Years ago, I came upon one of the most simple and powerful quotes I’ve ever read. It’s from Mohandas Gandhi, who in his 78 years of life, gave us so many great quotes (and his actions too!).

“Action Expresses Priorities.”

That’s it. That’s MY secret to getting things done.

Think about it — All of your actions, all the things you do, all the things you deliver — set your priorities. Once you take action, you instantly decide what you want to do first. Why? People tend to act upon those things that have meaning to them.

But I think it’s deeper than that. I think when you don’t know what to do, you need to just take action anywhere and suddenly certain things will start to fall into place.

But that’s the problem today — we don’t take action. We’re afraid to — we procrastinate, over-analyze, and postpone because we are sometimes afraid of action.

Because action will ensure we have to make a decision — we have to do something that is sometimes hard, or we will have to deal with the results of that action.

But what we don’t realize is that action moves us forward. It propels us . . . it forces us to rocket faster and faster. And sometimes we are afraid of that.

So ask yourself:

• How can I take action today?
• What should I do first? Second? Third?
• What should I stop doing?

So the next time you are putting off something — a decision, a task, a phone-call — just think “Action Expresses Priorities”.

Image provided by Ramkarthikblogger at Flickr.

I was having a chat with my good friend Margo Meeker and we hit upon a reality that clearly crosses both our vocations (Therapist/Life Coach & Executive/Business Coach).

Most business problems in one way or another come from personal problems.

Let me begin by saying that this doesn’t mean if your company’s stock drops it is directly related to your fights with your spouse . . . . then again . . . . .

But there are many corollaries with many business issues/problems/obstacles and certain limitations that are personal. Here are some examples:

• The majority of business issues usually begin with bad communication. Why? If there is an issue or blow-up, it’s usually bad or anemic communication channels that impact people’s feelings and self-esteem. Monitor your feelings.
• Micro-managing bosses are extremely overbearing. Why? They focus more on your responsibilities and performance than their own deliverables. Why? They have trust issues that usually stem from past relationships. Build better ‘trust’ bridges with your boss.
• Peers that undercut you during a critical presentation or meeting shunts you into damage control. Why? They see everyone as a threat and instead of dealing with it internally, they lash out. Talk to them and find out what’s really bothering them.
• Executives that lie, steal, and cheat. Why? They never built a strong moral code in their life and have consistently seen that their abberant behavior succeeds (in the short run) and pays handsome dividends in money and power (until they get caught). If you work for them, leave. If they work for you, fire them. If you work with them, rat them out (just kidding there folks).

Think of a situation or person that is causing you angst . . . odds are that they have one or more personal issues directing their behavior. The best way to ameliorate the issue? Try to figure out the personal problem impacting the business problem and nicely deliver solutions to (or at least try to understand) the real cause of the situation. You will be surprised how fast they disappear.

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“I’ve had a few arguments with people, but I never carry a grudge. You know why? While you’re carrying a grudge, they’re out dancing.” - Buddy Hackett

We all get angry. It’s normal.

The real question is WHY we get angry. As I tell my clients, to be happy, we need to have a certain amount of control in our lives. Not totally, but we have to have a handle on many situations to ensure that we don’t go quietly insane.

Unfortunately, things do go a little out of kilter. And our natural response is to get frustrated. That’s normal — something is knocking us out of our normal routine or belief structure and our body/mind reacts with frustration.

A typical example are KIDS. If you come home and the family room is a mess, you are immediately out of control (a clean room) and you react with frustration. A lot of parents (me included) might move right into anger and yell at the kids to clean up the room.

The same thing happens at work. A client, a vendor, a team member or your boss capriciously changes the project, agreement, or decision and promptly you are out of control, accelerating into frustration-land and anger is right around the corner.

How do you solve this? When you feel control ebbing away and you start to feel frustration, stop for a second and embrace the feeling. Don’t zip right into anger — try to leverage the part of your brain that solves problems.

What you’ve really been thrown is a problem. Work is made up of problems. Your job is to solve these problems. This is just one more problem you need to solve. Take the emotion, your ego, out of the equation. Recognize it for what it really is, a problem that needs a solution.

