John C. Maxwell on Personal Development - How To Climb Out of That Rut

Have you ever felt stuck? Like you couldn’t get where you wanted to go? That you couldn’t break free of the confines of your current situation? When you couldn’t move up to the next level? Maybe you were in a rut, and maybe you feel like you’re in one now.
If that’s the case, you need to be willing to do something about it. Why? Because as writer Ellen Glasgow said, “The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.” If you allow yourself to stay in a rut too long, it could mean the slow death of your dreams. Nobody wants that.
If you’re in a rut and you want to break out of it, then I encourage you to take the following advice:

1. Accept responsibility for your own life.

I believe it is human nature to look elsewhere for the source of our difficulties, but the truth is that the older you are, the more responsible you are for your circumstances. True, many things are out of our control, and bad things do happen to good people. But we also make choices every day that contribute to our conditions.

Michael Korda, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief, observed, “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility.… In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.”
Think about your life; where are you shirking responsibility or playing the victim? Have you blamed others for bad choices you made? Are you failing to follow through on anything that you know you should be doing? Are you doing things that you should never have agreed to do?
Take time to examine your life and how you’re spending it. Where can you take responsibility to make changes—even if your past choices haven’t led to your present predicaments? Getting out of a rut begins with the acknowledgement you must make the choices to do so.

 

2. Know where you want to be.

I have known a lot of people who hoped and dreamed of being successful, but their goals never become more specific than that. Hope is not a strategy. To quote baseball great Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you want to go, you might end up someplace else.”
You must define where you want to go in life; it’s not a guarantee you will reach your goals or achieve your dreams, but if you don’t define them, it’s almost guaranteed that you won’t.
You’re going to spend your life doing something. It might as well be what you really want to do. Have you given yourself a target? Have you written out your goals and described your dreams? If not, you need to.

3. Divide your dream into manageable parts.

One thing that often paralyzes people is having a dream or even a big goal with no realistic way of achieving it. How do you solve that? By breaking it down into bite-sized pieces that you accomplish with focused effort.
Motivational expert Tom Hopkins advised, “Take it in steps. If you’ve never made more than the minimum wage, don’t aim for a half-a-million-dollar goal the first year in selling or with a new company. Always aim for the earnings level that excites you a lot and only scares you a little.” And figure out the smaller steps necessary to get there. Break it down from your dream, to major goals, to intermediate steps, to annual goals, to monthly or weekly steps, and on down to what you need to do today.

4. Take action today.

Now you’ve arrived at the next step: taking action. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.” All the dreaming, hoping, planning and goal-setting in the world won’t do a thing for you if you never follow through.
Says producer-director Brandon McCormick, who owns the Atlanta-based boutique film company Whitestone Motion Pictures: “I meet artists all the time who learn about Whitestone and say, ‘I’m a director’ or ‘I’m a writer’ or ‘I’m a composer,’ but they don’t actually make anything. It’s very frustrating. At Whitestone, we’re a community of artists and artisans who actually make things.”
McCormick and team follow through. They take action. They make films, starting small and getting better as they go. As I write this, McCormick has 19 producer credits and 15 director credits on IMDb.com. And he’s only 28 years old!
What kind of action can you take today that will start moving you out of your rut and take you one small step closer to your dream? It doesn’t have to be a big step. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a significant step. It just needs to be a step in the right direction.

5. Grow into your tomorrow.

While the steps you take today don’t need to be earth-shattering, you don’t want every step forward to be small and insignificant. You want your steps to be progressively bigger, smarter and more strategic. The only way I know to make that happen is to be intentional about getting better every day.
In my new book The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential (in bookstores the first week of October), the last law, the Law of Expansion, says, “Growth always increases your capacity.” Tenure won’t make you better. Experience isn’t any guarantee of success. Having the best resources doesn’t automatically help you improve. The only thing that guarantees that you will be better tomorrow is growing today.
If you don’t have a highly intentional plan for personal growth, you might get out of today’s rut and dig yourself a new one tomorrow. Don’t do it. If you keep getting better, keep climbing higher, you’ll never find yourself stuck—at least, not for long.
My one final piece of advice is to tell you to get help. Too often we are so embarrassed about where we are that we become afraid of admitting to someone else that we’re stuck. That shouldn’t be. There’s no shame in getting stuck—only in staying that way when you have a choice to change.
There have been times that I’ve had to ask others to give me a hand to move forward when I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And there have been times when others have asked for my help. That’s the way it ought to be. I believe that God put us on this earth to help one another. via success.com

Follow me on Twitter @innothinkgroup, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Center-for-Creative-Leadership-and-Strategy, or check out my website http://innothinkgroup.com for more tips and strategies effective leadership, engaged employees, increase growth, and customer effectiveness through innovation.

Leadership and Innovation: 'One time, at CEO fantasy band camp'

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Forget Maui. When execs want to unwind, some are heading to band camp, where they form acts and trade hot licks. They also, apparently, come home with new management skills.

