Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

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How Do You Get the Job of Your Life? Part 2

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Part 1 is found here.

A tough personal economy, job loss, or unemployment means you may find yourself stuck in a job that no longer suits you or worse you feel stuck and that you have no options to change because the risk to leave is too high. Unhealthy thoughts are creeping into your psyche.

Worse, do you find yourself in a repeating pattern of moving from job to job in a sort of trial-and-error attempt to find the right job? The only thing worse than moving from job-to-job is the potential loss of confidence that can often accompany this cycle where you feel like you have no place to belong and contribute.

The challenge isn’t necessarily the job but the applicant! My implication isn’t that there is something wrong with you as a person. Quite the contrary; you’re uniquely gifted and talented with a valuable contribution to make. You have an unmatched experience and background … and that’s just the start of what sets you apart! What you have is backward thinking about how to find the job of your life.

The Secret to Finding the Job of Your Life

So what is the secret to finding the job of your life? Your process is flawed, not you! Chances are you’re chasing money, not meaning. If you keep applying for misfitting jobs that meet your financial goals but rob your soul, then you’ll get rejection letters galore. You lack the common sense to see you’re an empty suit chasing a dollar. Or, worse yet, if you do get an ill-suited job, how soon will it be until you realize the mistake you’ve made … or your employer does? Welcome to the repeating pattern that invariably ends in frustration, lost momentum, and a career setback.

Try this very different approach to finding the job of your life. Admittedly, my approach places a substantial burden of work on you to think, craft, and find the job and company that best suits you to thrive. Too often, I’ve seen people settle for a close approximation of something meaningful or the decision is made purely for “more money” reasons. Being sold to the highest bidder offers some upfront ego-strokes and rewards, but long term you have to ask yourself if this is the place, the people, the product, and the purpose where you can thrive.

Kill Rates or A Healthier Place

A couple of decades ago, my wife was applying for a job with a defense contractor. Judith loved everything about the position. Wisely, an interviewer bluntly asked her, “Are you comfortable being in the business of killing people? Here we talk in terms of ‘kill rates’ to assess the effectiveness of our products.” Everything else about this job seemed like a great fit — superior pay and benefits working in a major corporation, nice people, interesting work, but … Judith decided to pass on that position because being in the “kill rate business” just wasn’t who she was.

Years later, after raising our children, Judith decided to re-enter the workforce to become a health coach. Today she is in the business of saving lives by helping her clients to gain health. She is thriving because her heart is in her work. She’s put it together 1-2-3. She’s defined who she is and found meaningful work supporting her in becoming who and how God made her. The 3-2-1 approach almost invariably becomes oppressive rather than expressive.  166

Judith tapped me to work with her in support of helping clients to be at a healthier place. How on-purpose can one be when you’re not very healthy? Plus she’s training others to become health coaches by sharing in her joy of saving lives and my calling of helping people lead lives of being on-purpose.

Invest Your Life

Don’t spend your years wasting away chasing meaningless endeavors. Instead, invest in your life in what matters most to you. Do it on-purpose!

If your life or career needs some renovation, then let’s connect and see how we can help you take a healthy step toward being true to yourself, prospering, and making a difference by giving back. Is it time for you to invest in the first job of your life — taking care of you? Here is how we can help:

Finding the job of your life is the job of your life. Until you’ve figured out who you are, why you’re here, where you want to go, and what’s important, then you’ve placed yourself at a strategic disadvantage to find the job of your life.

Give this different process and approach a try. It is as easy as 1-2-3!

Angry? Decide Not To(a simple anger management technique)

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Decide Not To

Anger management techniques are plentiful. Cut to the core with this simple, yet powerful method that is so on-purpose. This comes from the mind of my nine-decades-plus-old mentor Mel Kaufmann. This morning he wrote me with this gem and gave me permission to share it with you.

