Better Management Begins With You

Begin by seeing what is really happening when some unhappy, annoyed and bad mood takes you over.  Try seeing that such a negative mood is just a bluff, that it does not belong to who you really are at all.  See that you do not have to dwell in any unhappy mental space at all, that you have more positive, creative and useful things to attend to and cultivate.  See that your mind is like a garden – you can water the flowers and the fruit trees and let the weeds of nasty moods whither from lack of cultivation.  Why feed your personal problems when you can feed your personal solutions instead?

You can learn to make better decisions.  To begin with, you must consciously and responsibly bear the consequences of previous wrong decisions of yours until the consequences have exhausted themselves and cleared a space for more thoughtful and better decisions.  You must not try to pretend to yourself or others that you have made no mistakes.  You must honestly resolve to learn from your mistakes.  You will be amazed how much people respect those who admit their bad decisions, those who are resolved to learn and do better.  Most disrespect comes to those who pretend they are right where they have been all too obviously wrong.

Your self-serving explanations to yourself and others are helping neither you nor the situation.  Face the fact of the problem you have become for yourself and others.  Denial of the truth of your own actual position will only make it worse in the long run.  Truth is your friend, not your enemy.  Let the real truth of yourself lead you into interesting new waters of your voyage through life.  You have nothing to lose but the tension you go through having to guard a false position.  You will be happier when you are better placed somewhere else in your organization or even entirely outside of it.  Can you see how much this might apply to you?

Pay more attention to what you can do to improve yourself and less attention to what others can do against you.  Stop letting other people do your thinking for you.  It is only because you do not do real thinking of your own that you get led into personal disasters and turmoil.  Many of your bad decisions have come from agreeing with the bad decisions of others.  Do you see this? 

Stop trying to be right all the time and start being real all the time.  Begin with yourself, not with what others may think of you.  When you are right with yourself is when you become real.  When you are secretly wrong with yourself, you are a false human being making bad decisions that only seem O.K. because they have become habitual, have become part of all the wrong routines all around you that keep generating problems and crises.

Vernon Howard once said, ”If a man could endure for twenty-five minutes all the things he has hidden from himself for twenty-five years, he would redeem those twenty-five years in twenty-five minutes.”

Better management begins with you.  It is you who have to change and fast.