Integrity Leadership

By Zig Ziglar


It is true that integrity alone won't make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one. A classic example involving integrity is one displayed by Steuben, the manufacturers of crystal. For generations they've had a policy of breaking every imperfect piece of crystal, no matter how small the flaw.

Needless to say, this is a potent symbolic act, to both employees and customers. By the same token, genuine leaders must resolve to uphold their standards and values and act as role models for everyone in the organization. If leaders don't place values on a pedestal and defend them against attack, who will?

A person of integrity will make many of his or her decisions in advance. They are guided by principles and decisions that are made not for each individual situation, but according to principle.

When values are well established within an organization, when those countless occasions arise where there has been no specific prior example, the integrity principle will lead to an integrity decision. This enables the organization to avoid serious pitfalls.

Leaders with integrity know they are not infallible, so when they make the inevitable mistakes they acknowledge their errors and immediately make amends. In other words, they are big enough to admit their shortcomings and wise enough to right their wrongs as quickly as possible.
In his books and speeches, former Notre Dame head football coach Lou Holtz regularly admonishes people to "do the right thing."

When you do the right thing, even if the results are not good, your integrity remains intact; and your followers' confidence in you is not irreparably damaged, because they know you are a person of integrity.

... Adapted from Zig's popular book Staying Up, Up, Up In A Down, Down World.
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Zig Ziglar offers a weekly newsletter filled with more of his inspiring stories as well as practical ideas to help you in the areas of sales, marketing, customer service, and related topics. You can subscribe to the Zig Ziglar Newsletter at http://www.zigziglar.com

Great Time Management Advice

By: Jim Rohn


I often talk in my seminars about the importance of time and time management -- how rich people and poor people both have the same amount of time every day - 24 hours (which by the way, I find fascinating).

I want to share with you four great time management ideas that were excerpted from the 2004 Weekend Event, Speaker Round Table Session - Enjoy!

Brian Tracy: I always give the principle of: Begin the day by "Eating That Frog". It basically says that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then you will have the satisfaction of knowing it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

And your "live frog" is your most important task. Now there's two corollaries to that. The first one is if you have two frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first and the second corollary to that is if you have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it too long.

So the key to high performance is to plan every day the night before, in advance, and set priorities for it. And then say, "if I can only complete one task on this list before I was to be called out of town for a month, which one task would it be?"

And whatever that is, it becomes your frog and the next morning discipline yourself to start in on that task, the most important thing on your list, and do only that until it is complete.

If you can develop that habit, you can double and triple your productivity, you'll take full control of your life, you will eventually become wealthy, and the personal feeling of pride, accomplishment, discipline and achievement you get will be absolutely extraordinary.

It is one of the most important of all lessons to learn, and one of the hardest things to implement if anybody has tried to do it.
Denis Waitley: Stop watching in prime time and start living in prime time. Prime time is 7-11 pm EST, when all of America is watching other people making money and having fun in their professions.

So if you want to watch other people making money, having fun in their professions, which gets their ratings up so they make more money, go ahead and do things that are tension relieving, instead of goal achieving.
But if you truly want to live your life in prime time, then write in prime time, have intimacy in prime time, talk with your children in prime time, live and do in prime time instead of unhooking and engaging in tension relieving activities.
Every book I've written, all seventeen, have been written 7-11 pm weekly and on Saturdays. And why? Because I am earning money the rest of the time, and I don't have time to write a book except in prime time.

So stop watching and use the television set as an appliance. It has doors on it. Close the doors and use like an iron, when you need to iron your clothes, bring out the TV set.
Jim Rohn: Regarding the television, I knew a guy who wasn't doing too well and he wanted some advice from me. I knew he had a television set and knew he watched a lot of television, so I asked, "How much did that television cost you?"

He said, "about $400."

I said, "No, you're mistaken."

He said, "No, this television set cost me $400." I said, "Well that's to buy it. To watch it, I am sure it is costing you about $40,000 a year to watch." He finally got the message and he called his brother-in-law, who had a pick-up, and he and his brother-in-law hauled his television out of the house.

His brother-in-law did say, "Well, you can just shut it off." And he said, "No, for now I don't trust myself, Jim Rohn is right. I'm not going to let this television set cost me $40,000 a year anymore."

Vic Johnson: My biggest tip would be in an area that I struggle a lot. About 15 years ago I heard someone say to never handle the items in your inbox more than one time.

So I adopted that for email. Now I get over 300 emails everyday even though I have all kinds of filters, some of them going to other people, etc. My biggest challenge is to touch that email only one time.

Either I forward the email, I return the email and delete it or drag it to a folder for action by someone else or delete it.