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

 

Decide Not To

Do you become angry? Do you argue? It need not be. They are habits you have learned from birth. Anger and arguing are not in your DNA. If they were, you would be angry and arguing for the rest of eternity. I will prove to you that anger is a learned response. In high school my brother, Marvin, would kick the tires of our car, if it would not start. When Marvin was 92, I said to him, “You don’t seem to be angry anymore. What happened?” He said without equivocation, “I decided not to.” Mother Theresa was asked, “How can we have peace in the world?” Mother answered with great clarity and firmness, “Go home and start there.” If there is anger and arguing within the four walls of your home; take a lesson from my brother Marvin; decide not to. Stop your anger immediately. Stop it now!!! First of all, it is not Christian. Second of all, it causes separation in your family. If you don’t, your children will find love somewhere.

The thoughts of Mel Kaufmann

 

“A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.”

Proverbs 29:11

Is It Fair To Profit Off Of A Sick Person?

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Apart from the political implications, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare is rich in life, business, moral, and economic lessons. Since this Minute was recorded in November 2009, an erroneous and displaced argument continues to be frustratingly waged in a legal, economic, social, political, and medical firestorm. It seems, however, that there is a deeper moral question at work here.

On-Purpose Business Minutes aren’t political in nature. They’re intended to get you below the surface to strategic issues that touch our lives and inform our thinking. By design, my goal is often to disturb your thinking in a manner that gets you closer to the root of the matter — to the purpose. Until you know the purpose, you can’t align your life to be on-purpose. This Minute will likely deliver on disturbing thinking!

My jaw dropped in stunned amazement as I heard Florida Congresswoman, now Democratic National Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz make the following statement on the November 22, 2009, ABC News broadcast of This Week With George Stephanopoulos. The following quotation from Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s comments can be found in context at this link in the show transcript.

“I hope we can all agree that we have to get rid of the profit-driven, insurance company-driven health insurance system that we have, where it’s insurance company bureaucrats, Senator Coburn, that are getting in between patients and their doctors.

“To suggest that this (healthcare reform) bill will put government in between patients and their doctors is really disingenuous …”

What has changed since 2009? Her comments are important because they reflect the crux of so much of the misplaced debate in the U.S. over healthcare reform. The failure to address core principles is a classic case of arguing sentiment over underlying values and structure that make their way into policy. Read between the lines of what she is saying here about free enterprise, economics, and so forth when she calls for “get[ting] rid of the profit-driven, insurance company-driven health insurance system.” Ask yourself if her comments represent healthcare reform or a reflection of an underlying philosophy of socialism or ignorance of the free enterprise system that created the amazing medical standards of care in the United States?

Here’s where I fall out on the matter … Yes, it is not only fair to profit off of a sick person — it is essential to the health of the individual and greater society. When the business side of doctors’ practices, insurance companies, hospitals, and medical supply companies are healthy, then the people are healthy. Free enterprise tends to increase access to healthcare, raise the standard, and make it more affordable to all. Legislation by definition comes between people’s relationships and behaviors. This burdens the delivery system with additional costs of compliance and drives up costs.

The debate over access to health insurance is a straw man argument. The true question to ask is, Can a sick or injured person gain access to healthcare? Yes! That is not a problem thanks to the Hippocratic Oath and community-based hospital systems that allocate dollars from revenues generated to care for the indigent. Persons in need are not denied healthcare. “The Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Act (EMTLA) passed by Congress in 1986 explicitly forbids the denial of care to indigent or uninsured patients based on a lack of ability to pay.”

Health insurance is simply a means to pay for services on a shared risk basis that opens up more options to policy holders who choose to participate with their dollars. When every person has access to healthcare, why must every person have health insurance? The moral argument is basically settled. The ill and informed are cared for whether theyHealthcare debate can afford it or not. Society has deemed that to be essential to the well-being of the nation.

Access to healthcare is a right. Health insurance, however, is a choice — not a right. Choice, however, is the essential element of a free market economy. 

Choices come with consequences. Many a time I can look back at my choices and wish I had chosen differently. But I live with my choices and learn from them.

