State Management & Managing Your States

No, this is not an essay on how to run a country.

By ‘states’, I am referring to ‘bodily states’. How your body feels and senses at any one time, can be described as your ‘state’. You may be familiar with the song ‘New York State of Mind’, and the term ‘mind over matter’. In cases of legality, one may have to prove ‘the state of mind’.

I learnt about ‘managing my states’ in 1995. I attended a workshop on ‘An Introduction to NLP’, and my mind became aware of what my five senses afforded me at that time. I learnt to play with the voices in my head, feelings, memories, imagination, and other sensations. Certainly, these were all private, internal, processes that I had no working manual to refer to. So, I wrote an operating-manual for it, which has since undergone multiple revisions and versions.

Two-and-half decades later, I am still raising my bar in my sporting aspirations. I began with competitive bodybuilding, and then shifted to racing in marathons and triathlons. Every year, I attempt to complete successfully at least one marathon (42.2km) and Ironman triathlon (3.8km swim, 180km cycling, 42.2km run). For each event, I have to be as well-prepared and mentally-conditioned to face the race-day, whatever the weather and terrain conditions would be.

For each of my fellow participant, their goals can be vary from completion to competition. My hopeful results are based on living and demonstrating the credo of the Olympic Games, namely, ‘Faster, Stronger and Higher’.

My 18-years of tacit experience and wisdom in racing in endurance, multi-sports, events has taught me to manage my physiological (bodily) states on several levels. These include:

1)   Manage my level and tolerance of pain (braving extreme cold and heat, cramps, injuries, painful stings, gut disorders)

2)   Manage my sensory level of discomfort (conditions of water, waves, currents, taste of the water I swim in, sweatiness, dirt, windiness, heat, cold, flies, and much more)

3)   Doing ‘damage control’, especially when my results start to slip away, as my fatigue level increases (deciding to stop and rest, feeding my body, and walking when I have to)

4)   Dealing with disappointments, especially when the results were expected/unexpected

5)   Dealing with distractions, confusion, uncertainty and changes to my plan (consider this: The race distance was modified for safety reasons; or cancelled due to extreme weather)

Managing my states is one of my motivations to racing. Sometimes, it hurts even more when you want something badly enough. In competitive racing, we call this ‘digging deep’. That is, we harness on our resources (limited) and our RESOURCELFULNESS (a useful value to tap on in times of crises). I am sue many entrepreneurs can relate strongly to the string of challenges that may be laid out in their quest for their business dreams. The successful ones keep rising incessantly when they fall. Even skillful cyclists still fall off their bicycles.

When I earned my qualification spots in the Boston Marathon, or the Ironman world championships, they were ‘painful joyfulness’. In managing my states to get there, I had to learn to stay focused, patient and calm (on the inside).

With the current global pandemic, millions of people are affected physically and psychologically by the stress(ors) of a personal viral threat: its impending infection, spread, fear, concern, anxiety, and other equally virulent impact from it (economic, financial, self-esteem, well-being). How can we strengthen our mental and physiological resolve (physical and emotional) to deal with it? How do we manage our responses and reactions to these stressors? What can we do to alter our attitude and behaviors, in managing ourselves and those we are entrusted with?

Only when we actively manage how we think and feel (internal factors) in the face of external factors, can we then sensibly and sensitively manage our people. We won’t be effective in leading others if we are ‘headless chickens’. Meanwhile, stay focused while re-building our teams, and encourage and embolden them for future discomforts and distractions.

Valuing Oneself & Others

How do you measure performance and value your talents?

Have you 'actually' measured your value?

'Perceived value' translates into 'actual value'. That is why the best people are sought after by potential employers and executive search specialists. When these people value your skills, wisdom, experiences and competencies you get compensated more, are recognised and  valued even further. 'Pay for the best' is the truism when it come to employment and employability.

How do you appraise your value? How do you get valued like a precious diamond is assigned a price-tag, or your property/real estate is appraised?

Before your next performance appraisal, do a SWOT Analysis. Born of marketing, and used to assess the value of a brand, SWOT can be used to assess your valuable skills, and Unique Selling Points (USPs). SWOT is an acronym for Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By identifying, in detail and exactness, your Strengths (abilities and capabilities) - you can project your Opportunities (including future value and potential). Your Weaknesses need to be reduced, and converted into competencies or your Threats increase to become your risks.

Do a SWOT Analysis before your next Performance Appraisal interview, job interview, or when updating your LinkedIn profile. 

Leadership Lessons: How do you value yourself? How do you value others? How do you answer questions relating to value, relevance and importance?

The Currency of Wisdom

How do you actively develop your wisdom?

How often do you seek your wisdom of hindsight? That is, your inner-eye that helps you reference your future decisions with your past.

