). We are all busy, but we all could set aside an hour or so a week or more to helping one person, and after a while, we will find we can give more (using email, telephone, etc. in addition to other meetings).

 

3. Replicate Yourself – Now our GTY project learns and grows and then finds someone that they can help, and takes on their own GTY project. As John C. Maxwell teaches about the end result of leadership being the creation of leaders who themselves develop other leaders, the GTY goal is the same.

 

I am now looking for the person who I will take under my wing as my first GTY project and at the same time, I will be searching for someone who may be able to take me under their wing. We all can learn and grow, and what better way than having someone who truly cares about us and our success, that loves to see us succeed.

 

I really enjoyed this book and in the end, I could not put it down. Now its time to put the material to work.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - Diagnosis for a Pending Collapse

Good Morning,

 

My current read is “How the Mighty Fall and why some companies Never Give In” by Jim Collins (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0977326411/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=152062265&ref=pd_sl_47fluezm68_e). This book focuses on how great organizations collapse into irrelevance or nothingness, the warning signs and what can be done to address it before it is too late. I have also found these same principles apply to people like Jim Collin’s other books: “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” which he co-authored with Jerry Porras.

 

Jim Collins talks about five steps in the fall of great organizations. I understand that failure can come in many different forms and patters, but it is interesting to see there is a pattern which contains these many different forms of failure. Also, these steps do not include plain old stupidity or ignorance. Organizations who fall often are working very hard for what they feel is the best for their department or organization. That is, they think they are doing something smart. Knowingly doing something stupid seems to be outside the purview of this research (like cooking the books, or trying to game the system).

 

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success. Here organizations are celebrating their successes and planning on building on them without necessarily understanding how they got there. They may think that they have the best management team or the best workers, but in reality, they succeeded through hard dedicated work with discipline and sticking to a plan. If they go forward without using what helped them get there, they could head down this path to stage 2.

 

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More. Organizations start building. Empire builders get caught up in this one often. ‘Hey if one system works, let’s get three, or five’. ‘This location is doing great, let’s open up 100 more’. Expansion is good, but it must be planned and use the same discipline that helped us to get to where we now. Too much too fast is like mounting credit card debt.

 

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril. In the first two stages, the organization is actually doing extremely well, but it is a false or unsustainable growth. That is where stage 3 comes in. It when the warning signs of going forward too far and too fast are purposefully ignored. ‘Everything is going so well, how could there be anything wrong?’ This is when the research into those signs needs to be taken seriously, or we find ourselves in stage 3.

 

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation. This stage is like dynamic death throws or a drowning person grabbing at anything and everything for help. Here an organization is willing to do anything or try anything to help itself out of the rut it is in. The solution is again to plan and take defined and disciplined actions, often replicating what worked in the past.

 

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death. The final stage is when the organization gives up the ghost and either closes its doors, or sells itself to someone else or continues on as a shell of its former self.

 

As mentioned above, not only do I see these stages working in organizations, I see them working in people’s lives. When we succeed at something or achieve a goal that we have wanted for some time, we can easily lose site of how we achieved the goal. We may thing that we are great and just did it. Like someone who plays at Carnegie Hall, to get there they practiced, practiced, practiced. When they finally got to Carnegie Hall they present themselves as a natural or prodigy. As a prodigy they try doing other things simply because they succeeded rather then by practicing a whole lot.

 

What I like most of about this book is that it shows there is hope for organizations and individuals who find themselves deep into Stage 3 and Stage 4.

 

It is like a diagnosis of a pending collapse.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - Book, Cover, Judge....Never!

Good Morning,

 

As many of you are aware, there is this lady from a small village in Scotland who has been wowing the world with her angelic voice on YouTube. She appeared on a British TV show called “Britain’s Got Talent” (modeled after American Idol). Her name is Susan Boyle and if you have not seen the videos of her singing, you need to do so immediately after reading this message. I will provide some links below.

