by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
I am not a consultant. I do not create documents or deliverables.
I do not parachute in to do the job of my client or of their employees.
I do not press my advice on clients or try to make their decisions. (Click to read how a client describes being coached by Tony Mayo,)
I do not fix or cure people. I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist. (Read more on the distinction between executive coaching and therapy by clicking here.)
I am not an entertainer. My goal is not to have my audience enjoy my presentations, feel more comfortable or pleased with themselves, laugh at my jokes, or like me. I am only interested in coaching people toward causing lives they love.
Results matter. If what I do makes no difference I have failed.
I’m out to make people’s lives satisfying and fulfilling, to help them matter and have positive impact. I foster workplaces of humanity and prosperity by coaching the leaders of organizations.
I am an executive coach.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Leadership Development
Your efforts to lead, manage, and sell often fail because of people’s fears. The fear may be disguised as resistance, indecision, lack of creativity, poor communication or reluctance to take responsibility. You can work on the symptoms forever, but the big rewards come from dealing with the fundamental fears we all share.
We promise according to our hopes and
perform according to our fears.
— La Rochefoucauld
I painted a lot of houses when I was a teenager. Each season, when school let out, I had to force myself up the ladder again. I didn’t look down, I maintained a white knuckle grip, I kept as much of my body in contact with the ladder as possible. The occasional trips across a plank between ladders were performed sitting down with one hand on the wall. Every sway and breeze was a stomach churning calamity. Some say acrophobia isn’t a fear of heights but a fear of falling and hitting, but that wasn’t true for me. I didn’t think about falling. My body just hated being up there. Over the course of a few days I got more accustomed to being on the ladder and by the end of the summer I even made a few trips across the plank standing up. The fear never went away. I just managed it better. The next season it would be back, full force.
Why would anyone do that to themselves? Why did I tolerate so much discomfort? Why would I place myself in situations which brought up so much fear? The reason, ironically, was (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Recommended Books
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D.
This is a sequel to Flow.
See a summary of that book by clicking here.
Purchase this book on-line through Amazon.com
See other recommended books.
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P. 5 This, in brief, is the project of this book. It will first explore the forces from the past that have shaped us and made us the kind of organisms we are; it will describe ways of being that help us free ourselves of the dead hand of the past; it will propose approaches to life that improve its quality and lead to joyful involvement; and it will reflect on ways to integrate the growth and liberation of the self with that of society as a whole.
P. 11 The thesis of this book is that becoming an active, conscious part of the evolutionary process is the best way to give meaning to our lives at the present moment in time, and to enjoy each moment along the way.
P. 11 Individuals who develop to the fullest their uniqueness, yet at the same time identify with the larger forces at work in the cosmos, escape the loneliness of the individual destinies.
P. 15 The idea of free will is a self-fulfilling prophecy; those who abide by it are liberated from the absolute determinism of external forces. This belief, in itself, is a “cause.”
P. 15 …consciousness enables those who use it to disengage themselves occasionally from the pressure of relentless drives so as to make their own decisions.
P. 18 What people all over the world mean by good and bad: bad is entropy — disorder, confusion, waste of energy, the inability to do work and achieve goals; good is negentropy — harmony, predictability, purposeful activity that leads to satisfying one’s desires.
Note that entropy is an accurate description of the typical modern workplace.
P. 28 For our ancestors, understanding themselves better was a pleasant luxury. But nowadays learning to control the mind may have become a greater priority for survival than seeking any further advantages the hard sciences could bring.
P. 29 Our brain is a great computing machine but it also places some dangerous obstacles in the way of apprehending reality truthfully.
P. 31 Melvin Koner, neurologist, reviewing studies of the human brain: “the organism’s chronic internal state will be a vague mixture of anxiety and desire — best described perhaps by the phrase ‘I want,’ spoken with or without an object for the verb.”
P. 33 The mind needs ordered information to keep itself ordered. As long as it has clear goals and receives feedback, consciousness keeps humming along. … Paradoxically it is when we are ostensibly most free, when we can do anything we want, that we are least able to act.