On the one hand, we experience self-talk like 'once beaten, twice shy', 'I should have listened to my gut feeling' and 'rash decisions'. On the other, you may have appreciated moments like 'Eureka!', 'my intuition talked to me' and 'I was fortunate/lucky'. We can attribute our success and failures to being acutely attuned to both our senses (sensitive, sensible) and our intuition (sixth sense, gut feel, instinct).

Learn From Your Failures
There is a truism that we can learn from our mistakes and failures. How exactly does one learn from disappointing results? Unguided, we may wallow in self-pity and become depressed. With the right internal lenses, we can filter out the emotions to attain the filtrate of 'good stuff'. These include lessons that we may apply at the next decision. What to avoid, be mindful of, cognisant about - we can apply this to our next business venture, relationship, and commitment. Sports-coaches remind us to write our thoughts and feelings while they are freshly-imprinted in our minds. We can review our results, and make adjustments in our planning and preparation for future attempts.

Learn From Your Successes
When you achieve a new milestone in your life, reflect over what you enjoyed about it. Ponder over how you would achieve your results and performance differently next time. Which values did you learn from your success? Humility, patience, consideration, respect, trust, care, and many more. What did you add to your character in your success? How can you build on your abilities, and expand and extend into your capabilities? Wisdom from our success can help us become confident to 'dream bigger for longer'. We can enter the realm of personal excellence and mastery, as such.

Leadership Lessons: How do you draw on your wisdom? How often do you convert to your currency of wisdom? How do you apply it to your decisions in business, socially, as well as in your personal relationships? Add to your wisdom. Observe, reflect, extract, from your experiences and use it for your learning and application.

Listening To Your List

We have written about using lists and even designing our own Bucket List. What else do we need to know about the listing of important tasks and priorities? Even Santa Claus’s list has been audited annually for any inconsistencies and miscreants. Do the crime, and do the time.

Have you considered your internal list? That is the list that we all subscribe to, now and then. This list includes our: dreams, aspirations, wishes, values, doubts, worries, unhappiness, and suspicions. We need to manage this internal list, which can upset our equilibrium of our mental health, confidence, spirit, and trust in our world. What bothers you most in life? What are you struggling with? Which aspects of your achievements are you most proud of?

Listen closely to your list. Sometimes, our mind reminds us to listen in to our ‘list of demands’. It is natural to be selfish for some moments in your life, and take care of yourself. Even caregivers, parents and nurturers need to take good care of themselves. Submit, occasionally, to your list of TLC and WIIFM and you may be in a heightened state of capability and performance. Celebrate your success. Learn from your defeats, failures and disappointments. Develop wisdom. Write your philosophy and wisdom out, and articulate with others.

Have a private chat with yourself, and review your list. And, listen closely to it.

Leadership Begins Outside of Corporate Life

Let’s face it: corporate leadership is being questioned for its values and effectiveness. The masses demand that leadership deliver, with their expectations of deliverables, leadership values and strength of character. Disappoint them, and the consumers and Followers can boycott a company’s products and services. Choices are ubiquitous. Companies can choose to lead with their head, heart or hands or self-implode from arrogance and conceit. Number One can slide down the spiral of self-indulgence and self-aggrandisement.

Have a holistic view of leadership: from within, and from without. Looking inwards, we glean from our hindsight, insight, and foresight. From the outside, we can learn lessons and wisdom of those who became regarded as models of inspiration and best-in-class practice. Let who you are in your personal life manifest itself in your professional life. We cannot have opposing sets of values. ‘Being yourself’ is not a pipe-dream in a corporate setting.

Professionalism is about reducing inappropriate behaviors. Start with ourselves! Lead with our actions. Talk is cheap. Theft is rampant. Control is on the rise by fearful people. Opportunists will patiently wait at every corner. Self-esteem and self-worth are taking a beating because leaders continue to talk down to their staff. Please remove archaic and demeaning titles like ‘subordinates’, ‘employees’ and ‘superiors’ from your Performance Appraisal forms and system. Treat staff like a colleague and person, not a prisoner number. Add value by creating pleasant working experiences and have productive conversations.

Communicate constantly and clearly. If your business language is not strong enough, do it face-to-face or over the telephone. Written skills are not a core competency of many, especially those who ignorantly hide behind templates, and are naïve about their lack of clarity. Reduce doubt, worry and anxiety because staff will intuitively suspect you of your dubious behaviors and intentions as a leader. Update your status and stature as a manager and do the right thing.

Earn your title as a leader. Live it. Express it. Let the Dragon within us arise!

