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Greetings!
If you are Blue or deal with Blue people, I think the recommended New Year's resolution below might be a most important Blue change to make of a lifetime.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan offers some hard-to-accomplish Blue goals in this week's YouTube video.
Oh yes, and do NOT give up on your New Year's diet yet. We bring you hope.
Jack
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New Year's Resolution for Blue People: Make firm decisions and act on them now | |
Like it or not, Blue friends, we are notorious for lots of talk and little action. Of course we mean to make good decisions and we expect to act on them. But we often - yes often - don't.
So what's to account for that? David Keirsey of Please Understand Me II fame calls Blue people Idealists - harmony-seeking, diplomatic-thinking, warm relationship people. Idealists' lifelong focus is seeking pathways for everyone's personal growth. And the problem with the innate pathway search is that the journey really is more important than the destination. Blue Idealists are no sooner at a destination than they scan the horizon for more pathways to make the world an even better place than they have just found.
Groan. Yes, it's true and you know it. So in the business world, we find that Blue leaders and team players remain open to ideas every waking moment and are reluctant to come to closure on decisions. Almost nothing is black and white for Blue people. Grey reigns supreme.
Listen up, Blue people! You need to know that our wonderful penchant for continually looking for pathways toward local and world peace can annoy the heck out of people of the other three Colors. And you need to know that we will be punished for doing so. Punished? You bet. Stop being invited to meetings? Not asked for ideas? Not put in charge of things? Not given a pay raise? Rejected for credit, positions of trust, and even dates?
So what to do?
Here are four steps.
- First, knowing you are not comfortable with closure, find group decisions that you can eagerly sign off on and act on them asap. Commit to living with the decisions and not re-opening them. Build a reputation for being a can-do, reasonable team player.
- Next, be very careful in the future about flip-flopping and going "wishy-washy" in your group participation. Come to meetings well prepared. Be assertive, business-like, and highly practical in your performance.
- Next, monitor your own talk and decision making for a few weeks and determine if you are going too far with the "pathways" approach to life and business. Better yet, ask a colleague or loved-one to help you monitor your interactions with other people.
- Finally, save the "pathways" approach for situations that call for it, i.e., choose your battles wisely. For example, when your colleagues are choosing sides and not moving because of black-and-white positions, use your natural ability to see opportunities for cooperation, compromise, and collaboration and guide everyone to a reasonable and respected decision. That is your gift as a Blue - to champion, heal, teach, and mentor. We are the world's diplomats. In the end, we make harmony happen. To use jazz terminology, we are the HarmoniCats!
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BIG BLUE IDEAS - Hard to Act On | |
 | | Arne Duncan on the Charlie Rose Show |
The often startling ability of Blue people - the Idealists -- to be comfortable with endless ideas for change is well represented in this video of Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, appearing on the Charlie Rose Show. Blue people populate the upper echelons of education largely, so it is no surprise the top guy in the nation is Blue.
Listen to the full range of possibilities from his perspective. It starts with advocating using schools 12 hours/day, up to 7 days/week. He dismisses financial challenges almost flippantly by passing on the burden to non-profit organizations like the YMCA.
Interviewer Charlie Rose attempts to bring him back to earth with questions like "why hasn't this happened already?" - questions that demand real-world, practical answers. The closest Secretary Duncan comes to that is a reference to an unexplained and poorly referenced activity in Chicago.
From Blues, you will often hear that solutions will indeed be found through collaboration, creativity, and bringing many forms of community - as seen in this video.
Duncan's reasoning is compelling and exciting, of course, because of huge shifts in society - especially the rise in one-parent families, or families with two parents who both work full time.
For a Blue to successfully achieve success with his ideas, however, he needs to have answers that Greens, Golds, and Oranges would ask immediately, like how much it costs, who will pay for it, how to overcome barriers and threats, who has done this successfully before, what the precise plans are, how efficient it can be, whether or not communities will buy in to it, who the leaders are - and so much more.
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Do NOT give up on your New Year's diet just yet!
You won't believe the tools available for you today to get to your ideal weight and fitness levels.
For one, consider Mary Miscisin's Diet Styles: Dish Up Your Personality for the Weight You Want, a workshop that I will deliver as part of your company's Wellness Program or else as a private event for you and a group of your friends (12 or more). Contact me for affordable details: dermody@cox.net. Call (602) 237-5627.
Yes, personality MATTERS when it comes to losing weight. We can help ourselves with our own natural temperament, but we can sabotage ourselves with that same temperament. Which dieter are you? A Feeler? A Planner? A Player? A Thinker? Just imagine leveraging your strengths with the strengths of others to more easily and naturally being fit again!
Can't wait for the workshop? Go to Mary Miscisin's Website to get the book What's Your Diet Type? By Jones, Miscisin, and Redard.
Want to know your diet type? Take Ed Redard's "What's Your Diet Style?" survey at Diet Personality Style.
And there are other tools. What's working gangbusters for me is an online competition called WeightLossWars. Check out the site. Research has shown that people who bet money and compete do so much better than average weight losers: on our own, we average only about a 2-pound loss in 12 weeks; in these competitions, the average is 13+ pounds. That might not sound like a lot, but those are big averages when you're talking about thousands of dieters.
And one more book is changing my life: The Willpower Instrinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. This well researched guidebook just came out and is written by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D - probably one of the most popular professors ever at Stanford University. I promise, you will see something in there that will give you hope for your own self-control.
Enough for now. Let's lose those pounds, friends. It's too early in the year to lose hope, right? Let's GO!!!!
ASK FOR MORE INFO AT dermody@cox.net.
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This really is YOUR newsletter. Send your stories and comments, please, to dermody@cox.net.
Sincerely,
Jack Dermody
JackDermody dot com |
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