Cortex Leadership Consulting

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Will you have rich habits this week?©

40% of all of our daily activities are habits, which I wrote about in a previous Lynda’s Launch List.  With that information in mind, it would seem important to know which habits lead to richer outcomes.

Accumulating wealth may not be your prime motivator.  I would say this, though, it’s a whole lot easier to retire early, fund your kid’s college, travel to cool places, and help others financially, if you have money in the bank and no debt.  There’s a freedom that comes from being financially secure and many people are motivated to feel secure and free.

Rich HabitsThere’s a compelling new book, Rich Habits-The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals by Thomas C. Corley, that spent 5 years studying and researching the habits of the wealthy.  The results give us a great deal of knowledge about the type of habits wealthy people have that we can copy.  I’ve sifted through the statistics and listed here the 16 habits.  I would recommend the book for a deeper understanding of the research.

STATISTICS about wealthy people:

88% read 30 minutes or more a day.  63% listen to audiobooks on their commute, 79% read educational career-related material, 55% read for personal development, 58% read biographies of successful people, 94% read current events, 51% read about history and only 11% read purely for entertainment purposes.

80% are focused on accomplishing some single goal.

76% exercise aerobically 4 days per week.

81% maintain a to-do list.

6% say what’s on their mind.

44% wake up 3 hours before work starts.

84% believe good habits create opportunity luck.

86% believe in life-long educational self-development.

HABITS of the wealthy:

  • Live within their means.
  • Don’t gamble.
  • Read every day.
  • Watch less than 1 hour of recreational TV viewing or Internet surfing.
  • Control their emotions.
  • Network and volunteer regularly.
  • Go above and beyond in work and business.
  • Pursue at least one major goal.
  • Avoid procrastination
  • Talk less and listen more.
  • Avoid toxic people.
  • Exhibit focus, persistence and patience.
  • Set aside self-limiting beliefs holding them back.
  • Get and use a mentor.
  • Eliminate “bad luck” from their vocabulary.
  • Know their main purpose.

Dave Ramsey did an interview with the author which you can find here.

What percentage of these habits have you consistently exercised for the last 5 years?

Which habit can you adopt immediately that you think will have the biggest impact on your highest-level desired outcome in the next 5?

I discovered this book when I was listening to Success Magazine’s CD that comes with their monthly magazine.  Subscribe to it or borrow someone’s copy each month.  Much of the content in each of the issues can lead to thinking that will help you move to the next level of success especially if you are an entrepreneur or want to think like one.

I also want to thank Mary Jo Fields whom I worked with for the Mayor’s Institute training session I conducted yesterday.  It was fun and inspiring to witness the commitment and dedication of Mayor’s throughout Virginia as they exhibited the habit of life-long learning.  Having my daughter Melody by my side to assist in the training, who is about to graduate from Virginia Tech, was quite the treat as well!

To sign up for Lynda’s Launch List go to www.lyndamcnuttfoster.com.

 

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Will you read a short letter from Lynda and get hooked this week?

Just passing along some love to you, the leaders, executives and managers I admire the most. Thank you for making the choice to receive this article series, “Lynda’s Launch List” each week.  You and I have been creating this content together, because it is based on your feedback in classes and coaching sessions, since the Launch List was first published in December 13, 2007.  It cracked me up to see the first one I ever posted and distributed on that date.  http://lyndamcnuttfoster.com/today/  We’ve had quite the journey together to build a subscriber base that reaches more than 2,000 executives and their teams each week.

I am grateful for the support so many of you have shown, over the last year, as my husband, Allen Foster and I, launched Cortex Leadership Consulting, which was the merger of a consulting firm I founded more than 20 years ago, McNutt & Associates, Inc.

Our team at Cortex has already coached and trained more than 120 participants in our leadership classes, Leading a Winning Team, and given keynote note speeches about my newest ebooks and audiobook to more than 750 in the last 6 months alone.  Our diverse team of professionals work hard to listen to you, hear your feedback and biggest challenges and respond with content and programs that appear to be transforming you and the teams you lead.  I am hooked on working hard to serve you.  I love what I do and wouldn’t be able to without you!  So, onto what you read this article for each week.

