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Authors: Steve Chandler
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gifts written inside and lines of contribution connecting them to each other, other departments, and your customers. A giving system. Sit back and look at your paper and let it sink in: You are there to keep their channels of contribution (the lines on your paper) open and flowing freely. As a manager that’s your primary job.
CHAPTER SIX
INSPIRED IDEAS LEAD TO SUCCESS
So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.
—Dorothea Brande
Surveys of successful businesspeople who are asked the question, “When do you get your best business ideas?” keep yielding the same two answers: number one, in the shower; number two, on vacation. This helps prove the point that the best ideas come when you stop forcing your thinking. The straining involved with forced thinking is actually pushing ideas away. You are repelling that great idea wanting to just float up and announce itself. The solution is to gets your hands off your thinking process and let inspiration flow to you.
Once you learn to do this with yourself you can do it with your people. You can plant seeds and ask questions which they can then take away and contemplate. Don’t demand immediate answers. Don’t micromanage problems. Once you truly see the unlimited potential of your people and the limitless possibilities that life has made available for them, you won’t have to worry about how to think of good ideas. You’ll just let them roll in.
“So maybe we should take showers and go on vacation all the time!” a small-business owner said after looking at one of these surveys.
He was not far from the real answer; our best practice will be to get into that relaxed, hands-off state of mind that occurs in the shower and on vacation. The real answer is to learn to listen and recognize, to learn to be available for the ideas that are in us instead of trying to find them in a manual or guideline.
That’s the secret discipline involved with success. It’s in allowing yourself to step back and let it happen. It’s a tough discipline to learn at the outset, but it’s a rewarding one. It rewards you in large ways by helping a great career unfold. But it also rewards you in smaller, more immediate ways, too: For example, you can actually finish your workday with a low level of stress. You can learn what it means to do less and achieve more.
But I thought you had to think to grow rich
People keep trying to succeed through forced thinking because they’ve drawn a false conclusion about it. They spend all day thinking about something, and when that doesn’t get them the answer, they finally just stop thinking. But then, boom! Once they stop thinking, they get their brilliant idea!And then they credit the thinking. They don’t see that it was the stopping and relaxing that delivered the idea.
Here’s another example of how this works. Someone will ask you someone’s name and you know you have it on the tip of your tongue. But in the moment they ask you, you can’t remember it. Try as you might, you can’t think of it! You keep forcing your mind to produce, and it just won’t. But a few minutes later, when you’re talking about something else completely off the subject, the name will come to you.
That’s the way of the mind. And that’s the way the hands-off manager uses it. Successful ideas will come to you once you learn to trust that process.
To put it another way, the fundamental key to success now becomes self-trust and belief in yourself. Belief that you’ve already got everything you need inside you.
That’s not an egotistical point of view, because it’s not coming from an “I’m better than you” orientation. Instead, it comes from “I have this life in me just as you do, and I’m trusting this life. Therefore success is coming through me. You can do the same thing!”
When you become successful, others notice. They notice that you use a hands-off approach with yourself. You don’t worry yourself to death. You
CHAPTER SIX
INSPIRED IDEAS LEAD TO SUCCESS
So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.
—Dorothea Brande
Surveys of successful businesspeople who are asked the question, “When do you get your best business ideas?” keep yielding the same two answers: number one, in the shower; number two, on vacation. This helps prove the point that the best ideas come when you stop forcing your thinking. The straining involved with forced thinking is actually pushing ideas away. You are repelling that great idea wanting to just float up and announce itself. The solution is to gets your hands off your thinking process and let inspiration flow to you.
Once you learn to do this with yourself you can do it with your people. You can plant seeds and ask questions which they can then take away and contemplate. Don’t demand immediate answers. Don’t micromanage problems. Once you truly see the unlimited potential of your people and the limitless possibilities that life has made available for them, you won’t have to worry about how to think of good ideas. You’ll just let them roll in.
“So maybe we should take showers and go on vacation all the time!” a small-business owner said after looking at one of these surveys.
He was not far from the real answer; our best practice will be to get into that relaxed, hands-off state of mind that occurs in the shower and on vacation. The real answer is to learn to listen and recognize, to learn to be available for the ideas that are in us instead of trying to find them in a manual or guideline.
That’s the secret discipline involved with success. It’s in allowing yourself to step back and let it happen. It’s a tough discipline to learn at the outset, but it’s a rewarding one. It rewards you in large ways by helping a great career unfold. But it also rewards you in smaller, more immediate ways, too: For example, you can actually finish your workday with a low level of stress. You can learn what it means to do less and achieve more.
But I thought you had to think to grow rich
People keep trying to succeed through forced thinking because they’ve drawn a false conclusion about it. They spend all day thinking about something, and when that doesn’t get them the answer, they finally just stop thinking. But then, boom! Once they stop thinking, they get their brilliant idea!And then they credit the thinking. They don’t see that it was the stopping and relaxing that delivered the idea.
Here’s another example of how this works. Someone will ask you someone’s name and you know you have it on the tip of your tongue. But in the moment they ask you, you can’t remember it. Try as you might, you can’t think of it! You keep forcing your mind to produce, and it just won’t. But a few minutes later, when you’re talking about something else completely off the subject, the name will come to you.
That’s the way of the mind. And that’s the way the hands-off manager uses it. Successful ideas will come to you once you learn to trust that process.
To put it another way, the fundamental key to success now becomes self-trust and belief in yourself. Belief that you’ve already got everything you need inside you.
That’s not an egotistical point of view, because it’s not coming from an “I’m better than you” orientation. Instead, it comes from “I have this life in me just as you do, and I’m trusting this life. Therefore success is coming through me. You can do the same thing!”
When you become successful, others notice. They notice that you use a hands-off approach with yourself. You don’t worry yourself to death. You
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