Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (31 page)

“It’s not how far you fall but how high you bounce that counts!”

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THE TRIGGER OF NEGATIVITY

Most negative emotions are triggered by
frustrated expectations
. You wish, hope, or plan for something to happen in a certain way, and when it doesn’t, you react with impatience and anger. This is quite normal. If you care about a result, you are going to be hurt if you don’t achieve it.

The challenge is that emotions are triggered instantaneously.

For this reason, you can have very little control over your emotions and reactions at the moment that something happens to you. It is too late. When the disappointment occurs, you will react instinc-tively and habitually, depending on your previous experiences.

When things go wrong, it is too late for you to think of fine and noble thoughts.You simply react.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, once wrote, “Circumstances do not make the man; they only reveal him to himself,” and to others, for that matter. It is not the adverse situation that builds your character so much as it
reveals
your character as it exists at that moment.

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PREPARE IN ADVANCE

One of the best ways to change your thinking, and your life, is to prepare for disappointment in advance. Set yourself up to bounce back quickly by practicing mental prepreparation.

Mental prepreparation enables you to prepare internally for the inevitable disappointments of life and work, even though you do not know what they are or when they will come. This is one of the most powerful of all thinking techniques that you can use to gain and keep control of your emotions, assuring that they are primarily positive and constructive, no matter what happens.

In mental prepreparation, you begin with the premise that you are going to face all kinds of problems and difficulties when you decide to accomplish anything worthwhile in life. In fact, if you set a big, challenging goal for yourself, one that forces you out of your ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 204

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comfort zone, you are going to meet with countless obstacles and difficulties that you cannot now imagine.

This trial by endurance seems to go with the territory. Every time you try to be or do something more or different, problems of all kinds will arise in your path. If you are not prepared in advance, they can discourage you and drive you back into your comfort zone.

Instead of waiting for the inevitable problems to occur, you mentally prepare for these inevitable difficulties before they happen.

You say to yourself:
“Today I will face all kinds of ups and downs, difficulties and setbacks, but I will not let them get me down. Once I start toward my goal, I will be unstoppable!”

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PRACTICE CRISIS ANTICIPATION

In business consulting, we teach a way of thinking called “crisis anticipation.” I encourage decision makers to look six months to a year into the future and ask the question, “What are some of the negative things that could happen that would derail our plans? Of all of them, what are the very worst things that could happen?” We then make a list of all the different setbacks or unexpected emergencies that could occur that would threaten the enterprise.

For example: A competitor could come out with a new product or service that was better and/or cheaper than ours. Interest rates could go up. Government could place new taxes and regulations on our activities. Costs of fuel or raw materials could increase. A key person or persons within the organization could depart for some reason. A key customer or customers could leave and go to a competitor. Competitors could cut their prices below costs in order to take business away. The economy could tip into recession and the overall market could shrink dramatically.

In each of these cases, the ability of the company to respond quickly and effectively could determine its very survival. These possible reversals and setbacks should be thought through in advance.

The best rule is “no surprises!”

Royal Dutch/Shell of the Netherlands has one of the most complete forward planning processes of any company in the world.

It has developed over 600 scenarios to deal with problems that might occur around the world in areas where it has oill and gas op-ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 205

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erations. As a result, the company is seldom surprised by anything that happens. It is never caught off guard. It always has a backup plan ready to go. It has also become one of the most continuously profitable and successful companies in the world. Thinking ahead really pays off.

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LOOK INTO THE FUTURE

What works for large and small corporations can work for you as well. You should practice crisis anticipation regularly in everything you do. Look down the road of your life, like a traveler, and imagine some of the negative things that might happen and how you could respond to them. You will be amazed at how much more positive and confident you will feel when you have already developed alternative courses of action to some of the worst things that could happen in a particular area.

For example, what would you do if you lost your job today? The idea of losing one’s job is a major fear for most people, affecting 37

percent of the working population according to one study. I received a letter recently from a gentleman who told me that his fear of losing his job, which he recognized was completely irrational, was so great that it was paralyzing him. It was actually holding him back from doing the kind of work that he had to do in order to
keep
his job. His fear and his lack of alternatives were actually increasing the likelihood that he would be laid off.

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YOUR NEW JOB

Sometimes I ask people in my audiences,
“What is your next job going to be?”
For most people this question comes as a surprise. They have not even thought about what their next job is going to be. But we know that the world of work is changing at a rapid rate. The fact is that you have already changed jobs several times. It is virtually inevitable that you will change jobs again, and perhaps sooner than you expect. What is your next job likely to be?

When I explain that each person must be preparing for his or her next job, it is a new idea for most people. They either have not thought about it or don’t want to think about it. But the only ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 206

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question is this: “What level of knowledge, skills, and ability will you require at your next job in order to continue to earn the kind of money that you want to earn in the future?” If you don’t think about this question in advance, you may be forced to think about it when your time has run out and the question is forced upon you.

