One bright high school summer day while driving early to work at Santa’s Village (oh yes I have been blessed) I saw a clown standing in the parking lot of some retail establishment waving to the early commuters. He was a real clown of the circus variety with big orange hair, big red nose with big red shoes to match waving with big animated motions. I was impressed. Here was a real clown on his day off picking up a second job promoting the opening of some window shop; got to like a guy who loves his work.

Fulfilling life’s calling, doing what you need to do to make ends meet, second jobs all could have been enough life-learning for one day but what came next meant more. I should disclose that I love clowns. They make me smile; even the tragic ones. I was never traumatized by them as an infant having no older brothers or drunken uncles to taunt me. I know that I am one of the lucky ones.

It’s early on a beautiful summer morning windows down radio up flying to work and I see a clown on my horizon. Life is good. I am approaching the clown and in the groove. This being the mid seventies I do what so many of us did at all things cool – flash the peace sign. Two fingers in a V recognition that all is well with the present; a happy high school kid sharing a moment of work related bliss with this puritan work ethic clown who I had come to admire deeply in those few brief seconds.

As I flew by I felt connected; the waving clown and the peace-out kid. I passed him in a flash and seeking confirmation of my spontaneous humanity I checked the review mirror. What I saw freaked me out. Standing in the middle of the highway was my clown jumping wildly up and down throwing me the finger; actually two of them. I mean this clown was jumping up and down waving his arms from side to side back and forth in highly exaggerated ways – even for a clown. He was mouthing something too. Couldn’t hear but I could guess. I just stared at my rear view mirror as the jumping finger thrusting clown zoomed out to a little dot on the historical horizon.

My instant reaction was confusion mixed with a heavy dose of horrified. And then it dawned on me. As I was barreling down the highway approaching my clown to the left I flashed the peace sign with my left hand. What he saw was the back of my hand with two fingers raised from an angle that apparently let my middle digit extend a bit beyond the fore letting him know he should go do something unnatural with a balloon poodle; which of course was the farthest thing from my mind. But that’s the point.

I had my intention and no time to think about how it would be received if my intention delivery was flawed. Had I used my right hand it would be a wonderful clown day my hand showing flat against the widow with no angle issues impacting perceived meaning; perhaps.

I think about this a lot. Not a lot a lot but more than many other experiences. I wonder how the rest of his day went and whether it carried over to others. Did he stop waving or with less enthusiasm. Did it take a little piece of him away? Or did he have issues which triggered. I mean jesus I would feel terrible if this was the thing that threw his life over the edge. Maybe he wasn’t the happy clown I imagined but rather an unemployed plumber let go for his drinking broke in debt unhappy with his cheating wife and tired of visiting his oldest son in jail. These are the guys that burn down motel rooms with any family members they can round up that day. Or maybe he was just an ass. Andy the Ass Clown.

I learned a great deal in that moment about any number things not the least of which is that if you ever piss off a clown just keep driving. Do NOT look back just keep driving. Past your original destination if needed.

I also learned the unintended impact of actions regardless of their intent. I do think of the residual effect I might impart when trying to communicate, but certainly not enough. Much of dialogue is transactional – I tell you something of little consequence and you reply likewise; it’s the score, the news, the grade, the car. Sometimes it is more and it’s then that we need care. It is a habit hard to break and even more so when there is some disconnect between our own interpretation and theirs.

No, we really can’t plan for it all. But we can more than we do.

Jim

jim@thepeopleacademyinc.com

www.thepeopleacademyinc.com

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Example:

About ten years ago I was working with a guy named Todd. Todd and I got along really well and had many interesting conversations, some deep, some shallow, most I don’t even remember. One conversation we had was about fitness. I wanted to get in better shape, and I was uneducated on how to go about it.

Todd recommended a book, Body for Life, by Bill Phillips. It’s a book for entry level fitness folks. If you know almost nothing, it’s great. If you think you know a thing or two, you may be educated a bit. Some things in it may not be totally accurate, but it can and does give you diet guidelines, workout schedules and inspirational stories.

I read it and entered the “Body for Life Challenge” 1999. So did Deb. We made progress on our physical and mental selves and met an entire new online community, the Yahoo Body for Life group. That group got us involved in Wishlifts, which are weight lifting events to raise money for the Make a Wish Foundation. At one of those lifts we met Bob Doyle (from the movie The Secret - before the movie was even thought of) and we organized an event where he presented his Create Your Own Reality workshop. That was his first experience in that direction. His first workshop.

Then I took Bob’s Six Figure Streams course a year later and we started down the path of having on-line internet careers.

The body for life also got Deb excited about fitness and she got certified as a trainer and eventually got a job at Body Zone, which introduced us to Jim and Toni Reece. Meeting them helped start the Get Inspired! Project.

All this from a brief conversation with a coworker on fitness.

We both have new careers and mindsets and have an expanded new group of friends.

Q What tiny thing have you said that has changed lives?

