Is honesty the best policy?

A truism of the human condition is that everyone lies, even if it is unintentional. Now, even the most honest person will know that telling the whole truth all the time is not a wise practice - people are not made to accept blunt truth.

A wise person thus knows that it is possible to put too high a premium on complete honesty. Sometimes, the truth must not be stated bluntly, it must be packaged. This, of course, begs the question: ‘If it is all right to conceal the truth, then when does concealment end and lying begin?’

In moral terms, honesty is without doubt a virtue, and dishonesty is a vice. But in social terms, absolute honesty can lead to trouble, risking causing offense to others who may not want or need to hear the complete truth. You have to weigh the benefits achieved by being honest with those achieved by being dishonest. To withhold the truth is sometimes a wise act, however, to present a falsehood, as truth is always wrong.

‘Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.’ Plato

What Should I Eat?

Such a simple question has become so complicated. In the words of Michael Pollan, author of the New York Times best-selling novel, Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“As a culture we have arrived at a place where whatever wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety”.

As IF training coaches we are repeatedly asked the question stated above by customers. It is the reason why we push food logs and hold nutrition challenges. Customers have lofty weight loss goals and want to find the mystical diet that is conducive to reaching success as quickly as possible. Too often people are looking for the proximal explanation when it comes to eating, or in other words the immediate answer that’s quick and easy. “Tell me what to eat and tell me how much” may sound familiar. This requires tedious work on our part such as examining food pyramids, glycemic indices and RDA charts. In my opinion the distal explanation is far more important. The reason being that it addresses why the individual’s current diet simply isn’t working. Carrying out an extreme diet may help you lose weight but we all know that it won’t stay off in the long run. It’s impossible to maintain the unrealistic caloric, food group, food item and behavioral requirements for the rest of your life. A diet is simply a band-aid solution in that it is a temporary patch up for a much more complex problem.

A couple weeks ago I had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Kitsilano and the place mats on the table featured a map of Italy illustrating the country’s wine and pasta regions. Italy is a country with traditions dating back to the Romans and the claim to fame for foods such as risotto from Venice and pizza from Naples; wines such as Chianti from Tuscany and Brunello from Lombardy. What would the map for Canada look like? Nanaimo bars, wild salmon, poutine and fast food? I’m being facetious but it’s a reality that we don’t have traditional food staples like most other countries in the world. This is due to our mosaic society and our relatively new status as a nation state.

It is my opinion that this puts us even further behind the proverbial 8-ball in our world of convenience and constitutes the ‘distal’ explanation that I speak of. Everyone leads an extremely busy life and there’s not much time for anything, including eating. When we do manage to find 5 minutes to inhale our meal it’s often fast food, refined or unhealthy comfort food.

What should we eat? Somehow the most fundamental of activities has come to require an incredible amount of expert help from dietitians, nutritionists, doctors and training coaches. Not to mention the help of investigative journalists who find out where our food actually comes from and how it’s processed. When it comes to providing nutritional advice to customers I encourage you to dig beneath the simple advice such as pointing out RDA’s and portion sizes and stimulate their intellectual sphere of health. Challenge them to examine why it’s so difficult in our environment to eat well and discuss solutions. This is obviously a daunting task so if you'd like a great starting point, check out the novel Omnivore's Dilemma when you get a chance.

Perspective

There was an article sent out a few years ago that really resonated for me. It was all about our perspectives, the way we viewed our lives... and how, for all the conveniences that exist now and are supposedly meant to make things easier for us, they are actually making things tougher. I wish there was some way to actually compare "then" to "now". For example - how many of you, when you were, say, 8 years old, would say "bye mom - I'm heading to John's up the street" and then head off for day, coming home in time for dinner and relaxing with a little bit of Mattel hand-held football before bed? Now, some of you are parents - how many of you would let your kids do that in this day and age, and how many are afraid that someone would grab them off the street if you did? And is it actually more dangerous out there, or does it just seem like it because of the never-ending media reports?

Some of the points that were listed in the aforementioned article (and perhaps someone can let us know what it is, because I tried to find it but couldn't... so my apologies for referencing something without direct credit):
How many of you rode a bike without a helmet?
Sat in the back seat without a seat belt?
Watched your mom cut and prepare the chicken on the same cutting board that she prepped the vegetables on - without washing it in between?
Failed a test, and weren't told that it was someone else's fault?
Got absolutely hammered in a team sport, losing so badly that the sting lasted for a week?

The thing is, many of us (even if we remember these things) forget what life was like before cell phones, Blackberries, DVD players, digital recorders, computers... hell, even the internet.

With that in mind - please, watch this clip and think about what we have, and where we're going... it's only 4 minutes, and I think (if you haven't seen it already) you'll enjoy it quite a bit.

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/louis-ck-everythings-amazing-and-nobody/1349328242

Have a great week!

~Guy

Inevitable

Impossible to avoid or to prevent from happening

Line ups, we are certain to experience our fair share. Was recently waiting for 90min for a referral…yikes! Good thing I had my day timer and black berry. We will constantly experience line ups of life…

To bring this back to us, in our profession we will inevitably be given resistance from a customer or just plainly hear, ‘no, I don’t want to do that’

I don’t profile
I don’t go outside
I don’t do group work
I don’t do events

We can’t back down and be submissive in this situation. Post up and stop this action in its tracks. Period.