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YOUR NEW CAREER

After audience members have thought about what their next job is going to be, I then ask the second question,
“What is your next career
going to be?”
What entirely new field, industry, business, or line of work are you going to be in 5 to 10 years from now?

According to employment experts, a person starting work today will have an average of 14 or 15 full-time jobs, each lasting two years or more, over the course of a working lifetime. He or she will also have as many as five different careers, in completely different fields, each of which will require new kinds of knowledge and different skills.

Much of what you know about your current work will be obsolete within five years. Because of rapid changes taking place in every area, your existing store of knowledge, information, ideas, and skills will be of little value. These will have no relevance or application to the job market and the economy of the future. You will need new knowledge and skills if you want to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive society.

This is why Peter Drucker said, “The only skill that will not become obsolete in the years ahead is the ability to learn new skills.”

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CONTINUALLY THINK AHEAD

You probably recall the famous comment by hockey star Wayne Gretzky. When he was asked by a reporter for the secret of his success on the ice, he replied by saying,
“Most players are pretty good, but
they go to where the puck is. I go to where the puck is going to be.”
This observation is directly relevant to you. Where is
your
puck going to be three to five years from now? Where is your puck going to be 10 years from now? Taking a long-term perspective on your ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 207

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work life enables you to make better decisions in the short term. As strategic planner Michael Kami says,
“Those who do not think about
the future cannot have one.”

Look into your future and begin to imagine and anticipate some of the twists and turns that might occur. If you lost your job today, how would you react? What would be your first thought? The great majority of people, when they think about losing their jobs, go into a form of panic. They have no idea what they would do.

However, in my work with many thousands of
successful
people, I have found that they have one particular attitude in common.

They all know with complete assurance that if they lost their jobs they could walk across the street and get another job tomorrow.

They are so good at what they do, and so confident in their abilities, that job loss to them would be merely an inconvenience. They have lots of options.

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, there is a way to determine how good you are in your field. What is the number of job offers you get on a regular basis? Just as a store or restaurant can measure its success by the number of customers or patrons it attracts, you can measure how valued and respected you are for what you do by counting the number of people who want to hire you and use your services. How are you doing?

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EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Sometimes I ask audiences what they would do if their entire industry disappeared overnight. They shake their heads and they say that can’t possibly happen. Then I point out that the defense industry in California literally collapsed in the early 1990s and over 400,000

highly competent defense engineers and executives, with many years of education and experience, were rendered obsolete. Their jobs were not only gone; they were gone forever. Each of these thousands of competent, capable men and women were forced into the position of going out into the marketplace, developing new skills, and going to work in entirely new fields.

The collapse of the dot-com mania wiped out more than 90

percent of the Internet jobs and companies that had sprung up across the country. The collapse in the telecom sector led to layoffs ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 208

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of many thousands of workers. The decline in recent years of the frantic investment activity that had been seen during the 1990s triggered the layoffs and firings of tens of thousands of people in the financial services industries. It goes on and on, and will continue.

Only the names of the industries will change. This rapid shift in jobs and industries is going to happen more and more often to more and more people.

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YOUR FINANCIAL LIFE

The world of finance and investments is constantly changing. The markets are increasingly volatile. The old philosophy of “buy and hold” is no longer relevant to the world of today, and tomorrow. If you have money invested, you should be thinking continually about what might happen if your investments went bad and you lost all your money. You should always be preparing against the worst possible outcome of a particular investment.

There is a direct relationship between how much time you invest in thinking about and planning your financial life and how likely you are to become financially independent. According to Dr.

Thomas Stanley’s interviews with thousands of self-made millionaires, they share a common characteristic: they spend far more time thinking about financial matters than the average person.

The average adult, even though he or she worries about money much of the time, spends only two to three hours per month actually thinking about his or her finances, usually at bill-paying time.

The average
affluent
American, in contrast, spends 20 to 30 hours per month thinking about his or her money. As a result, they make far better spending decisions and more intelligent investments than the majority. They become increasingly skilled in money matters, and eventually pull ahead of their peers.

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THE STRATEGY OF NAPOLEON

The French general Napoleon dominated the continent of Europe for almost 20 years. He led his armies to victory in dozens of battles, and lost only three battles in his entire career. He lost almost 600,000 men when he invaded Russia, failing to anticipate the ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 209

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cold of the Russian winter. Greatly weakened from the Russian campaign, he subsequently lost the battle of Leipzig, which led to his being exiled to the island of Elba. And finally, he lost at the battle of Waterloo due to a series of miscommunications with his field generals.

It is often forgotten that he won many other battles, small and large, and is considered to be one of the three greatest military geniuses of history. (Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were the other two.) Napoleon had developed a quality that helped him to achieve victory, which you also can develop. It is called
extrapolatory
thinking.
This is the ability to think and plan several moves ahead in whatever you are doing. This way of thinking involves your considering every possible event that could occur, and then making provisions for them, well in advance.