Book Number 6 on my Book-a-Week list for 2011 – GO Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham

This book was a fun and enlightening read for an action-oriented, strengths-loving person like me! Buckingham outlines six very clear steps to achieve outstanding performance through truly leveraging your strengths. Each of the six steps is represented by a chapter, complete with tools, templates and even accompanying video, available on-line, to help you take action on the steps. Throughout the book, Buckingham references the story of Heidi, a top-notch brand director for the Hampton Hotels chain, who finds herself burned out on her work because she is working in her areas of greatest weakness most of the time, instead of her strengths. Happily, through applying the process described in the book, Heidi learns to transform her current role so that she can leverage her greatest strengths. In doing so, she not only finds her joy again, she also produces much greater results for her company.

Buckingham’s 6 Steps to achieve outstanding performance include:

1. Bust the Myths: Myth #1 is that as you grow, your personality changes. In truth, as we grow, we become more of who we already are. Myth #2 is that you will grow the most in your areas of greatest weakness. In truth, we grow the most by leveraging our greatest strengths. Myth #3 is that a good team member does whatever it takes to help the team. In truth, being “well rounded” is not the best way to serve your team, but rather by focusing the most on what you are really good at, so you can help the team truly excel.
2. Get Clear: This is about really knowing what your strengths are, which only you can decide. Buckingham references the 4 signs of a true strength: Success in doing it; Instinct, meaning you are instinctually drawn to it; Growth, meaning you easily learn and grow when doing this type of activity; Needs, meaning this type of activity is one of your greatest personal satisfactions. Note the first letter of each of the 4 signs spells out the word SIGN.
3. Free Your Strengths: This is about making the most of the activities that strengthen you. Buckingham recommends writing Strengths Statements that help you define the specific areas in which you “feel strong.” Heidi’s #1 strengths statement reads: “I feel strong when I help a hotel manager take a good hotel, or hotel group, and make it #1.” This was an eye-opening discovery for Heidi because what she had been spending her time on was just the opposite: trying to help struggling hotels get their performance up to an acceptable level. She found this activity to be extremely draining. Again, Buckingham uses a four-letter word, this time FREE, to describe the steps in this model: Focus, Release, Educate and Expand.
4. Stop Your Weaknesses: This step is about making sure you are very clear about all those activities that drain you, or as Buckingham puts it, “make you feel weak” so that you can avoid them whenever possible. It’s important to not assume that just because you hate doing something, that so does everyone else. I recently led a team meeting centered around understanding and leveraging talents and strengths. In the discussion of tasks and who should be doing what based on their strengths, one woman blurted out, “I hate doing all this paperwork!” The team member sitting next to her replied, “Really? I love doing paperwork. Can you teach me how to do yours?” While we have to be careful not to appear as though we want to dump the rotten jobs on to everyone else, it is important to recognize the activities that drain you and figure out ways to get rid of them, or at the very least, minimize the amount of time you spend doing them. Again, a 4-letter word (STOP) to help you remember how to do this step: Stop doing the activity all together and see if anyone notices; Team Up with others who are strengthened by this activity; Offer Up a strength of yours and steer your job toward it; Perceive your weakness from a different perspective.
5. Speak Up: Share your strengths and weaknesses in your work team, and encourage others to do the same. Buckingham outlines specific steps and even scripts for what can be very challenging conversations, especially when having them with your boss.
6. Build Strong Habits: This step is about making the strengths focus last. Buckingham suggests things like: Every day look over your three Strength Statements and your three Weakness Statements; Every week complete a Strong Week Plan; Every quarter look back at how well you used your strengths.

I enjoyed this book because it builds on the other books I’ve been devouring lately related to maximizing strengths. The story of Heidi made Buckingham’s 6  steps particularly real and compelling. The happy ending for Heidi was great affirmation that we must all take care to do what we are best at and love the most. It’s the only way our unique purpose can truly be fulfilled. 

