When I was at university, my friends and I developed a somewhat unique way of getting the most out of our philosophical reading. Before we would dive into books like Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents or Niebuhr’s Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, we would make up what we thought the book would be about and discuss the topic from our own point of view.
My early client work was fairly therapeutic in nature – people would come to me with panic attacks or phobias and I would help them change their scary thinking until that fear was no longer a factor in their lives. After a few years of doing that kind of work, I realized that while my clients felt better about feeling better, it rarely changed their lives…
I have written over a thousand blogs and written and/or contributed to over a dozen bestselling books over the past 20 years. And until a few years ago, there were two things I could absolutely guarantee would be part of my process.
First, I knew I would make my deadlines.
When I was an actor (several lifetimes ago), I realized fairly early on that I was really good at taking direction and pretty hit or miss when it came to coming up with ideas on my own. If a director told me to play a scene as though I secretly fancied the person I was confronting, or I had just been told I had a life-threatening illness, or as though I was scared out of my wits and trying really hard not to let it show, I would feel inspired and things would come through me that made me feel like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Robert DeNiro rolled into one.
In part one of this blog series, I highlighted how caring about people and a job well done as being at the heart of excellence and effectiveness in business and in life. Then in part two, I spoke to the feeling of care and caring as being the natural response to recognizing our shared humanity and engaging fully with our lives instead of our thinking.
