Your Power Point - And I Don't Mean the Slides

Focus: Professional Success, Management Success

Audio duration: 4 mins. 4 secs.
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YOUR POWER POINT
Transcript - print now

Wc: 532 

Welcome to the audio lesson Your PowerPoint. That’s right, did you know that you have a PowerPoint! And I’m not talking about a slide. What I am talking about is how you live your life. 

Day in and day out, believe it or not, we have power points. Here’s what I mean. If you have a sheet of paper in front of you, I’d like for you to write out this equation: E=R=O. If you don’t have a sheet of paper, just write it out in your mind. Again, E=R=O. 

Here’s what they stand for: E is the event, R is our response or reaction to the event, and O is the outcome that is a result of our response or reaction to the event, E=R=O. You know, that’s a formula for how we live our life. 

Life happens, stuff happens. And consciously or unconsciously, we are responding and reacting, on a regular basis, to things that go on around us. And they result in outcomes. Some of those outcomes we like and some of those outcomes we don’t like. That formula is so important to be conscious of because if you want to have different outcomes, you’ll have to consciously determine different responses and reactions to various events. 

What’s also interesting, those people who are empowered, those people who are very effective are more conscious and more purposeful in choosing their reactions and their responses because they are taking responsibility for the outcomes. Those who are less mature, those who have a victim mentality, you will find will typically blame the event for the outcome versus taking ownership for their response and reaction to the outcome. 

Here’s an example. I recently heard a story about a manager in a staff meeting. The staff meeting was designed to get input and ideas for how to make a good year even great. As the staff members began to share feedback about how the year had gone, the manager began to take a lot of the feedback personally and became very, very defensive to the point where it was embarrassing.

Now you can only imagine what the outcome of that particular experience was. She responded so negatively and so defensively to the feedback that was given by some of her staff members that she, in fact, alienated the staff. And the very thing she wanted from them, ideas and feedback, were the very things she wasn’t going to get any more because she had set the stage for not having a safety net and people being able to give feedback and ideas.

That sometimes is what happens to us. We react in ways that we get outcomes that we really don’t want. In order for that not to happen, we’ve got to take one hundred percent responsibility for our reactions and our responses so that we get the outcomes that we want and stop blaming the events. That is critical to personal power and personal effectiveness. 

Remember, your power point in that equation is your response or reaction to the event. You know events, in most cases, we can’t control. What we have one hundred percent, absolute control over is our reactions and responses. That’s your PowerPoint.

The content of this post is related to a very popular topic in the workplace today and that is Emotional  Intelligence. You haven't had an EQ seminar brought to your organization -- you should -- learn more here!

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