To the original question, the profit motive fuels the engine of creativity and innovation across all sectors of the economy including bio-medicine and healthcare. Entrepreneurs and business people are like economic ants swarming to find a strategic, market, or price advantage crack to gain access to and serve customers. In some minds, this behavior is seen as being unsavory and “disingenuous” and greedy. On the other hand, the profit motive fuels cost reductions, stimulates product/service enhancements, and drives down costs to the consumer in total. Free enterprise creates freedoms in a free society. Within the free enterprise system the legal system catches and punishes those who violate the law. Profit, however, is not a criminal act.

Purpose, however, is an even greater force than profit. Purpose can lightly be thought of as the inherent desire to contribute to the well-being of another person, what is often called “Making a difference.”  Purpose is service. When service and profit are integrated then the heart and the head come together to produce high and noble outcomes that profit us all.

Profit with purpose is a reason the USA has the greatest medical delivery system in the world. It is also why the USA is the wealthiest nation in the world. This combination of moral clarity, technical excellence, and business acumen provides remarkable strategic advantages.

Reform is needed, but to radically alter the course of the socio-economic sanity is the greatest threat to the health of our citizens, country, and the world — especially the coming generations. 

 

How to reduce the costs of healthcare for yourself and the country?

Here’s the Kevin W. McCarthy Solution: 70% of Americans are overweight. Let’s encourage every American to get to a healthier place — to take personal responsibility for what they eat by making healthier choices. The rising cost of the healthcare crisis will end. Doctors will be able to practice acute care medicine instead of wasting their time and talent patching up and medicating our self-inflicted “wounds.”

The true culprit to our the healthcare crisis is a nation’s collective choices of unhealthy habits and lifestyles. Personal responsibility matters deeply in one’s health and well-being. Dumping the cost of one’s unhealthy decisions onto our neighbors isn’t loving them. It is asking our neighbors to underwrite the consequences of our poor choices.

The greatest “pork” in ObamaCare isn’t in the bill itself — although it is massive. The real “pork” is in the people who are weighting down the economy with the mindless self-selecting of diseases like Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, gout, cholesterol, and more. These obesity-related diseases lead to strokes, heart attacks, cancers, premature disability, and death — an ironic and discriminating form of Darwin’s natural selectionLove your country, but a waste of human life by any measure.

Do you love your country? Then, get to a healthier place! Stop the slow killing of yourself starting today. If you can’t do it on your own, then get help. There’s no sense giving away your hard earned “profits” when you can gain health and lower the full costs of your healthcare.

Your comments are appreciated.

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

P.S. Need assistance? Ready to see “the waist” go away? Talk with the Health Coach who forwarded this message to you.

Need a health coach? Talk to my wife, Judith. She can help you get to a healthier place. Go to www.ahealthierplace.com or call her at 407.927.1642.

To-Do Lists and the 24-Hour Day

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This article called Why Creating A To-Do List is Derailing Your Success highlights the importance of time blocking as we do in the 24-Hour Day found on page 50 in The On-Purpose Person.

I found the article interesting reading because it says To-Do Lists actually create more stress. I admit that I use To-Do Lists irregularly within a day as a way to allow me to focus on the matter at hand. When a fleeting thought or action item comes across my brain — (shiny new object or squirrel), I find that if I capture the idea on a running list for the day, I tend to be able to get back to the matter at hand.

Writing books or client business plans, for example, are intense efforts demanding minimal interruption or distraction, yet my brain is always running with seemingly random thoughts popping in and out. If I give one an audience, then I’m an hour down the road on something else when what was really important gets put off.

Time blocking works when I work it. If I know I have 90 minutes to write something and then there’s a next time block coming for exercise, another project, a client video conference, etc. then I value that time and attention better. I’m less apt to interrupt myself because I know what the rest of my day looks like.

So what works for you? 

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

Are You In The Midst of A Tough Shift?

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How would you like to have a 42% improvement in your overall well-being? Keep reading!

The more and faster that things are changing for you, the more you want that which is holding fast — that which is unchanging … your purpose.

