Minute Mindset

Do you have any idea how many businesses I go into where the environment is out of control? I mean you walk in and you can feel the confusion. You stand and watch and see the emotional interchanges that are going on.

Most don’t seem to understand the need to create an environment that is calm. I know, I know — you are thinking this guy doesn’t live in the real world. There is no such thing as calmness around here. All I do is move from one crisis to another.

That is not how things have to be! That is how leadership has designed the environment. You see, any business is simply an environment that is decision driven or crisis driven. The difference is the style of leadership.

Show me an environment that is crisis driven and I will show you a place where people are constantly involved in emotional collisions. Someone is blaming someone else for what is happening. No one is really looking for resolution; their only concern is protecting their territory.

Someday...

Every time I talk to leadership the question of motivation comes up. It seems to be a constant challenge to keep the environment motivated. Recently, I had a manager put it this way, “I get so tired trying to keep these people up. It seems like each time something good happens, something else goes wrong. I don’t understand it, they choose to remember the bad and forget the good. I just don’t understand it.”

Human behavior is an interesting thing to study. It seems that no matter how much good is happening in a person’s life, the majority tend to remember the bad that has happened. What one takes from yesterday, creates the emotional pictures they use to define today.

Have you ever had a negative person around your life? When I ask that question, do names come to your mind; do faces appear in your brain? Negative people have a way of playing with our emotional presence. What many fail to understand is that “negative”...