Time to Get Vulnerable

By Darren Hardy of ‘Success’ magazine

WHEN you hear the term 'leader', most likely an array of adjectives come to mind. Some may include courageous, strong, powerful, assertive and so on.

Rarely would you think of 'vulnerability' as a trait equating with leadership. 

Darren Hardy of 'Success' magazine

 Those within leadership positions in a company may even believe that displaying signs of vulnerability to your team is a sign of weakness.

But I’m here to tell you that view is wrong. And they couldn’t be more mistaken. In reality, vulnerability is a strength.

All great leaders have vulnerability.

So, in order to help you grow into a more powerful and courageous leader, I want you to be vulnerable.

In my interview with Patrick Lencioni in the February issue of SUCCESS, he said:

“Start by coming to terms with your own vulnerability as a leader and then translate that to your team and then the rest of the organization.”

This reminds me of something Waldo Waldmen, a good friend of mine, said.

He was a Top Gun fighter pilot, like the ones you saw in the movie Top Gun, with Tom Cruise as Maverick and his co-pilot Goose.

Well, Waldo said he learned a great deal about leadership from that experience.

He explained that, after the end of every mission, they would have a debriefing. He said before it started, everyone was required to first TAKE OFF their name tags and their rank.

Now, with an even playing field, they would go over the good, the bad, and the ugly of the mission. And then the leader would take the lead, admitting their own mistakes first.

This process is what they knew as exposing your chest to daggers - meaning showing your own vulnerability first.

What this does is it creates an environment for the new hires, the young wingmen, and the young folks that are in the formation to say:

“You know what? If so and so, the flight lead, or so and so, the Top Gun, is going to share his or her mistakes, then I can do the same thing.”

But it has to come from the top down and a lot of times, it means being a little more vulnerable, a little bit more honest and open with some of the things that are going on.

He said the key is to show you are a human being first and a Top Gun or high-ranking officer second.

Now think about your own leadership meetings when you are doing an ‘after action’ review on a project, meeting or client engagement. Do YOU start the meeting by exposing your mistakes first?

Now I’m not talking about the passive-aggressive admitting of a mistake like, “I never should have trusted so and so with this project or that responsibility.”

That is the opposite of taking responsibility and exposing YOUR failings, and I see and hear that all the time. No really, where did YOU underperform? What did you do wrong?

What bad call or bad move did you make? What did you not anticipate, plan or prepare for?

Be the first to throw your mistakes, thus vulnerability, on the table. As a leader, it’s important you lead by example and set the pace.

Many years ago I had a conversation with Les Brown after he attended a keynote I did, and he gave me some really great advice.

He said, “You are a compelling speaker and certainly you have had a tremendous track record of success, but that won’t help you truly connect, empower and influence an audience.”

He continued, “You can’t just talk to people’s heads or only appeal to their intelligence. You have to talk to their hearts. You can’t move people with logic. They cannot just hear you.

“They have to feel you. And they will only feel you if they know you. Not your title or resume or track record of success, but your story, the whole story.

“The failures, shortcomings, fears and pitfalls - the whole truth of who you really are and how you got here.

“Both the triumphant and the terrible. This is what will make you real and make yourself available to be connected to.”

This was a real awakening for me and a fantastic insight. You’ll even notice a dramatic difference between my first book The Compound Effect and The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster.

You get a real insight into the true journey I took to create what you now see as the entrepreneur success story, but it has been a wild ride of failures, defeats, set-backs, and ego-bruising along the way.

I learned some really valuable lessons and the book is designed to save you from suffering some of the same consequences, and to ultimately accelerate your success.

BUT you will learn a lot more about my personal journey in The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster than you might have even learned about me in The Compound Effect.

This is thanks to learning that while people may be inspired by your success, they are empowered by knowing that you too, like them, have failed, and they too, like you, CAN succeed.

And that is what I am after - helping you realize that YES - YOU. CAN. DO. THIS.

In general, I believe we are in an era of authenticity.

People want to connect with what’s real, open, honest, transparent and authentic. If you want to be a leader today, then one of your greatest keys is to open yourself up to others.

Be real, lead by example in your honesty and openness. If people can feel you and connect with you, they will charge through walls for you.

That is real leadership, real influence, real achievement.

So, what’s your plan?

Think of one way you can open yourself up to the people on your team. How and what can you share about yourself that gives them something to connect with and FEEL?

Come up with just one and do it. Deal? You in? Will you do it? I promise you will be AMAZED at the reaction and connection you create when you do.

Article source: http://tiny.cc/gsvcux

Finding Paradise

By Darren Hardy of SUCCESS Magazine

DO you feel restless or dissatisfied with life?

