Fix the most important problem

What problem can you solve that would solve 100 or 1000 other problems in the future?

Get on it.

Get home by 6:00 pm

If you are working more than 55 hours a week, you have misdefined your job.  You are doing too much.  Make YOUR job responsibilities smaller so you can get your job done well and be home by 6:00 pm.  Delegate the things other people can do.

Who, not how.

What problem is persistent that you are trying to figure out?  Stop trying to figure it out and think of who knows how to do this already and get them to do it.

Who is great at what you are not?  Who loves to do what you hate?

You are team-builder-in-chief. 

Who?, not how.

What is most important now?

What is the number one most valuable thing you can be working on this week based on what is happening now?

Get in it and stay on it until it is done (solved, built).  Forget the rest.

Influence – Conclusion

Well, it’s been a great ride through this book I found in a forgotten stack in a crowded aisle in a Birmingham Alabama bookstore.  Here, we finish the last chapter on the Acquisition of Dominating Power.

The Shogun leaves us with advice on who you hang out with due to their influence on you.  He says not to hang out with commonplace minds because as we can influence them, they can also influence us by repetition of their inferior thoughts and weaken the quality of our power.

“A forceful man who wants to gain influence will not hang around small caliber minds.  He will know how to listen to them, then talk to them, perhaps convince them, but not for a moment will he submit himself to their commonplace thoughts…for having come among them in the spirit of an apostle…he will not allow himself to be affected by things beneath him.”

“So it is with all those who possess power: they maintain themselves only because they create disciples whose devotion serves to consolidate their work.”

“Dominating power is developed by creating a mental current between the master and those whom he is teaching, that wards off opposing currents.”

“Do not rub shoulders with a commonplace mind except with the intention of raising him to your own level, but do not think of entering into mental communion with such…”  

Master yourself.  Then seek to bring others up without letting them bring you down.

From the editor, “…every line of Yoritmo’s writing is an appeal to energy; an invitation to the practice of the cult of moral beauty, an encouragement to advance toward the better.”

Truth, Courage, Cheerfulness.

-Yoritomo Tashi, Japanese Shogun, 1186 A.D.

Influence – Last Chapter

The last chapter of this ancient writing about “Influence – How to Exert It” is “Acquisition of Dominating Power”.

(I feel the need to downplay the title of this chapter.  I don’t want to dominate anybody – at least not in the way we use the word domination today.  I want to lead, and I want to bring out the best in other people while accomplishing the noble goals of my organizations.  But after you read the notes, I think you will see I do not need to soften the word.  Judge for yourself.)

In this chapter, Yoritomo Tashi talks about winning people over slowly at first, with sympathetic thoughts – going to their level – getting small agreements first – not trying to overwhelm people with big ideas at first – getting their agreement – building rapport and trust – find out his likes and dislikes.  

Sympathy begets confidence and paves the way for beneficent suggestion.  Attract slowly, but retain surely…an attraction at first vague and ill-defined, later justified by a thousand reasons…

“…it is better for this power to assert itself less roughly to have more chances of permanency.”

He says that if you try to influence people significantly they are more likely to reject your idea later when they get away from you.

Get on the other person’s level at first and make a connection.  Give up any condescension.

“He who can master himself is already qualified to master others.”

Yoritomo explains that people with ambition and confidence in their own worth often have a weakness – they think they are self-sufficient and don’t need anyone else, and it comes off as arrogance – and arrogance hurts your chances of influencing others.  Ego is the enemy.

Arrogant people with big egos can’t influence others well.  Neither can victims, negative people, or people who are indifferent and apathetic.  They can hardly lead themselves.

“Cheerfulness is one of the requisite conditions for controlling others.  Not boisterous cheerfulness…but that inward peace which we define as cheerfulness and which is the mark of highly developed minds.”

“The art of happiness lies especially in the great wish to live. ” 

“We have unquestionable influence on our own destiny. Most men are, for the most part, the cause of their own problems and refuse to fix it – but curse and complain of their condition instead.”