Because the minute you get angry, you really lose control and it takes you farther away from getting back in control. Take your kids — you can yell at them — your blood pressure rises, they are scared/resentful, there is acrimony in the air, etc.

If you pull back and start directing them to clean up assertively (no anger), you’ll find dutiful helpers who actually clean the room – no acrimony, no high-blood pressure.

Focus on getting back into control at work — solve the problem. Here’s an added benefit — people notice when you don’t get angry or fly off the handle. They pay attention when you are composed in chaos and deliver alternative solutions to solve the problem.

That’s the difference between good and great leaders.

What techniques do you use to get back into control?

Okay — the title might be a little misleading. If you just robbed a bank and are evading the authorities, this post will probably not work for you (sorry).

But for most business and career problems — this will do just fine.

Let me start by explaining what I call “The Whirlwind”.

What’s a “Whirlwind”? The offficial definition is:
Whirlwind - Noun
1 : a small rotating windstorm of limited extent
2 : a confused rush : a whirlwind of meetings
3 : a violent or destructive force

Whenever we are faced with a powerful problem in our lives, we probably encounter The Whirlwind. It is a violent force that spins out of control in our heads. It mixes up our current thought processes, past failures, and future fears. In addition, it easily combines straightforward facts with a bevy of crazy emotions. To make it worse, there is usually a time, importance, or personnel component that just adds to the anxiety and severity.

And you wonder why you can’t solve this problem.

What we normally do is keep this Whirlwind bottled up in our heads. We might even talk to a number of people about it — but most of the time, it just gets worse and you rarely ever solve the problem.

So what do you do?
Get The Whirlwind Out Of Your Head!

You need a process to eliminate ALL emotions from your problem solving and develop factual options which eventually lead to a solution. Follow these rules to the letter (no deviation!):

1. Take out a sheet of paper or stand at a whiteboard.
2. Have a pencil or whiteboard marker ready to go.
3. At the top of the page (or board), write what the problem is. Be clear, succinct, and ensure that it covers what the problem is. As an example, you can write: “Interpersonal Issues With Tom: Duties, Meetings, Staff”.
4. Define The Problem. Here’s the catch: it can only be no more than 3 bullet points. Example:
   a. Tom cannot keep to his promised deadlines (over-promise, under-deliver).
   b. Tom has a hard time staying focused at his meetings and loses control of the group.
   c. Tom’s staff is unfocused and are now coming to me for direction.
5. Develop possible solutions to each of the bullet points. Example:
   a. Tom cannot keep to his promised deadlines (over-promise, under-deliver).
   - Talk to Tom about this situation – refer to facts and instances only. Ask him how he would solve the problem.
   - Begin to manage Tom more closely. Schedule frequent, regular, but short meetings to cover progress.
   - Uncover what is the ‘real’ cause of Tom’s inability to meet deadlines.
   - Follow up after one month – track progress.
6. Sometimes you might need to do a PROS & CONS list. Especially when balancing a difficult decision.

Bottom line — get the Whirlwind out of your head and get it on paper. You’ll find that it will be so much easier to solve and you’ll feel better in the long run.

By Orville Schell at The Los Angeles Times.

It is impossible to focus on those Himalayan highlands without realizing that something that once seemed immutable and eternal has become vulnerable, even perishable. Those magnificent glaciers are wasting away on an overheated planet, and no one knows what to do about it.

Another tipping point has also been on my mind lately, and it’s left me no less melancholy. In this case, the threat is to my own country, the United States. We Americans too seem to have passed a tipping point. Like the glaciers of the high Himalaya, long-familiar aspects of our nation are beginning to seem as if they are, in a sense, melting away.

In the last few months, as I’ve roamed the world from San Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai, I’ve taken to keeping a double- entry list of what works and what doesn’t, country by country. Unfortunately, it’s become largely a list of what works elsewhere but doesn’t work here. In places such as China, South Korea, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland and (until recently) the United Arab Emirates, you find people hard at work on the challenges of education, transportation, energy and the environment. In these places, one feels the kind of hopefulness and can-do optimism that used to abound in the United States.

China, a country I’ve visited more than 100 times since 1975, elicits an especially complicated set of feelings in me. Its Leninist government doesn’t always live up to Western ideals on such things as political transparency, the rule of law, human rights and democracy. And yet it has managed to conjure an economic miracle. In China today, you feel an unmistakable sense of energy and optimism in the air that, believe me, is bittersweet for an American pondering why the regenerative powers of his own country have gone missing.