By Pete Gerstenzang, contributor

FORTUNE -- If you've watched any of the highly charged, heavily edited episodes of "Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy Camp" on VH1, you're not really getting the complete picture. You may be imagining that the camp is primarily peopled with combative, longhaired, chain wallet-wearing dudes, who look like they should be roadying for the Allman Brothers.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But these five-day camp programs hosted in several locations across the country -- where "civilians" get to jam with their rock heroes -- are now fairly filled with CEOs, CMOs, and execs of all stripes.

Forget Maui. When upper-management wants to unwind, some of them are heading to band camp, where they form acts and trade hot licks with artists like Ozzy's (as in, Osbourne) lead guitarist. And, perhaps surprisingly, they return to their companies with new management skills.

"I've been an attorney for 30 years and now have my own firm," says Frank Pawlak, 58. "I've been involved in a variety of court cases, such as unlawful discrimination and employee wage compensation. It's wonderful work, but stressful. Going to The Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy Camp is the best remedy for this I know."

Pawlak, who has attended the camp twice, says he's not sure what's more impressive about the rock getaways, which average $6,000 for the week, or $8,000 if you choose the recording studio package: whether it's the way it makes you a better musician, or how it sharpens your skills so you can become a more intuitive manager.

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"Certainly, by playing with guys like Warren Haynes [of The Allmans], your skill level rises and you become more confident on your instrument," says Pawlak, who plays guitar. "I mean, try to imagine the best guitar teachers in the world, showing you how to play a riff they invented. But, if you pay attention to the group interaction, you also come away from Fantasy Camp as an improved executive."

While more and more camp attendees are executives, says Pawlak, they still have various temperaments and come from different fields. And getting along with each other in such a closed environment is imperative, he claims.

"When you're thrust into a band situation with, say, an oil baron and a software CEO, you have lots of disparate personalities," says Pawlak. "You all have to figure out quickly how to work well together, so your 'presentation' goes smoothly. I know we did. And after playing our three-song gig at The Whiskey, at camp's end? Let's just say I've newfound interactive skills. And they're still paying off in how I run things in my business life."

Pete Krainik, 54, founder of The CMO Club, a program that brings chief marketing officers together so that they can "become better at what they do," says he was feeling "excited but worried" about forming a band and playing live at his Rock 'N' Fantasy Camp experience this past February.

"I'm a keyboard player, but I hadn't played in a band in 30 years. Still, I knew this was the place to play. Especially since Teddy Zig Zag [who has played with Guns 'N' Roses] would be there. If you're going to brush up on your chops, he's the guy to learn from."

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As exciting as Krainik says his twice-monthly CMO Summits are, it was hard to top this experience. "You feel like a groupie for a few hours meeting your heroes," he says, "but pretty soon, the novelty wears off and you get down to business. And as wonderful as it was working on my keyboard technique, I learned so much about being a better CMO. The week paid for itself."

For Krainik, guitarist Steve Stevens' breakdown of "White Wedding," the Billy Idol song on which he plays, speaks volumes about what he learned from his time at band camp.

"Each section of the song was analyzed, so we could all understand how to make the song have more impact," says Krainik. "And even though I was there to learn about rock, I also began to think about brands. I wondered, 'How often do we take apart the brand or campaign we're working on and figure out the best way to reassemble it so we can really reach our customers?' That was an 'aha' moment for me."

Andy Roberts, 47, a senior project manager at telecommunications firm NTT America, claims he may have learned more about human psychology during his recent week at 'camp' than at college.

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"There are about 65 people of different ages and backgrounds at the camp," Roberts says. "You need to learn to be reasonable and considerate with all of them, but especially with the people in your band. My group played Black Label Society's song 'Stillborn' on our final night. As you can imagine, we all had to really be patient with each other when we learned that song. It's pretty complicated."

David Fishof, the founder of this rock-themed camp is pleased, but unsurprised, to hear such praise. And the camp is even making its way to offices.

"There's no question that we're seeing more executives at these camps," says Fishof. "But we're also doing one-day corporate camps, where I go to, say, GE with a rock star, like Lita Ford or Mark Hudson. We'll 'crash' a sales meeting with Mark and say to everybody, 'Okay, here's the guy who wrote the lyrics to 'Livin' On The Edge.' And we get the folks from GE to re-write the lyrics to describe what it's like working at GE. We get someone to do the choreography. We have them perform the song that night."

Fantasy band camp is not just good for these execs' management acumen; it can also, apparently, soothe the soul. Fishof relates a story in which a Morgan Stanley (MS) staffer was sent back to camp by his therapist for some R&R. "'Do yourself a favor,'" the therapist reportedly told the exec. "'Stop coming here. Go rock out.'"

Posted in: Band camp, David Fishof, management training, Music, Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy Camp

via management.fortune.cnn.com