You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.
–Yogi Berra
People have been using my goal-setting process to create better lives for over twenty years. Their improvements benefit themselves, their families, friends, and colleagues. Clients have reported extraordinary results in all areas of their lives, including doubled revenue, increased family time, and reduced stress. Participants have credited it for their weddings, career changes, speaking opportunities, and published books.
Goal setting works. Like any tool, it works best with expert guidance and proven methods.
To register, learn more, or arrange for Tony Mayo to deliver this workshop privately for your company use (more…)
Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you …
A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short …
the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. …
it’s only by going through a volume of work that you are going to catch up and close that gap.
Mr. Edward Rochester, “And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labours?”
Miss Jane Eyre, “Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise.”
Mr. Edward Rochester, “Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full being.”
Ever since 1996, when I published my first website on Erol’s,
I’ve shared with business owners the insights and ideas collected or created in my career as a founder, teacher, and coach. This includes two books, scores of emailed newsletters, hundreds of articles, more than fifty podcasts, and dozens of videos, as well as too many social media posts to bother counting.
Today, after a three-year hiatus, I am re-introducing my opt-in email newsletter. I’ll alert subscribers to my latest offerings and provide links to my most popular resources. You can get a clear idea of what’s coming by sampling past issues with this link to my blog.
Please allow me to help you. Just click here to put your name on my mailing list. I promise never to let anyone else see or use what you share with me. I plan to send new issues about once per month, so I won’t be stuffing your inbox. Plus, there will be a link in every newsletter to opt out permanently if I disappoint you.
You can even help determine the topics I cover and other features of the newsletter. After you subscribe by clicking here, I will send a welcome message with an invitation to complete a six-question survey plus a comment box to share your suggestions with me. {Yes. This is Tony. I’m the one who writes every word I send and reads every word in your reply.}
Thank you for your generous attention. I look forward to coaching you toward even greater success.
The COVID pandemic has forced many of us to migrate even more of our lives online. Much of our world is now viewed through the keyhole of a screen, constricted to two dimensions; restricted to where the camera aims and what the text claims. We’re losing touch, texture, and context. The absence of familiar social cues defeats our usual attempts at attention and discretion, leaving us in thrall to well-financed and algorithmically-tuned manipulation of our fascination.
This insight is not original to me. On the contrary, this insight was not acceptable to me.
In 1997, when I read, A radical theory of value, in Wired, I thought Professor Goldhaber was nuts or grasping for a headline with another The Internet changes everything! hyperbole. The shocking subtitle was meant literally, The currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention. I was skeptical. Sure, every child is exhorted to, “Pay attention!” But that was a “just” metaphor. I had not noticed anyone collecting money for the attention “paid.”
Now, I see his prediction manifested globally. How else to explain the (more…)
Hard Money Bankers presents, Moving from What is Necessary to What is Possible, a conversation with Executive Coach to Business Owners Tony Mayo about the power of goal setting. Includes a link to a free goal setting workbook and audio guide.
A global pandemic now seems inevitable.
Get ready!
You’ve no doubt heard the advice about handwashing and avoiding crowds in confined spaces: concerts, aircraft, conferences. I’d add, “Do everything you can –STARTING RIGHT NOW– to stay healthy and strong: adequate sleep, regular exercise, and good food (including weight control).”
Here’s one you may not have thought of:
The U.S. CDC recommends getting a flu vaccination.
The CDC has detailed guidelines for employers here:
Have a clear and well-communicated policy for various epidemic scenarios.
Step One: How will employees know whether to stay home?
How will you communicate your status to clients and vendors?
How will they communicate their status to your business?
For example, what if your cleaning service abandons you?
Implement “Work from Home” technology and policies. This should include:
A staggered schedule of “dry run” tests by every single employee who might need to work from home.
Plan and prepare projects that can be postponed until people are at home, so they have things to do in case their regular duties are exhausted or rendered unnecessary under the circumstances.
Make sure you have all essential positions filled. You don’t want to lose people to illness when you are already short-staffed.
Stock up now, before the rush, on hand sanitizers and face masks, including wipes for conference tables, telephone handsets, doorknobs, coffee machines, keyboards, etc.
As a coach and advisor to business owners, I find that the resolutions for many of our most complex, challenging management situations become simple and obvious when we use precise language to accurately describe exactly what has happened and what we want to help happen. Getting work done is faster and easier, for example, for entrepreneurs who understand the five aspects of trust, the operative features of a powerful request, and the distinct types of group agreement.
Leadership success requires accurate evaluations of colleagues and keen cognizance of how others are evaluating us as leaders. Managers can improve these judgements by understanding the difference between four common words that are too often used interchangeably.
Integrity
Morality
Ethics
Legality
One action or omission may breach all four though not in every case.
Integrity comes from engineering. A machine or system with all of its parts and components working together as intended and expected has integrity. Integrity for the human machine is consistency of behaviors, often summarized as, “Do what you said you would do.”
Integrity isn’t right or wrong, good or bad. It just works.
Morality is that aspect of a culture which delineates “good behavior.” Morality is how we “ought” to do things around here, the requirements for being respectable. Morality emerges from some combination of intuition and mysticism, from the nature of being human, not by vote, volition, or convention.
Ethics is a set of rules specifically defining the behaviors required
for membership in a group and enjoyment of the privileges membership confers. A
defining characteristic of modern professions, e.g., accountants, lawyers,
physicians, is a Code of Ethics. Ethics are manmade and can be changed
by agreement.
Law defines behaviors that can be punished by government. A unique characteristic of government is a monopoly on the initiation of force. Laws may be arbitrary or democratic, stable or capricious, and applied with equality or discrimination.
These last three are about right and wrong. Integrity is in that field Rumi wrote a poem about. 😉
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
A Great Wagon by Rumi
Those three also require imposed punishment:
Violate the law and risk violence.
Breach ethics and risk dismemberment (exclusion from membership).
Fail to act morally and be shamed, excluded from society.
Integrity does not require enforcement or punishment. Lack of integrity carries its own intrinsic punishments. Behaving with integrity just works better.
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A global pandemic now seems inevitable.
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