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Solitude – From a Business Warrior

I rarely repost from another website, but think this post from Jim Cecil at nurturemarketing.com is worthwhile. Those of us in business often find that having time to be by ourselves with our thoughts is a rare commodity. AKF

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Solitude

 


 

  • All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.–Han Suyin
  • Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.–Thomas Browne
  • Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.–Alice Koller
  • Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life’s greatest tests alone.–Agnes Macphail
  • Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. … When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. –John O’Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
  • I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.–Peter Hoeg (Smilla’s Sense of Snow)
  • I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.–Brenda Ueland
  • I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.–Albert Einstein
  • I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.–Henry David Thoreau
  • Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.–Pearl S. Buck
  • Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.–Jeanne Marie Laskas
  • It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking . . . in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.–Franz Kafka
  • It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.–Max Nordau
  • Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone, and the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.–Paul Johannes Tillich
  • Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.–Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
  • Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.–Indra Devi
  • Man cannot survive without air, water and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.–Thomas Szasz
  • One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.–Meister Eckhart
  • Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.–Hans Margolius
  • Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.–Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
  • The person who has not learned to be happy and content while completely alone for an hour a day, or a week has missed life’s greatest serenity.–H. Clay Tate (Building a Better Home Town)
  • Solitude can be frightening because it invites us to meet a stranger we think we may not want to know–ourselves.–Melvyn Kinder
  • Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.–Abraham Cowley
  • Solitude gives birth to the original in us.–Thomas Mann
  • Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.–James Russell Lowell
  • …solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition…–Amelia Barr
  • Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.–May Sarton
  • Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone.–Thomas De Quincey
  • There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.–Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (Earthly Paradise)
  • To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations–such is a pleasure beyond compare.–Kenko Yoshida
  • Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.–Alice H. Rice
  • Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.–Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.–Paul Brunton
  • Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.–Hannah Arendt
  • Solitude is the place of purification.–Martin Buber (I and Thou, 3)
  • Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.–Goethe
  • There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.–Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.–William Penn
  • We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.–Philip Gilbert Hamerton (The Intellectual Life)
  • We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature–trees, flowers, grass–grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…we need silence to be able to touch souls.–Mother Teresa
  • What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it-like a secret vice!–Anne Morrow Lindbergh
  • What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be.–Ellen Burstyn
  • When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash–at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness”, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.–Thomas Merton
  • When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death–ourselves.–Eda LeShan
  • Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.–Barbara De Angelis
  • You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.–Wayne Dyer
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Better Sales – Managing Different Styles – The High-D

Better Sales – Managing Different Styles – The High-D

The D score is defined as Dominance. I like to call it Ego Drive and I think that conforms more with the seminal article “What Makes a Good Salesperson” published in Harvard Business Review

High-D’s are highly motivated salespeople. In fact, the reason that they are successful is because they are so highly motivated.

To a High-D there is literally a dialogue going off in their heads that says ”I can make it. I can do this work. I am the one who can make this happen. It’s all up to me.” (They might have different words, but that’s the essence.)

High-D’s love a challenge. They are never satisfied with the status quo and will be attracted to the new and different. This is a great asset for you, as a manager since you can be sure they have the ability to achieve more.

Whether you can get them to live up to their potential is another thing.

Hopefully after you read this, and other more detailed tools in the Member Area, you will know more about helping them to maximize their productivity.

High-D’s don’t shy away from confrontation. And if they are not getting enough challenge or they are feeling frustrated they are more likely to get involved in conflicts.

I joke that it seems like they can almost appear to encourage fights. “I’m bored, why don’t you two fight?” In some ways it’s not really a joke because they like being highly charged.

The way to motivate a High-D is to challenge them. For the Low-D confrontation is a turn off and leaves them hurt and retreating. For the High-D they don’t get offended when you call them out. Tell them that they darn well could do better than they’re doing.

Give the High-D a goal to shoot for – and then make sure the reward is congruent with their highest ValuesMatrixTM value. (Just look at page 2 of the ValuesMatrixTM and match the reward to the number one value in the report.)

High-D’s might seem a bit difficult, but once you understand what makes them tick they’re easy to manage. The trick is to challenge them to reach a goal that matches their values, then get out of their way…

A P.S. to this, is be sure you really have a High-D. Check their StylesMatrixTM to be sure. If you don’t have a true High-D and you try and manage them like one you will wish you hadn’t…

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Sales Management Tip: Sales Meetings with Fat Salesmen

Steps for Sales Managers Who’ve Let Their Salesmen Get Fat

You are fat

A client told me the other day that in an effort to cut turnover over the last 2 bad years, they have pared down the size of their team. As a result, they created greater stability in the sales team. The remaining members of the sales team are doing very well financially servicing their renewal business.

His team is fat, dumb and happy.

At a sales management seminar a number of years ago, Dr. Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, was discussing motivation strategies. Bandler said that how we see ourselves determines how we act.  This, he said, is why pep talks don’t work – either the ones given to us or the ones we give ourselves.

This explains why, by nature, we get into patterns of behavior and do everything we can to maintain the status quo.

If your sales team has become accustomed to making their nut by servicing existing business you can forget new business development from them. They will not do it and will do everything in their power to keep things the way they are.

Bandler described an experiment done among the housekeeping staff at a hotel. They set up hidden cameras to watch the staff making the beds and cleaning the rooms in the hotel rooms.

Questions to the staff members about their weight revealed that 83% of fat staff members said they wanted to get more exercise to lose weight. Yet, when they watched the videos, fat staff members moved slower and made less movements in cleaning the room and making the bed compared to the thin staff members.

Overweight people in the study said they wanted to lose weight, but acted to preserved their fat by moving more slowly.

Fat Salesmen Don’t Hunt

If you’ve allowed your team to live off renewal business during the past 2 tough years, don’t think you can change things with them. The only solution to getting new business is to hire new sales team members.

Fortunately, now is a great time to recruit new sales talent. Take a free profile to learn how we can easily predict whether your applicants have the heart and blood of a top performer. Sales Managers and CEO’s Only. Thanks

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