Wisdom from Bart Yasso Over Twitter Chat

This was gleaned from the boisterous blasts of tweets at 12.00am, Tuesday, Singapore time. It was akin to seasickness with the avalanche of questions rolling in large discrete packets; Twitter chat has it limitations. Bart Yasso (@BartYasso) is Chief Running Officer of Runner’s World magazine, and he co-hosted an hour’s worth of Q&A. He wrote his biography ‘My Life On the Run’.

Here are the highlights of Bart’s wisdom (he has run over-1,000 marathons) during the hour-long ‘chat’:

1)    There are fuel and food every 4 miles for most ultra-marathons. Carry water all the time and refuel at all stations.

2)    Do speed-work if you are to reduce your half- or full-marathon times.

3)    I would eat at any fuel zone, and only ate what looked good.

4)    Time in the bank doesn’t work.

5)    Longest training run for a half-marathon should be 10-12 miles.

6)    You can only do 2 or 3 key workouts per week – long run, hills & Yasso 800s – something like Tuesday, Friday & Sunday.

7)    Walk-runs work just as well. Do it on your long runs.

8)    You need some morning runs to let your body get used to running at the race-start time. Just once a week.

9)    Use the foam-roller and the stick to ease knots out of your calves.

10) Running is all about community.

11) Dress warmly when it rains.

12) Eat something light about two hours before the race. During the race,

13) Eat every 30 minutes – gel, blocks – test it in training.

The Perception Principle Powers Positivism

Once upon a time, a potential client informed me: ‘Although you are, probably, the most suitable for this job, our senior management would prefer somebody older.’

I was denied the opportunity because of my youth. A few days ago on Facebook, my friend remarked about my abundance of grey hair when he saw a few of my racing shots. It seems, that years after that incident, that my Richard Gere head-of-karmic-returns has received more positive feedback. In turn, I have been accepted for the physical imperfection I possess. Perception is a form of reality. And, reality is both within and without.

If the silver population reflects wisdom, and we value it in our communities, then we should continue to hire skillful and capable staff. If tacit wisdom and experience matter, then we can farm it, and grow its potential. On the other hand, youth and youthfulness is not to be dismissed. We can be energised and rejuvenated by new and radical ideas.

Watching my older friends excel in their choice of sports and pastime makes me pleased. It motivates me, and I am stoked by it. I enjoy watching their progress. It is, as if, aging is regressed. They do get better with age. In sports, there will be days where we succeed in besting our times, and there are others where we miss the mark. As Bill Bowerman of Oregon/NIKE used to say: ‘The real purpose of running isn’t about winning a race. It is to test the limits of the human heart.’

Congratulations to all the age groupers for last weekend’s race – and to those who qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Las Vegas in September. I will be off for an overseas teaching assignment today, and I hope to update you on a daily basis. This will be my 19^th country in my resume of overseas work, and I am looking forward to my work, and even a few short running sessions there.

Quote Me on This!

"Running is about more than just putting one foot in front of the other; it is about our lifestyle and who we are." Joan Benoit Samuelson

Quote.

The above quote came via one of my Twitter friends, who captured the quote from one of the world’s best marathoners. I love quotations, as some of these eventually merge into my cache of internal or external mantras. Mantras are usually quotes that are recited in repetition, or become clichés through time if these are habitual verbal spouts. Famous people tend to be quoted often, through their writings or public interviews.

Quotes are interesting verbal utterances. In journalism, you may be familiar with ‘Don’t quote me on this!’ and wonder why they do. Usually, the best stuff is often not quoted (but appear in print, nonetheless). Quotes may include wise sayings, or words of wisdom – drawn from tacit wisdom and experience. Quotes are distilled knowledge, filtered finely through time. It is précis writing at its verbal best.

Blogs are archives of open quotes. The writer expresses his or her own thoughts, musings, random thoughts, babbles and sharing. Certain, random outbursts of unbridled thinking can lead to humiliation and shame. Never accept a quote provoked in a moment of emotional outburst. It can be raw and unsavoury.

In an abstract sense, quotations may conceal personal strategies for success. Virgin’s Richard Branson’s ‘Screw it. Just do it!’ suggests that at times we should be proactive and decisive, and not hesitate. ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.’

Which quotes keep you moving, one step in front of the other? Which quotes activate you into action? Which quotes sustain your actions and passion? Which quotes remind you to stop, take stock and smell the roses?

Unquote.
******
'Status update: Sprained my right wrist last Wednesday before a ride'; rode on adrenaline for two more hours until I responded to body's shocked state. Applied RICES and rehabilitative interventions. More mobility, markedly reduced swelling. Hand grip improved, with wider range of finger mobility. Spirit still high, thanks to well wishes from friends and associates. Mild setback; what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Enjoyed the forced rest. My new Elite Razor Carbon is fine - at a glance, she does look like a traditional steel-bike (painted deliberately as such). Listen to your body.'