P. 36 Depression, anger, fear, and jealousy are simply different manifestations of psychic entropy.
P. 51 …”human nature” is a result of accidental adaptations to environmental conditions long since gone.
P. 55 The brain is a wonderful mechanism … it forces us to strive after forever receding foals. To keep us from settling for daydreams, it begins to project unpleasant information on the screen of consciousness as soon as we stop doing something purposeful.
P. 61 Reality is created as one tries to apprehend it. … Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, “Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through an active construction in which we participate.” And the physicist John Wheeler said: “Beyond particles, beyond fields of force, beyond geometry, beyond space and time themselves, is the ultimate constituent [of all there is], the still more ethereal act of observer-participation.”
P. 65 Each creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns.
P. 76 Instinctual desires and cultural values work their way into consciousness from the outside [of consciousness]. The third distortion of reality begins in the mind and works itself out: it is the side effect of consciousness –the illusion of selfhood.
P. 82 People who lead a satisfying life, … are generally individuals who have lived their lives according to rules they themselves created. … They do what they do because they enjoy meeting the challenges of life, because they enjoy life itself.
P. 89 “Power” is the generic term to describe the ability of a person to have others expend their lives to satisfy his or her goals.
P. 105 the powerful lion turns out to be a living shelter for hundreds of different parasites … For every complex organism, survival is a constant battle against less complex life-forms that make a career of using its energy for their own ends.
At the psychological level, a parasite is someone who drains away another person’s psychic energy; not by direct control, but by exploiting a weakness or inattention.
P. 120 Dawkins “a meme is any permanent pattern of matter or information produced by an act of human intentionality”
P. 121 It is possible that one of the most dangerous illusions we must learn to see through is the belief that the thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate then at will.
P. 135 Television is a dramatic example of a meme that invades the mind and reproduces there without concern for the well-being of its host.
P. 150 “organism” might be defined as any system of interrelated parts that needs inputs of energy to keep existing. … includes crystals and memes.
P. 151 (1) Every organism tends to keep its shape and to reproduce itself.
P. 151 (2) In order to survive and to reproduce, organisms require inputs of external energy.
P. 152 Entropy — or the dissolution of order into redundant randomness — is one of the most reliable features of the universe as we know it.
P. 152 (3) Each organism will try to take as much energy out of the environment as possible, limited only by threats to its own integrity.
P. 154 (4) Organisms that are successful in finding ways to extract more energy from the environment for their own use will tend to live longer and leave relatively more copies of themselves.
P. 154 (5) When organisms become too successful in extracting energy from their habitat, they may destroy it, and themselves in the process.
P. 155 (6) There are two opposite tendencies in evolution: changes that lead toward harmony and those that lead toward entropy.
P. 155 Harmony i.e., the ability to obtain energy through cooperation, and through the utilization of unused or wasted energy)
P. 155 Entropy i.e., ways of obtaining energy … causing conflict and disorder.
P. 156 (7) Harmony is usually achieved by evolutionary changes involving an increase in an organism’s complexity.
P. 156 Complexity, that is, an increase both in differentiation and integration.
P. 167 The world in which our children and their children will live is built, minute by minute, through the choices we endorse with our psychic energy.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Fun
While a consultant at Arthur Andersen & Co in New York City I was assigned to a high-pressure project for a Wall Street firm. We were proud to work at Arthur Andersen because this was way-back-when, before Enron, before helping investment banks was cause for abject ethical concern, and before the building we worked in was destroyed by hijacked airliners. It was the summer of 1985 when I was old enough to think I understood business and too young to notice that I didn’t.
We worked long hours in cramped quarters implementing mainframe software for an innovative financial product. One of the first derivatives, come to think of it. The bank’s internal developers had fallen woefully behind schedule and AA&Co was called in to rescue the project. Every day of delay, we were assured, was millions lost to the bank. Too many delays and the market would be taken by some other bank.
Threescore and eight “Arthur Androids” pulled from “the beach” in every office around the continent instantly gelled as a team and, as in any tribe, we quickly fell into the lazy habit of using buzzwords and (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Fun
During the 1980s, I was an avid admirer of Ayn Rand‘s philosophy of Objectivism. The greatest expression of this devotion was the following short story. The germ of the idea came from this news event. I was very proud of my story at the time. I offered it to only three magazines. I was shocked by their responses.
