#843 Merry Christmas

First of all, Merry Christmas to you. I hope Santa brings you all you hoped for tonight and I wish you a wonderful and healthy season no matter what holiday you celebrate.!

I have so many subjects I want to address with you at this time of year; but, this one is time-sensitive; have you settled on a new motto for 2019?  I know Lori has, and it’s a good one.

I’m down to my final two and could use a little help:

·        All in; Every Day

·        Start with Helping

Both remind me of essential attitudes I need to bring to life each day.  All in, reminds me to squeeze each day like a lemon until all the juice is gone.  It tells me to be committed at a deep level.  All in reminds me not to surface skim with family or friends but to take the time to go deeper.  All in tells me, like my Cousin Steve’s motto a couple of years ago, that “You can’t out-train a bad diet." I'm either committed to my fitness goals, or I'm not.

All in gets me to my computer early on Sunday morning to make a strong plan for the week, and All in helps me to live in day-tight compartments as I try to approach each aspect of my life with myopic focus, and it reminds me to avoid distractions.

Start with helping has the apparent meaning you will derive from it.  The words themselves require no explanation or in-depth examination.  But beyond that, for me, Start with helping keeps me centered as a speaker to focus on message over performance.  It reminds me as a trainer to mentally sit in the audience and feel the expectation of an audience member before I begin a session.  Start with helping tells me to park the ego and listen first.  It tells me to understand before I worry about being understood; and Start with helping echoes that famous Zig Zigler quote I love so well, “You can have anything you want in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

That’s what my motto does for me.  It’ more than just the words, it surrounds itself with all that just I articulated about each motto and, over the year, it’s meaning becomes deeply intrinsic and adamantine and stays that way for years to come.  In 2019 I will still want to “Be nice because people like that.”(my 2018 motto)  And I will forever continue to try “To be the kind of person my dog thinks I am” which I think was 2015.

So here are two assignments for you.  First, if you haven’t already, go ahead and create a motto for yourself and commit to it; put it in your email signature for 2019.