So, will you be hooked on what I discovered for you this week?

Hooked Nir EyalI have not been able to put down Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, by Nir Eyal.  It started when I watched a short video on YouTube one morning when I was on the elliptical.  Then I bought the 30-minute audio summary.  Next came the Kindle version and the hard copy is on the way.  Why am I devouring every piece of material available on this book?  Simple.  It provides a clear path to how people get hooked on things and then build habits around them. The work Eyal has done focuses on products and services.  A previous article from “Lynda’s Launch List” focused on the book The Power of Habit.   Why I am so interested in the formation of habits is that I want to discover easier and simpler paths for leaders to be hooked on the types of behaviors that lead to their, and their team member’s successes.  Eyal talks about wanting to produce products and services that use what know about getting hooked for the betterment of people rather than simply manipulating them.

Consider some of the book’s key take-a-ways:

Behaviors = Motivation + Ability + Trigger

A behavior is created when there is sufficient motivation, an ability to complete the desired action and a trigger to spark the fuse.

It’s much harder to motivate someone to do something than it is to simply make it easier for them to do it.  In Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Switch, they researched and wrote about how important it is to make the “path” easier during any change you want to see.  Eyal found the same thing to be true.  Simply the steps one needs to follow to get to their reward and they are much more likely to get there.  It works the opposite way as well.  If you want to break a habit, make it WAY more difficult to get to the reward and you will be less likely to chase after it.  For example, it’s much easier to collaborate on a project if you have set days and times to meet and everyone is in attendance.  The harder it is to communicate with one another the more likely it won’t happen.

In other words, if you want to not eat ice cream, don’t buy it in the first place.  If you want to exercise more, make your desk sit on top of your treadmill.  Stop trying to motivate yourself and others and simply make it easy for them to do what you want them to do and connect it with one of the 3 types of rewards people seek.

The 3 types of rewards that people seek are:

Rewards of the tribe…people want to feel connected to others.

Rewards of the hunt…people want information or tangible goods and they like to make a small effort to get them.  They like to complete tasks.

Rewards of the self…this one is about our desire for learning and mastering new skills.

Social media sites have been genius at getting many of us and I dare say most of a young generation of folks, hooked on their products.  The sites appear free of cost, yet that is only true when users are not valuing the time they are investing in those platforms.  The emotional reward comes when we go to the site and “hunt” to see what is available to us as far as information.  Once we are invested in the sites by having connected and invited our friends to join we become less likely to disconnect from them, even if a better site comes along.

What if we used the principles and practices described in Hooked to get ourselves and our team members hooked on the types of actions that we know lead to lasting results?

What do you want your team to be hooked on?

Sticking to agendas in meetings?

Meeting deadlines?

Having higher quality conversations?

Lower levels of drama between team members?

  1. Start by determining, as a team, one habit you want to create.
  2. Next, discuss the types of rewards (tribe, hunt, self) team members would achieve if they were to create that habit.
  3. Determine what reward team members are getting now from their current behaviors. (Trust me, there’s always a reward or they wouldn’t be doing it.)
  4. Brainstorm what type of external trigger you can create to help cue people to take action on the behavior. If you want meetings to stay on time and on agenda, agree to send agenda’s ahead of time, get agreement to follow it during the session and have a time keeper of the meeting to ensure they stay on track of what has been agreed upon.
  5. Determine how people will be invested, over time, in the new behavior. Maybe team members receive points each time a meeting starts and ends on time and those points add up to rewards.

Footnote:  I hope that each of you have someone in your life, on this Valentine’s Day, that you are hooked on the way I am my amazing, brilliant, and supportive husband, Allen Foster.  I am deeply, madly in love with him and appreciate him for what he has done to make the last 17 years joyful.

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Will leaders exhibit emotional discipline this week?