 

When Susan walked on stage, an unemployed frumpy, 47 year old woman, the audience jeered at her. The judges, including Simon Cowell, all made faces to each other. It was all as if to say ‘oh Lord, no, this can’t be good’. The audience and the judges had already decided, this woman was a loser and laughingstock and should get on the next bus back to whatever little village she came from.

 

Simon asked her what her dream was. She said it was to be a professional singer. He then asked why hasn’t worked for her yet, she being 47. She said she never had the chance until now. The audience and judges continued to snicker.

 

Then Susan sang.

 

Her voice filled the auditorium and snickers immediately turned to cheers. Susan was awarded top scores, possibly the highest in the three year history of the show.

 

The first glances at Susan Boyle gave the wrong image, the wrong impression.

 

We have a lot of situations in our lives when we find ourselves judging others before we get to know them. They look frumpy, they have wild hair, their eyes are all ‘wiggy’, they wear weird fashions. They walk with a limp, or whatever. It would behoove us to look past this initial scan to find out more about people. When we get passed those first images, the book cover, so to speak, we find the diamond in the rough.

 

It is a profound lesson in life, that all we initially see may not be as it seems at first glance, that we should give people and situations more time when it is safe to do so. A bus that looks like it is barreling down the road toward you may not be worthy of a second or third glance to be sure prior to stepping out of the way, but with people, it normally is safe.

 

And the videos:

 

Watch This Video First: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

 

At the Semi-Finals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmWCqIVQpEI

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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Message of the Day - When our Foundations Crumble

Good Morning,

 

Happy Memorial Day!

 

Have you ever had a time when something that you knew, with all your heart and mind, to be true turned out to not be true? The finding out the truth can be literally earthshaking in its impact in our lives.

 

My Grandfather, Sam Bass and my Grandmother, Dolly, were planning a trip to Israel. Sam needed to get his passport updated. Being in his late sixties and having not traveled overseas since his tour of duty in World War II, he figured it would be nothing out of the ordinary to get his necessary paperwork and update his passport.

 

That is, until he received the legal copy of his birth certificate. I can only imagine what he thought when he opened the paperwork and read his name, but only the name on the birth certificate was not the name he knew.

 

It said ‘Colwin Bass’.

 

Imagine being in your mid sixties and finding out your real name is not your real name. How would you feel? In addition to the shock, my Grandfather took it in stride and went through the rest of the paperwork to get his passport updates, which had just become a bit more complicated. He and my Grandmother did get to go to Israel.

 

Earlier in my life, I had one of those moments too. In the sixth grade, I had a genealogy project to work on. I had spoken to Grandmother Dolly already and was now talking to my Grandmother Dottie. She told me stories of our family coming from Poland, being from an important family who served the King. I was so excited be able to share some great stories. Then it all came crumbling down as she said those final words. “But, I’m not your real grandmother”.

 

It was one of those rare moments when I had nothing to say (I think I can count them on my fingers).

 

In the end, I found out about my family and I moved on.

 

This past weekend, we adopted a dog (a rescue) named ‘Petey’, and well, it is shaking the foundations of my world. I think this is God’s answer to my need to exercise. Since I don’t seem to do it for myself, I now have to do it for the dog. Today was a nice power-walk, and later today and tomorrow will be more of them.

 

That is the key, when information which you base your life on, your name, who your family is, what you do in life, etc., turn out to the false or not what you expected, after the initial shock, it is time to move on.

 

People can get fixated on what has changed and cannot let go of it. Sadly, some folks hold onto these earthshaking moments for years. It is like being held prisoner to these events and not being able to move on.

 

You can move on. The first step is to step back and take a deep breath, and understand that this too shall pass. You know those famous words. They truly work. Look at the new reality in your life and decide what YOU want to do with it. If it is a huge change, then take some time, if you are able to think and pray on it.

 

Our foundations crumble under us from time to time; it is a fact of life.

 

How we act in face of them, and what we do in spite of them, defines our character and who we are.

 

Time to play with Petey!

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net   

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ß Click here to order: “Learn And Grow Daily!”

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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