The Importance of Perseverance in Famous People
No less a person than Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 winner of the Nobel Peace Price, recognized this trait in herself when she said, “I do have a stubborn streak in me.” In her case, she lived a good share of her life under house arrest pursuing the goal of reducing the power of the military in political affairs in Burma. She finally was able to travel to Europe to present her acceptance speech 11 years after receiving the award.
You Tube Video: Intro to the Speech and the full speech to the Noble Committee (June of 2012)
While all leaders must have a bit of stubborn in them, transformational leaders have to possess an especially strong dose; since it’s hard, damn hard to change other people. It’s also hard, doubly darn hard to change yourself. Despite the important of this trait, it remains a mystery to many. All the greats know this, but it seems each generation must learn it anew.
Case Study in Perseverance: Colonel Sanders and Starting KFC
The Charismatic Leadership Style
Eric Hennengsen: En agitator
“Throw away those books and cassettes on inspirational leadership. Send those consultants packing. Know your job, set a good example for the people under you and put results over politics. That’s all the charisma you’ll really need to succeed.” — Dyan Machan.
Do You Need Charisma?
Transformational leaders need a bit of charisma. Butif you are in a large bureaucratic organization, you can use your authority, and the power associated with the position. Indeed, most people we find in organizations lack charisma. They are bland personalities, the person you never remember, who has nothing of interest to focus on. They are the people we forget since they can never get anyone excited about what they are doing.
So do you need the charismatic leadership style? The answer is no. One can be a small cog in the great machine. However, it you want to be a leader, if you want to have followers, if you want to do anything great, you better have it.
This isa special leadership style commonly often associated with transformational leadership. While charisma is extremely powerful,it is difficult to learn and there are a number of different charismatic definitions.
“Charisma is a sparkle in people that money can’t buy. It’s an invisible energy with visible effects.” — Marianne Williamson
“We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning “of the spirit” or “inspired.” It’s about a sparkle in people that money can’t buy. It’s an invisible energy with visible effects.” — Marianne Williamson
Crawl: “You have got charisma! Becca!: Hats that? It’s a special quality of leadership that captures the popular imagination and inspires allegiance and devotion.” — Movie: Son in Law (1993)
“Charisma is a fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention.” — Robert Brault
Alex Law: “I mean, my first impression, and they’re rarely wrong, is that you have none of the qualities that we normally seek in a prospective flatmate. ‘I talking here about things like presence, charisma, style and charm, and I don’t think were asking too much, I don’t think were being unreasonable.” — Shallow Grave, Movie (1994)
One can also exhibit this leadership style if you keep in mind the following six charactersitics of charisma.
“Charm is charisma in the lady.” — M. Johannsen.
References:
Charisma and Vision: An Empirical Study
“Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” — July 1965, Horace Greely concerning America’s expansion to the West.
Self-Mastery: Get Control of Worry
There are a number of time wasters in our lives. Sometimes our boss wastes our time, sometimes screen addiction. But all too often, we waste time thinking about the wrong things. Not only that, but we add to stress loading by worrying about it.
Worry has a positive function (to a degree). After all, if you never thought about dying, one wouldn’t buy life insurance. If you can’t imagine yourself in a car accident, you’re not going to wear your seat belt. On the other hand, getting control is another issue entirely.
Conceptually, this is a simple four-step process:
- Decide what should change
- Determine if you have control
- If control, take action.
- If not control, practice patience.
For example, if you are worried about rabbits eating the carrots in your garden, you have two options: stop worrying about it or build a fence. Seems simple. But this is not the easiest thing to do since one must get control your self-talk.
Image by Thomas Bresson
This article starts the process: a list of ten worry items that people spend too much time thinking about. So go through the list, find one (just one) stressor that you are devoting too much thought to.
Ask, “Is this a legitimate problem?
Follow up with, “Do I have control?”
Finally, ask, “What can I do today to decrease my worry?”
Sounds simple. It is, but it is not. Logically it is, but who said the mind is always logical?
Regards,
Creativity Lost?
This article acts as more of a check list, one that you can use to see what you might (heaven forbid), to killing the ideas of those around you. I’m sure in the list, you can find at least one. Or you may want to learn group facilitation techniques as a means of getting control and so you know how to better Act the Part.
A Parable on Change
By Aesop
An Ant nimbly running about in the sunshine in search of food came across a Chrysalis that was very near its time of change. The Chrysalis moved its tail, and thus attracted the attention of the Ant, who then saw for the first time that it was alive. “Poor, pitiable animal!” cried the Ant disdainfully. “What a sad fate is yours! While I can run hither and thither, at my pleasure, and, if I wish, ascend the tallest tree, you lie imprisoned here in your shell, with power only to move a joint or two of your scaly tail.”
The Chrysalis heard all this, but did not try to make any reply. A few days after, when the Ant passed that way again, nothing but the shell remained. Wondering what had become of its contents, he felt himself suddenly shaded and fanned by the gorgeous wings of a beautiful Butterfly. “Behold in me,” said the Butterfly, “your much-pitied friend! Boast now of your powers to run and climb as long as you can get me to listen.” So saying, the Butterfly rose in the air, and, borne along and aloft on the summer breeze, was soon lost to the sight of the Ant forever.