There’s a part of being emotionally intelligent that is key to leaders successfully creating collaborative outcomes and it would appear, from my experience with thousands of them in training and executive coaching sessions, to be the portion know as “self management.”

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability of individuals to recognize their own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.  Basically, it’s your “people” skills.  The characteristics include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.  Daniel Goleman, a psychologist, developed the framework for it.  Many organizations use assessments that measure your level of development in each of the skills.  Studies of indicated that emotional intelligence is a higher indicator of success, in many areas, than even a person’s IQ.  Here’s a nice article to compare the two for you.

Discipline is defined as:  the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.  Discipline used to be something that was coveted.  The concept was honored and honorable.  It still is when it applies to having a perfectly sculpted body (one thing I may never see in the mirror).  Everyone seems to want one of those these days and will go to great lengths to have one.

Emotional discipline, though, is something that we may not be focusing quite enough on right now and could be the missing key that unlocks the outcomes we want to achieve.  The leaders I have coached and admired have emotional discipline, which I have found to mean that they don’t always do what they want to do, or say what they want to say, when they want to say it.  They don’t always react in anger when they have full justification to do so.  They don’t do tasks when they feel like it, but rather when they have them scheduled to happen.

Leaders that possess emotional discipline have an impulse, quite frequently, to run the other way when the super tough decisions need to be made, and yet they don’t.  They stand up, when others sit down, and they speak their truth in the face of criticism and sometimes serious consequences.

For those of you that are familiar with the DISC behavioral styles here are some areas that each of us may have an opportunity to develop emotional discipline in regard to:

Drivers – may have an impulse to over-confidently say exactly what’s on their mind, with little contemplation. They may speak from the “gut” and may not give consideration to how it lands on peers and team members.

Influencers – may have an impulse to avoid needed conversations and situations if they feel like they could result in a possible conflict, or deterioration of a relationship or a how much a person likes them.

Supporters – may have an impulse to hold back on their opinion or believe that their opinion isn’t as important.  They may also have an impulse to take all of the work onto themselves instead of burdening someone else which may sometimes lead to not delegating well.

Calculators – may have an impulse to NOT communicate instead of communicating.  Calculators can sometimes be more comfortable in their office with “time to think” instead of seeking others’ opinions.

When the rules of emotional discipline aren’t followed there are consequences for the leader, their team and their organization.  They might include and certainly aren’t limited to their team loosing respect and trust in them.  A lack of emotional discipline may lead to lack luster results because a leader did what they felt like doing in meetings and during important interactions with others, rather than calling out unproductive behaviors. Maybe customer centric standards aren’t kept because it’s easier to overlook poor performance than it is to inspire excellence every day.

We all have work to do to right this ship and make emotional discipline as sexy and common place again as it used to be, when we celebrated and were more attracted to a leader taking a moment to quietly contemplate their answer than blurting out the first thing that came to their mind before the other person was even finished talking.

Here are some things to discuss with your team this week:

  1. In which areas of their work do they feel they are exhibiting strong aspects of emotional discipline?  Do they hit deadlines regardless of the internal or external obstacles they are dealing with?
  2. In which areas of their work do they need a higher level of emotional discipline? Do they need to lean into meaningful conversations that can move themselves and the team forward rather than leaning away because it’s more comfortable and familiar?
  3. Where do team members need help in being more disciplined? Is it hard for them to get fired up in the morning and do the toughest tasks they need to get done, first?  Who can help motivate them and keep them on track?

This article can also be viewed on the TTI website here. TTI SI, Target Training International – Success Insights, is the provider for our DISC assessments and the industry leader in understanding the science behind them.

At Cortex Leadership Consulting (www.cortexleadership.com) we provide DISC, Motivators, Leadership Competency, Stress, 360 degree and Team Accountability assessments along with workshops and leadership programs to assist you and your team to reach your peak performance.  You can contact us at [email protected] or (540) 776-9219 to book a workshop for your team, a customized leadership program for your organization or schedule a keynote speech.

If you would like to receive the Leader’s Launch List, each week, in your email inbox, go to www.lyndamcnuttfoster.com.