EXECUTIVE COACHING

Anyone or anything  that you cannot see both sides of runs your Life. brought to you by the second universal law of nature, nature evolves and so do you.

opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Our opinions are based on information we have gathered and in some cases spent a lot of money and time gathering, so that we can claim to know something infinitely well. Of course, we can always go on the Internet, and the Internet is never wrong!

but opinions are also a cage. They create the prison walls in which we live. The more we addict ourselves to our opinions, the stronger cage. Kicking and screaming we complain that we are not getting what we want, all that people are not doing what we want, or, we are not achieving what we want and quite often we build the cage even stronger. The boundaries of our life I built, not by commerce but by opinions.

I remember so clearly while studying environmental science at university, visiting the home of a friend whose parents were professors at a university. Both of them were professors. I was explaining why the world would come to an end if we didn’t change the way we managed our ecology. At one point, the guy turned to his wife, and said, “I think this man is having us on.”

I was at this time rowing competitively, a patrol captain at the Surf club, spending hours on the weekend surfing and scuba-diving. So I was a grown adult. But with this comment I burst into tears. I cried like a little baby boy. My opinion had been discounted. And I had spent four years struggling through this engineering course, not easy for me, to come to these very strong opinions. It was like somebody had taken a hot poker and shut it up my bum.

afterwards I realise that I had been trying to convince these people that my opinion was truth. And, as academic geniuses, who dealt with this sort of opinionated garble every day they were highly sceptical. It was the first time I saw the difference between wisdom and an opinion. Shattered, I walked away licking my wounds being very angry about the fact that I couldn’t convince them that the world was coming to an end. Little did I know that I had built a cage. I had built a prison cell. I couldn’t see any other data in the world that would contradict what I thought. I’d become a religious fanatic in the world of environment. I have become, in truth, a hypocrite.

a few years down the track I was now owning an air pollution control engineering firm. I built this firm from taking over a $500,000 debt, signing a promissory note to the German licensee to repay that money within three years. I had $20,000 and a factory full of spare parts. Within a year I paid the debt and business turned to profit. In order to do so I had to be one of those people who were creating the very pollution that I talked about that was going to bring the world to the end. In manufacturing air-pollution control equipment, I had to compromise my righteous opinions. In dealing with customers it was even more extreme.

industrial hygiene, is the art of collecting dust within a factory before it gets sucked into the lungs of those people who work there. All dust is carcinogenic. But some dusts are worse than others. Some dust, such as tea dust, is collected and recycled in teabags. And so there is both a commercial reason, collecting dust for recycling within the plant, and there are social reasons in protecting the well-being of employees. I was so passionate about what I did in the industrial hygiene area of the business that I would consider zero dust my baseline. The cost to a factory to create a zero dust environment is much higher than allowing a few microns of dust that is invisible to the naked eye, to exist. And so here I was, competing with five or six other companies to install $300,000 worth of industrial hygiene in the new factory, trying to achieve perfection and yet having to compete. After losing many of the contracts we bid for by going overboard with our design, I had to except that to be competitive, and survive in the industry, I had to lower my standards. Now I was dealing with a different problem. On the one hand I was building a business and doing a great job because if I can eliminate 99% of the dust from the atmosphere of a factory it is better than eliminating nothing. Nothing was the benchmark. And yet if I went that extra 1%, I would lose the job. And suddenly this commercial argument started to mould my opinions. Maybe the world would not come to an end with a little bit of dust here in there, maybe a little bit of consumption will not bring the world to its knees. As the commercial requirement of my survival and the business became more critical, my opinions became less rigid. And as my opinions became less rigid, I found new information that validated that less rigid stance.

anything you can’t see the balance in creates an opinion. That opinion forms the foundation of your identity. When you think that you are what you think, which is the standard default for most people, then, our opinions from the prison that constricts, stifles, stresses and ends up taking us to an early grave. Dismantling that cage is called evolution. This is what we practice with Innerwealth as we use the emotional shower or the discard form to make sure that our opinions become malleable. With malleable opinions we are more inclined to listen rather than shout with emotion. Remembering that an emotion is a lopsided thought. So every single emotion in someway is an opinion. Or comes from an opinion. And every opinion is based on a lopsided thought which is an argument with the universe. There is nothing out of balance in the universe except a human thought. There is nothing out of balance in a human except the appetite to create opinions, emotions, feelings that are based on one-sided information. The most extreme opinion is a terrorism opinion.

there are different forms of terrorist. We all know, and our lives are run by, the worst of them, those who would destroy the lives of others in order to vocalise their opinion. But there are more surreptitious and subtle forms of terrorism that I think cause more damage.