Do you seek a certain paradise…

The life of your imagination, dreams and childhood fantasies?

Where's your own personal paradise?

Let me see if I can help you find your paradise.

Just the other day, I was talking to a friend of mine, Rachel. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you Rachel has the perfect life.

In her mid-forties she is as healthy and radiant as she’s ever been. She has a husband who adores her and three kids who multiply that love.

Yet lately she admitted, she’s been feeling… restless.

Like something was missing and she had this nagging urge to sneak off and find it.

As I listened to her talk, I recalled a story an old mentor of mine had told me in a time when I felt restless in my own life.

The story went something like…

Once, long ago, there was a man who was displeased with his life.

Yes, he had a wife who loved him and two children who adored him.

He liked his work and had friends he enjoyed, but still something nagged at him.

Daily, he found himself dreaming of an unseen place he heard about called Paradise.

One morning over a bowl of oatmeal, he stopped dreaming of Paradise and decided to go find it.

Without a word to his family, he walked out the front gate with the broken latch, away from the place he had called home and never looked back. He was a man bound for Paradise.

For three days he traveled. And each night, before falling asleep, the man removed his shoes and deliberately pointed them in the direction he had been traveling, toward Paradise.

Each morning he carefully stepped into his shoes and continued his quest.

Then, on the third night, the man accidentally kicked his unofficial compass 180 degrees.

When the first rays of morning fell, the man leapt to his feet, carefully stepped into his shoes and began traveling in the direction they told him to go - toward “Paradise”.

Exactly three days later, he arrived. “Paradise!” he cried from atop the hill. Though, as he stared at the village below, he thought it looked vaguely familiar… but wrote it off as coincidence.

He excitedly descended the hill and walked through the village of Paradise where strangers knew him by name. Of course they did! Why wouldn’t they? This was Paradise!

The man continued until he came to the end of the road where there was a gate with a broken latch.

He walked through, and as he did, he heard a melodious voice calling him in for dinner and could smell the aroma of his favorite meal.

As he opened the front door the man was greeted by two children who yelped “Daddy!” as they wrapped themselves around him and a woman who kissed him like she meant it.

Ah! Paradise he thought.

Now, every morning the man eats his bowl of oatmeal and revels in his new, wonderful life in Paradise.

I finished the story, and Rachel nodded just as I had when I heard it years ago.

I assured her that the desire for Paradise is not itself a crime.

Everyone desires Paradise.

The confusion of where to find Paradise is the problem.

Paradise is a choice.

It is a state of mind.

It comes from within.

Paradise doesn’t exist unless you create it and unless you choose it everyday.

We all seek significance (aka Paradise):

That we are important, that we matter, that our life matters.

The reality is, you already are.

You are significant, you matter, your life matters.

The only thing separating yourself from the knowing is your perspective.

Stopping, looking and realizing the profound impact you making in the worlds of everyone you meet, most particularly those you lead in your home and at the office.

For, my Paradise seeking-friends out there, the next time you feel dissatisfied, kick your shoes around. It may lead you to discovering the Paradise you’ve been living in all along.

Feel free to share this with any like-minded achieving friend, family member, or teammate that may need the wake up call because they are ready to pack up and search for their own paradise.

Article source: http://tiny.cc/244rpx

The Dirty Little Secret of High Performers

By Darren Hardy of 'SUCCESS' Magazine

I think that you'll find this fact shocking:

Most high-performing achievers are lazy.

Darren Hardy - author & publisher of SUCCESS Magazine

Yes, LAZY - but they had big dreams and big goals.

To achieve them, they forced disciplines, routines and rituals on themselves.

Ultimately, then they produced much, much more than people who didn't have the same weaknesses but failed to proactively and aggressively build these important discipline systems into their lives.

If you don't believe me, flip on SportsCenter, where you'll see that some of the most accomplished athletes of all time - renowned for their strict eating habits, grueling fitness programs and intense training schedules, and now retired (goals accomplished) - have reverted to their more “natural” behavior, habits and discipline.

Former National Basketball Association stars Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley quickly come to mind (more, more, more).

And me?

Most people think I'm one of the most disciplined and consistent people they've ever known. Which I am.

But I confess that I am naturally quite lazy.

If you question that, just ask my wife.

I've had to work at building in the systems, rituals, routines and processes to, well, really, protect myself from myself.

That's why I'm so good at teaching these systems - because I'm my own neediest client!

I am intensely disciplined in the areas of my life in which I really want results, improvement and success.

Outside those areas, well, not as much. I didn't realize this dichotomy until I started to see the same reality in über-successful people I know and have interviewed.

Outside their areas of focus, where they've built in routines and proactively developed habits, they're not as disciplined or hardworking as you'd expect.