A: You have no idea, but think about that a bit. When you are in a poor mood or a good mood, that’s contagious. When you make a suggestion, someone may listen and follow through. Words are like knives. They can cut through flesh and change lives.

If you are given a car and unequivocally  told to get in the car and drive a certain distance, and the car runs out of gasoline prior to arrival, are you responsible? Perhaps. Can you be held accountable? Maybe. If you had no gas gage or means of purchasing fuel, did you have control of the situation? No. A simplified example to be sure, but it makes a point. (I hope.)

Unless you can have personal control over a situation, it is impossible to be held totally responsible for a given outcome. If you can’t control the process, then you can’t predict your responsiveness, either. Before someone can truly take ownership of a process they need to know who they need to respond to, what they are responsible for and levels of accountability.

These can be tough things to define, but until you really examine them, you can’t begin to solve barriers that may be holding you back.Ownership, properly defined, can help take your processes, employees and thus your business to the next level.

A performance is the way someone does some action. Generally in a professional sense it means how someone does the actions involved in completing their defined job functions and that little extra that isn’t defined in the traditional sense. That means that both parties have to have a clear notion of what is expected to be achieved.

The phrase “what does good look like” is one way of defining what needs to be achieved. What does a good performance look like? What needs to be accomplished to have “good” results? What have those results looked like in the past? What do they look like now, and what do they look like moving forward?

This may seem pretty basic, but this is a shortfall that many companies have. Business owners and managers have one concept or idea about what good looks like and they know the driving force behind the reasons, but perhaps supervisors and team members don’t. They may have an idea about what is expected in their basic job function, but they may not have a handle on the “why” and the why is a huge part of motivation for the things we do.

Defining “what good looks like” is step one in the process. Having the tools to make it happen is the rest of the story.

It is something that employers really need to look at when they assign tasks to folks. Often a team leader, a supervisor or any employee gets asked to perform certain tasks and they are doomed to failure right from the start because they can’t perform it. This inability to perform a task is because of a lack of “X”

“X” may be the authority to order a tool, be that tool a software package or even something as simple as a screwdriver. Have you ever heard “for the loss of a nail a battle was lost”? There were a lot of steps in between that nail and the potential victory, but what it boiled down to was the efficacy of a blacksmith to order the nail to shoe the horse, etc, etc.

If that smith would have been given the authority to order the nail, things may have gone an entirely different direction. do you have someone in your organization who should have authority over some aspect of a task they’ve been assigned? Or maybe that person is you and you need to have a discussion with someone higher up about your efficacy.

This is just a thumbnail view of one of the six aspects of the PEOPLE model, and hopefully just seeing this small portion gives you something to think about.

But there I was in the third row seat of a van, not really able to see where I was going, with the windows fogged up from the conversation and hot breath of six excited people.

My head is like that ride sometimes. I know I am headed in the right direction but I am not quite in control. That can be alright, and/or it can be really scary. That’s when it’s good to have people to reach out to. But what if you are the one that people are reaching out to, and you don’t know what to say or a direction to take? You can’t tell people what to do, you can only help to guide them through their thought process.

That’s easy enough if you have the right tools. I have found that going through the PEOPLE model framework helps to define that journey. To learn more, go here and sign up for the e-mail series on client exploration. This short series (7 e-mails) contains a lot of information on growing your business and talks about tools you can use.

The odd part of my partial drowning was that I enjoyed it. I spent hours trying to stand on a board in the midst of waves and never succeeded beyond kneeling, but I ‘got it’ from a psychological standpoint. I could feel the ‘one-ness’ with the ocean and I could see that given time (and possibly a couple lessons) I could grow addicted to it.

But what would it gain me? Possibly some Zen-like moments. Definitely a feeling of mastery over something. Quite likely some core exercise for my body and stuff. Alone time, which I like sometimes. I’m not sure what else.

What would it cost? Well, easily a great deal of time and some money. Waves are free, but driving back and forth to them and buying a board, etc. Time I don’t really have abundance of. I have lots of temptations, but all things – new things – have me deciding what I am replacing. If I spend four hours a week on X, Y has to go. What can I eliminate?

You might wonder what this is really about. I’ve heard a lot about the ‘newest thing’ from Google, Google wave, and I’m not sure whether I should ride this one or not. I am weighing the pros and cons and asking everyone I know who uses it; what is the cost/benefit of this.

Life is like that. Best bet, if you want to get the most out of anything, get a tutor/coach/mentor/instructor to teach you. Learn the basics, at least, from an expert, and then go from there.

Now, back to surfing the waves on the ocean, maybe I made a mistake trying to learn on my own. Maybe I made a mistake thinking I don’t need any help (definite) and maybe the waves hitting the Texas shore aren’t the best introduction to the sport.

Such a common point and so valid. It wasn’t my phrasing, but something borrowed from JTA training I received, and it applies to all situations.

I said this to my son while teaching him how to drive. I just said, “you need to pay attention to details.” And he replied that the world population would rise if we did that. I did a double take and said “What?”

