A Story of Influence

When it comes to influ­ence one thing is cer­tain. One’s abil­ity to cre­ate and main­tain a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship is a must have skill. With­out the abil­ity to have a rela­tion­ship with some­one, there is absolutely no way to have influ­ence. One can argue that power (through the manip­u­la­tion of money and/or vio­lence) can allow a per­son to have influence. I say that is sim­ply not true influ­ence but more so an invest­ment and use of fear. If given the choice, a large num­ber of lead­ers would pre­fer to use the power of influ­ence over the power of fear in order to get things done.

It All Started with a Visit

A few years back I was vis­it­ing the head­quar­ters of a very well-known inter­na­tional com­puter con­sult­ing firm. This par­tic­u­lar firm ser­viced my com­pany on many occa­sions and I was always happy with how their con­sul­tants han­dled my company’s requests. An acquain­tance of mine, Larry, was one of the company’s man­age­ment. While I was there, I noticed that many of the mem­bers of his team Read more

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A New Perception Can Alter Your Reality

What are you doing right now? What are you think­ing about at this moment? How do you per­ceive the chal­lenges you’re fac­ing today? If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could change some­thing for the bet­ter, would you go ahead and do it? The out­come of some­thing is greatly influ­enced by the per­cep­tion a per­son has towards it. Even though I may be begin­ning to sound like a Pollyanna at this moment, there is def­i­nitely some truth in the fool­ish­ness that some peo­ple take to be part of being a severe opti­mist. Per­cep­tion is con­trol­lable and alterable.

Accord­ing to the Oxford Dic­tio­nary, the word “per­cep­tion” comes from the Latin words per­cep­tio, per­ci­pio, and means “receiv­ing, col­lect­ing, action of tak­ing pos­ses­sion, appre­hen­sion with the mind or senses.”

In phi­los­o­phy, and psy­chol­ogy, per­cep­tion is the process of attain­ing aware­ness or under­stand­ing of sen­sory infor­ma­tion. Per­cep­tion is per­haps one of the old­est fields in psy­chol­ogy. The old­est quan­ti­ta­tive law in psy­chol­ogy is the Weber-Fechner law, which quan­ti­fies the rela­tion­ship between the inten­sity of phys­i­cal stim­uli and their per­cep­tual effects. The study of per­cep­tion gave rise to the Gestalt school of psy­chol­ogy, with its empha­sis on holis­tic approach. Read more

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Don’t Know Where You’re Going? It’s OK. Like it or Not…You’ll Get There Anyway!

How does it hap­pen? You wake up one morn­ing and you dis­cover that you’re in a place you didn’t expect to find your­self.  I’m not talk­ing about any of those movie scenes where the char­ac­ter wakes up in a strange bed after a wild bach­e­lor party, even though it’s hap­pened to some in real life. What I’m talk­ing about wak­ing up one morn­ing (or sit­ting in an office or doing some par­tic­u­lar chore or job) and hav­ing a minor epiphany of your life. You dis­cover, or rather yet remem­ber that when you were younger you imag­ined your­self liv­ing another kind of lifestyle or doing some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what you’re doing now. What hap­pened? Why did you end up where you are right now and not where you thought you’d be? Read more

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Aligning Actions with Values: Set the Example

Yes­ter­day, I was read­ing an arti­cle about the sen­tenc­ing of a beloved New Eng­land city mayor for receiv­ing a bribe while he was in office. The inci­dent in ques­tion was com­mit­ted about three to four years ago by way of him accept­ing work to be done on his home at a greatly reduced price in exchange for favoritism on con­trac­tual bid­ding for work need­ing to be done for the city he gov­erned. I say this mayor was beloved because even while he was being tried, hun­dreds of city res­i­dents flocked to the cour­t­house where the trial was occur­ring in order to show their sup­port for him. Dur­ing this mayor’s time in office, he cleaned up much of the city he gov­erned. Re-allocating funds for edu­ca­tion, clean­ing com­mu­nity neigh­bor­hoods by giv­ing police more resources to do their job,  chal­leng­ing processes that were (in his eye) not work­ing and mak­ing changes in key gov­ern­ment offices and posi­tions in order to help save the city from unnec­es­sary expenses and to  Read more

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