Figure 5.1 Focus on your circle of influence. Stephen Covey’s circles of concern and influence.
5
ACT
In Part One I wrote that the most important line in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People involves our responses to external events, and the fact those responses are more important than the event itself. Well another line runs it a close second:
“Act or be acted upon.”
He goes on to say that “the difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don’t is literally the difference between night and day.”
This is another of those universal recommendations across the self-help cosmos. Without proactivity we are lost, they all seem to agree. And, as with taking responsibility, this is at once a depressing but also liberating statement. A key factor in making progress involves our own actions – not those of somebody who may or may not like us, or may or may not take pity on us, or may or may not have our best interests at heart.
We no longer have to wait for that knight in shining armour. We are that knight in shining armour. To be able to act ourselves means that we are no longer acted upon. We are no longer someone else’s tool, enslaved to their actions. It is our actions that matter, not those of a higher being or “saviour,” or parent, teacher, boss or friend. And once we act we are expressing ourselves as an adult, potentially for the first time.
To be proactive is therefore a giant leap towards achievement motivation. Yet Covey warns us that proactive thinking is very different from positive thinking. By being proactive we are assessing things as they stand, which may be at their most negative. There is no gloss. It is what it is. Nonetheless, we are also stating that we can, and that we are willing, to do something about it.
But do something about what? In order to be effective we need boundaries for our proactivity. And, luckily, Covey offers them – via a major point of mental differentiation. Any transformation to a more productive place requires the correct focus for our energies, which Covey maps by describing all external inputs into our life as being part of our Circle of Concern. However, some of these inputs are beyond our control, such as the weather, the traffic, or the actions of governments or large corporations.
What we can influence within the Circle of Concern – such as our own well-being and our work and home life – he calls our Circle of Influence. Obviously, this is a smaller circle, although it is the area that should be the focus of our every action. Anybody trying to take action to make progress in their life should concern themselves only with what they can change – their Circle of Influence – leaving areas where we have no influence both physically and mentally alone.
It is the world of the reactive person, Covey states, to spend their lives feeling angry and powerless (and even victimized) by what they perceive as the forces lined up against them, which – of course – they are helpless to do anything about. Proactive people, meanwhile, change what is changeable by focusing only on what is within their Circle of Influence.
Figure 5.1 Focus on your circle of influence. Stephen Covey’s circles of concern and influence.
Having calculated that action is required and reconciled ourselves to the zone where action is possible we now need to direct that action. Any step is only a step forward if it is a step in the right direction. And that requires a plan. Without plans with discernable objectives we are directionless, and directionless people are either stuck in the same place or condemned to going round in circles.
“Without goals you simply drift and flow on the currents of life,” wrote sales motivator Brian Tracy in his best-selling book Goals! (2003). “With goals, you fly like an arrow straight and true to your target.”
Tracy describes life without goals as being similar to driving in thick fog. No matter how powerful the car we drive slowly and hesitantly, making little progress. Clear goals, meanwhile, enable us to “step on the accelerator.”
Goals, therefore, make a big difference to both those that set them, and those that don’t.
Yet for High-FFs, our fate can be worse than simply watching the goal-setters progress while we get left behind. Fearing failure with respect to our own ambitions (which we may have avoided setting, such is our fear), we are often recruited to help execute their plans, sometimes under the false premise that their goals are also our own (very much my own experience when starting Metrocube – see Part Five).
Indeed, in the absence of our own plan, we may as well adopt their goals. Those with a plan inspire confidence in others so, if we are directionless, we are bound to follow them. How can we make a decision if we don’t know where we are going? How can we lead even ourselves? Decisions and leadership are for those that have direction, so directionless people often end up feeling they are best-off outsourcing their ambitions – even their decision-making – to someone who appears more able, simply because they have defined goals and therefore a clear path ahead of them.
According to Steve Chandler in 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself (2001) in “life today, you are either living your dream of living someone else’s. And unless you give your own dream the time and space it needs … you’ll simply help others make their dreams come true.”
Yet many High-FFs perceive themselves to be frustrated by others – usually those with high achievement motivation who seem to block our way while the path for them appears open. The difference between them and us, however, is often no more than the fact they are pursuing a detailed and preconceived plan and we are simply being dragged along by seemingly greater but invisible forces.
Goals also prevent us from entering what neuro-linguistic programming practitioner Lindsey Agness calls in Change Your Life with NLP (1998) the “grey zone” (more on NLP in chapter 6). This is where most High-FFs spend their lives: not destitute, quite comfortable even, but stuck and tremendously frustrated. It is a settlement for second best that will eat away at your happiness daily unless you enter what she calls the “awful zone” where things become so bad action becomes essential.
