You Already Know How to Be Great: A Simple Way to Remove Interference and Unlock Your Greatest Potential - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Fine is a New York Times bestselling author and widely acclaimed keynote speaker and performance coach. He is the founder and president of InsideOut Development, which offers training programs, coaching services, team performance workshops, consulting, and reinforcement solutions. For 35 years, he has helped audiences from athletes to Fortune 500 companies reach their fullest potential. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Rebecca R. Merrill is the founder of Merrill Leadership, established in 1999 to coach top-level executives on their personal and professional leadership skills. Working with the senior leadership of companies both large and small, her industry clientele includes clinical research, manufacturing, banking, education, retail, real estate, and private wealth management. Merrill is the author of Living In Yes: Helping Smart People Make Good Decisions and Starfish Leaders: Five leadership Fables of Personal Regeneration.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

You Already Know How to Be Great

You Already Know How to Be Great

To all those amazing people who make it safe for others to explore their own experience—especially those who did and still do it for me

FOREWORD

by Stephen R. Covey

Over the years, one of the most important ideas I’ve learned about and taught is the power of a “paradigm shift”—of seeing something in a new and different way that creates a huge change in thinking and behavior.

In You Already Know How to Be Great, Alan Fine creates a paradigm shift of major proportion. Most often, he says, dramatic performance improvement does not come from gaining new knowledge; it comes from getting rid of the “interference” that gets in the way of using the knowledge and capacity we already have. That one idea has phenomenal implications and applications. It literally transforms the way we approach improving our own performance and also the way we approach helping others improve theirs.

Five Reasons Why I Like This Book

There are a number of reasons why Alan’s approach resonates with my passion for effectiveness in leadership and in life.

TO BEGIN WITH, it taps into two fundamental human desires that are deep within each of us—the desire to be and do our best and the desire to be significant to others, to make a difference. These desires created a catalyst for my own work on The 8th Habit—“Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs.” In You Already Know, Alan shares a paradigm and a process to help readers fulfill these basic desires by improving their own performance in any area of life and also helping others to improve theirs.

SECOND, it’s not some fad or “flavor of the month.” It’s based on sound, universal principles. For example, Alan’s approach recognizes top performance only comes when the performer, not the coach (or leader or manager or teacher or parent), proactively accepts responsibility for results. This frees individuals to release their talent and creativity and increase their performance capacity.

THIRD, this approach is highly pragmatic. It not only acknowledges the principles of breakthrough performance; it provides both the performer and the “coach” a simple but robust way to implement them through Alan’s GROW process.

FOURTH, it stands solidly apart from approaches that while they enable people to perform in the moment create a dependency on the advice and direction of others. Truly great leaders, great managers, great coaches, and great parents help others strengthen their core capacity, thus empowering them to be effective not only in the moment but also in multiple applications over time.

FIFTH, this approach is universally applicable. It provides a template that can help any individual improve performance in any area of life. It can help any group or team resolve any issue and improve performance in any organization. One of the important implications is that this truly is an approach for a global world.

I’m excited by the insight this book provides into the nature of human performance and how to influence it in self and in others. I’m even more excited by the language Alan has developed to help people understand and talk about performance issues and by the simple, highly pragmatic tools he has created to address them. But most of all, I’m excited by the results. There are a lot of people with a lot of good ideas for making the world better. But Alan is one who’s been able to translate ideas into simple doable actions that truly create breakthrough outcomes.

To me, this book is really a book about leadership—both personal and public. It gives readers the vision and the tools to exercise personal leadership by improving their own performance and public leadership by helping others improve theirs. In doing so, it helps readers walk an enriching path of fulfillment and contribution. It is a truly landmark book on helping yourself and others journey to greatness.

UP FRONT

If we did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

THOMAS A. EDISON,
American inventor and businessman

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• You know that if you had a regular exercise program you’d have more energy and feel better. You’ve bought a variety of exercise equipment. You’ve tried a lot of different types of programs. Each time, you’ve lasted about three weeks. You ask yourself: “What’s the matter with me? Do I just not have the character to do this—or was I somewhere else when the exercise genes got passed out?”

• You’ve been told that your job as a manager includes coaching the people in your division, so you’ve been meeting with them regularly, giving them good instruction and trying to help them improve. But much of the time, your help doesn’t seem to matter, and sometimes it’s even rejected. One person you need to talk with about an accountability issue refuses to even meet with you. You think: “How can I coach these people, and how can I do it in a way that will truly make a difference?”

• You’re trying to help your daughter grow up to be a responsible adult, but you can’t even get her to clean her room. You’ve tried everything—incentives, encouragement, punishment, withdrawal of privileges, even yelling—but nothing seems to work. You wonder: “What’s it going to take to make her want to keep her room clean?”

• You’re standing on the golf course at the first tee. You’re playing with some clients, and you’d really like to make a good impression. You know what it’s like to hit a really nice drive, but you can’t do it consistently. So you worry: “What if I hit the ball into the trees or ‘whiff’ it? What are these people going to think?”

• Your organization is not performing as well as you’d like. You’ve tried a variety of approaches and had some success, but the goals you set at the top never really make it down the line and your employees are not fully engaged. You spend most of your days dealing with internal problems instead of external opportunities. You keep asking yourself: “How can I raise performance throughout the organization? What can I do to get everyone fully engaged and on the same page?”

These scenarios represent a wide range of common experience, but they have one important element in common: they all deal with issues of performance—either in self or in others. Most of us want the results of top performance. We want the enthused organization, the engaged work team, the exceeded sales quotas, the responsible child, the low handicap on the golf course, the increased energy and the washboard abs. But even when we know what it takes, we don’t always have the tools that make those kinds of results possible.

This book is about those tools. It’s about a paradigm, a principle, and a process that can lead to breakthrough performance in the workplace, on the golf course, in the boardroom, in the family room, or anyplace where higher performance makes a difference. It’s about how to improve performance in your own life and also in the lives of those you are trying to help. It’s based on the premise that

EVERYONE has the potential to perform better;

potential is blocked by interference;

interference can be reduced by focused attention; and

focused attention can be simply and systematically increased.

Let Me Introduce...