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Have fun asking why following right enemy within

As a kid I knew that a sweater was something you put on when your mother was cold. As a father I say things like, "Take a sweater. You can always leave it in the car."

I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t tell my kids to put on a sweater. I tell them to take one. Call me practical because I’m always prepared.

Call me experienced because I’ve learned that two things stop us from having fun – the constant 'what if' in our minds and Murphy’s Law. According to the one, things will go wrong. Thanks to the other, we kill the moment by imagining 'what if' things go wrong.

Call me wise because I know that being prepared actually makes it possible for me to have more fun. Which is why, Mother, I always take a sweater.

Ask 'why?' successfully

Summer is (finally) over which is why I take a sweater. And why it’s time to get serious again about work. Here’s a question that might help you get serious about the rest of the year. How will you know that it was a successful year for you?

We tend to list the things that should have happened and the things that we should have done. These are ‘what’ questions. What happened? What should have happened? What did I achieve?

When it comes to success, the right questions to ask begin with 'why'? Why should that have happened? Why should I have achieved that?

Do yourself and your colleagues a favor. Ask 'why?', repeatedly. Do this often and you will succeed in irritating them. But the chances are that you will also be more successful. And that’s worth a little irritation.

Mistakenly following right

What is the opposite of 'right'? Before you shout 'left', let me be more specific. What is the opposite of 'right' as in 'correct'? Once upon a time my immediate response would have been 'wrong' as in 'incorrect'. With scratches and scars that tell of me not knowing my left from my right, I now believe that the opposite of 'right' is . . . learning . . . as in 'teaching moment'.

I have never learned as much from being right as I have gained from being wrong. So I wonder, why do we only have positive role models? How about a few negative ones! We might gain more by trying to be less like poor Mr. X rather than striving to be more like spectacular Mrs. Y.

This applies equally to companies. Don’t always compare yourself to a 'better' competitor. Compare yourself to a 'worse' one to see what you should avoid doing at all cost.

Compare the enemy within

We know that success comes from listening to customers and from watching our competitors. We also know that we should pay attention to the people inside our organization.

But we don’t, not really. The attention we pay them is mostly in the form of instructions, rules, and regulations.

And now job scarcity has made it much easier for us to do more telling and less listening. No wonder we spend so much time and energy dealing with internal issues.

When we fail to see our repetitive internal struggles as odd behavior, we have become what Carl Jung called the enemy within. We remain the enemy within as long as we deny that we create our obstacles to success.

Would you like to irritate my enemy within?
Ask 'why' by clicking here

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