We cannot repeat it enough –

“Real influence over others is only acquired at the price of complete mastery over himself.”

“This mastery should be the aim of the efforts of the man who wishes to possess this faculty and to make use of it for his own happiness and that of those who he comes in contact.”

Confidence – the mind/body connection

To close out this chapter on confidence, I love that the Shogun talks about the confidence you have with your own opinions regarding your health.  I read a statistic somewhere that people with positive attitudes who expect to be healthy for a long time live an average of seven years longer than average (if I can recall that properly).

He says, “There is a solidarity between mind and body which allows of the latter becoming an easy prey to affective conditions brought about by suffering…It would be idle to deny the connection between our physical ills and our mental suffering.”

(Earlier in the book, he talked about hypochondria.)

Now when he says suffering, let’s unpack that.  External conditions are there.  Stuff happens in the world – around us and to us.  We may experience physical or mental pain for a short time.  But suffering – that’s different.  Suffering is to dwell on the pain, to relive it, to make it part of our identity and think of it over and over – to become a victim.  That’s suffering.  It’s internal.  A choice.

“It is wiser sometimes to cure the mind before considering how to care for the body, for cure both at the same time.”

So there you go.  From 838 years ago – before modern medicine.

“Now it is that influence makes itself felt, triumphant, radiant; it stamps on the nerve centers an impression which reverberates through one’s whole being.  Considering that our troubles are due to pain, to anxiety, to hypochondria, we should cultivate confidence and cheerfulness.”

“If the sick are told with confidence they are getting better…then do…miracles have no other basis than this.”

Yoritomo says that some people who feel sick just need a purpose – then they’ll make themselves better to carry it out.  We know this.  When people retire and have no purpose, they leave us pretty quickly.  If they have a purpose, a someone or something, they live for it.  If that purpose goes away, they do too.

Let’s close this chapter on confidence.

“Let him who feels himself to be in the right and has confidence in himself rise up and proclaim this faith, so that the weak, the vacillating, and all those who suffer from doubt may flock around him to warm themselves at the genial blaze that issues from the fire of contentment of which his mind is full.”

Influence – Lesson 11 – By Confidence, cont.

Yoritomo talks about being influenced in the moment and then later after we have had a chance to think about it, the idea doesn’t stick in our minds.  Think about being swept up in a situation, and getting excited, only to later be left with little after you measure the idea against your existing beliefs.  The Shogun blames that on the “authors of the influence” – they were missing something.

Here are five qualities to inspire confidence –

1. Sincerity with ourselves.
2. Hatred of injustice.
3. Certainty in our decisions.
4. Absolute truth in our predictions.
5. Confidence in our own merits.

Sincerity with ourselves means that we believe in something so much and share in the good effect so deeply that we can’t help but share it with others, and to not do so would seem to us “a dereliction of our duties”.

“Like a refreshing stream, the words of him who “belives” spread into the minds of his hearers and quench their thirst of moral support and lofty convictions…like moths attracted by the light, they will all flock around hum who is for them the light and knows how to envelop them with its life-giving rays.”

People remember your words of confidence and faith.

Next is hatred of injustice.  If you have lapses of judgment or justice, you lose your influence.  “Strict justice alone should direct his words and preside over his acts.”

Here Yoritomo gives some great advice.  If you are confused and don’t know which course is just, wait – do not act…until you know for sure.  “It is more honorable to confess ignorance than to risk committing an injustice.”  Don’t risk your reputation by an assertion that is not borne out by facts.

Here’s a wonderful statement that gets to the heart of confidence and influence-

“In order to implant confidence in others, it is necessary to possess it.”

(Hey salesman!  Hey everybody!  The first one you’ve got to convince is yourself!)

In these last two paragraphs for today, the Shogun talks about those who experience the confidence of the leader, the receivers of the confidence who lack resolution on the issue and respond to those with confidence about it.

“Then it is those to whom thinking for themselves is a labor, those whose power of resistance are fitful and ill-balanced, those whom moral idleness rises up against all individual initiative, will lift their heads and feel a new strength relying on the feeling of confidence which they will experience first in the master and afterward in themselves.”

