Is Marcus Buckingham talking about False Independence?

Many of you might have seen the recent Oprah show with Marcus Buckingham. It is part of an effort by Oprah to help people with issues in their life and with an aim to better themselves. This also includes the workshop offered online at the website for Oprah taught by Eckhard Tolle.

As you know, people are in a critical place right now. We are facing a recession, oil prices keep climbing to new records almost daily. The food we consume is getting more and more expensive and we don’t really know if we should be angry, because the reason for the price increases are measure to produce alternatives to crude oil through the production of Ethanol. That means we have to pay more for food to have less dependence on foreign oil?

It’s not the main point of this article, but I think we could do more by allowing Ethnaol produced form sugar cane into the country. We could also produce more sugarcane ourselves and leave the corn for what it was meant in the first place. We could also think abut using the enormous coal reserves we have and convert them into fuel. I wonder how many people realize that the United States has so much coal that we wouldn’t need to import one ounce of crude oil if we converted our coal.

Prices keep rising, the US Dollar is falling, houses keep going into foreclosure, jobs keep getting cut and we may or may not officially be in a recession. That’s not a great motivator. It may have contributed to a statistic recently released which stated that 84% of people are unhappy or frustrated with their work.

That frustration doesn’t mean that they don’t do their work anymore. It manly means they don’t do it with a whole lot of enthusiasm and fun. Many of us have lost what originally attracted us to the job. What we do most of the time is maintaining the status quo. Marcus Buckingham acknowledged this frustration and suggests to instead develop our strength. I agree with that notion and we do this everyday with our coaching clients at AMC LLC.

The question that comes with this situation is: “Why are we accepting what we don’t really like?” The Answer:…

We are blinded by False Independence!

We have established a system that is well under control. All players do exactly what they have been told to do. Those with decision power always look for plenty of support form others for every decision they plan to make. All changes to the system are squelched by well developed skepticism and a mantra that says: “this is how we do things around here and how we always have done them – don’t change what isn’t broken”. In a nutshell, we keep feeding our fear of the unknown by doing what we have been doing, knowing that it doesn’t really satisfy us.

A certain part of this False Independence qualifies as insanity. You may or may not know that insanity is defined as: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

The interesting aspect of False Independence is that it appear to portrait stability. Only when we really reflect on our situation or someone shows us a mirror do we realize that we are really unhappy in all this stability. That realization and the associated awareness is the first important step towards a better future.

What we are actually looking for is Real independence, characterized by fun, energy, enthusiasm, creativity, motivation, ambition and a high level of confidence that we can do what we set out to do, even if it includes things we have never done before.

That actually allows us to bring all our strength to bare and really accelerate towards our goals and the goals of our organization. Bottom line: Playing to our strength is definitely a good idea to overcome False Independence. Overcoming fear alone is very hard to do. That’s why performance and leadership coaching as I do it at AMC LLC is such a great and gratifying thing. If you like to learn more about it or test it in a FREE session, email me at AM@Meierhoefer.net. or sign up at www.meierhoefer.net/welcome.htm and get a new Free special report for your efforts.

Axel Meierhoefer, AMC LLC