You can take away two great insights from learning this dirty little secret about high achievers:

1) The success of those you admire has less to do with their inborn talent, intelligence, nature or any other gift, and is more dependent on the processes for creating and reinforcing successful habits that they built into their lives and environments.

And, 2), even if you are lazy, you can become a superstar success! In fact, it might become your advantage!

Article source: http://tiny.cc/dk2wfx

Be a Game-Changer

By Darren Hardy of Success magazine

STOP playing the game.

Change the game.

Bringing your shade of vanilla to the market is no longer acceptable. You are going to have to add some chili pepper or foie gras (seriously, try Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream in San Francisco).

Be a game-changer.. and win big

Today everyone can be an entrepreneur.

But to win - win big, that is - you can’t just join the game that has been running for 20 years… heck, not even the last five.

You have to disrupt the game.

You have to innovate, create and change the game entirely.

The über-successful achievers on SUCCESS magazine covers are game-changers. They didn’t join the status quo; they disrupted it - big time.

Consider our three latest cover entrepreneurs - Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh and Ryan Seacrest. They all achieved their extraordinary successes because they saw the game and changed it.

Today’s entrepreneur must ask herself or himself the all-important question, What would it take for me to be a game-changer in my industry?

Ask yourself, What would it take for me to be a game-changer in my industry?

Here are five key ways you can stop playing the game and start changing it:

• Solution. Start with what people want. Don’t invent something no one cares about. You have to add value where pain or a need exists. Then change the game by providing the solution (e.g., Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Starbucks vs. Folgers, Pandora vs. radio).

• Process. How can your method of sourcing, manufacturing, designing, engineering or delivery change the game in your industry (Dell Direct vs. retail, Amazon vs. bookstores, green builders and designers vs. traditional ones, Tesla’s high-performance electric cars vs. other vehicles)?

• Communication. Can the way you interact with your clients change the game? Can you humanize your contact and connection with your market (Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Seacrest’s tweets to more than 12   million followers)?

• Marketing and message. Can you be a “white knight” to your industry or society (TOMS shoes, Starbucks, Warby Parker, Kenneth Cole, Dove)? Can you be clever enough to game-change the conversation in the marketplace (Ben & Jerry’s, Old Spice, Hyundai)?

• Technology. Being first to adopt sweeping new technologies can also make you a game-changer: mobile wallet, mobile applications, social media, tablet computing, real-time Internet, streaming video, virtual malls/shopping, 3-D printing, Big Data, etc.

Oh, and for those who already are game-changers in their industries, it’s best that you change your own game before it changes on you.

Apple is a great example. The company’s iPod was a game-changer for personal music devices. But the game has changed on the iPod. Sales have fallen dramatically as it was disrupted by… the smartphone.

Apple isn’t reeling from waning iPod sales, though—the company’s iPhone set the standard for the disrupting new device, and iPhone profits far exceed revenue lost on iPods.

It’s best to self-disrupt if you want to stay in the game.

I don’t want to let you off easy here. I really want to encourage, prod and push you to think about how you can be the game changer in your industry.

Again, it’s likely that if you don’t initiate and lead the change, someone else will and the marketplace might be pulled right from underneath your feet.

Article source: http://tiny.cc/jkrvbx

Is Success in Your DNA?

By Darren Hardy of 'Success' magazine

“Success just isn’t in your DNA.”

I’ll never forget the day she said those words to me.

I was in eleventh grade English class, and it was a Friday. I was eager for the bell to ring so I could get to baseball practice. We had a big game that night. As the bell tolled the teacher asked me to come to her office after class.

I knew this couldn’t be good.

I sat across from her as she handed me our most recent essay test with a big red letter that came much later in the alphabet than I had hoped. She told me not to be discouraged - that everyone has different skills and that this just wasn’t my “thing.”

“But even if you aren’t successful at writing,” she continued, “You can be successful at other things, like baseball. Didn’t you hit a home run last weekend?”

I knew she was trying to be helpful, but there was something about what she said that I didn’t like.

Her tone implied it had already been decided, not just that I wasn’t successful at writing but that I couldn’t be. And when I questioned her, she answered: “That kind of success just isn’t in your DNA, Darren.”

It’s true. My DNA certainly wasn’t extraordinary. My mother was absent, living a couple thousand miles away, working, I think, as a waitress and sometimes bartender. My dad was a college football coach with fewer nurturing instincts than a frat boy.