Your purpose is permanent and unchanging. It can sustain you through your tough shift. There is remarkable hope within your current means and circumstances. As much as you may think differently, you lack nothing to live your life on-purpose.

Jihad, national politics, economies, and technologies are in a rapid swirl of seeming chaos that make it hard to wrap one’s mind around what is really happening in society and life. Context and meaning can become washed over in a sea of 24/7/365 news cycles, disappointments, and difficulties. We wonder:

  • Who can be trusted?
  • How will these changes affect my life, my job, and my family? 
  • Will I have gainful employment?
  • Does anyone really care?

Do you find yourself thirsting for answers and insights, but find your daily time and energy is like seeping water cupped in your hands just long enough to get a quenching sip of life through yet another day? Laying your head on your pillow at night, you’ve likely poured yourself into yet another day of routines and problems, yet you reflect if any progress has really been made.

Time is the currency of our lives and too many of us are spending our time instead of investing it. We wonder, Is redemption and restoration possible? Is it too late for me?

Take heart!

Being in a tough shift is one thing. Thriving in the midst of one is another. Regardless of whether your tough shift is in your personal life or your work life or both, the essential responsibility for safe and productive passage rests with one person — you! Nothing can replace or is as powerful to prepare you to prosper as assuming personal leadership of your life. The nuclear core of being true to who you are rests in knowing your 2-word purpose statement and then making a decision and taking actions in alignment with it — to be on-purpose.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been helping individuals and organizations to surf with success all kinds of waves and tough shifts by simply helping them to find answers to four “Who Am I?” questions and then design plans and actions to live into them:

  • Why am I here? (purpose)
  • Where am I going? (vision)
  • How will I get there? (missions)
  • What’s important? (values)
My On-Purpose Folder 3D cover
Newly Available: Everything You Need to Be On-Purpose!

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Absent answers to these questions, we’re practically, emotionally, and spiritually adrift. Regardless of the endeavor when our mind, body, and spirit are disturbed we’re at a strategic disadvantage. This impediment to our leadership directly ripples from our life to those around us. When we’re not who we were intended to be and become, everyone pays some price — our spouses and family, our co-workers and partners, and our fellow citizens. The old adage goes, “If you aren’t carrying your end of the log, then someone else is.”

Invest your time to actually think about your life and to answer the “Who Am I?” questions. Write down your thoughts, refine them, and review them. A survey of our clients who have done this work reported a 42% improvement in their overall well-being.

Tough shifts are neither positive or negative — they just exist. How we react and respond determines their influence. Holding fast to our purpose produces strength and resilience so we’re less susceptible to the ever transforming ebb and flow of the tough shifts.

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Answers to your “Who Am I?” questions for your business or your life are but a phone call (407.657.6000), email, or online order away. At On-Purpose Partners we provide a variety of products and services that include:

  • Business Advisory Services: Articulation of Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values plus business design and planning
  • One-on-One Coaching: Individual help to become a better leader of your life and/or business
  • Books: The On-Purpose Person, The On-Purpose Business Person, and FIT 4 Leading

Facing A Decision? Got A Decision Making Process?

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Facing a DecisionAs a person or an organization matures, decisions need to be distributed across the team to those closest to the choice. In the absence of clearly articulated and communicated values (and a 2-word purpose) even the most well-intended person makes ungoverned decisions — typically on emotion rather than values.

Where is the root responsibility for such “ungoverned decisions?” If values are not “articulated and communicated” plus reinforced regularly, then leadership, not the person, has failed.

Consider the sheer number and importance of decisions made every day by every person associated with your organization. Every line item on your income statement reflects a decision. Ask: Do we have a specific decision making process in place that is introduced at orientation and is a regular part of our corporate conversation and storytelling?

The highly likely answer is, “No. In fact, with everything else I need to get done, this hasn’t even been on my radar.” The problem is you’re too busy making decisions that could be better done by someone who is closer to the problem who is trained, tested, and trusted.

Experience tells us that this leadership “oversight” undermines sales and profits by 25% annually. Run the numbers — now you know the price of poor leadership!

