A Note From The President

Avil Beckford, President

For the past seven years I have been on a journey to self-discovery, and three years ago I intensified the process. Most of us come to the point where we ask ourselves "Why am I here?" I got to that point a lot quicker than most people do. I have been reflecting on the work I do and the relationships that I have and have been evaluating everything in my life. To undergo such a process, if done correctly, is very painful, especially if you're honest with yourself. I realized that I was bored with some of the things that I was doing and wanted to add some spice to my life.

Through this evaluation process, I discovered that I really enjoy writing and have been thinking about how to more fully incorporate it into my life. Once I made that decision angels started falling from the sky. I got the opportunity to write 15 stories for an anniversary booklet and I wrote my first paid article. In addition, in my quiet way, I have been working behind the scenes writing Tales of People Who Get It, which is an extension of this newsletter, Ambeck Edge. I asked the interviewees the following questions:

1. Describe a business challenge that you've had and how you resolved it
2. What lessons did you learn in the process?
3. In your opinion, what is the formula for success?
4. How do you integrate your personal and professional life?
5. What's a major regret that you've had in life?
6. What's your favourite quote and why?
7. Which book have you read that had a major influence on your life?

Writing the book has had a transformative effect on my life. I sent out the manuscript for review and one feedback was to develop a workbook to go with the book. I naively thought that I could create the workbook in four days, instead it took me three months. I am selling the ebook version of the workbook, Journey To Getting It on my website at http://www.ambeck.com/products.html (The print version of both Tales of People Who Get It and Journey to Getting It will be available in print copy shortly. I will keep you posted). After creating the workbook I realized that I had to revisit Tales of People Who Get It to add a few things. Creating a workbook forces you to think things through. I am very glad that I undertook this major project because now I know that I am capable of writing a book.

Have you taken the time to ask yourself some of the tough question?

• Why am I here?
• Do I find joy in what I do?
• What would make my heart sing?
  

Take the time over the holidays to answer these questions. Until next time! Avil

P.S. Like this newsletter? Will customize for medium-sized firms that want to distribute it to their staff. Contact me at avil.beckford@ambeck.com and let's talk!

Book Review

The Vowels of Personal Power: 5+1 Ways to liberate Your Creative Energy by Bob McCulloch & Julia Gluck

Even though The Vowels of Personal Power contains a lot of information that I have been exposed to before, I liked it because it was presented in a "fresh" manner. It's taking old ideas and giving them a new spin. The book is filled with many examples to help you grasp the concepts. One criticism that I have, and it's just my personal preference and may not be the same for you, is that there were too many examples, and the majority of them were about the authors' personal experiences. Is it possible to have too many examples? I would have preferred it if there were less examples and more of them about other people.

According to the authors, the premise of the book is that "we are all born bundles of creative energy… We're born with the capacity for awareness, engagement, openness and understanding." The "I" from the vowels is for Integrity and what McCulloch and Gluck refer to as the "Thoughtful I," which integrates all the other practices in the vowels.

Below are listed the five vowels of personal power and the 12 practice areas - presented in the book -to unleash your creativity.

1. I: Integrity and the Thoughtful I
2. A: Awareness
   i. Stay Mindfully Aware
   ii. Capture and Cherish Your Lightness
   iii. Be Thoughtfully Authentic
3. E: Engagement
   i. Get and Stay Engaged
   ii. Stay Resolved Without Attachment
   iii. Accept and Support Your Mutuality
4. O: Openness
   i. Accept Every Idea's Inevitable Relevance
   ii. Allow and Fully Appreciate Fresh Associations
   iii. Perceive the Positives
5. U: Understanding
   i. Acknowledge and Suspend Judgment
   ii. Confirm Your Understanding
   iii. Embrace the Power of the Both/And
   

Glancing at the list you may think that "oh I already know this," but knowing something and practicing it are two very different things. This book is a good reminder to be positive, appreciative, focused, fully engaged in whatever it is you're doing, not be attached to how you get to your destination (outcome), and to give things a chance before you decide to "nix" them. The book helps you to integrate the 12 practices into your life.