He explained that if everyone was more careful we wouldn’t have as many car accidents, plane accidents, etc. And those survivors would still be contributing to the gene pool. You know I wouldn’t have even thought about that.

So there is another example of mid and eyes on task and the result of not doing that. A smaller example is me spilling my coffee this morning. This was the result of compound situations. I promised my youngest daughter that I would phone West Chester University for her. To remind myself I added the paper with their phone number to the mess on my desk. Unfortunately it partially covered my coaster, and the coffee cup landed off kilter there and spilled.

Three benefits. Most of my desk is now cleared of the excess paper. It soaked up some of the spill and is now in the trash. My desk is also clear of dust and stains from the past couple months as it got wiped up. It inspired this writing. (that can go in the plus or minus column, depending if you get anything out of it)

Two downsides: Any notes I had scribbled on those papers are gone. I have more laundry as the coffee “waterfalled” onto my pants.

So what’s the bottom line here?
1. Be more organized
2. Follow my own advise (eyes and mind on task)
3. Listen to my kids (wisdom from the mouths of babes)

Are you in the group classified as ‘helping professionals’ and what does that even mean? Helping professionals is a new term that includes coaches, mentors, peer support specialists, teachers, social workers, ministers and managers. What do all of those have in common? Guidance. The problem that many of these folks face is that some of them really haven’t had any education along that line, or the education was too general.

Given enough time, your experience will eventually teach you how to handle various situations, but most of us just don’t have the time, and can’t afford to make mistakes. The purpose of this particular entry is to get feedback and discussion on what tools and resources you use on a regular basis. Do you have a particular software program or an HR handbook that assists you in the tough times?

One ‘problem’ with that is that most people in these positions don’t have one resource they can rely on and then try to ‘wing it’ and that doesn’t always give the best results.

I’d really like to get some feedback on this to track where I can go with future blog entries. Thanks

Standing on the shoulders of giants basically means that all the efforts that are put into research, new products, motorcycle stunts, whatever, are built upon things that have been done in the past. No one would be doing a double back flip in the Olympic floor event if someone wouldn’t have done a single back flip to start out.

So we all build on the things that are. Cars get faster, stronger, more fuel efficient. It’s all about what direction you want to take things. A scientist may look at the human genome project and decide that manipulating genes could make athletes stronger, while another scientist sees that same line of reasoning helping people with ALS.

If you look at the ‘giants’ in the self-help business, they will be quick to reference their influences, whether they are Mother Theresa or Napoleon Hill, and if you look at their work, you can see where they took the original material and changed it to give it their own flavor and personal slant. That slant may or may not be an improvement. It really depends on your perspective.

What it comes down to is you can take other people’s ideas and experiences and use them to shorten your path to success. If you fall in with the right bunch you can leverage their experience and ideas with a mastermind group and really accelerate the process exponentially. That is one line of reasoning with this and it had proved to be very successful over time.

Henry Ford didn’t come up with the automobile or mass production, but he was the one who united those concepts and the rest, as they say, is history.

Not to belabor the point, but it’s kinda like the pyramids. As a large solid foundation is laid, you can build on that to reach for the sky.

The shoulders of giants can be illustrated in the basis of written language. The start of that was probably symbols to represent numbers; one scratch is one, ten scratches, ten – sort of like the old timey movies where a prisoner is counting the days until his release. Ancient languages emerged which evolved into what we have today.

But what happens when ‘facts’ are established and built on over centuries, when the facts are misconceptions? Eventually the whole structure falls to pieces. When Galileo announced that the sun was the center of the solar system, he ended up spending his life in prison for being a heretic. He was not a favored child of the Inquisition, to say the least. Time exonerated Galileo, as it will someday clear Darwin.
It’s the smallest bits of evidence that built a case. Observations. But observations obviously can be wrong, so as R.E.M. says “standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.”
When so much happens from that practice, why deny the obvious benefits? Because you can end up in a rut.

Modern scientists, engineers and theorists all can fall into this trap very easily. It is the safe route to take and going outside the norm can be cause for imprisonment (like Galileo) or ostracism, like UFOlogists. (I’m not saying that UFO’s or Bigfoot is real, just that even having an interest in them leads to other work being taken less seriously.)

So there we are, possibly in a rut. Are there people who are exploring alternative sciences? Yes. But generally they aren’t going to get the funding that people who are more main stream are going to get. Interestingly enough most of the breakthroughs in modern history have come from smaller labs, independent researchers and even basement hobbyists.

So what is my conclusion here? It’s a mixed bag. In most instances standing on the shoulders of giants is going to make you bigger, badder, more efficient and give you better results quicker. The flip side of that coin is that you aren’t going to have divergent investigation that may be paradigm breaking. Bottom line, if you’re going to stand on those shoulders, make sure they are the right shoulders.

(Um, scratch box equals starting from scratch thinking outside a black box.)