REEL LIFE WISDOM - HARD TARGET

Toppa the mornin' to ya both...

SCENE 2: “Hard Target”

OK, so I'll admit to a small guilty pleasure: I enjoy Van Damme movies (most, anyway). 

One good one (maybe because it was directed by John Woo) was Hard Target,  a story about merchant marine (he's Cajun, which gives them an excuse to film it in New Orleans) who helps a girl find her missing father. Their search lead them to a guy (played by Lance Henriksen ... always a great villain) who hunts people for sport. It also has Arnold Vosloo (you know ... the bad guy in The Mummy).  

JCVD is hunted by the bad guys, but they discover that he's a hard target to hit. Add this to your list of movies to see.

So, as in last week, all I'm borrowing from this movie is the title: Hard Target. :-) 

Last week we looked at the stress vs. performance curve and the need to understand it ... the need to live like we understand it ... and the need to find out how to hit the sweet spot.

Imagine trying to hit the bulls-eye of a dart board when the board is moving (up, down, sideways, forwards and backwards). It moves slowly at times and darts wildly at others. How the heck do you hit it?

Oh, and don't forget this part ... you need to learn how to hit it consistently every day ... sometimes numerous times a day. If you don't, you'll end up feeling miserable, stressed-out, unfulfilled, bored, angry, apathetic ... and a host of other undesirable and very unproductive emotions.

Well Christian and Faith … did you figure it out?  Did you guess what was the one thing you need in your life to hit the sweet spot? It is a very hard target to hit!

The answer is PURPOSE (along with its cousins mission and challenge). You might have guessed that it was going to be one of the P.I.E. words because ... well, this blog is not just a series of posts ... it's one long story and the thread that runs throughout it, weaving in and out of every example and every smaller story, will usually be connected to one of the PIE words.

PURPOSE is the “P” in P.I.E. Now is when I share the first big learning on this for me.

Any kind of stress gets us moving up the curve. But without something that tells us when enough is enough we just keep allowing the stress to increase, eventually taking us past the sweet spot (peak) and our declining performance isn't the only problem we run into. On that downward side that comes from too much stress we run into things like increasing anxiety, grumpiness, anger, panic attacks, emotional breakdowns and eventually nervous breakdowns (and potentially, death).

Remember the question that I left you with at the end of March?

Do you do what you do because you have a reason to, or do you do what you do because you don’t see a better reason not to?

As crazy as it sounds, you (meaning, your mind and body) will continue allowing stress to increase ... dysfunctionally ... dangerously ... unless you give it a reason to not. And if you don't, at some point, your body/mind will take over control (the elephant will completely ignore the rider ... maybe even bucking him off the saddle) and you will suddenly find yourself behaving in unpredictable (and most unwelcome) ways. 

Controlling stress requires a reason to control it. Purpose provides you with that reason.

Having a challenge provides the stress to get us moving up to the peak. Having a clearly understood challenge, which includes knowing when the challenge has been completed, helps us to know when to ease off the stress pedal.

When you string a series of challenges together you get something that looks like a mission (or campaign) … and the clearer the mission is, the easier it becomes to know when to say NO to additional challenges (as Stephen Covey puts it … it’s easy to say NO to a request for your time and energy when you've already committed to someone/something else with a bigger YES).

Whether it’s a simple challenge or a more complicated mission, the point is to have a clear understanding of what you are doing and why. And if the WHY doesn't exist ... then create it. The secret to managing stress is having a reason inside of you for why you do what you do. If someone else gives you something to do and you begrudge it or don't believe that it is actually important to you, this creates negative stress and your rider has no way of convincing your elephant when enough is enough. But choosing to embrace the challenge or mission and declaring it to be important to you literally flips an internal switch ... a very very deep internal switch ... that turns the stress into something positive. 

Learning how to flip this switch, at will, is what it means to have purpose. The beautiful thing about learning how to flip this switch is that it doesn't rely on emotions ... it is a choice that can be made and executed in the blink of an eye.

The First Time I Intentionally Found the Target
Remember how I ruined Christmas for the family back in '97 because my job situation had changed? No? Well, your Mom does. At an office Christmas party I learned from my director that I was being assigned to an HR project for about 18-months. I was so upset about this that I was miserable all through Christmas and into the New Year ... and I know I made Deb miserable too. Why was I miserable? After all, this was a great job opportunity that might open up new doors for my future. No sir - all I saw was my dream of being the "king of the hurricane centre" being taken away from me. Taking me out of the operational environment would erode my skills, weaken my science, and open the door for someone else to grab that prize (which, at yet, didn't even exist).

Early in January Deb said to me (in a mocking fashion, with eyes rolling and head shaking), "Why don't you do with this what you do with everything else and make it a point of purpose? If they want you to do this classification project then just make up your mind to be the best bloody classification person that you can be!"

That's all it took. She broke the hysteria and helped me find the switch. The funny thing ... she had watched me do this naturally for more than 15 years, yet I didn't realize myself that I was doing it. In one quick rebuke she made me realize that I can find and flip that switch at will. To make a long (and fascinating) story short ... the next 18 months were amongst the most gratifying of my career, and in the end, the things I learned during that HR project actually made me an "unbeatable" candidate in the eyes of all competitors when the job of "King off the CHC" was posted in 1999. I won the job, had a great 10 year ride as Ops Manager at the hurricane centre, and switched to my calling which is working with people.

Find the switch ... it's the bulls-eye in a constantly changing and moving target. But it's worth it because purpose lights us up. It floats our boat. It is an intrinsic motivator of biblical proportions (literally … but I’ll save the details on this for a while).

In the ideal, strive to have not just purpose … but a longer-range purpose for your life. This can be one of the most powerful things you can ever do to create an effective and anxiety-free life. Supplement it with a personal mission statement (your personal constitution to guide you when saying YES and NO to new endeavours) and you will become someone who is a high performer.

I’ll come back to this on numerous occasions … but my big AHHA that I’m sharing this week was discovering the role that purpose plays in stress-management, anxiety-management and a sense of gratification.

I love you guys .... please be purposeful in all that you do ... it makes everything on the inside so much better.

Yoh Daddy