Freedom to Think and Dream Big» Health and Wellness Archives – Geoff Snyder’s Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog

Potholes and Construction

Geoff — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:26:04 +0000

Once you’ve set your goals, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the road to realizing your carefully crafter planned for success is going to be smoothly paved. Life doesn’t work that way. Instead, you will probably be faced with a street filled with potholes. This is why you have to anticipate those potholes and construction signs. Learning from and adapting to change is part of the journey.

Most of us have heard of Tony Robbins, the powerful motivational speaker and best selling author. Tony Robbins knows full well about a journey that involves changing and adapting. First, his family name isn’t even Robbins, it’s Mahavorick. And he was not always the buff presence he is today. Believe it or not, there was a time when he was overweight and depressed. But he got motivated (by another motivational speaker) and developed a unique neurolinguistic program that is the basis of his philosophy and teachings. His famous fire-walking seminars teach participants the strategies of control: mind over body and logic rules over pain.

His message is to always keep your wits about you. When unexpected obstacles block your path, use your head. Don’t let a little thing like a hot coal burn your feet. Keep walking, with your goal of completing the path uppermost in your mind. Later, you can look back and say, “Ouch! Boy did that hurt! But it’s over, and I won!”

Potholes and Construction is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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John Robert Wooden — October 14, 1910 – June 4, 2010

Geoff — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:17:16 +0000

John Wooden was the greatest college basketball coach in history. The record winning streak of the UCLA Bruins of 88 games, including 10 NCAA titles, gave John, the “Wizard of Westwood” plenty of statistical and practical evidence that the players who start the game are not a big factor in who’s going to win. What counts is staying in the game, playing at full capacity, and doing your best.

And so it translates into the game of business. Let’s say you don’t launch a new product or discover a new sales technique before the competition—it doesn’t mean you’re going to lose. Don’t let somebody else’s innovation inhibit you! Remember that your ability has gotten you where you are today. Concentrate on what you do, and don’t slow down because you didn’t get to market first.

Take advantage of being second. Capitalize on the lessons learned from your competition and use the valuable knowledge to make your product or service better. Heck, think about Apple’s success. They didn’t even’t the MP3 player; they simply created one that a community fell in love with. Focus on continuing to deliver excellence, and you will not only gain from the experience, but it’s entirely possible you’ll win the market.

John Robert Wooden — October 14, 1910 – June 4, 2010 is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Ideas, Trends, and Fads – Both Good and Bad

Geoff — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:09:05 +0000

There are some good ideas…and some bad ideas. Ken Hakuta should know, as for he is known as “Dr. Fad” and made quite the name for himself when he introduced the Wacky Wall Walker to the U.S. market. It became one of the best-selling fad toys of all time. Hakuta earned over $20 million while selling 250 million rubber spiders over a period of just six years!

Ken Hakuta can also attest that what may seem like a bad idea to somebody may be viewed as a great idea to somebody else. Everybody knows of an idea or concept that they’ve heard about and thought was not going to go anywhere (heck, look at Twitter!) and then, wham! – several years later the organization not only succeeded, but the idea spawned other related ideas and the business grew exponentially. Think of the Pet Rock, Chia Pet, and any other of stress management desk toy.

Always be on the lookout for new ideas that appeal to the masses. As you go about your daily life, look through a different worldview at the jobs people are doing around you. Are there ways we can be doing these jobs more easily? Are there certain aspects of an industry that you find fascinating? Do you find yourself attracted to businesses and markets that help people? Are you seeing something that will make people’s lives easier? By answering these questions, you might be able to brainstorm and think of something unique that the market will respond to in a very positive way.

Ideas, Trends, and Fads – Both Good and Bad is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Stop Worrying and Start Living

Geoff — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:53:30 +0000

I have come to realize that people on a fast paced “career track” often burn the candle at both ends. I should know, I was once one of these people and I thank God that it didn’t take me very long (oh about 10 years or so) to figure out that I needed to change a few things in my life. These fast paced individuals are programmed to believe that if they work harder and longer, that they can eventually get ahead, solve the problem, or close the account. But let’s face it…none of these things will happen if you’re exhausted.

One of Dale Carnegie‘s bestselling books,How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, is about stress management. In fact, based on quite extensive research that I did, it was the first book written specifically on the subject. Mr. Carnegie wrote it because he was sick and tired of stressing out everyday over his position in life and wanted to put a stop to it. So he looked very closely at what it was he was worrying about, how it affected him, and came up with a method on how to stop it.

One of the first realizations was that stress and worry cause fatigue. So Carnegie’s strategies for combating include this very simple technique: lie down for an hour before dinner. He translated those hours into the course of a lifetime to get the technique called “5,467 times more effective” than a cocktail.

