Over 30 years ago I had a conversation with a teenager that caught me completely off guard – and reminds me of a valuable principle to this day. While I have a very well-honed skill for catching people doing things wrong – if I want to be an effective leader, I need to catch people doing things right. I work on this every day, with clients, peers, and bosses – greatly because of the jumpstart this conversation gave me.
Cultivating a spirit of gratitude makes life more fulfilling and meaningful. But have you thought about how YOU can cause someone else to be grateful? There are lots of ways to enhance the lives of others–one of the most valuable of which is to give them your attention.
Choose to make the decisions that will take you to the end that you have in mind. That means being proactive, not reactive about life and what it might present to you. The wisdom of Winnie the Pooh in the 2018 movie Christopher Robin is useful on this point. Winnie The Pooh: I always get to where I’m going by walking away from where I’ve been.
If scientific thinking can be learned through application to large challenges, the hope is the behavior will be applied to all challenges without effort or thought. As the administration has embraced lean production and Toyota Production System, it is no surprise kata is the chosen methodology.
The position of the kicker on a football team has always intrigued me. Here is a player that for most of the time is practically anonymous. Many of the rival fans and neutrals watching won’t even know his name. He runs on, unannounced and unnoticed, a few times in the game just to kick the ball between the posts, and then disappears again, whilst everybody is generally consumed with the much higher profile players and the more dramatic plays.