Motivational Leadership Speaker, Bestselling Oprah Author

Archive for the ‘Success’ Category

Do you ever notice that, when you go into a funk, it is so hard to do the simple things that will lift you out of it?

Like, you know that you feel better if you exercise, but you can’t make yourself put on your shoes and go for a walk — not even it is to just go down the block. Or, you know that affirmations work and take no time at all, but you can’t make yourself do them. So, you start off feelin’ the blues and slide into a funk and wind up in a full-blown depression. Five pounds later, you wonder what happened.

I think we have to consciously do everything we can to keep from sliding into the darkness. Too often, we wait until it is too late. I had lunch with one of my best friends yesterday and she’s on a real downswing into a depression. Note: she makes her living as a clinical therapist. So, when we started talking about what she needed to do to climb out of it, she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t take the tiny steps she’d need to take in order to begin feeliing better.

I have had my dark moments. I felt like I was sliding into a black hole several years ago when my mother started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t recognize my father, and I would quiz him about tiny details from our past so she could see he knew things only her husband would know. It didn’t prove that he was her husband to her. She just said, “I wonder how he knows that.” I was devastated and the world turned dark.

But, a friend told me to meet her at Fort DeSoto park at sunset with my kayak. We went three times in one week, and at the end of it, my perspective was in check. I’d come back into the light, and it wasn’t that hard.

The people closest to me know to give me a push when things start getting tough. Someone will usually say, “Go get in your kayak.” And that usually wakes me up.

I think the trick to warding off the blues is to have people around you who give you that kick in the butt you need when you can’t do it for yourself. Know what makes you happy, and have good friends to remind you to tap into it.

free true colors Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

One thing I notice when I am out on the road is that people “in the ranks” think they are somehow different from those who have soared above. Like the superstars have something special or have been pre-ordained for the success they achieve.

That is a complete crock. Some people are “special” because their self-confidence lets them see that they can do big things, and they have the guts to try. So, the next time you see an opportunity and hesitate, ask yourself this:

Why not you?

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What makes anyone else more deserving of great success and financial reward than you? Are the people who control the business, financial and political worlds the most deserving or even the most intelligent and competent people in the world? No! They just got in line, had a vision and started working.

I think I need to drive this home a little more. You cannot assume that those who have “made it” are any more special than you are, because they are not. I promise you. I have spent much of my career interviewing people who are held out as great success stories and visionary leaders. They are special people because they had the courage to chase their dreams and manifest their success. But, they are not always the best or the brightest. They are the boldest. They bet on themselves and carry forth.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies. true colors free

Yesterday, I wrote about my response to the aspiring author who wanted my advice on how to write a book. It was quite simple. Start the book. Finish it.

Have the dream, do the work. This advice applies for anyone who aspires to do anything different, whether the dream is to write books or be an astronaut. What good is a dream if it stays locked in the imagination? That’s just fantasy. Forget your fear and just take the first tiny action step that turns an idea into reality. If you need to get more education, sign up for a class. If you aren’t sure what you want to do, go get career counseling. Just do something to get going.

Life change sometimes seems so huge and unwieldy that we are paralyzed to take the first step. Stop seeing it for all of its enormity and see it as a series of very workable, manageable steps that you can knock off, one at a time, until your dream is complete.

A book is a great example of what I am talking about. There is no book until you start it. So, start! Just write one page. Don’t get caught up on perfection, but write the page. The next day, write another. Do another page every day and, in about a year, you’ve got your book done. You don’t write a book in one sitting. You do it one step at a time — one page at a time, one word at a time.

The manager at the Goodyear where I go happened to see some of my books in my car when I went in for an oil change and he asked if I was an author. He told me he was working on a novel, then described the plot, which I thought was really good. Every time I go in there, I ask how it is going. He always has a huge progress report. He spends all of his lunch hours in the library. He forces himself to write at least three paragraphs on an index card, which he will type into his computer when he goes home at night. He’s got more than 500 pages written! And, he has done it three paragraphs at a time. See? Just take it a little bit at a time.

That’s the formula for making any change in your life. Don’t overwhelm yourself and be your own biggest naysayer. Just analyze what it will take to make your dream come to life, write down the steps and do them one at a time.

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During the Q&A portion of my keynote yesterday, I was asked what advice I had for an aspiring author who wanted to write her first book.

“Start it!” I said.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Finish it!”

