Tag Archives: caring

Are you having a good time? WE LOVE IT HERE!

11 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Motivation, Uncategorized

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Until now, I haven’t shared with many people that I was a cheerleader in high school. Although I would not become a cheerleader now nor necessarily advocate it for any young person, it’s who I was at that time in my life.

I learned some valuable leadership lessons about motivating others as a cheerleader. I mean real lessons about how to get people to do things, not just yelling in unison. Recently, I realized that one of the most valuable lessons was about motivating myself.

Cheerleading camp was a grueling, week-long ordeal. We got up at dawn and were jumping, cheering, and yelling for most of the day. Several times we met as one huge group.

The leader of the camp would yell out, “Are you having a good time?”

Our thundering answer was, “We love it here!”

I used the phrase and technique on my children as they grew up. I remember several times sitting in the car with them when circumstances were less than ideal. I would ask in a loud and cheerful voice, “Are we having a good time?”

They would answer in a grudging, sarcastic tone, “We love it here.” However, it did cheer them up. They smiled. There is something silly about the process. More importantly, it underlines the fact that we do get to decide whether or not we like it here.

Recently, I was reminded of a story I’ve seen online several times. It’s probably not true, but it contains a valuable lesson. The story is about an old woman who is moving into a nursing home. In the story, she has never seen her room there.

As an attendant takes the old woman up in the elevator, she says casually, “I hope that you like your new home.”

The old woman answers, “I am going to love it.”

The attendant displays incredibly poor customer service skills and asks, “How can you know that? You haven’t seen it.”

The old woman says, “Because I’ve already decided to like it.”

I’ve been having some difficulty adjusting to my new and smaller home, so the memory of cheerleading camp and the story of the old woman going into the nursing home came at an opportune time. They reminded me that I get to choose how I feel about things. I am choosing to love it here!

The cheerleading camp memory and the story also give clues to the answer to a question that I am asked in leadership workshops all the time. At the beginning of a leadership series, we discuss the important qualities of a leader. We think of leaders in our lives who were truly motivating and inspiring. I ask the group, “Did that leader have a positive attitude?”

They always answer yes. Then I ask, “Do you feel that the leader cared about you?” I always get a resounding yes. I remind them of the old saying (sometimes misattributed to Theodore Roosevelt): “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

We don’t give our best to people whom we believe do not have our best interests at heart. Caring is a basic motivational technique. However, caring about everyone can be a challenge. The question that I get over and over is, “How can I care about people who I don’t like?”

I struggled with the answer until I realized that like the old woman in the elevator, we decide to.

Deciding to like a situation or care about a person is not easy because it’s not a one-and-done decision. We must continue to decide every second of every day until one day, it just happens on its own. The new way of thinking becomes a habit that we have created with intentional effort.

There are other things that help us care and have empathy for others. Reading books improves empathy. Of course, there is a lot of research behind the Loving Kindness Meditation in which I firmly believe.

We can wave around the Magic Wand of Destiny by making intentional choices in every aspect of our lives. It isn’t always easy and takes constant vigilance to create an attitude or feeling. However, realizing that we can is empowering and life-changing.

For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

 

Lessons from the Movie Groundhog Day

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Emotional Intelligence, Positivity

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I was reminded of two lessons when I watched Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day. I knew these two things helped to create happiness and success in life, but the main character, Phil, embodied them in such a great way that made the lessons really hit home. If you haven’t seen the movie, Phil is played by Bill Murray and his love interest, Rita, is played by Andie MacDowell. Now you can visualize them easily.

Phil is stuck in the same day, Groundhog Day. He wakes up every morning to the same Sonny and Cher song on the radio and relives the same day. He goes through the expected stages. First is disbelief; he thinks he’s going crazy. Next he uses the information about the day to his advantage. He robs an armored car. He learns everything he can about Rita and tries to use the information to get in her good graces. It doesn’t work. Phil isn’t a nice guy and he proves it in this phase. Then he becomes depressed and kills himself, and on one occasion the groundhog, in several different ways. However, no matter what he does, he keeps waking up to Sonny and Cher. I read online that someone figured out that he lived the same day for over eight years. Talk about a rut!

The things he’s been doing, which are expressions of how he has lived his life up to this point, are not creating success and happiness. Finally, Phil makes a shift. He makes two changes and I think it’s beneficial, if not absolutely necessary, to do one before the other. The first thing he did was decide to have a positive attitude. Up to this point, he has interacted with the same people and had basically the same conversations for eight years, and none of them were pleasant.

Once Phil changes his attitude people feel better after they talk with him instead of feeling worse. Phil listens and takes other peoples’ opinions into consideration. He smiles and is pleasant. Phil becomes a positive force in the world that buoys other people instead of making them insecure and dragging them down. Instead of dreading a conversation with Phil, people look forward to talking with him. As a general rule, we all like being around positive people. We are attracted to them. People began to find Phil attractive!

The second change that Phil made was just as significant, but hard to do if you don’t have a positive outlook. Phil began to take care of other people. It started when he found a homeless man on the street one night who later died at the hospital where Phil took him. From that point on, Phil adopted a “No one is going to die on my day!” attitude and took action. Every day, he caught a young boy falling out of a tree, saved the mayor from choking, fed the homeless man, and even changed the tire of a group of little old ladies. He spent his day helping other people and felt satisfaction, gratification, and happiness as a result.

There is a Groundhog Day party at the end of Phil’s day. In the beginning he refused to go, even mocked the party as ridiculous. After he decided to be positive and help others, he became the center of attention at the party. The mayor’s wife kisses him and says what a wonderful person that he is. The three little old ladies speak of him glowingly. He’s even been taking piano lessons and his piano teacher who believes that she’s only seen him on this one day, says what a great person he is.

His new emphasis on positivity and helping others changes how Rita sees him. Remember, it’s a fresh day for her and she has no memory of all the others that Phil has lived. When she got up on this last of Phil’s Groundhog Days, she expected him to be the same jerk he was the day before. Instead, she is taken by his positivity and kindness. He is not trying to impress her at that point and yet he does. By focusing on becoming positive and helping others, he’s achieved the goal that he had in the very beginning, winning Rita’s heart. He became attractive to her by focusing on his own personal growth.

Each of us can become more attractive as well if we work like Phil did to cultivate a positive attitude and genuine determination to help others. Everyone around us would benefit from that course of action, but people who would benefit the most are us.