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Inspiration

Four Ways to Make Gratitude a Daily Practice

When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises. —PAUL COELHO

When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.Paulo Coelho1

Life truly is a gift, regardless of how great or troublesome life and business may appear. Below are four tips to improve your attitude about gratitude and make it a daily practice.

1. Schedule Time to Give Thanks

Incorporate more gratitude into your daily life. Schedule at least a few minutes to feel grateful. Make it a daily appointment with yourself. When the alarm sounds, think of three things you can be thankful for and write them down in your journal. These moments of gratitude will shift your focus from feeling stressed to feeling uplifted.

Another approach is to start and end the day with this gratitude exercise. Being thankful first thing in the morning is optimal because it starts your day with positive energy and primes you for the rest of your day. Reserving time before bed can help put your mind at ease and be a catalyst for a good night’s rest.

2. Write Thank You Notes

Saying thank you is an excellent way to show your appreciation for all the small things people do for you. But the sentiment can lose power when spoken often. Giving a speech on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetary, less than two weeks before his death, President John F. Kennedy, “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

Express gratitude through writing. At the end of your day, write a note, send an email, or text the words “thank you” to a colleague whom you are grateful for. Writing will allow you to reflect on why you are genuinely thankful. The letter will also serve the recipient as a token of your appreciation.

3. Stay Present

In The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic writes, “We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.” We are all accomplished multi-taskers, always analyzing past decisions and projecting future consequences.

Unfortunately, divided attention makes it hard to feel genuine gratitude. Take time to be present. Appreciate the person you’re with instead of the phone in front of you, the flowers outside the window, and even a hot cup of coffee. Being in the now is not easy, but tools like meditation can help you stay present, allowing you to focus more on gratitude.

4. Celebrate Thanksgiving Every Day

Every day is a holiday, and every meal is a feast. Think of your lunch break as a giving-thanks break. Sit down for lunch with your colleagues and treat it as Thanksgiving. Share what you are grateful for in your personal life. Take turns talking about what you appreciate about each other.
Offer specific examples, such as, “I appreciate all the hard work you’ve done to help me with my report, despite your demanding schedule.”

Not only is sharing a meal great for establishing a thriving corporate culture, but it also will make colleagues feel more connected.

Onward

What you focus on grows. When you focus on the many gifts you already have, you create more of these gifts. Maintain these practices every week, and you will cultivate a grateful attitude year-round.

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February 9, 2022 by

You Can’t Lead From Your Office

Get out of the office and experience the magic.

One of the most frequent questions we get from CEOs is what they can do to build an exceptional company culture. They usually expect the answer to involve costly consulting. But the best advice we can give is a simple technique that improves culture immediately without costing a penny.

Here it is: Get out of the office and experience the magic.

Get up and get out.

Go and talk to your team, connect with your advisors, speak to your people.

Talk to your customers, especially your Brand Lovers—they often know your brand better than the majority of people in the organization do.

It’s easy to get bogged down in everyday responsibilities and accountability, but in the end, it’s the small, simple things that end up mattering the most.

When was the last time you left your office and engaged with those you value the most?

November 30, 2021 by

3 Steps to Level Up Your Leadership

What is required of you to lead by your values?
A question to help you improve your leadership.

Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung often would refer to the two-million-year-old self, even when speaking to a child. Jung understood that inherent in our humanity is the wisdom of the ages.   

Here are three steps you can take to start developing yourself so you can become the leader you want to be.

Step 1: Define Your Leadership

Decide who you want to be as a leader. Remember that at the heart of great leadership are deep values. Here are a few simple questions to help you start your new vision:

  • What are your top three values?
  • What is required of you to lead by your values?
  • How do you inspire others?

After you answer these questions, put pen to paper and do some journaling. Use emotive words to describe your leadership experience and how you will feel once you have become the kind of leader you want to be.

You are the creator of this experience. There’s no one stopping you from developing a vision of whom you want to be, how you want to be perceived, how you want to feel, and how you perform your role.

Step 2: Make Friends with Reality

Telling the truth is the tricky part. This move is second in the process for a reason. If you start with facing reality before you define your vision, you may get discouraged. Telling yourself the truth about where you are today takes courage.

As you look at what you want to create, assess where you are in comparison.

Step 3: Build a Plan to Close the Gap

As a leader, you need to be a good planner. There’s no better way to test and train your planning abilities than to start with yourself. Your plan includes shoring up your weaknesses, developing new skills, and building empowering habits.

What kinds of accountability systems do you need so you can measure your results, course-correct, and celebrate your accomplishments?

Onward

You were chosen to lead because of your character, your initiative, your work ethic, and other excellent qualities.

You don’t have to wait if you have an entrepreneurial mindset to commit to your leadership journey. No matter how much you invest in yourself, that investment is never wasted; it always gives you a return.