Better Decisions = Better Business

Values seem well below the surface of the daily waves of activity. In fact they are on the surface of every decision made by every team member. Coming to terms with this hard reality in the busyness of the day can be a daunting, humbling, task for the leader.

On-Purpose Partners helps clients to define, share, and activate their purpose, vision, mission, and values (PVMV) so better decisions are more consistently made across the company.

Follow our 3-step ACE decision making process to align and improve the decision making quality, speed, and effectiveness:

  1. Articulate: Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values (PVMV). These “On-Purpose Statements” can typically be identified, refined, and written in less than a week for most organizations. For smaller businesses they can be completed in less than a day.
  2. Communicate: Find authentic stories within the organization that reflect the values. Create an open dialogue to introduce them to the larger team so ownership of them spreads into the hearts, minds, and guts of those who engage.
  3. Exercise: Put your On-Purpose Statements to work by creating decision matrices across the organization. Here are just a few places decision-making is improved using On-Purpose Statements:
    1. Strategy & Planning – It is easy to get mechanical and analytical about strategy and planning but your PVMV keep it real on a human level.
    2. People – Employment, engagement, and retention of team members are profoundly influenced by PVMV. This is where “The Tingle Factor” comes from. See The On-Purpose Business Person to learn more about The Tingle Factor.
    3. Financial management – Complement the ROI, NPV, or IRR analysis with your PVMV analysis.
    4. Vendor/sub-contractor selection – Does the vendor demonstrate similar PVMV? Have you shared what you value as a part of right business performance?
    5. Operations – Are the people and processes informed and aligned with the PVMV to create the performance needed to grow the business? If not, then you’re producing a flawed product.
    6. Marketing & Branding – Truth in advertising matters. What, however, determines “truth”? Your PVMV keep the company true to what matters most.

The power of On-Purpose® is profoundly relevant to execution and profitability — but only when the CEO or leader decides it is. Otherwise, it is business as usual.

Business as usual or business on-purpose? Now you’re facing a decision!

How Convincing Are You?

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We’ve become a contentious and polarizing culture. What place is there for hard edges and righteous attitudes in the course of civil conversation?

Does convincing work? No!

Is it more important to be right or to be in a right relationship? This doesn’t mean that you become a doormat for others to wipe their waste on your thinking or person. Rather it means that you maintain your dignity and decorum as others debate and argue. You need not be defensive or offensive, simply be an adult who doesn’t get drawn into the fray unnecessarily.
Conversing

To influence another person’s thinking there must be a basis of some trust and respect, period.  Those qualities of leadership only come within the context of relationship where conversation, not convincing takes place. Stop convincing. Start conversing!

This approach is much easier said than done. A great technique is to say to someone, “Look, I know I’ll never convince you to change your position, nor you mine; but I would appreciate understanding your rationale, perspective, and opinions on the matter.” Then sit back, ask questions, and learn what the other person is thinking. Then sincerely thank them for sharing and walk away better informed and prepared to understand a different point of view. Build the relationship!

 

How to Make Money?

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Regardless of whether you have a job or own a business, today’s On-Purpose Business Minute invites you to explore three aspects of what it takes to make money and make even more money. 

Make Money TreeDo you have the mindset, the multiplier and the mechanism in place to make money?

For most people, how much money they want to make isn’t the challenge … it is making that amount of money that presents the real issue. So let’s revisit this classic On-Purpose Business Minute and explore some simple elements to making money.

Study the people who made or make big money — Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Stephen Jobs, or whomever comes to mind — and you’ll find the three essential M’s are present and to the creation of their wealth in a socially responsible manner and in a way that is meaningful to each person.

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Do you have a favorite quote about money and wealth? Share it in the comments section. Here are some that I found valuable.

Abundance consists not alone in material possessions, but in an uncovetous spirit.

                Charles M. Sheldon

 

Those who condemn wealth are those who have none and see no chance of getting any.

                William Penn Patrick

 

That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich; and is hence just encouragement to industry and enterprise.

                Abraham Lincoln

 

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