My rejection letters from
The New Yorker and Esquire are below.
The Atlantic Monthly did not bother to respond.
Reading the story now, it seems much more righteous and judgmental than I admit to being today. I still love the rhythm of certain sentences, the cinematic clarity of the settings and some of the word play, for example, the double meaning of the title and the triple meaning of DRILLER. Comments are welcome, of course, but please remember that I am no longer the author. He has grown away.
You can read it below this line or click here to download an Adobe PDF that is prettier to print.
Relative Evil
by Anthony P. Mayo
He pressed his fingers to the throb in his temple. Not to ease the pain, but to focus on the rhythmic pressure and blot out his sister’s insistence. Her unpersuasive words sought to compensate with repetition and emotion what they lacked in evidence and reason.
“Please Randall, if ever family mattered it is really important now.” Yes, Rachel, he thought as she talked. I know family matters, that is exactly why I am sitting at your kitchen table on a weekday morning. Being part of this family is why his day had detonated from the usual historical exposition to this hysterical exposition. If he were not born a Fleischer, Randall would still be at his desk, working on his next book.
Randall had just finished his daily preparing-to-get-ready-to-start-to-write rituals and was about to fill the computer screen with historical in-sight when the telephone rang. The first surprise was that the caller was his literary agent. Franklin called for only two reasons, either to report that Randall’s latest book had been sold to a publisher or to report that the publisher was impatient to receive the final draft of Randall’s latest book. Since Errors of Democracy had been purchased only three months ago, he could not imagine a reason for this interruption.
“Rand, what is your father’s first name?”
“Otto. And my mother’s maiden name was Calabrisi.” Randall was playful. “Is this some kind of identity check, Franklin? Are you going to pass along a secret message to me?”
“I’m afraid its no secret, friend. Something terrible has happened. The news is filled with reports that your father was… Rand, do you know what your father did during the war?”
(more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
Years ago, while I was establishing myself in a new executive coaching practice, I supported my family by working as a part-time, outsourced CFO. Here is a reminiscence of a deep learning I earned during one of those accounting gigs.
I sought help from my own executive coach with the very difficult behavior of a bookkeeper employed by my client. She had called several urgent meetings with the partners and each time threatened to quit, more or less because of me. These meetings were very exasperating as she made charges that were either too vague to dispute or clearly contrary to plain facts. For example, although we repeatedly assured her that she had her job as long as she wanted it she insisted she could not continue to work under such uncertainty and would resign immediately because we were conspiring to take her job away. The partners felt obligated to placate and mollify her because she was the only bookkeeper out of several they had tried who was able to make any progress in getting their bills out to clients.
I said to my executive coach, “I am stressed and bothered because of her unpredictable behavior, of course, but I am mostly bothered by the fact that it bothers me. I am so ‘trained’ and ‘transformed’ I ought to be able to deal with her behavior without becoming stressed, hurt, or angry. I try to remain calm, not react to her outbursts, and keep on working because I need this income. I do what is necessary just to keep getting paid, so why do I lose sleep and spend my non-billable time talking about her with my coach, family, and friends?”
By the way, is this scenario reminding you of anything in your life, right now?
My coach reminded me of the dangers of attachment, of identifying with our property or positions. We confuse preferred outcomes with necessary results. We grasp so avidly to particular bits of property or actions by others that we forget we can still be ourselves without them. We attach money or prestige to ourselves so firmly that we forget that we are not our results or our reputations. What I want is not what I am.
I then remembered the old samurai expression (I suppose all samurai expressions are now old).
The most effective warrior dies before entering the battle.
The bookkeeper was not damaging my body or physically invading my free time. My attachments were the only things making my life difficult. I was attached to looking good in the eyes of my client, I was attached to (more…)
Tony Mayo is the executive’s career coach. His expertise, professionalism, and RESULTS are impressive. My experience in evaluating career goals, strategy and navigation through the waters of change, with Tony’s coaching, have landed me my dream situation.
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