Today it seems that it’s even harder to find a free hour. But we are able to, and can adapt. Find the time to take a break, even if it’s for only 20 minutes. It will suffice. You’ll be amazed at the wonders it will do for your stamina and your overall peace of mind.

Stop Worrying and Start Living is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Dreamers, Visionaries, and Idealists.

Geoff — Sat, 15 May 2010 06:10:48 +0000

If you consider yourself to be one or more of the above mentioned in the title of this post, then I think it’s safe to say that we all have one thing in common. We have identified that we want something in the world to change, and we listen to our inner voice to find a way to do it. I recently started to read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich again and started to analyze the habits of the of about 500 successful businessmen. After in which, realized a shocking conclusion. Successful people are the individuals that have the ability to tap into their very own unconscious mind through an very intense level of focus, thus allowing for a very free flowing thought process to occur. These people are able to look outside the box, discover and invent products and services that never existed, apply them in such a way that the real world can gladly prosper from them!

Our unconscious mind is an untapped storage bank that is full of all kinds of information. We get an inkling of how powerful it is when we get gut feelings or experience hunches. Hunches are the answers to questions that we pose to our inner voice. Something that I found is that we do not want to dismiss our hunches as crazy concepts. Instead, we want to ponder about them, look at them from every angle possible, to be open minded to all the possibilities that they offer.

Our inner voice is active and available to us every day and every night. We can’t consciously control it, but we can steer it in the right direction. By positioning words, ideas, concepts, and/or feelings into our internal thoughts, we can give ourselves the ability to access our subconscious and reap the rewarding benefits.

Dreamers, Visionaries, and Idealists. is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Are You Building Your Community?

Geoff — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:12:44 +0000

Here is an interesting article about some former Google employees leaving to build social networking sites. This was found on the Mashable and it offers an insight into the importance of building your brand or products community. This continues to be the secret success for online companies as well as traditional companies. As Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes, once you have a loyal “Tribe” following you and your product there is nothing you can’t achieve. But how do you do this? In my opinion, it starts with being authentic. Second, have to build trust. Finally, you have to provide a product or service that can go viral. Are your customers proud to talk about your product and promote it to their friends and family? If you can answer yes to all three you are well on your way to having a smashing success on your hands.

For an outstanding article summarizing some of greatest Lessons Learned from Seth Godin, just click on the hyperlink.

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Memes

Geoff — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:38:44 +0000

Something that I have come to realize is that there is a whole slew of memes that are interconnected in the area of money and success. But these memes are about keeping us from achieving money and success, instead of helping us obtain it. They are very widespread today, and a huge majority of the population is tainted with them. These memes are gladly accepted and replicated because they allow people to validate their lack of progress in their life goals. I’ve found that some of them are:

❚ Money is bad.
❚ Rich people are evil.
❚ It is spiritual or noble to be poor.
❚ Big entities are bad; underdogs and the little guys are good.
❚ You have to sell your soul to get rich.
❚ Rich people lie, cheat, and steal.
❚ Rich people have lots of money, but they also have many additional
problems. Being rich isn’t worth it.
❚ Money causes good people to go bad.
❚ If you deny yourself now, God will provide true prosperity in
the afterlife.

It might be hard to believe that something a teacher or parent said to us when we were six years old is preventing us from getting a promotion today, but it could very true. We may doubt that a TV show we watched when we were younger could be causing our friendships, relationships, and/or marriages to suffer 20 years later, but that might be the case. We may find it hard to believe to think the books we’ve read or the movies we’ve enjoyed could be causing us to get sick or manifest disease.

But in fact, this is exactly what is happening to millions of people. And most likely you or I could be one of them. As we are exposed to these people, institutions, and environments, we are likely to be infected by thousands of potential memes. Just as exposure to raw sewage can cause us to be infected with germs, microbes, and other nasty things, prolonged exposure to the data-sphere (meaning TV, radio, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and e-mail) will infect us with many nasty viruses of your mind if we’re not careful what we chose and what we do with it.

Memes are as real—and deadly—as biological viruses. Just like computer viruses, memes parasitize the host (our minds), replicate, and spread to others. And just like other viruses, an epidemic of memes is sweeping through our society today.

Memes is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Thinking Big

Geoff — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:12:27 +0000

I had recently chatted with a Recruitment Director for one of the nation’s largest Information Technology firms. Four months each year she visits college campuses to recruit graduating seniors for her company’s junior executive training program. The tenor of her remarks indicated she was discouraged about the attitudes of many people she talked with.

“Most days I interview between 8 and 12 college seniors, all in the upper third of their class, all at least mildly interested in coming with us. One of the main things we want to determine in the screening interview is the individual’s motivation. We want to find out if he or she is the kind of person who can, in a few years, direct major projects, manage a branch office, or in some other way make a really substantial contribution to the company. “I must say I’m not too pleased with the personal objectives of most of those I talk with. You’d be surprised,” she went on, “how many 22-year-olds are more interested in our retirement plan than in anything else we have to offer. A second favorite question is ‘Will I move around a lot?’ Most of them seem to define the word success as synonymous with security. Can we risk turning our company over to people like that? “The thing I can’t understand is why should young people these days be so ultra-conservative, so narrow in their view of the future? Every day there are more signs of expanding opportunity.

This country is making record progress in scientific and technological development. Our population is gaining rapidly. If there ever was a time to be bullish about America, it’s now.” The tendency for so many people to think small means there is much less competition than you think for a very rewarding career.

Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measure by the size of their thinking. How big do we think determines the size of our accomplishments. Now, let’s see how we can enlarge our thinking.

Ever ask yourself, “What is my greatest weakness?” Probably the greatest human weakness is self-deprecation that is selling oneself short. Self-deprecation shows through in countless ways.

John sees a job advertisement in the paper; it’s exactly what he would like. But he does nothing about it because he thinks, “I’m not good enough for that job, so why bother.” Or Jim wants a date with Joan, but he doesn’t call her because he thinks he wouldn’t rate with her. Tom feels Mr. Richards would be a very good prospect for his product, but Tom doesn’t call. He feels Mr. Richards is too big to see him. Pete is filling out a job application form. One question asks, “What beginning salary do you expect?” Pete puts down a modest figure because he feels he really isn’t worth the bigger sum that he would like to earn.

Philosophers for thousands of years have issued good advice: Know Thyself. But most people, it seems, interpret this suggestion to mean Know Only Thy Negative Self. Most self-evaluation consists of making long mental lists of one’s faults, shortcomings, inadequacies.

It’s well to know our inabilities, for this shows us areas in which we can improve. But if we only know our negative characteristics we’re in a mess. Our value is small.

Thinking Big is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Bill Gates – Can he solve the world hunger problem?

Geoff — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:06:22 +0000

Among his many generous efforts to spread good, it looks like one of the richest men is setting his goals on solving world hunger. Recently, Bill Gates called for the second “Green Revolution,” focusing on farmer training and infrastructure in Africa, in addition to new crop varieties and higher yields.

“Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land,” Gates said. “So if we can make smallholder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty.”

Interestingly, Bill is looking to controversial genetically modified foods (GMFs) as part of the solution. The Microsoft founder recently gifted $10.4 million to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and Michigan State University, as part of a charge to develop a center in Africa to regulate the new biotechnology.

Think Gates can lead the way? Are GMFs a viable solution? It’s certainly great to see someone using his wealth to do so much good in his lifetime.

Read the entire article at: Scientific American

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Sleep Debt

Geoff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:13:09 +0000

So here is a repost of an entry I made back on January of 2005 after assessing my 2004-2005 New Year’s Resolution. I’m glad I stumbled across this (and no…this is not a StumbleUpon plug) because I had completely forgot about it until now. Currently, my life is quite the same, yet very different at the same time. I don’t drink coffee any more. You will no longer find me smoking a cigarette or drinking alcohol other than the occasional celebratory glass of red wine. I enjoy this much better than my previous “lifestyle”. So, in a nut shell…it’s cool to look back and see how things change from time to time.

“Sleep Debt
Category: Life

My life is full of contradictions, as is true for many of us. For example, if you asked me what my top five favorite things in life are, sleep would certainly be high on that list. I love to sleep…it’s not merely a necessity, it’s a joy. Circumstances permitting, I’d sleep 12 hours a day if I were physically able to. On the other hand, my actions don’t bear out this enthusiasm for sleep. I drink outrageous amounts of caffeinated beverages. I’m usually still awake and working at 2 or 3 a.m. And frankly, I prefer a lifestyle that’s at least partly nocturna…stay up late, wake up late. This in itself doesn’t result in a contradiction; if I went to bed every morning at 3 and woke up at noon, I could enjoy a nice long stretch of sleep and still maintain my desired schedule. But it generally doesn’t work that way. There are too many things to do…deadlines to meet, appointments to keep…and the rest of the world doesn’t conform to my schedule. So I end up getting out of bed after only six or seven hours of sleep if I’m lucky (which is far too little for me) and feel tired most of the day.

I recognize that this is a problem. When I’m sleepy most of the time, I can’t think clearly, and I am much less effective at my work. I don’t like this situation, and I sense that it is taking a toll on my physical and mental health. So my New Year’s resolution this year was to get plenty of sleep. I think I kept it for about a week, but hope springs eternal: maybe I’ll sleep next month or, if not, the one after that. Sooner or later, though, some thing has got to give, because the effects of too little sleep are cumulative…what sleep researchers refer to as “sleep debt”.

Racking Up Debt
Sleep debt is defined as the difference between the amount of sleep you need and the amount you actually get. So if you need 8 hours of sleep per night and get 7, you accumulate 1 hour of sleep debt for that night. And if you get 7 hours of sleep every night for a week, you’ve accumulated 7 hours of sleep debt. Of course, the amount of sleep required per night varies from person to person…and for a particular person, it changes with age. Some people, like me, operate at peak efficiency with 9 or more hours of sleep; others function perfectly well with 5 or 6. But whatever that amount is, sleep debt accrues when you get too little.

Casually speaking, say experts, “If you feel drowsy during the day, you probably have some sleep debt.” This is more than a mere annoyance to me; besides making me grumpy, drowsiness negatively affects my productivity, reduces reaction time, increase the risk of traffic accidents (I’ll tell you this later), and even contribute to weight loss/gain. Various studies have suggested that anywhere from 50% to 90% of Americans experience, and suffer the consequences of, sleep debt. One major cause, according to some people at least, is the alarm clock…or, rather, rigidly defined schedules that demand its use. When you awaken every day before your body says it’s ready, you add to your sleep debt.

At Least There’s No Interest
Until recently, some sleep researchers claimed that sleep debt could be accumulated indefinitely…that, like financial debt, it simply never goes away until it is repaid. If this were the case, I would probably be in the red for about a year’s worth of sleep. Current research suggests that this notion is a mistake, and that the body’s maximum sleep debt is under 20 hours, no matter how many consecutive nights you’ve had too little sleep.

Be that as it may, the only way to “repay” sleep debt, so the experts say, is to sleep more…and there are limits, both practical and physiological, to how much one can sleep. If I had, say, a month off with absolutely no obligations or distractions whatsoever, a perfectly dark, quiet bedroom, a great deal of motivation to repay my debt, and some really boring reading materials…even then, with the optimal conditions, my body simply wouldn’t stay asleep 24 hours a day, or even 12. On those lazy weekends when I’ve had every hope of repaying a week’s worth of sleep debt, I still couldn’t stay asleep more than 10 or 11 hours at a time. So to the extent that sleep debt really is like a financial debt, my body appears to disallow anything other than a minimum payment of an hour or two at a time.

Of course, unlike financial debt, sleep debt isn’t rigorously tracked in a database somewhere. Sleep specialists can perform tests to determine one’s propensity to fall asleep, which gives a rough indication of sleep debt level. But there is no test that will tell you exactly how many hours or days of unpaid sleep debt you have, so the claim that it’s strictly cumulative is ultimately just an educated guess. Still, the claim that it exists is generally accepted, and certainly borne out by my own experience. In fact…*yawn*…I think I need to go make a deposit.”

Sleep Debt is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

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Always Dream Big Enough

Geoff — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:12:10 +0000

There may come a time in your life where you have to make some hard decisions. When you do, half of the people will think you’re crazy and the other half will think you’re right. You’ll need to make those decisions for yourself and your family when your time comes. I do believe the future is bright and my one hope is that I want anybody that reads to know that inside of you are the seeds of greatness. God blessed you with special gifts that only you have. Learn what those gifts are. I know that you can do anything in the world that you choose to do. You have to focus and always believe in yourself. Never beat yourself up for your past performance, just keep on striving to make your dreams come true. I know you are going to do something great in your future and that you can accomplish all you want and then some. Never give up on yourself. You know that it is better to go to bed tired knowing you give it your all than to go to bed lazy because you are striving for nothing. Keep on dreaming, it’s worth it. You are on your way to being the best. You will go beyond where you thought you could. I am proud of you for standing up against mediocrity and claiming yourself to be A DREAMER!! Yes, that is what you are and never ever forget it. Don’t let the fog take it away from you.

You’re the real deal my friend.

May God bless you and always be there for you.

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Freedom to Think and Dream Big» Health and Wellness Archives – Geoff Snyder’s Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog

Potholes and Construction

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Geoff Snyder Recommends

John Robert Wooden — October 14, 1910 – June 4, 2010

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Ideas, Trends, and Fads – Both Good and Bad

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Stop Worrying and Start Living

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Dreamers, Visionaries, and Idealists.

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Are You Building Your Community?

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Memes

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Thinking Big

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Bill Gates – Can he solve the world hunger problem?

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Sleep Debt

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Always Dream Big Enough

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