I can remember almost wishing for the awful zone to come – some disastrous moment that cleared the slate and allowed me to start again. I used to call it my “virtual suicide.” With nothing to lose, I would surely lose my fear, I thought. Yet that day never arrived because I never made it happen. Instead I remained trapped in avoidance activities – simply “making a living” rather than designing a rewarding and fulfilling life. Goals, of course, would have circumnavigated the need for a “virtual suicide.” Goals would have allowed me to see and plot a path upwards without having to hit rock-bottom first.
This leads on to what is perhaps the most fantastic thing about goal setting. The fact that the journey itself generates such a sense of excitement that we experience something of the sensation of arrival from the moment we take that first step. This is obvious to all but those with a high fear of failure simply because we have always been terrified of that first step. Yet we experience the same feeling when travelling. Just knowing that the destination is the airport and, after that, some exotic land of adventure makes that familiar first-leg drive through our home town that much sweeter.
Brian Tracy agrees with this, writing in Goals! that: “Goal-setting is so powerful that the very act of thinking about your goals makes you happy even before you have taken the first step towards achieving them.”
Given this, imagine how you will feel after just a few positive and reaffirming steps along the path.
Tracy states that strong goals will make “you feel internally motivated to get up and get going every morning because every step you are taking will be moving you in the direction of something that is important to you.”
Goal setting also reverses the psyche in the most profound way possible.
Tracy again: “Successful people think about what they want and how to get it,” he writes, “while unsuccessful and unhappy people think about what they don’t want and talk about their problems and worries and who is to blame.”
Anthony Robbins (1992) wrote that the human mind is always in pursuit of an objective (Aristotle backs this up, opining that humans are a “teleological” organism, which means we are always moving towards something). So if we are not pursuing positive goals, says Robbins, we are pursuing the goal of eliminating or avoiding pain. These are negative or avoidance goals but, for the High-FF, they are probably the only real goals we have ever set.
Robbins states that it is the unconscious fear of disappointment that stops many people from setting positive and appropriate goals. Some may previously have set positive goals and failed to achieve them – resulting in an overwhelming fear of inflicting further pain. And this has led us to abandon positive goal-setting in order to avoid any renewed expectations also being dashed.
Yet the answer is not to hide from the pursuit of goals. The answer is to set the right goals. And these take time to calculate.
So what do you want? As a High-FF you will need to have an acute awareness of the fact you may set inappropriate goals – at both extremes – for fear of Atkinson’s High-FF peg-hooping avoidance tactics mentioned in Part One. You may yet aim too low or too high because you secretly view yourself as incapable of achieving even moderately challenging goals.
So how can you tell if you have the right goals – other than by waiting for potentially the wrong result? Not easy. For instance, at Moorgate we often discuss with clients the need to look beneath the surface when it comes to setting objectives for our PR campaigns.
Properly brainstorming objectives can reveal that the real goals are not always the obvious ones. There have been times when we have set the wrong objectives, which has led to the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics (more on strategy and tactics in Part Three) – something that has sometimes only become apparent after achieving the wrong results.
For instance, we had one banking client whose stated objective was to win new clients. Yet he was determined to do this by profiling himself in the international financial press. He was unimpressed by trade or regional publications, he stated, and thought a profile in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal the only way to get noticed.
Of course, we failed to win him the coverage he wanted as his messages were too specific. Yet when we dug further it turned out his real objective was to impress his bosses who were thinking of cutting funding for the department. This knowledge meant we could change the strategy and tactics accordingly – eventually creating a series of newsletters that detailed his deal successes and included interviews with happy clients. We then circulated them both internally (upstairs) and externally to new or potential clients. He was delighted with the results.
This is no less the case with our own lives. Just being busy and taking action is pointless unless we are pursuing the right goals, which are not always obvious. Covey writes about getting caught up in “busy-ness” or the “activity trap.”
He describes a parable in which an exploratory group hack their way through a jungle only for their leader to climb the tallest tree, survey the landscape, and shout: “wrong jungle.”
“Shut up,” says the manager in the ground, “we are making progress.”
If our ladder is not leaning against the right wall, he states, then every step up just takes us further from our real goals. We are heading to the wrong place faster.
So how do we find the right jungle to cut through or wall for our ladder? And how can we trust that we have set the right goals? This takes some intense visualization, some deep thinking and some soul-searching – all of which is to come.