Book Number 5 on my Book-a-Week list for 2011 – Making Your Dreams Come True by Marcia Wieder

Marcia Wieder’s mission is to help people have dreams again, and to teach them how to make their dreams come true. She founded Dream University over 25 years ago, and has many impressive credentials, including author of 14 best-selling books, 3-time guest on the Oprah Winfrey show, and personal success coach to Jack Canfield, author and founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting Marcia and hearing her speak on three different occasions. I feel especially fortunate that her endorsement now appears on the cover of my book. It says:

 Making Your Dreams Come True is a step-by-step guide to figuring out what your dreams are and determining the steps you need to get there. Marcia’s formula for making your dreams come true is actually very simple:

1. First, get clear about what your dream is.
2. Second, remove the obstacles, especially the limiting beliefs.
3. Third, design the simple steps to make it happen.

Of course the individual steps take some work, but Marcia makes it clear that they don’t have to be as hard as many people think they are. And she walks you through the questions you need to ask yourself to complete each of the steps. Marcia teaches about the “Passion Pyramid”, a tool to help you align the “four P’s” that can ignite your dreams: purpose, passion, possibilities and power. The book is also filled with many real-life examples of people Marcia has worked with over the years to help achieve their dreams. These are not people of great financial means or great genius. They are just ordinary people who got clear about their dreams, removed their limiting beliefs about them, and put plans in place to make them happen.

Perhaps the message of Marcia’s that resonates with me the most is her message about living your life on purpose. She says that one of the requirements for achieving your dreams is to live your life on purpose. And to live your life on purpose, you must do three things:

1. Have a spiritual practice. In other words, spend time every day connecting with your spirit and the whispers of your soul through prayer or meditation or some other means.
2. Know what is unique and special and great about you (and I call that the Reasons Why YOU ROCK!)
3. Live your life in service with your greatness

An inspiring and yet practical read. I definitely recommend it.

Book Number 3 on my Book-a-Week list for 2011 – Turbo Growth by Travis Chaney

Travis Chaney totally ROCKS! His work is amazing. His book is amazing. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Travis personally over the last few months, and each time we talk, he impresses me more with his knowledge, his leadership, his incredible results, his giant heart, and his undying passion for helping financial advisors achieve their dreams.

Travis’ mantra is “Be bullish on life!” and that describes Travis to the core.

In the opening pages of the book, Travis describes how to use it as a “playbook” and how throughout the book he will help you shift your thinking from trying to make money to adding value to the lives of the people you work with. And isn’t that what we all want? For our lives to have meaning and our work to add value to others? Of course, we also want to make money. Travis’ book describes how in the process of truly understanding what it means to add value to people’s lives in your own authentic way, you will also figure out how to make more money than you’ve ever made before. And he has years of results with many highly successful clients to prove it.

The book is very easy to read and absorb because of the way Travis organized the themes in each chapter: Core Concepts, Turbo Growth Moments, Mind the Mindset, Drew to the Rescue!, The Turbo Growth Training Guide, and at the end of the book, a “Ten Minute Turbo Growth Refresher Course” summarizing all the key concepts in the book. Each chapter also includes the continuing saga of “Andy the Advisor”, a struggling advisor who makes many of the common mistakes Travis sees in the clients he coaches. Andy’s character is so true-to-life that you really feel his pain, and I almost immediately found myself wanting to shout words of encouragement and advice to him. I looked forward to each chapter, in large part to find out what Andy was up to and whether he could figure out how to turn his life around!

Travis’ wisdom and practical exercises throughout the book make it a must read for every financial advisor, no matter what their experience or level of success in the career. And even if you aren’t a financial advisor, but simply want to raise the level of your game – and who doesn’t? – you will find this book extraordinarily inspiring.

In the words of Siskel and Ebert, I give this book two thumbs way, way UP!!

Click here to order the book

Book Number 1 on my Book-a-Week list for 2011 – The Power of Who by Bob Beaudine

Bob Beaudine is President and CEO of Eastman and Beaudine, an executive search firm in the Dallas area geared towards sports and entertainment. Beaudine’s book promo video states his message perfectly, “You’ve got WHO!” So many of us spend so much time trying to cultivate new relationships that will get us the next client or the next job. We join clubs, attend networking meetings and schedule 1:1s with people, forgetting that the most important relationships are the ones we already have! The people who will help us most are the people who know us best and care the most about us. He shares a big personal realization that prompted him to write his book: He did an analysis of the connections that helped him get business over a ten year period.  Of 5,100 connections in his database, he got ten years of business from only 87 of them!