As I’ve traveled from China’s gleaming, efficient airports to our often-chaotic and broken-down versions of the same, or ridden on Europe’s high-speed trains that so sharply contrast with our clunky, slowly vanishing passenger rail system, I keep expanding my list of what works here at home and what doesn’t.

Over time, the list’s entries have fallen into three categories. There are things that are robust and growing, replete with promise, the envy of the world. Then there are those things that are still alive and kicking but are precariously balanced between growth and decline. Finally, there are those things that are irredeemably broken.

Here is the score card as I see it:

• , which is delivering much of the world’s most innovative research and ideas.
• Silicon Valley, which has enormous inventiveness, energy and capital at its disposal.
• Civil society, which, despite the collapse of the economy, seems to be luring the best and brightest young people, and superbly performs the crucial function of goading government and other institutions.
• American philanthropy, which is the most evolved, well funded and innovative in the world.
• The U.S. military, the best-led, -trained and -equipped on the planet, despite being repeatedly thrust into hopeless wars by stupid politicians.
• The spirit and cohesiveness of small-town American life.
• The arts, including our film industry, which remains the globe’s sole superpower of entertainment, along with the requisite networks of orchestras, ballet companies, theaters, pop music groups and world-class museums.

Aspects of U.S. life that still function but need help:

• Higher and secondary school education, in which America boasts some of the globe’s preeminent institutions. Increasingly, though, many of the best institutions are private, and jewel-in-the-crown public systems such as California’s continue to be hit with devastating budget cuts.
• Environmental protection, which compares favorably with that in other countries despite being underfunded.
• The national energy system, which still delivers but is overdependent on oil and coal, and depends on a grid badly in need of upgrading.

Aspects of U.S. life in need of drastic intervention:

• Public elementary education, which in most states is desperately underfunded and fails to deliver on its promise to provide all children with high-quality schooling.
• The federal government, which is essentially paralyzed by partisanship and incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems.
• State governments, which are largely dysfunctional and nearly insolvent.
• American infrastructure, including highways, docks, bridges and tunnels, dikes, waterworks and other essential systems we aren’t maintaining and upgrading as we should.
• Airlines and the airports they service, which are almost Third World in equipment and service standards.
• Passenger rail, which has not one mile of truly high-speed rail.
• The financial system, whose over-paid executives and underregulated practices ran us off an economic cliff in 2008 and compromised the whole system in the eyes of the world.
• The electronic media, which, except for public broadcasting and a vital and growing Internet, are an overly commercialized, broken-down mess that have let down the country in terms of keeping us informed.
• Print media, which from newspaper publishing to book publishing are in crisis.
• Basic manufacturing, which has fallen so far behind it seems headed for oblivion.

I started keeping these lists because I was searching for things that would banish that dispiriting sense that America is in decline. And yet the can-do list remains unbearably short and the can’t-do one grows each time I travel.

American prowess and promise, once seemingly as much a permanent part of the global landscape as glaciers, mountains and oceans, seems to be melting away by the day, just like the great Himalayan ice fields.

Orville Schell is the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. He is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and the author of many books on China. A longer version of this article appears at tomdispatch.com.

Working with employees to resolve performance problems is one of your key leadership responsibilities. How well you meet that responsibility will depend on your ability to fully understand the nature of each problem you face. By identifying desired and actual performance, you begin building that understanding.

1. Identify the desired and actual performance in specific, behavioral terms. Write them down.

2. Determine the negative impact of the problem — the ways others are affected — in specific terms. Write them down.

3. Identify the realistic consequences the employee will face if the problem is not resolved. Write them down.

4. Check “past practices”. Have similar problems occurred elsewhere in the organization? How were they handled?

5. Determine what type of discussion is appropriate: Coaching? Counseling? Formal Discipline?

6. Seek counsel and obtain necessary approvals if formal discipline is involved.

Without question, the most critical component of the problem-solving process is preparation. How you handle this activity will, with few exceptions, shape the discussion, employee’s response, the outcome, and the nature of your long-term relationship with each other.