The root reaction should always be the same. Why don’t you xx? Uncover all the excuses and label them accordingly. Be confident and educate using explanations of our systems as your guide, the what/why/how principals and the challenge/adversity/victory model. Always relate everything back to the benefits.

The x-factor would be our own confidence.

We can’t expect to challenge/understand someone until will first challenge/understand ourselves…

8 Oscars Later…

Last night at the 81st Academy Awards, Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars, Best Picture, Directing, Song, Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography, Writing (Adapted Screenplay).

For those that have not seen this movie, it is about a young Indian boy from the Mumbai slums who gets a chance to be on the Indian Version of “Who wants to be a Millionaire”. This young boy, by chance, by being a genius, by cheating or by it being staged, manages to answers nearly all the question and looks set to win the 20 million dollar prize. As always, the show ends without the young boy answering the question, who is then arrested on suspicion on cheating. How could a boy from the slum answer all these questions? The movie portrays how this young slumdog was able to answer these questions through his experiences living in the slums of Mumbai.

What is so unexpected about this film was that it was not your typical Hollywood spectacle. In fact, the film was made for 13million dollars, a tenth of the production cost of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It had no recognizable stars like Brad Pitt, Sean Pen, Merrill Streep, and Angelina Jolie. They had unknown leads, Dev Patel who was from the “Indian-Inhabited London Suburb of Harror” and the stunning actress Frieda Pinto in her first movie role ever.

The movie was close to not going to the theaters due to a fold up with the distribution company “Distributors of Warner Independent” in May 2008. The film and its producers would have to consider making this movie go straight to DVD. Luckily, Fox Searchlight came to the rescue to take it to distribution. As Christian Colson, the producer of 'Slumdog Millionaire’ said in his acceptance speech: "When we started out, we had no stars, we had no power or muscle. We did not have enough money, really, to do what we wanted to do. But what we had was a script that inspired mad love in everyone who read it”

For this low-budget movie to win 8 Oscars it quite unbelievable. I personally believe that it is a wake up call to Hollywood, that this 8 Oscar winning movie was not due to the technology of making movies (i.e. special effects) but it was the raw talent of every single person involved. It is a movie involving ordinary people, in ordinary setting about the common man. It portrays the struggles of ordinary Indians who fight for their survival in one of the biggest and poorest countries in the world. You cannot help but be drawn to this tale and understand their day-to-day struggles, their joy and their pain.

Success

In his runaway bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell showed how ideas and products catch fire; in Blink, he explained why gut decisions are often better than well-thought-out responses. In his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell probes what separates the highly successful from everyone else.

What matters: Talent, yes. Timing and opportunity—crucial. And not surprisingly, good old-fashioned hard work and discipline. "What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve," he says. Success is the steady accumulation of advantages.

Gladwell himself is intimate with hard work and discipline. He grew up in rural Elmira, Canada, a place best known for its maple syrup festival. When his dad, a civil engineering professor, refused to drive young Malcolm 20 miles each morning to swim practice, the boy turned to running and became a high school champion. "Sometimes constraints actually create success," Gladwell says. "Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer."

Gladwell's Five Steps to Success

1. Find meaning and inspiration in your work.


2. Work hard.


3. Discover the relationship between effort and reward.


4. Seek out complex work to avoid boredom and repetition.


5. Be autonomous and control your own destiny as much as possible.

Prestige Runaway

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist (1849-1936), is credited as being the first to describe the idea of classical conditioning. In the 1890's Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs by externalizing a salivary gland so that he could measure and analyze the saliva and the response it had to food in different situations. He noticed that dogs tended to salivate before food was actually delivered to their mouths and went on to research to investigate the phenomenon. In his experiments he manipulated the stimuli occuring before the presentation of food and established the basic laws for 'conditional reflexes' and learned behaviour.

Allow me to relate learned behaviour to our everyday lives. Our society is quite homogenous in terms of what is popular to wear, what slang to use and how to style your hair. We are obsessed with showy displays of wealth. There are very few leaders and innovators because established trends are well established and trigger the stimulus -> reaction response in all of us. For instance, when you see a woman wearing a very expensive dress and a shiny necklace at a cocktail party you immediately have an impression of her. Thoughts such as "she must have money" or "she must be important" may come to mind.

We are all guilty of this 'prestige runaway' to some extent. We get caught up in brand buy-in and focus far too much on materialism and the shallow things in life. Consider these two examples:

• Rex is on steroids, has a nice fake tan, blonde streaks in his hair, a bunch of tatoos, drives a Hummer and wears a $300 Ed Hardy t-shirt that cost $3 to manufacture.
• Stacey wears tons of make up, has hair extensions, fake breasts, wears hair extensions and 6 inch heels every single day.

How on earth could these attributes ever become popular? They are expensive, can cause health problems and may be very uncomfortable. In my opinion people perceive that having a certain image will somehow make them successful. They pick cues from others' images and adopt them as their own, in turn creating a feedback loop that increases the importance of the cue. We need to understand that it's not the cue (such as big breasts or muscles) that create success for an individual. True leaders understand this and have the ability to blend in while being very different from the rest. On the surface they may look like everyone else but it's the intangibles that you should pay attention to. Look at the things that they do which others aren't doing. Today, I challenge you to examine a great leader and identify what truly makes them successful.