Diagnosis, Cure…Decisions.
Don’t ask me how, but I made a Decision once upon a time, and sold it to my daughter. She was pregnant with twins and I sold her on naming – I really did this – BOTH of her daughters after their grandmother, my beloved Queen Kate. The twins’ names are Kathryn and Kaitlyn. Embarking on that mission was one of my best Decisions ever.
I share that because it was Kaitlyn who forced me to focus on Decisions relative to my diabetes journal. She walked up to me after a blood sugar reading and looked at all the chicken scratching in my journal and asked me, “Papa, what are you doing?” (Continued)
Let’s consider what a Future Perfect Plan for just ONE day might look like:
(1) The first challenge you must meet is to – Know your dream.
(2) Stirred by the guiding light of your dream – Boldly awaken.
(3) Alert and aware, with an unyielding stare – Envision your victory.
(4) Course set, charged and resolute – Express your word; exercise your might.
(5) Your powers expended, your strengths toiled away, sit in silence and – Appraise the day.
(6) Lessons revealed, your mandate is change, the time is now to – Embrace a new way.
(7) As new truth is found and lessons accrue, your dream commands you – Become as anew.
[originally posted November 21, 2012 at my Recruiting Tactics & Strategy LinkedIn Discussion Group]
Did you realize that the medical model, with Diagnosis and Cure, dates back roughly 4,500 years to ancient India?
Twenty-five hundred years ago, when the Buddha walked with his fellows, it was the medical tradition – a tradition that, already in the Buddha’s day, stretched 20 centuries further back into the impossibly distant past – which inspired his great four-point structure:
(1) All life is suffering.
(2) This suffering has a cause: ignorant craving.
(3) There is a cure for this suffering.
(4) The cure is the Noble Eight-Fold Path.
Everything else the Buddha taught flowed from those four points. (Continued)
How does a Future Perfect Plan attain Certainty, or as close thereto as we can get? The answer is Science, as in Cause and Effect Relationships that we know, truly know. The best word for these Relationships is “Principles”. When your FPP is based on such solid Principles that you believe in utterly, with no doubt at all – just as you believe in gravity for example – then your Plan has come as close to Certainty as a plan may.
What I recently realized is that the Ancient Chinese were building exactly such a scientific method literally thousands of years before anyone else. In their studies of nature and mankind, of success and failure, they broke causes and consequences down into this simple model: (Continued)
It’s tempting to move from Diagnosis straight into Decisions. Doing so, though, causes much of the foolish and unnecessary striving we foist upon ourselves. Whenever you attempt to merely treat your illness, reacting to its urgent demands, you are likely to make the illness worse in the long run, if not the mid or even the short run. Turn back to me.
Upon Diagnosis, I had to have insulin to bring down my blood sugar levels. I’d have died without it. The old Reaper was starting to get greedy about another soul for his collection. (Continued)
Some strange convergences have been taking shape lately. This thread is one of the reasons. Take a look at the list of my main projects stretching back to 1989:
(1) The FSTOPS™
(2) Goal Setting/Performance Tracking & Visual Graphing
(3) The Lock-On Report™
(4) Future Perfect Planning
(5) Learning to Write so as to Document the list above (1 – 4)
(6) Social Media – such as our work right here…
(7) The Switch
We’ll leave Sales, Coaching & Practice Development and my own Cash-Based Goal Setting as a professional off the list. And I also won’t let you know that of late I’ve been working especially hard on the financial measures required to stabilize a recruiting practice or how to translate the time-honored accounting tools of Balance Sheets, Income and Cash Flow Statements into management wisdom for recruiting shop owners.
What’s the one tie that binds all these on- and off-list projects together? It’s item #4, Future Perfect Planning.
Come at this another way. What do we all seek? We seek to know the causes of our success and to take control over them. I have a single word, well it’s probably best as two words, that captures this ultimate goal:
In one word: CERTAINTY
In two words: POSITIVE CERTAINTY
A Future Perfect Plan is precisely what you require in order to come as close to this ideal as possible. If you contemplate all six of the other projects listed (1 – 3 & 5 – 7) you can see that this Positive Certainty is always the goal, so that in all six projects a sufficient Future Perfect Plan is always required as our end point.
In the next posting I’ll bring this down to application to a brand new (for me) model for FPP Certainty.
[originally posted November 15, 2012 at my Recruiting Tactics & Strategy LinkedIn Discussion Group]
The Godfather Commentaries #100
As he (Clemenza) expected, Gatto’s eyes became greedily interested. Paulie had swallowed the bait and because he was thinking how much the information was worth to Sollozzo, he was forgetting to think about whether he was in danger.
The Godfather, Chapter 6, Page 105, Paragraph 5, Sentences 22 & 23
Do you remember King Priam of Troy? He surely did not coin the phrase, “beware of Greeks bearing gifts;” it was he who allowed his men to accept the famed Trojan Horse.
Our Sicilian tactical command built upon the same wisdom is simply, “never accept what your enemy offers you.” (Continued)