If you were to count up the “success strands” in my double helix, it wouldn’t add up to much, and my teacher had clearly done the math. But then again…

* Benjamin Franklin was the 15th of 17 children, had two years of schooling and was the son of a candle maker.
* Ralph Lauren was the son of a house painter.
* Steve Jobs was born to two college students who also gave him away to adoption.
* Sara Blakely, self-made (now) billionaire and founder of Spanx, had planned to be a lawyer until she failed the LSAT. Twice.
* Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then as a software sales person from which he was fired.
* Sean “P. Diddy, Puff Daddy” Combs lived in public housing in Harlem where his father was shot to death when he was two.
* Susie Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer, her mother was a secretary. Susie started as a waitress.
* Former General Colin Powell was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He as a solid C student.
* Tony Hawk was so attention deficit, hyperactive that he was tested for psychological problems.
* Oprah Winfrey was born to a teenage mother in poverty-stricken rural Mississippi.
* Both my mentors - Jim Rohn and Paul J. Meyer - barely squeaked out of high school.

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

I wonder if any of their teachers ever sat them down and told them success just wasn’t in their DNA? Think how our world would be different if they had believed it, if they hadn’t gone on to create and live such extraordinary lives.

I wonder if anyone has ever said that to you?

I had a lot of time to think about what my teacher had said as I stood in the outfield that Friday night and somewhere during a home run lap, I vowed to prove her wrong.

Well I wonder if New York Times best-selling author and publisher and editor of SUCCESS magazine is enough… HA! Take that Mrs. So and So…. whom I’d love to rub your nose in it (just a little!) but I can’t remember your name - that is how much I have erased your commentary from my brain!

And really, it’s not all Mrs. So and So’s fault. During the 1920s America experienced a brief infatuation with eugenics and the idea that a man’s destiny and character were almost entirely determined by his DNA.

I know, ridiculous, right? But let’s remember during the same time they were performing lobotomies and shock therapy as regular practice for depression, and “coloreds” and women were not considered equal in the “All men are created equal” line of the Declaration of Independence.

Thankfully, ALL those crazy beliefs have been dispelled now. Including the one that your destiny and potential has anything to do with your DNA.

Here’s the deal. No matter what your DNA, or who calls you into their office and says what they say, YOU always get to decide. YOU are the creator of your destiny while you traverse this planet.

Success IS in your DNA.

And a final thank you to Mrs. So and So. Thank you for ticking me off, thus firing me up to prove you wrong. That was very helpful.

Article source: http://tiny.cc/SuccessDNA

Doing the Impossible

By Darren Hardy of Success magazine

“We are. We are going to stop them.”

It was a promise, a battle cry - to end a country’s longest war. But this battle cry wasn’t bellowed by a mighty Roman general or a U.S. president.

No, it was uttered in a dark room in northern Uganda, to a frightened boy, by a recent college graduate from San Diego.

And it was impossible.

The college kid was Jason Russell, founder of Invisible Children.

The war in Africa led by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and warlord Joseph Kony, the first person indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The boy was 12-year-old Jacob, who - like 30,000 other children - had been abducted by the LRA. Jacob also had watched as his brother was murdered by Kony.

Russell believed that if U.S. citizens knew about these atrocities, they would stop them. But how could Russell and his two co-founders spread the word in the United States? Well, by appearing on Oprah!
But getting on Oprah was about as easy as stopping a war.

April 25, 2009, was the day. In Chicago 3,000 people gathered to demand attention from national news to be the voice for invisible children halfway around the world. An Oprah-worthy crowd, they were certain.

They stood outside in 40 mph winds and sheets of cold rain. The crowd quickly dwindled to 300 freezing-cold, trash-bag-clad believers.

It wasn’t enough.

No media came.

No Oprah Winfrey.

Nothing.

One day, two days, five frigid days passed - days without sleeping, showers or success. They called news stations; they called Oprah’s main switchboard.

Nothing. The brave 300 moved through the city, refusing to give up, but victory looked… impossible.

The sixth day was a Friday. Russsell and his team knew it was their last chance - Oprah didn’t air on the weekend, and the crowd wouldn’t stay. At 2:48 a.m. the troops mobilized, numbering 500 after out-of-town reinforcements arrived.

Before sunrise they walked to the show’s Harpo Studios and, shoulder to shoulder, surrounded the block.

When Winfrey’s car pulled in at 7:15 a.m., she asked her “people” about the ragtag crowd. Her people strongly advised that she stay away - to just ignore them.

But at this point, ignoring them was impossible.

Moments later, Winfrey emerged. She invited Russell and a few others inside.

Those left behind were concerned that they had infuriated the most powerful woman in the world.
Instead they had done the impossible.

She invited them to go on the air, live, in an hour. Right then, right there - Russell and his unstoppable team told the largest, most committed viewing audience in the United States about Kony.

That a war was raging. That children were abducted and murdered brutally and in terrifying numbers. And that together, “We are. We are going to stop them.”


You, too, can do the impossible.

Article Source: http://tiny.cc/DoImposs