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That’s about the size of it. Anyhow, back to my very spontaneous advice of “START IT!” and “FINISH IT!”

People get so stopped up because they think they have to write the perfect piece of literary prose. Well, I give everyone permission to write prose that sucks. Just start, get something going, then clean it up later. Go for quantity, not quality, then edit like hell once you have finished a draft. When I was working on my novel, Mermaid Mambo, I went through periods when I couldn’t seem to get anything out of my head. I was uninspired. Then I read the book, No Plot, No Problem! which told me to stop sucking my thumb and just write a massive amount of words every day, for editing later.  Author Chris Baty‘s theory is that you write, write, write without worrying about quality, then quality will emerge. It is a theory that I now ascribe to. Just keep moving forward.

In that novel-writing process, I did produce a few sections that I would never want anyone to ever see, but they were easily deleted. Because of Baty’s advice, I finished the book.

I constantly meet people who tell me they want to write books. They ask me for advice and I always tell them that, if they will just write one single page a day, they’ll be done in a year. And, I tell them to buy The Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published and Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents. The publishing industry will give you brain damage, if you let it. Those books tell you the truth and guide you through the maze.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

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“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Well, what is it today? Russia’s going to wipe out Georgia, and talk radio says we are on the brink of World War III. The economy is in the crapper, and talk radio says we are on the verge of a depression. Frogs are dying and global warming is real and so earth is about to bite the dust and…

What is going on here! Seriously, if you pay attention to the news or the pontifications, we are all on the verge of extinction, killing humanity with either our brute force, greed or stupidity. Are we on the verge of a depression? NO! WE ARE IN ONE — and it’s our attitude.

You can’t listen to all of this bad news without it affecting your psyche and behavior. People are afraid they are going to lose their homes, their jobs, their retirement dreams, their security. And, those fears are so powerful that, in so many cases they are real. Positive attitude can’t save your job when your company is going down. It can’t pay your mortgage when you are sinking faster than you can swim. But, attitude is your key to resiliency in tough times.

None of us like feeling out of control, but the world really is spinning these days. Know in your heart that you are strong enough to counter your obstacles with courage and creativity. Don’t let fear paralyze you. It’s paralyzing enough people, but you can steer your way through these hassles because you know you will be okay. You’ve got friends, family and spiritual support. You also have your own strong self to drown out the voice of fear and uncertainty.

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I once met a bank executive who, after telling me most of her life story, confessed her biggest secret.

She’d never gone to college. She had a high school diploma – nothing more.

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Now I have met plenty of people with PhDs who I would never list among the world’s most highly functioning people, so I never base a person’s ability to contribute to this world on their educational track record. One of the best editors I ever had as a journalist never went to college. One of the most short-sighted and nasty individuals I ever met was a Harvard professor.

But there was that bank executive who had an office high atop a very nice office building, and a very impressive title that put here near the top of her bank’s hierarchy.

“I’ve always felt like a failure because I don’t have the education,” she said.

She told me she’d been invited to speak to business students at a local university, but she declined because she was intimidated. She figured they knew more about business than she did, considering that they were college students.

Incredulous, I asked her what the hell she was talking about.

“I’ve never even been to college, and they are juniors and seniors! I have nothing to offer them.”

“How did you find the confidence to get as far as you have?” I asked.

“I just worked hard and kept getting promoted. I think they needed a woman…”

So sometimes your career gains speed and momentum despite everything you think or do to sabotage it. Does her story illustrate that I am wrong about thoughts manifesting success, because obviously, the bank exec’s self-talk shouldn’t have manifested much of anything. Or do we need to go deeper?

I could tell she was sincere when she confessed her insecurities to me, but I knew two things. First, something was driving her success other than her company’s need for a female in a high place. She was not a stupid woman — that was evident — so talent and ability counted plenty. But, what would have happened if she’d totally rewritten that negative story of inferiority that she kept playing inside her head? If she could have gotten beyond that negativity, I am absolutely convinced she could have achieved even more.

There is a lesson in this for all of us. All of us have insecurities. We need to put them in their place.

Ski instructors will tell you a very true fact about the sport: If you look at the dangerous route below you and try to figure out how the heck you will be able to maneuver it, you’ll fall down.

Just ski.

Do it, don’t overthink or overanalyze it. Move forward.

