Big Ideas
Have a Mission statement
What is success – 2 scorecards for success
- What you achieve – what goes on your resume
- The path you took to get there – who you became
Character scorecard includes:
- Performance character strengths
- Moral and ethical character strengths
- Reconnect to your sense of purpose in life. Who do you want to be?
- What do you want to be etched on your tombstone?
- Identify the character traits you want to develop
- Practice the ideal character traits every week – deliberately
- Internal and External Motivation don’t have to be exclusive
- We can reconcile internal and external motivation to perform at our very best
Speaker 1: Yeah cool so let’s get started. Welcome everyone today we have Jim Loehr1 the author of “The only way to win” and the subtitle of the book is how building character drives higher achievement and greater fulfillment in business and life. Well welcome Jim and thank you for taking the time today.
Speaker 2: Thank you Manny it’s great to be with you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Let’s talk about this book. What was the genesis of this book? Why did this book come about? When did this come about.
Speaker 2: So the last decade of my life has devoted to something that I have witnessed. After you’ve been around a long time you begin to see patterns, particularly patterns in people’s lives what happens to… I’ve worked with athletes then I’ve worked with other children and I’ve actually seen what’s happened to those people in the course of their lives.
I have had an opportunity to know even their grandchildren in some cases and what I’ve been particularly interested in is what is the role that the spiritual dimension plays in a person’s life in terms of happiness, health and performance. And that spiritual dimension for me is actually characterized best in terms of character. Who you are terms of your values your beliefs and most people don’t really think about character that much because it’s kind of we all know it’s important but we really don’t know what to do about it.
So I decided to invest a decade of my life and researching what has been around for thousands of years and really collect data here at the institute. We have thousands of people go through the program every year. And track them for a decade and look at the impact the character has on the most important dimensions of their life. There is their happiness, their health and their ability to sustain high achievement for long periods of time and it’s been by far the most rewarding part of my career. I’ve been the most excited about this and I’m sure I will continue this until my last breath but I feel like this is the most fertile ground for individuals to you know find a sense of connection to the world and to something that actually is going to sustain them and a way that nothing else does.
Speaker 1: I noticed that in this book you take a lot of inspiration from John Wooden the legendary basketball coach. So I had to go and get a copy of his book just to just to learn what he was trying to say. So you know I’ve been reading this lately this classic amazing book for all of you listeners it’s just called “Wooden, A lifetime of observations and reflections on and off the court”. So let’s jump into the book let’s talk about it. Let’s see why…
Speaker 2: I have a big full life picture of John Wooden right here in my office.
Speaker 1: He is absolutely inspiring and he has a tech talk as well I’m not sure if you have watched the tech talk.
Speaker 2: Absolutely I’ve seen it
Speaker 1: He was probably a hundred years old at the time when he gave the talk and still talking about very inspiring about character about the value of not necessary focusing on the winning but working through a character. So let’s talk about this book let’s talk about the process here that you that you laid out which is starting with the mission statement and then going into the character score cards and building the score cards and designing a life around those things. So what’s the process or what was the first step what was the importance of the mission statement in the Life segment to tell us about it.
Speaker 2: First of all you know we’re all chasing achievement. Everybody wants to achieve and we want to be successful and so we began to realize that there are two things that are important here. One of them is what you achieved which goes on your resume and we all have to have big resumes. These are all the things that we’ve accomplished in our lifetime and the more we we’ve kind of been told that the greater the achievements the happier we will be, the more successful we will be, the better character we’ll have It’s how we develop into extraordinary human beings.
That is a false assumption again. What we looked at was achievement does not guarantee anything but the other issue that is more important than what you achieved is the path you took to achieve it. It’s how you got there. Who did you become as a consequence of the chase? And we’re all becoming something. And in life we’re all trying to find a way to Nirvana. And we love to take the shortest path possible.
So we’re all looking for shortcuts and in sports sports pages are filled with people who fell from grace whether it’s Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods or anyone else. They really they didn’t fall because they didn’t have great achievements. They fell because something on the moral and ethical side was not solidly in place that that character dimension somehow did not, they weren’t able to hold the line and that there are many ways to win there are many pathways to winning. But this book is about the only way to win is to win with character and the only way to lose is to lose with character.