As my friend Mike likes to say “I’m a lucky man….” I still can’t tell whether it’s an affirmation or tongue-in-cheek but it’s one of the traits I like about him. Another friend told me about this iPhone app called the Gratitude Journal and explained how it changed his outlook.
Sounded interesting to me. I mean happiness is a core strategy for everything that I do on my life, after all. I’m a believer that love conquers all, positive thinking is powerful, mind over matter, etc… (yeah, all that foolishness). I also know myself to be susceptible to taking things for granted. So I decided to challenge myself to try this gratitude journal and see what happens.
It changed me…. and more importantly my children.
Although I didn’t stay very disciplined in using the gratitude journal beyond a few weeks, the sheer fact the I was confronted with thinking positively everyday about what I’m thankful for was enough to leave a mark on me. I thought about how lucky I am to live where I live, feeling safe and warm, surrounded by people that love me. To quote Mike… “I’m a lucky man.”
One night at dinner, I was telling my inspiring wife about the gratitude reflection activity. She’s a clever one and suggested we should all express our gratitude at dinner each night. So we started that night and each of us, including my 6 & 8 year olds, each said three things we were grateful for during that day.
We’ve been saying our “thankfuls” at dinner for over a year now. We’ve also added to it by saying three ways we helped someone else each day. I love this and feel proud to be teaching my children this personal reflection technique.
I am a lucky man! I’m especially lucky to now keep my core life strategy (be happy and appreciative) in my mind every day.
Anyway, the point here is that by simply asking yourself an often-overlooked question, you can make improvements and realign to your core strategy. This applies in personal (see above) and business activities.
As business leaders, do we remember to ask the fundamental questions that explore alignment to our firm’s core values & strategies? For example, do you know whether your company prefers faster time to market or quality? If you do know the answer, do you remember to explicitly ask about it when reflecting and making business decisions?
Perhaps this is a bigger concept than what I wanted to post about. What I’m getting to is that perhaps a simple checklist (hat tip to the checklist manifesto) of questions related to your core corporate strategy could help your firms get back to and apply the most important and essential criteria that makes it unique and competitive.