I haven’t yet done this type of analysis of my business, and I don’t have nearly the number of contacts in my database that Beaudine has, but I suspect an analysis of where my clients have come from would yield similar findings. And what his book made me realize is that I want to do an even better job cultivating those professional and personal relationships that mean the most to me. Asking how I can help those people, asking what is important to them, connecting them with people they can help and who can help them, sharing my vision and goals with them so they know how to connect me. That sounds a lot more fun than racing around trying to attend every possible meeting I can to connect with new people. Not that I don’t believe in networking; it’s an important part of building a business. But whatever the method of connecting, it needs to be purposeful to make a difference in my business. And I plan to make all my connecting more purposeful this year.

Great book, easy read, and while in many ways a “one message” book, it is still worth the read for all the great stories and reinforcement Beaudine shares. I highly recommend it!

Click here to order the book on Amazon

If you read my January newsletter, you know that I have set a goal to read a book a week in 2011. Four weeks in and so far I’m meeting the goal! This is such an energizing goal for me as I really love to read and learn. Last year was very filled with writing and publishing my book and speaking opportunities centered around promoting it, that I didn’t make time to read as I typically do. I realized during my end-of-year reflection that I really missed regular reading and the inspiration it brings.

I sort of feel like “Julie” of Julie and Julia, who set a goal to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes in a year. I’m excited about the challenge and what I’ll learn in the process, eager to share what I will learn, and a little nervous about the pressure I’m putting on myself to reach this goal. Thanks to Bob Beaudine, author of The Power of Who – the first book I read this year – for giving me the idea to read a book a week.

If you’re wondering how I’m having the time to do this, it’s not as hard as it sounds. I’ve often shared with my clients and speaking audiences that reading ten minutes a day will result in reading a book a month. That insight came to me from a book – no surprise! – by David Cottrell called Monday Morning Leadership. If you don’t believe me, think about it. Most books have about 200 pages. If you read ten minutes a day, you are reading about 8-10 pages, and if you read every day, even just week days, you will read about 200 pages a month. So if you read about 40 minutes a day, you can read a book a week.

Here’s how I’m doing it: My morning exercise routine includes twenty minutes on the recumbent bike, which leaves my hands free to read. Over lunch, which, since I work out of my house, is usually at the kitchen table between client calls, I read another ten minutes. In the evening I read another ten, and there’s my forty.

Titles I’ve completed so far, four weeks into the new year, include:

• The Power of Who by Bob Beaudine
• The Gift in You by Caroline Leaf
• Turbo Growth by Travis Chaney
• Now Discover Your Strengths by Donald O. Clifton and Marcus Buckingham (a book I’d read in pieces before but thoroughly enjoyed re-reading cover to cover, especially given my Reason Why YOU ROCK! passion which ties directly to my mission of Inspiring Leaders to Realize Their Greatness).

Additionally, I’ve finished a couple of books I started reading last year:

• The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (a terrific novel written in the voice of a dog, which was great especially given our new status as dog-owners)
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which is one of the most impactful spiritual guides I have ever read, and which I will start reading again next week. I find it to be very helpful to read a few pages of this every day.

I’ll be writing short blogs about all of the books, to help me capture what I learned, and, I hope, to spark interest in my readers in a book that may inspire them as it has inspired me.

Here’s to joyful reading!

If you read my January newsletter, you’ll know that I’m attempting to read a book a week this year. Third week of the year and so far I’m on track, which feels great! If you count the two books I also finished that I had already started, I’m actually up to five for the year. It’s really fun and enlightening to be reading this much, and I’m looking forward to posting some book briefs – not real reviews because I don’t plan to summarize the whole book. Just want to share some of the key insights that were meaningful to me. Stay tuned…