We don’t do that with our lives, do we? We see what looks like a treacherous path ahead of us and talk ourselves out of trying it before we even start. We are so afraid to trust ourselves that we choose instead to limit ourselves.

free gunfight at the o k corral movie download Some of us think we are “average” or “middle class” or “worker bees” or “mid-level managers.” As we label ourselves, we limit ourselves. We set ourselves apart from those who succeed at the highest levels. It’s almost like we are mentally delineating the career “haves” and the career “have nots,” and are literally choosing to place ourselves with the “have nots” because we don’t see ourselves with the same potential and possibility that the superstars exhibit.

Why?

When your mother is very ill and your heart is breaking, you want an e-mail like the one my close friend sent me. It was filled with hope and support and love and friendship.

I never acknowledged it.

When I called her to talk, she asked if I were angry. Why hadn’t I responded?

I hadn’t responded because I never received the e-mail.

I know of at least ten e-mails that haven’t gotten to me in the last few months. Those are the ones I’ve found out about and been able to rectify. What worries me are the ones I don’t find out about. Kind words from friends or well-wishers. Inquiries about speaking opportunities. How many people think I have snubbed them when the culprit is some technological glitch?

Then I start to wonder how many e-mails I’ve sent that have gone unacknowledged. I assumed they just ignored the e-mail. But, maybe they didn’t even get it.

If it’s a personal e-mail, this kind of mess-up can really hurt feelings. If it is a business e-mail, it can hurt the bottom line. I wonder what we can about it, short of everyone having to r.s.v.p. within 24 hours for every e-mail, which is ridiculous, or just getting rid of e-mail altogether and resorting to good old human contact. That is also ridiculous because none of us has time for that anymore.

Let me know at fawn@hardwonwisdom.com . I’ll write back.

If I get the e-mail.

I know a lot of us have a problem confronting those who undermine us or flat-out knife us in the back. We’re afraid that, if we say something, our words will be distorted, spread around and used to hurt us even more. So, we remain silent.

Silence, of course, suggests you condone what happened.

If you are afraid to directly spell out the crime, you can always resort to my secret method of confrontation. Once something has happened, just go up to the person who did it and say, “I know what you did.”

The person gets all out-of-sorts and starts demanding details. “What? What did I do? What are you saying?”

You respond, “I know what you did. I am not going to engage further, but I want you to know you did not get away with it.”

Then, walk away. It is so beautifully effective and absolutely simple.

Is it as good as a direct confrontation where you spell things out and put everything in the open? Generally not. But sometimes, you end up in conflicts with gossippy people who will continue to damage you if you engage. Just know that it is an option.

I am about to admit something embarrassing. It goes back a couple of decades, to my first years as a reporter out of college. My old boss at The Florida Times-Union got himself one of those Commodore computers in the early days of the home PC and figured out a way to categorize and calculate how reporters were performing. We’d get points for the number of stories we produced and the placement of the stories. If the stories were scoops or blockbusters, we got bonus points.

At the end of the month, good ol’ Nick Bournias (still one of my favorite bosses) would publish his “Nicky Points,” ranking us from first to worst.

We’d all commiserate about his stupid rating system, griping that we weren’t manufacturing shoes but rather, performing an immeasurable public service as journalists.

When I finally left the paper, Nick published a special edition of his newsletter, praising me for all the times I was on the very top of that list and teasing me for the times I was on the very bottom.

It was so true.

What was it they used to say? “When you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not.”

Well, I’ll admit it.

I’ve been through plenty of spells when I was not hot. Or warm. Or even lukewarm. My performance was excruciatingly cold.

And, I wish I could write this in past tense, as though my slumps were all a thing of the past, but there are weeks when, as a writer, I am on fire and weeks when I am in recharge mode.

Sometimes my brain needs a break.

Remember that. Brains need breaks.

Bosses label those spells when we shut down or slide from excellence into mediocrity as slumps, but, I see those moments as crucial brain vacations that let me recharge my batteries so I can perform again. It took a lot of years for me to learn that I can’t drive in fifth gear every day without completely burning out my internal shifters. I remembered that when I became a manager and saw my people go through the same experience.

We need those down periods so we have the energy to perform when the time comes. We do not have an inexhaustible supply of energy; we have limits. Success comes in cycles. It is never a straight shot from earth into the stratosphere, so when you catch yourself sliding a little, don’t panic. It has happened to everyone.