Morale of the Story: If you keep changing, you are able to soar to new heights.
Image by: jkadavoor
A Simple Way of Motivating Behavior Change
by Murray Johannsen
Typically, the business of business is focused on the management of money, and managers are not expected to pay that much attention to changing behavior. We see the money motivated tending to forget about the simple rules of human motivation. And a deep understanding of motivation is a central element necessary for effective leadership. You might say that motivation fills the mind with energy, the same way gasoline powers a car. No gas, no go—no motivation, no behavior.
In the article called “Leveraging The Power of Thank You,” Susan Meisinger presents a number of examples where executives missed opportunities to use a heart-felt thank you to positively reinforce the behavior that they want. It’s as if they were blind to the fact that all of us like to hear a kind word on occasion.
I remember a personal example of this. A medical director at a large medical group, once told me that he had a boss he never saw and rarely heard from. However, this person would call whenever this medical director screwed-up—and he very rarely made mistakes. So he rarely ever heard from him. I remember him telling me, “You know, the money hardly seems worth it when you never hear a kind word.”
This suggests executives don’t understand or don’t know how to use the power of positive reinforcement. In psychology, we call this consequence positive reinforcement. Remember this very simple heuristic, it works almost all the time (nothing every works 100 percent with humans, that why in the know people use the term heuristics instead of algorithms.)
It goes, if you want to increase the likelihood or frequency of seeing a desired behavior occur again, then you must positively reinforcement it. This is one of the five major consequences you can use to change behavior.
Learn How: Find Out How To Motivate
Perseverance and Weight Loss
Perseverance and mental toughness are also important in weight loss. It’s not easy to exercise and harder still to lose weight with exercise due to both physiological and psychological factors.
It long been known that there are many benefits to exercise-patrons of the easy chair take note. Yet, the association between exercise and weight loss is elusive, like trying to catch the perfect snowflake. New research suggests that getting those six-pack abs and buns of steel, or even just a few inches off the waste line is going to be very, very difficult.
This article documents three causes.
Cause 1: The first is that humans don’t have a great deal of brown fat. That may not sound like a tragic problem; but rats have a great deal of it and you don’t see many fat rats, although you can’t say the same thing about fat cats.
Cause 2: Plus exercise can cause one to feel more hungry afterward. In fact after exercise, many have to chow down that muffin. So, paradoxically, intense exercise can make you more hungry and allow us to rationalize the extra food sense, “I just got done doing an hellacious workout.”
Cause 3: Finally, in a perverse sort of way, resisting hunger can cause you to have less will-power and motivation to perservere. If you work out, one likely will have less self-control. And since most do not view mental toughness as a vital ingredient to weight loss, they seriously underestimate the motivation energy needed long-term to prevail.
This research suggests that both weight loss and exercise are good candidates to practice developing mental toughness and perseverance.
For More Information: How to Development Mental Toughness
Increased Materialism Creates Relationship Problems
Image by: Darkone
The fundamental assumption underlying many commercials is that owning things makes you psychologically better off. But does it? Actually, materialism tends to introduce more problems in relationships according to an article in the LA Times.
According to the study authors, “Using 1,734 married couples, we developed a typology of couple materialism to investigate how congruent and incongruent patterns of materialism between spouses influence marital outcomes. We found that materialism had a negative association with marital quality, even when spouses were unified in their materialistic values. Marriages in which both spouses reported low materialism were better off on several features of marital quality when compared to couples where one or both spouses reported high materialism. Previous research has shown that spousal materialism is negatively associated with marital satisfaction. However, researchers have yet to determine if this association is due to value differences between spouses or if materialism is problematic even when partners place a similar priority on money and material goods. ”
So, if you want to create some happiness, don’t go for those into materialism. Of course, this may be difficult to impossible to really do. In every relationship, one or the other has got to have the latest boy toy or the most up-to-date fashion artifact. Of course, a truly materialistic spouse is never, ever satisfied with what they have . The house always has to be upgraded, or the car has to be a one-up from what the neighbor has.
So the first step in this change process is to understand that the possession of material objects is rarely related to happiness. And while we may get some satisfaction with it, this often declines with time until we can’t find a space to hide it in closets and garages.
Change Behavior, Find Love?
Image by: Aomorikum
Changing The Motivation For Eating
Change doesn’t have to be within someone else. In fact, great transformational leaders make more changes in themselves than others. And to make a any change permanent one has to examine motivation. Unfortunately, motivational factors are subtle, typically unconscious.
It’s long been thought the primary motivation for eating is hunger. However, whenever I mention that I commonly eat one meal a day in the afternoon that I get hungry, gets many weirded out. It seems most individuals have a time-based clock that says you must eat early in the AM, at noon, and early in the evening. So for these people the primary motivational element for eating is not hunger, but time.
Image by Mark Ordonez
And it turns out the amount one eats can be manipulated as well. We tend to eat until the plate is empty, no matter how much is on the plate. In fact, to find out how one can change what one eats, it best to understand the unit bias
It seems like a simple change, put less on the plate. And take home half of what is served when at a restaurant. Try it, you might like it.