Five + 1 Great Ideas

1. You have lots of things standing in the way of the flow of your personal creative energy, all anchored in your thoughts and beliefs about the way the world works. So to get out of the rut of automatic thoughts, you need to mobilize your conscious thinking
2. Equilibrium seems safe to us. It is still, unchanging, knowable, and predictable. However, it stops us from growing. It stops us from being open to new possibilities
3. What happens to you, what you achieve in your life, is dictated less by your abilities than by the choices you make, including choices to do nothing
4. By not becoming attached to one particular way of doing things, you liberate people's creative energy. You liberate them to use whatever talents they have in order to achieve the desired outcome - even a difficult one
5. Carry a notebook and pen at all times… Whenever an interesting thought comes to you - even one with no apparent application in the present - write it down. When you find your energy blocked regarding an idea or a situation, consulting your ideas book may just give you the inspiration to move forward
6. Solutions will not always present themselves to you right away. Sometimes they need to be coaxed out, and sometimes you need to sneak up on them from behind
   

I recommend this book, and it's one that you should read more than once, just to remind yourself about what you already know.

November's Book List

The Vowels of Personal Power (click here to order)

Survey Results

According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, Americans devote one to eight hours a day worrying:

• 40% of the worries never materialize
• 30% of the worries were about the past, where absolutely nothing could be done about them
• 12% of the worries were directed toward other people's business
• 10% of the worries were spent on real or imaginary illnesses
• Only 8% of the worries were justified

To me, this means that 92 percent of our worries are needless.

Source: The Monster is Real: How to face Your Fears and Eliminate Them Forever, Yehuda Berg, page 54

How Did They Do That?

Jim Love, Partner, Performance Advantage

http://www.performanceadvantage.ca/

Challenge: The key challenge for me was to grow the business beyond just me, and an idea. This is a huge challenge for entrepreneurs.

Resolution: I made many mistakes. One mistake was panicking and saying that I had to bring other people into the business. I didn't handle this process as well as I could have, and one classic example was bringing in salespeople who couldn't or didn't sell. I expanded too rapidly and hired people who I shouldn't have. I did all the right things to resolve the challenge, but I didn't do them well. The renaming of the company from True North to Performance Advantage reflected a crisis point that we hit and I had to fix that. Now I have expanded much more cautiously with much more deliberateness. I have two partners in the business and we have a selection of consultants. We were more rigorous in the selection process.

A key thing, which helped me, was to take my own advice, the advice that I give to my clients. I did a plan and looked at some of the metrics in my business. I looked at where we wanted to go and that took me a long time to complete, which gave me a newfound respect for why some companies do not want to do strategic planning. In the planning I looked at what types of people and revenue we wanted to attract, and how they fit together.

Now I know what I want, and I am aware of what offers to take and which to leave on the table.

Lessons Learned:

1. It's important to understand how your business runs at every level - from the strategic to the operational
2. Know what you're passionate about, know what you can do that can beat the world, and know what metrics drive your business. The better I got at doing this, the better I became at solving crises and not just the challenge I talked about
3. Business success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent discipline. You have to work in pursuit of your goal
4. You have to plan for strategic success and follow the plan. Stop worrying about the attributes that you don't have and start exploiting the things that you do well, recognizing the places where you don't want to go
5. Be able to be true to your moral compass
   

What Can Ambeck Do For You:

Ambeck Enterprise provides diverse business research and analysis services to senior executives, through the relevant distillation of diverse facts and data.

Formula for Success

Jim Love

"To thine own self be true" by William Shakespeare sums up the formula for success. To me, it is to know who you are, what you want, what you are passionate about, take the time to plan for it and celebrate milestones along the way, and NEVER deviate from your moral compass.

If you do not wish to receive this e-Newsletter, please send an e-mail to postmaster@ambeck.com with unsubscribe written in the subject line.