the corporate terrorist

getting things done at work requires clarity. Managing time requires clarity. Leadership requires Clarity. However, clarity is not an opinionated instruction. But many people are promoted to high positions in business because they have very strong opinions. They lead with their opinions. You can tell that they do not see balance in what they do and therefore they gamble their decisions. When we form a business decision or an instruction to somebody based on an opinion we are gambling with a 50-50 chance of success. Once, many moons ago, that may have been able to be built into the pricing of the business. And sometimes those odds were reduced by finding two people with the same opinion, which reduce the odds to 75% accuracy. But as we’ve seen in many business examples, 75% accuracy leaves 25% gamble, and that leads to failure. Opinions can also be struck against another person. Remembering the two professors I spoke to earlier, when I was trying to sell my opinion to them, and they rejected it, if I taking it personally and was a more violent person I might have got angry at them. And that’s when opinions turn to terrorism at work.

there are also terrorists in the home. When mum or dad has a paranoia about the use of the Internet or bedtime or table matters, they are not saying that it is their opinion, they think that their opinion is the truth. They will hammer that truth against the wall and punish anybody who betrays that opinion. This is the worst of terrorism because it becomes a personal attack or a human being for not being complicit with an opinion. That parent, accidentally, becomes the worst form of terrorist attacking the human spirit by saying, “my opinion is the truth opinion.” And there is no more mean, cruel and sad human being on the planet than one who thinks their opinion is truth especially around children. To kill another persons spirit by demanding compliance to an opinion, is fascism.

so you can see from this conversation that lopsided thoughts, unbalanced viewpoints, run people’s lives. They run the lives of people at work, they run the lives of people at home. Anything we can’t see the balance in runs our life. To some degree we don’t mind the upside button none of us would subscribe voluntarily to the downside. It is an irony that we cannot have the good news without the bad, and therefore lopsided thinking, the cause of stress and anxiety and emotion and human story, being a two sided coin in itself, becomes a question as to whether you want to play in that game. If you want the benefit and fun of the upside of lopsided thinking which is going to therefore run your life pursuing pleasure having fun, you must also except the downside which is the depression, sadness, anger frustration and more.

anything you can’t see the balance in runs your life. I eventually built my air pollution control engineering business into a multi million dollar organisation. We had a purpose-built factory in Melbourne where we could big build some of the biggest air-pollution systems in Australia and supply them Australia wide. We were able to install air-pollution systems in aluminium smelters and brick factories where the technology required was very demanding and the dust was incredibly noxious. But one day my opinion destroyed the business.

we had one a contract to install air-pollution control systems at a brand new cement plant. These cement plants are huge and the dust that comes from them is incredibly toxic. Dust such as lime and other minerals that are broken down in the process of creating the raw material for cement production, that eventually go into a raging hot kiln produce gases that are very very naughty. We were in the design phase and I was visiting the cement plant having a meeting with the general manager on site. There were three existing kilns in operation and they were in construction of the fourth.

The evening before this meeting I had been to the home of this man and had dinner with his wife and four children. Cement dust was everywhere throughout the home. My car which was a rental was covered in cement dust after just a few hours. And because this factory was located outside of the city, the company relied on prevailing winds to distribute this rather noxious dust over a large area. At the meeting, the next day, I offered the general manager I had been to dinner with the night before, and upgrade. What I offered him was it to reduce the air-pollution of the new dust control systems by 80% more than we had been required to achieve in the tender for only a few extra thousand dollars. I was going to offer this at cost. And given that I had experienced his home full of dust, and the cost of that dust to the health of his family was obvious, I thought it was a great olive branch. But he immediately said no. Again, incredibly, and to the surprise of the plant manager and myself, and just like with the professor and his wife, I burst into tears. It seems I will still living in the prison cell of my own opinions.

after the meeting and after drying my puppy tears and licking my wounds and hearing the reasons why he could not justify spending a few thousand dollars on a billion dollar plant to reduce the air pollution control in the whole township, I walked out the door and stood on the makeshift Veranda of the site hut, picked up my antique styled mobile phone, and the brick that was used as a battery, rang my business partner and said I want to sell my share of the business.

this decision put in place chain of events that I couldn’t stop that eventually cost me around about $5 million. Whatever you can’t see the balance in runs your life. And in this instance I could not see the balance in something that caused me to make a decision, that I don’t now regret, but I could’ve made it in a much more commercially and emotionally balanced way. It’s clearly written that if you can’t manage your emotions, read here opinions and lopsided thoughts, you can’t manage your money. I’d go so far as to say if you can’t manage your emotions, opinions, you can’t manage your life. 

And what’s worse, we project this on to others. Anyway you can’t see the balance in either causes us to be attracted or repelled from. And given that everybody has every quality, the witnessing of half the truth which causes us to be attracted or repelled from somebody, isn’t running their life it’s running our own. Every opinion we have about another person whether good or bad is running our life. What’s worse, is that every opinion we have about other peop is a reflection of the opinions we have of ourselves and all the opinions we have of ourselves and others allies. Everybody has every trait. If you can witness this reality in every day life you will become a leader in any field that you choose. There may be sacrifices in the short term because you don’t join the mass consciousness of ups and downs and honeymoons, you may feel a little separate. Wasting your time going up with the illusions of half-truths going down with the other half of the illusion of a half truth, adds up to big fat zero at the end of the story.

Anyone or anything  that you cannot see both sides of runs your Life.