Motivation by Inspirational Quotes

I have recently connected, on Tweeter, compilers of inspirational quotes. They research and source extensively for quotes by famous people. I get to enjoy quotations from celebrities and famous people from history. Get on Tweeter and choose to be a follower of some of these tweeters. I can log on, and appreciate a quote within two pages.

I love reading quotations. In each of these bite-size orations, I get a glimpse of the speaker’s wisdom’ wisdom that is drawn from tacit experience and tacit wisdom. Most of these are more than mere observations. Most are insightful, and if you are creative enough, you can draw upon some useful strategies (techniques) for being more effective in your personal leadership.

Some of the quotes make me smile. I love funny, one-liners, uttered by comedians. As a presenter, I am constantly on the lookout for clever lines that my audiences may resonate with.

The Lure of Designated and Self-Proclaimed Gurus

1) Hindu or Sikh religious teacher: in Hinduism and Sikhism, a religious leader or teacher

2) Leader of religious group: a spiritual leader or intellectual guide for a religious group or movement, especially one not considered mainstream.

3) Influential expert: somebody who has a reputation as an expert leader, teacher, or practitioner in a particular field.

4) Revered teacher and counsellor: a person's revered guide, mentor, or adviser in spiritual or intellectual matters

~ Encarta World English Dictionary

I have never been comfortable with the term ‘guru’ in business, management and leadership. In Asia, a guru is a ‘teacher’. In the western context, guru connotes an expert and one who is successful in a field of endeavour. Here is an explanation of guru through a spiritual guru, who questions the validity of a car guru, political guru, computer guru, and more. The use of the term has become blasé and diminished, although it is a great word with enormous gravity of meaning.

I think that it is time to review terminology and definitions. Just because something is accepted does not make it contemporary and precise. For instance, the word entrepreneur means more than a small business. Many mistake business for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is more than started a home-based business or a solo operation.

It is so easy to buy into the influence of a guru. That is why self-help junkies buy the latest offerings of their favourite author or motivational speaker. It does not help much if the book is promoted by somebody as influential as Oprah Winfrey in her Oprah’s Book Club. Granted that the occasional psychological ‘jab in the arm’ works its motivational magic on us, it is not sustainable. The most effective motivation comes from self-motivation, encouragement and feedback.

You have a lot to live up to if you proclaim and accept yourself as a guru. You are expected to live up to your code of ethics, and core values becoming of a leader. You have to be consistent, and match word for action. You will need to appear to have all the answers, or at least, the clever questions. You will want to offer both abstract as well as concrete responses. You cannot hide behind a curtain of mystery, without the substance. You must demonstrate behaviors of worth that are substantial and solidifies your reputation and personal branding.

Review what you believe. Stop accepting everything without question, or critical thinking – even if it stems from the wisdom of the gurus. If you seek a guru, ensure that he/she brings out the best of your natural talents and potential you can realize.

Leadership Stardom

Lim Leong (aka Reeves) wrote on his blog an interesting piece, Leveraging on Consumer Stardom. By the way, that’s a clever name for a blog.

It started me thinking about stardom. Click. Click. Whirr.

What about leveraging on leadership stardom? If you are well-liked by your staff, colleagues and peers (not just by your personality) for your ability to lead in teams, and you seem to be the default, leader-elect for other opportunities – then you may be a star. Stars sparkle. They may have that cheeky twinkle in their eyes, or their feet. Their energy is infectious, and their behaviors affective on others.

Dr Kua Harn Wei, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore is an internationally-ranked, Deca-Ironman triathlete. That’s 10 Ironman distance races, done back to back, over 10 days; or 38km swim, 1,800km ride, and 420km run done, consecutively. This endurance athlete is considered amazing and bonkers at the same time. He has star quality, by reputation of his achievements. He also volunteers his time with wheelchair athletes.

Top, local Olympic Distance triathlete and SEA Games gold medalist, Mok Ying Ren may be considered a leadership star. He was the Ambassador for the Tri-Factor triathlon series this year. Despite being a busy medical student, he continues to achieve personal bests in public runs and triathlons.

In the early days of this blog, we enjoyed interviews with leading triathletes, ultra-marathoners, celebrity-emcees, and Everest climbers. They included: Steve Novick, Dave Low, Craig Holland, Oz Perlman, Alan Geraldi and Whit Raymond.

Have you generated and garnered enough wisdom to offer advice, or your words of wisdom? Have you updated your beliefs, including contemporary versions of idioms, axioms and proverbs?

How do you leverage on your leadership stardom? Do people around you spread your reputation? Are you often quoted in conversations?

The great leader is the one who the people say: We did it ourselves!