Have you ever analyzed the influence
you have on your company and your
employees? If you haven’t, you
could be causing unrest and undermining
your own goals. Samuel J. Lucci III,
founder and CEO of Partners Through
People, recommends that you keep your
energy levels positive and stable.
“Energy tends to grow in either direction,” Lucci says. “Positive energy seems
to be infectious to people around you.
Negative energy seems to be infectious the
same way.”
Lucci stresses that it’s really important
for the company leaders — the managers
and owners — to be able to be positive
and stable, because if the employees see
them afraid, that promotes fear throughout the whole company.
Smart Business spoke with Lucci about
how to curtail bad decision-making on
your part by unleashing the power of the
question.
How can you ensure that you aren’t creating
problems for your company?
We all have an internal program that
pulls our strings and makes us do what we
do. What we do seems normal to us. It
won’t look normal to somebody else, but it
will be normal to us. If you can break that
cycle, then you can get a different result.
That’s the best thing to do. But without
that knowledge and the emotional conditioning that goes along with it, the best you
can do is to try to keep yourself as emotionally stable as you can.
What I mean by emotionally stable is that
your mind is positive; it’s not talking back
to you and driving you crazy. To do this,
people who don’t understand their internal
program are going to have to practice
something that is commonly called state
management. What that means is you constantly work at keeping yourself in a positive frame of mind.
It’s not something that happens naturally,
it’s something you have to continually
work at and keep working at. Literally, you
have to work at it all day. State management is a process that involves three daily
activities.
What are the three activities that help manage your state of mind?
The first thing you have to do is protect
yourself from the negative stimuli that are
all around you. Everywhere you look
today, there is negativity. You have to try to
protect yourself from that as much as you
can. You can’t protect yourself from all of
it, but you have to be aware that it is there,
and certainly don’t engage it when you
don’t have to.
My suggestion is not to listen to cable
news, political talk or private negative discussions. Whenever somebody is talking
about an ‘Ain’t it awful’ story, like ‘I lost all
this in the stock market; I can’t believe it.
Now, I can’t retire.’ Don’t get involved in
those discussions.
Of course, be very careful about your
own inner negative self-talk. If your mind
starts to say, ‘We’re not going to be able to
do this; it’s not going to work,’ you want to
get away from that negative self-talk.
Essentially, try to protect yourself from all
the negativity around you.
Now, you can’t completely do that, so the
second thing you have to do is cleanse yourself from the negative stuff you pick
up every day. Keep those negative emotions from building up a head of steam.
When you have an experience, don’t just
let it go. Don’t let it hit you and ignore it.
You want to go back and reflect on it —
think about it, think it through.
The third thing you want to do is set a
positive agenda and keep your mind busy
working on that agenda. If your mind is
busy working on what you want — something positive — it doesn’t have time to
work on the other stuff.
If you’re busy working on something
positive, your mind is not going to be
working on something negative, building
up a head of steam and driving you crazy.
How does state management help you make
better decisions?
Thinking is the key to success. All success
is being able to think. If thinking is the key
to success, the absence of thinking is the
father of disaster. When your mind shuts
off, that’s when you’re going to get hurt.
There is really only one tool you need
to practice this artificial state management:
the power of the question. Stop making
statements and decrees and start asking
questions. Do it all the time in every situation. Instead of telling your people what
you want them to do, ask. Draw them into
the conversation. Question everybody in
every situation, including yourself. The
questions you should ask would be the type
of questions that would be the answer to a
solution, not an explanation of a problem.
An example would be, ‘What is the right
thing to do in this situation?’ Or, ‘How
could I turn this adversity into something
beneficial to the company?’ Never ask
questions like: ‘How is this going to hurt
me? How can I get even?’ If you ask negative questions, you take your mind into
that negative mode, and then it starts to
build up a head of steam. That’s exactly
what you don’t want to do. So asking yourself a question is critical, but the quality of
the question is just as important.
SAMUEL J. LUCCI III is the CEO and founder of Partners Through People. Reach him at [email protected] or
(724) 457-2500.