“The healing balm of faith will by its good qualities impregnate them in the gentlest fashion and. despising the faint-heartedness which hitherto had marked their most trivial resolutions, they will advance fearlessly toward the goal which has become plainly visible to their sight.”

“It is a well-known fact that an imagined support serves as well as the support itself.”

I say, confidence is one of the most important qualities to have if we are to influence others.  

What do you think?

Heat moves from more to less, and the greater the heat, the faster it moves.

Think about the key idea you are trying to put across to others.  How confident are you?

Influence – Lesson 11 – By Confidence, cont.

We are talking about Influence.  What could be more important if you are a leader, coach, manager or teacher? And if you have no influence, well, that means nobody listens to you.  That is ineffective, unproductive and for many of those people, probably sad or frustrating.

I love this chapter on confidence.  Confident people are able to influence others.  Heat flows from more to less.  Ideas flow from more confidence to less confidence.

A suggestion of any kind being implanted in the mind…We too readily give an idea of magic to the word suggestion.  And when that suggestion comes from someone you already respect and listen to – it will penetrate and grow inside you.

Suggestion is the development of confidence.  It is in a way, the imposing of one’s belief on the mind of others.

“Be it remembered there is a suggestion in everything; in the book which fascinates us and the theories of which gain possession of us in spite of ourselves; in the conversation to which we listen of our own accord, in the discussions of which only one side seems to us to express the truth.”

So we can be influenced by confidence from many angles – not just direct conversation.  Our environments are giving us signals and indirect communication to build our beliefs, understanding and confidence in those ideas.

Tomorrow, the Shoguns list five qualities that must be present to inspire confidence in others.

Influence – Lesson 11 – By Confidence

Ahh – by confidence.  I talk about this all the time – with leaders, salespeople particularly.  When I am teaching a sales training I talk about the customers confidence can never exceed that of the salespersons’ confidence.  And the confidence is contagious.  So is lack of confidence.  Recently, I produced a 14-video series about the 42-year history of our company to build the confidence of new employees.

So let’s see what  Japanese Shogun Yoritomo Tashi says about it in the 12th century –

“Confidence is the mental impulse that all those who wish to influence others should seek to elicit.  It is the means of replacing the vacillating and ever-faltering will of others with your own will, which you impose according to circumstances and according to the character of your followers.”

Don’t you just love how he just says it?  Sounds like some mind-control stuff here.  But it was 838 years ago and it’s still true today, and I am sure it will always be.  Confidence is contagious between humans.

“With some, gentle persuasion is a means, even if slow, yet almost sure of success.”

He goes on to say that once we are firm in our position, don’t second guess it and don’t allow others who are second guessing it to get in your ear.  Now this I think is a paradox.  On one hand you want to maintain your confidence and not vacillate by considering the other side – that is sell or be sold – don’t allow their opinion to influence you. But of course, if you settle on your position too early, you could be wrong, and if you shut down any other ideas you will always be wrong and not learn.  But I digress.  Let’s stick to influencing others.

“The best way left to us is not to hit them too hard, for their obstinacy – which they sometime take for willpower, would form a troublesome obstacle to their conversion.”

I think this is an important point.  If you come off too hard or like a jerk, know-it-all, insulting, or forceful, people will resist you even more for that reason.  People just don’t hear or like the ideas of people that they don’t like.  You have to maintain the relationship while influencing others.

He tells a story…and I wrote these words down from it – “whose words had the force of an oracle.”

The Shogun says to influence we should listen to the opinions of others, however baseless, and then put before them objections “which appear rather involuntary and which to all appearances we regret the necessity of formulating.”  

After you listen, it might sound like “I see.  Hmmm.  Well what about _________ ?  I’m not sure that will work.  It seems that wouldn’t be a good strategy.”

He tells more stories saying to just gently implant your idea into the mind of the (weak, stubborn, argumentative) and it will incubate.

More on confidence tomorrow!