Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

If you think about your life, there are a handful of items that are really important:  your health, your wealth, your sleep, your family, your relationships and your finances.  Those are important.  So, what is urgent?  Well, it’s putting out the latest fire, it’s the latest thing you get seduced by, it’s the “We have to clean up the house before the cleaning people arrive.” How insane is that?  If you get seduced too often by the urgent, you’ll notice that the important takes short shrift.  So write down a list of what is really important and set aside time to do those first.  When you do, you are in charge of your life.

“The Benefit of the doubt,” when I hear people say that, I think it’s insane.  In what way is there any benefit in doubt? When you think about it, the moment you hear the word “doubt” you start getting nervous and you start thinking there is a real problem. Rather, the intent of "benefit of the doubt" is actually one that is supposed to repair things as opposed to making them worse.  So, change the wording from “the benefit of the doubt” to “the benefit of the trust” or “the benefit of the confidence.”  When you say that it seems like it is repairing things rather than making them more divisive. So, change it from “doubt” to “trust” and see what happens. 

When you feel sorry for yourself, in addition to wasting time, you are sucking life out of your relationship.  When you say “Life isn’t fair,” the reality is that is correct, life is unfair.  When you say, “Nobody knows the pain that I’ve suffered,” then you are seducing people into feeling sorry for you.  Decide that it is now time for you to become a grown up.  Quit feeling sorry for yourself and start validating what is good rather than whining about what is bad.  “Poor me” will suck energy out of a relationship so turn it around and breathe life into it. 

Love what you can love and let the rest go.  Do you ever notice that you have a relative… a parent, a brother, a mother-in-law, someone who you care about and yet they drive you out of your mind?  Their behavior is insane.  It makes you want to dip into the Prozac, or open a vein or go buy them a set of cement shoes.  “Come on darling, let’s go get some shoes.” Well, what do you do about that?  The reality is that it is hard to reconcile the gap between the fact that you really love that person and that you really have trouble with their behavior.  You might thrash around trying to figure out what to do.  Look at it this way… love what you can love and let the rest go.  Love what you can love and let the rest go, that’s common sense.  You can simply love what’s lovable and quit fussing about the rest.  It makes sense. 

The final step to resolving conflict, once you have defined the problem, come up with multiple options, evaluated the options, chosen what you want to do and implemented the solutions is to follow up.  It is absolutely essential that you follow up.  You must meet again with the people with whom you have conflict.  If you fail to follow up the whole thing will evaporate. And, when you do follow up, fine-tune and keep going and the resolution is solid. Remember to follow up. 

In resolving conflict, once you have defined the problem, come up with multiple options, evaluated the options and chosen what you want to do, implementing is critical.  Now, you want to assign who is to do what and when.  Perhaps you are to take care of Option A and Larry is to take care of Option B.  When you make those assignments of who is to do what and when, you’ve got the traction you are looking for and the conflict can now be resolved.  So the key is to make some accountability and assignments and you are on your way to resolving conflicts.