Rather than racing around learning all kinds of new managerial systems, procedures, and trendy formulae, you just get better at knowing yourself and the person you are managing. You’ll then learn how to let go of your old ideas. You’ll learn how to find what’s already there, rather than going looking for what you think you’re missing. Napoleon Hill said, “Think and grow rich.” But we are saying, “Remember and grow rich.”
When you manage yourself and someone else it is only the negative thoughts you have that get in your way. If you believe negative, limiting thoughts about yourself and the other person, then those thoughts will manifest in the outcomes you experience.
Radical? Contrary? Let’s start here: Think about how you use your mind. Why do most of your ideas, inspiration, concepts, and solutions come to you when you’re singing in the shower? Or when you’re just relaxed and being quiet? Or when you’re driving down the road not really thinking about anything?
Many surveys and almost all anecdotal inquiry show that managers get their best ideas in the shower, when doing easy yard work, or while on vacation. Why is that?
It’s because you’ve stopped trying to control your thinking. You’ve taken your hands off your mind and allowed the wisdom within to emerge.
It always will.
At a mental level, this is similar to the difference between talking and listening. People have taught for years that if you listen, you will learn more than if you were talking. But people have always assumed that “listening” only means listening to another person, an all-too-narrow interpretation of the word. Hands-off management starts with listening to yourself, tuning in to your own heart and mind, because if you will learn to listen to your inner being, you will learn more than when you’re always trying to talk to yourself about how things should be.
Most of your thoughts are created by fear. Have you ever noticed that? Especially if you believe them without question. They are centered on your survival as a manager, so they are worried thoughts, scanning the future for possible problems and catastrophes. You function as a human scanner all day long. The problem with that approach is that it leads to hands-on micromanaging. It leads to trying to manipulate your people out there in the external world. It also leads to a life of worrying about your own future, and therefore a life of always feeling anxious and distracted.
The people you’re dealing with may feel as though you aren’t there. And you feel it, too. It is the very definition of stress. It is the very source of workplace fatigue and burnout.
To try to get relief from all this anxiety, a micromanager will often dip back into the past. But that’s not much better, is it? When you’re in the past you are spending the majority of your time thinking about what you feel guilty about. Shift to the future and you’re back to what you’re afraid of. How can you mentor someone from that sort of “bipolar” mood swing? How can you be present to the task at hand and the person in front of you?
To truly mentor someone you must be at peace. When you are not at peace the other person will be contaminated by your stress. So find the peaceful place inside you that tells you what success really is. Then go forth and model the same peaceful efficiency and creativity to others. That’s the beauty of hands-off management in a nutshell.
True success is less about reaching the final goal and more about using each moment to make progress toward the goal. Focus more on how you can be constantly moving forward and what the next step is. It will make the ultimate goal that much easier to achieve.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Make a list of all the external, material goals you have in your life. Then ask yourself about each object (a car, a boat, a vacation home): Why do you want it? How will it feel to have it? Write that feeling down as the true goal, with an openness to the possibility that the feeling can be achieved without (or prior to) achieving the material goal.
2. Write down your financial definition of success. Give it a number. What does success mean to you financially? Then ask yourself why you want the money. For what purpose? What feeling do you want that you don’t have now? A feeling of security? A feeling of power and freedom? When you’ve written it down, allow yourself to be open to the possibility that you can have that inner feeling without (or prior to) receiving the money in your life. Then open yourself to the possibility that wealth may even flow faster into your life when you are at peace and feeling secure, powerful, and free.
3. Write down your relationship and family goals. Why do you want these things? How much of what you have written down depends on other people acting in certain ways? Then rewrite them focused only on what you want to contribute to others regardless of how they behave, or their “loyalty” to or “appreciation” of you. Make these goals within your capacity to reach now, right now, and not at some future time when the world corrects itself.
CHAPTER THREE
USING THE POWER OF NEUTRAL
Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface.