A client had hired me to help her get control of her business life, which was causing her great stress. At the time, she was Executive Vice President of Franchising for one of the largest fast-food companies in the world.

A seasoned professional in the industry, with proven talents in sales and marketing in addition to franchise operations, my client determined that in order to grow professionally, she needed to have a greater understanding of Finance. Her problem was that she was already consumed with all the tasks and details of her core responsibilities. Her schedule allowed absolutely no time to pursue anything else.

Now, one would think that an executive who had risen to the high level my client had would be adept at delegating tasks and responsibilities to peers and subordinates. But, she wasn’t. She was overbooked and overwhelmed.

While working with my client, I discovered that she had come from a large family that depended on her as the breadwinner and care-giver. It was this set of values, expectations and sensibilities that informed the way she viewed and conducted her job, not to mention its effect on her personal life. She tried to do everything herself, unable or unwilling to let go of even the most routine tasks.

At one point, she told me, “I don’t know, sometimes I feel like a fire-extinguisher.” That comment prompted me to advise my client to visualize herself wearing a bright-red hat that looked like a fire extinguisher. I guided her to imagine it blinking and blaring warnings like, “Urgent!” and “Emergency!” Its bright red color, I suggested, acted as a magnet, attracting projects that needed to be done “yesterday,” and people who were dependent on her to get them done.

After letting her experience the effect this identity created for her, I then urged my client to change her hat. Instead of the bright-red fire extinguisher, I asked her to now visualize herself wearing a dark blue one, with a shield on it that said “Fire Commissioner.” The new hat was demure, calm, self-assured and authoritative. And those were precisely the qualities it conveyed to her and to others around her.

Wearing her new hat — and persona — my client derived a whole new wardrobe of benefits. As Fire Commissioner, she felt comfortable letting go of control of the tasks piled up on her desk. By delegating these to others, she not only increased her own effectiveness as a leader and performer but strengthened the skills and reinforced the independence of her team. In addition, she pared the items on her to-do list from 48 to 8 by letting go of the strings that bound her to controlling too much.

Plus, with her schedule now able to accommodate new initiatives, she was able to follow my recommendation to forge an alliance with the CFO of the company, for a “mentoring-exchange” relationship, helping her develop a financial acumen that would propel her to the next level in her career.

And, as an added bonus to the benefits to her business life, my client realized that she now had time for her life outside of work, which she relished by going to the gym more often and by spending cherished time with her family and friends.

It’s always a good idea to look at yourself in the mirror of pure awareness. Does the hat you’re wearing compliment and complement who you are and the identity you want to project? Does it align with your goals and intentions or does it clash with the wardrobe of success and fulfillment you want to wear?

Here’s a good exercise to do to determine if you are projecting the identity that is aligned with who you are:

1. Draw and/or describe the hat you wear in your business life and personal life.

2. What does that say about you?

3. Ask three people to describe the persona they see you projecting in the world.

4. Decide how to change your hat to bring these factors into alignment.

5. Try wearing that hat for the next week and see what happens within you and around you.

As a creative director for The Cola-Cola Company for ten years, a vice president of Universal Television, and a communications director of the 1996 Olympics, Neil Tepper has had a creative and fulfilling professional career. He now focuses on what he loves best helping people live more successful and meaningful lives through his unique insights into the creative process. Visit Neil’s website at www.neiltepper.com.

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EXPLORE THE POETRY OF YOUR LIFE

Living the life of an entrepreneur has its privileges. One of them is choosing whether you’ll work 100 hours a week over the course of seven days or six. Every person who has ventured out into his or her own business knows the dark humor in this, even as he/she revels in the life of a free agent, accountable to no one but their own sense of ambition and industry. But, the truth is working so hard can work against your higher levels of success.

When I first went out on my own, as an entrepreneur, after more than fifteen years in the corporate world, where the phone always rang with people wanting to do business with me, I learned a valuable lesson about productivity. As the legions of self-employed before me had done, I performed numerous marketing tasks in order to drum up consulting projects and other work. I made phone calls, took meetings, made more phone calls, sent out letters and resumes, attended networking events and took more meetings. As every independent businessperson knows, attracting clients is a full-time job in itself.

I did whatever I could think of to let the world know that I was open for business. With sterling credentials and worldclass experience, I thought it would simply be a matter of answering the phone to field a flood of clients and projects. But, it wasn’t so simple. It was difficult at first. My phone didn’t ring off the hook like it did when I was the client.

Although I was surprised at the meager response to my efforts, I wasn’t overly concerned because I knew my work ethic would keep me pushing and pitching. Like many of you, I know that about myself. I know that I am relentless and indefatigable when pursuing a goal. And my goal then was to make it as a successful entrepreneur. I believed that by keeping the pressure on myself, it would be just a matter of time until the door swung wide with clients and cash flow.

One day (a Wednesday, I recall) during this intense period of dialing for clients, I found myself lying on my sofa, reading a book. It was a novel. Well… I was aghast. On a weekday afternoon? On my sofa? Reading something for . . . pleasure?! I remember actually looking around to see if anyone was watching me commit this unseemly crime of self-indulgence.

Then, I felt a gloom of guilt descend on me and I heard a voice deep within me somewhere lecturing myself about how unproductive I was being and how lazy I was. It was the voice of my “inner dictator” demanding that I needed to be making more phone calls, sending out more letters, attending more events, doing this and doing that to make something happen for my business. “Reading for pleasure?” the task-master implored. “Are you crazy? I’m going to tell your boss.” (”Or, your mother!” the primal authoritarian within me threatened.)

Then, just as I was ready to surrender to the command and flog myself into submitting to make 20 more phone calls, I heard another voice within. It was calm and soft and quiet. It said, “It’s okay. I’m exploring the poetry of my life, not the industry of my life.” And, immediately I felt an ease come over me.

The lesson I learned in that moment was that there is a balance point that needs to be paid attention to. Even an assembly-line machine has a cutoff switch and I needed to locate it within me and turn it off sometimes. Without guilt!

The irony is that,  by refreshing and renewing our body and our mind by doing something purely for pleasure, even in the midst of an intense work period, we become even more productive and effective when we turn the switch back on and get back to work. This seems contradictory, antithetical and just plain illogical, but it’s the way of the “logical creative.”

Trammell Crow, one of the world’s most successful commercial real estate magnates and philanthropists, is known to actually schedule time for daydreaming in his busy day. He knows that this humble activity enables his body and mind to be refreshed and to enable creativity to flow more easily. He has discovered this secret of the logical creative and it makes him a more effective executive, and a happier person.

The coda to my story is that after allowing myself to continue to enjoy the poetry of my life that day, the phone rang the very next day with a high-paying consulting job. Interestingly, the call was not from one of the many contacts I’d made previously by following the industry of my life.

As a creative director for The Cola-Cola Company for ten years, a vice president of Universal Television, and a communications director of the 1996 Olympics, Neil Tepper has had a creative and fulfilling professional career. He now focuses on what he loves best ­ helping people live more successful and meaningful lives through his unique insights into the creative process. Visit Neil’s website at www.neiltepper.com.

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The prevailing buzz these days, from self-help books and seminar stages, is to THINK BIG. And, of course that is valuable advice, as many people need to be encouraged to stretch beyond the bounds of their comfort zone and reach for greater potential.

But don’t forget that you can grow big by thinking small.

One of the myths of creativity is that it is a “big deal,” and that the act of being creative is always accompanied by trumpets and fireworks, with a chorus of angels singing in the background. This is a lovely visual image, but the truth is that creativity and access to your highest potential — can be small and silent and come to you in the quiet circle of your own life.

Take the case of Arthur Fry, a scientist with 3M Corporation and a regular churchgoer, who loved to sing in his church choir. During choir practice, Fry would thumb through his hymnal and become mildly irritated when the slips of paper he used to mark the pages kept falling out.

Then he remembered a failed experiment performed by Spencer Silver, a colleague at 3M. Silver had produced a new adhesive, but it was rejected because it was too weak. “Aha”, said Fry as he picked up yet another slip of paper that had fallen from his hymnal (and you may be saying “aha” right now, as well). Fry went to the lab, retrieved that “failed” experiment and applied the adhesive to those slips of paper. In doing so, he realized that in addition to the papers sticking to the pages, he could also write little notes on them. Voila: Post-it Notes® was created.

And, yes, in this case creativity was a big deal. Post-it Notes®, of course, is one of the most successful office-products in the world and has become a mega-product and profit-center for 3M. But, and here’s the thing, for Arthur Fry, it was simply a simple solution to make his life a little easier and happier while he sang in the choir (well, in Fry’s case, perhaps a chorus of angels did sing, but my point remains.

And so it is with you. Think of times when you had an idea that made your life, or someone else’s, a little easier. Maybe you found a short cut to work, or you came up with an idea to get your kids eat their vegetables. A small idea in the quiet circle of your own life.

Here’s how you can begin to harvest some of the good ideas that come to you that you think are no big deal:

1. Carry a little notebook around with you, small enough to fit in your pocket or purse. Keep it in the car and take it with you wherever you go.
2. Jot down any idea that comes to you, no matter how silly or obvious or inane. So, if you’re in a store and you see something on sale and you figure you’ll buy two of the items, write it down.
3. Also jot down what your state of mind was when you had the idea.
4. At the end of each day, take 15 minutes to read what you wrote for that day and consider how the principle of each idea could be applied to a problem or challenge in your life.
5. Look for any patterns in your state of mind, it might be a clue about how to access your “Creative Power Zone” whenever you need a bright idea.

Remember to acknowledge all the little ideas that come to you that make your life a little easier or happier. It’s important to pay attention to such things. The more you become aware of these small, quiet moments and ideas, the more you will have them. Some of them could even lead to something BIG.

Did you find this article interesting, informative, even thought provoking?

As the Creative Director for Cola-Cola Corporation for over a decade, a Universal Studios Producer, and Director of the 1996 Olympics, Neil Tepper has had a creative and fulfilling professional career.  He now focuses on what he loves best – helping people live more meaningful and enjoyable lives through his unique insights into creativity.  Visit www.neiltepper.com for more information about Neil.

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