Sometimes the best insights can come from setting aside time away from the busyness to reflect on your own. Having a close group of trusted advisors is powerful but it should not be a substitute for introspection and reflection.

October 26, 2021 by

The Hidden Power of Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are some of the oldest stories in existence. In one form or another, these stories have been told time and time again—admittedly to entertain, but also to teach.

The details vary from culture to culture—Europe gave us Hansel and Gretel using their wits to get away from a ravenous witch, whereas Brer Rabbit and his tricky antics originate in the antebellum American South—but the underlying messages remain the same: there is no obstacle that can’t be overcome if we’re smart, steadfast, and not above being strategically committed to objective truths.

Why Fairy Tales Are Important

Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature that reveal, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of humanity. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And, the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms. We use cultural stories to help us understand life experiences. We also use these social stories to guide our actions to better navigate what life throws at us.

Brand Lovers and their Cultural Stories

Another way to refer to fairy tales, and other old, eternal narratives, is as cultural stories. In Brand Modeling, we focus on understanding the cultural stories that influence our Brand Lovers.

Although we seldom articulate our connection to cultural stories, cultural stories connect people to their ideal selves. These are symbolic road maps we use to navigate our way through life; they are strategic touchstones to reference as we move forward from where we are to where we want to be.

Cultural stories provide the framework we see ourselves in—as individuals and in relationship to others. This is where cultural stories guide purchasing behavior.

What are the stories that most influence your Brand Lovers?

February 17, 2021 by

Core Values, Passion, and Happiness

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness, and vision/meaning. —Tony Hsieh

This reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story I heard about a shoe company back in the 1800s that sent a couple of their employees to a distant land for a month to scout the region and determine the market opportunity there. One of the employees came back and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s no opportunity there!” The other employee came back a week later and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s so much opportunity there!”Tony Hsieh1

Like many people in the business world, I was saddened to hear of the passing of Tony Hsieh last week. Not only did I have a lot of respect for Tony, but I was fortunate to call him a friend.

If you ever met Tony, you’d know he was definitely like the second employee in the story he recounted. Tony saw potential everywhere, not just in businesses, but also in people. Whether it was empowering Zappos employees to pursue their passion projects or listening to an artist friend around a campfire in the yard near his airstream, Tony saw possibility where others would just see half-baked ideas. 

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December 1, 2020 by

3 Ways Taking a Break Improves Performance

Again, it is well that you should often leave off work and take a little relaxation, because, when you come back to it you are a better judge; for sitting too close at work may greatly deceive you. Again, it is good to retire to a distance because the work looks smaller and your eye takes in more of it at a glance and sees more easily the discords or disproportion in the limbs and colours of the objects.Leonardo Da Vinci1

When things are busy or stressful, it’s easy to get caught up in the doing and lose perspective. And, when you lose perspective, it’s hard to connect your day-to-day actions with what you desire over the long-term

Here are three ways taking a break can help you achieve long-term success.

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August 11, 2020 by

Take Your People on a Heroic Quest

Inspiring leaders see their companies’ journeys as grand stories.

Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? What is our fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen or Washington crossing the Delaware or the fabulously named Rough Riders?

Mythology expert Joseph Campbell tells us that these adventures are all part of the hero’s journey—a schema laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The heroic quest predates written language and its primary structure can help guide teams through massive changes. This story structure is all but hardwired into the human brain: We tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern release transformative psychological power.

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July 14, 2020 by

What To Do When You’re Worn Out

Fostering a happy workplace Starts with cultivating optimism within yourself.

There are ways to change the tide and bring greater optimism and joy into your organization as well as your personal life.

Fostering a happy workplace starts by cultivating optimism within yourself.

Here are four effective strategies for developing positive personal psychology:

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June 25, 2020 by

How To Stay Motivated By Your Company’s Vision

WHAT YOU DO TODAY DETERMINES THE TYPE OF ORGANIZATION YOU CAN BECOME TOMORROW.

When you visualize daily, you align your thoughts and feelings with your vision. This makes it easier to maintain the motivation you need to continue taking the necessary actions.Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning

Developing a vision creates energy and momentum in a company.

But, that energy usually fades over time. The pressure of the now takes over. The vision becomes something that will happen in the distant future.

The vision loses the power it was designed to have: create a passion to motivate you through anything in service of the better future you want.

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June 17, 2020 by

Pivot With Purpose

Purpose carries you unwavering and committed through not only the high points but also the difficult times.
Business purpose helps you get through difficult times.

These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose,—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.Robert Walton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Talk of pivoting is popular. But, most companies don’t have a place to pivot from.1

When a company only chases profits or market share, they only have the whims of the market to anchor their business. And, when those whims change, their anchors get dislodged and they have to scramble for a new spot to give them stability.

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May 13, 2020 by