A speaker on personal agency and community growth shares Frances Hetzelbein's lesson that thoughts become words, words become actions, and actions become identity. Find a buddy to check in with regularly, ask yourself daily if you're doing your best, and treat respect as social currency. Coaching others and accepting coaching creates a cycle of paying it forward.
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There's something truly beautiful, magical about when you bring peers together for a common cause. When people choose buddies and peers to help them get better over time, we create a community that has a vision that is much larger than any individual. When people follow up with each other on a consistent basis and talk to each other on the phone about specific items that they can get better on and better at every day of their lives, and say to themselves instead of passively, "What did I do wrong?" You think to yourself, "This is what I did my best to do today." You say to your here, did I do my best today to be happy? Did I do my best today to be positive? Did I do my best today to let go of the things I know so the greater good can come to me? Frances Hetzelbein at the New York Stock Exchange once came over to me as I was facilitating a meeting, and she whispered in my ear, Lou, be careful Be careful of what you think, for they will become your words. Be careful of your words, for they will become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for they will become who you are. Everything we do on a daily basis defines us. Everything we do to become better defines us. If we think of life as a series of actions that we give to others. And in every grain of sand that we take off, we create less chaos and more order and love inside the world. Creating an emotionally connected workplace is about creating more love in the world. Love for yourself, love for others, in the form of respect. Respect itself is the new currency. Kind of social currency. When we understand what happens in our own lives, and I encourage you to do this, what's happening to you in your own life and saying, "I take control and I understand that this has happened in my life and it will not define me. It will not define who I am as an individual. I have the power to define who I am. Find the things in my past that I don't like, let them go, and move toward a future to what I want to do. When I move that to a new level of working with other individuals and helping them achieve change, I'm paying it forward. I'm helping others to do the things that I know they want to do as much as the things that I know I need to do. Now I'm coaching. I'm not only enabling myself to be coached, I'm enabling others. When you give to others and pay it forward, it always comes back to you. This reciprocity this currency of respect and giving, where you will always win. Patch Adams said to me, "When you treat a person like a problem, you may win and you may lose. But if you treat a person like a human being, you will always win."