If you continue to have to go back and revisit that email over and over trying to make a decision that's time -- that's wasted time -- plus it's on your mind until you get rid of it.

So if you are in a profession and you handle a lot of emails and you're still getting a lot of items in your inbox, only touch them one time.
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Seeing is Believing, or Is It?

Seeing is Believing, or Is It?
(excerpted from The Seeds of Greatness Treasury)
When your eyes are open, you see the world that lies outside yourself. You see the items of the room you're in, the people, and the view of the landscape through the window. You take for granted that the objects are real and separate from yourself.

However, successful individuals see the act of achieving in advance -- vivid, multidimensional, clear. Champions know that "What you see, is who you'll be."

When you close your eyes, images and thoughts flow through your mind. You may review memories of past events, or preview future possibilities. You can daydream about what may be or what might have been, and your imagination will take you beyond the limits of space and time.

Most people attach little importance to these inner visions. They may seem pleasantly irrelevant, or uncomfortably at odds with the accepted external reality.

If you're like most people, you grew up with the idea that "Seeing is Believing." In other words, you need to physically see something with your own eyes to believe that it's real.

I know many successful individuals who live this way.

But there's an attitude that suggests, "Before you can see it, you have to believe it." This premise holds that our belief system is so powerful that thoughts can actually cause things to happen in the physical world.

I also know many successful individuals who live according to this notion of reality.

So which concept is nearer the truth? Do you have to see it before you believe it, or believe before you can see it? The answer is: both are basically true.

If you can see something in your mind's eye, and you imagine it over and over again, you will begin to believe it is really there in substance. As a result, your actions, both physical and mental, will move to bring about in reality the image you are visualizing.

During my university years at the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, I underwent training in aircraft recognition. All of us midshipmen sat at one end of a hall while silhouettes of American and foreign military aircraft were flashed on a screen at speeds similar to combat situations.

We were supposed to write down the numerical designations and names of the planes, such as A-4, F-ll-F, F-4, MIG-21, and so forth. But the task became more difficult each week, because they kept adding more planes, scrambling the order, and speeding up the projection.

Finally, it got ridiculous, because the images were going by faster than an MTV music video so that most of us saw only a blur, and some didn't see anything. I began to see planes that weren't even invented yet.

When it came time for the final exam, I didn't know for certain which planes I was seeing. I wrote down hunches, intuitions, and reflex responses. But when the test results were announced, virtually everyone had scored a perfect 100 percent. We had seen the planes, even if we didn't necessarily believe it. For me, that test proved that images can be stored and retained, unconsciously, at incredible speeds. And those stored images, when recalled, can enhance performance. What about the thousands of flickering images we see on a TV, computer or movie screen? What about commercials? Do we have to believe the products really do all those amazing things before we buy them? Do viewers have to think that violent scenes in movies and TV are actually occurring in real life for there to be a negative effect on their behavior?

Many people believe that violent fantasy has no impact on their lives whatsoever, because they think they're too intelligent to be swayed by it. Well, I've got news for them. Whatever you see or experience, real or imagined, consciously or subliminally, when repeated vividly over and over, does affect your behavior, and definitely can influence you to buy a product or buy into a lifestyle, good or bad.

Your attitude and beliefs are, quite simply, functions of what you see day in and day out. Information can be taken in almost unnoticed. You won't react to it until later, and you still won't be aware of what lies behind your response. In other words, what you see really is what you get, regardless of whether you know it or not. You don't need to be watching slides of airplanes, or TV shows, or music videos, video games, or commercials.

You can be just lying down, or commuting to work, or walking through a park, and by seeing from within, in your mind's eye, you can change your life. By rehashing fears and problems, you can make yourself depressed. As a result you can botch a business deal, hurt a relationship, or lower your performance.
By forecasting a gloomy outcome in your mind's eye, you can act as your own witch doctor and practice a modern-day kind of voodoo that will fulfill your negative prediction with uncanny accuracy. On the other hand, by replaying in your mind's eye the best game you ever played, you can repeat that best game again, when the stakes are even higher and the pressure is on.

And by mentally pre-playing the best game you've ever imagined, you can set the stage for a world-class performance. This "instant replay" and "instant pre-play" applies to anything from a successful sales call or athletic event to the effective motivation of your teammates and children. Choose your role models and inputs carefully. Your attitudes and beliefs are the software programs driving you every day on life's journey. Denis Waitley
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Written by Denis Waitley. To receive Denis Waitley's Weekly Ezine, and to learn about his new program The Platinum Collection - Healthy, Wealthy & Wise visit http://www.getmotivation.com/qk.cgi/denis-waitley