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  Now I’m not suggesting that you start lifting a calf every day to develop your self-confidence, although this would certainly do the job. But the principle for developing self-confidence works in a much simpler and easier way. All you need to do is to make the decision that you are going to take action to develop your self-confidence, and then do it. Select a relatively easy goal to accomplish and proceed until you reach it. Every time you complete a task or goal successfully, celebrate and congratulate yourself. Then set a higher goal or a more difficult task. It’s just like training with weights. You build up the amount of weight slowly or run more swiftly as you develop your strength. Before long, you’ll be doing things that you never thought you could. You will have acquired the self-confidence you need to expect positive results as a leader.

  Move Out of Your Comfort Zone

  Here’s a great method. Every day select something different that is out of your “comfort zone”. That is, something that you have never done previously and feel a little uncomfortable and uncertain about doing. This might be something physical like going dancing, ice-skating, or bowling. Or it could be about challenging a fear, going on a roller coaster or going bungee jumping or skydiving. The latter shouldn’t be out of the question. After all, former President H.W. Bush sky-dives every year, and he’s in his nineties as I write this! Even food can be used. If you have never before eaten sushi (raw fish), eating it for the first time is one way of getting out of your comfort zone. You can see that selecting a different thing every day can be fun. As time goes on, you can select more and more things to do that you find challenging. Of course, don’t ignore challenges in your professional life either. Volunteer for tasks that are out of your comfort zone, from organizing a retirement party to company sports to making a speech. Don’t select things that you have already done or are comfortable in doing. Challenge yourself! Do the uncomfortable.

  Before long it will become more and more difficult to find things that you are unwilling to take on. At the same time, you will find that your new self-confidence has spilled over significantly into your professional life. You will find that others look to you because of your leadership and self-confidence, and that you are now considered one of the “up and comers” and “fast burners” and are slated for a promotion. Others will wonder how it happened that you suddenly caught fire. The truth is, you built your own self-confidence. You did it yourself. Drucker would nod approvingly.

  Self-confidence Comes from Knowing that You Can Succeed

  How is it possible that some leaders take charge and assume responsibilities for lives, jobs, and billion-dollar companies? How is it possible that leaders can take responsibility for the future of nations, if not mankind itself? How is it possible that leaders sometimes lead thousands or even millions of men and women in accomplishing something? Yet they may do all of these things seemingly without blinking an eye. Where do they get such tremendous self-confidence?

  An old Air Force training manual on leadership says, “No man can have self-confidence if not convinced in his own mind that he is qualified to perform the job he is assigned.”6

  How the Military Builds Self-confidence

  The military knows that if you build self-confidence in one area, it can carry over into others. So the military uses something called a “confidence course” to build self-confidence. It consists of man-made obstacles or events that each participant must traverse successfully. All are designed to be moderate to severe in difficulty, but doable if done right. One might be required to climb down a 100-foot rope suspended from a cliff. Another might force the participant to jump out to catch a swinging rope suspended over a pool of water. Do it right, and you catch the rope and safely reach the other side by dropping off before the rope starts swinging back. Do it incorrectly and you end up in the water. Another is called a “slide for life”. It consists of a rope drawn across a lake from a 90-foot tower on one side of the lake, to the bank of the lake on the other. The participant jumps off the tower holding onto a pulley attached to the rope. As he slides across the lake to the other side, he keeps his eyes on a man signalling with a set of flags. On one signal, you raise your legs so that they are parallel with the water and you appear to be in a sitting position. At the next signal, you drop off about 20 feet above the water. Like a stone, you go skipping across the lake to the other side. If you don’t let go and drop off the pulley, you land on the bank of the lake with some impact and can get injured.

  While there is a real need for parachute training for some types of military duties, parachute training is frequently encouraged for all and given to almost anyone who applies for it for the same reason: confidence-building.

  Anthony Robbins, the famed motivational speaker who has worked with groups and individuals around the world, started his career by learning that fire walks did the same thing. Yes, this is no misprint, I mean walking on a bed of white-hot coals for a distance of 12 feet or more. Robbins calls this seminar “Fear into Power” and makes it quite clear that he isn’t teaching party tricks, but rather using the fire walk as a metaphor: “If you could do this which you think is impossible, what else can you do that you also think is impossible?” Before you put this down to pure quackery, I should tell you that Robbins has been to Camp David in the past and helped the serving US president and other senior members of the government do a fire walk.

  What I am saying here is that there are a variety of confidence-building means available, some commercially, and they all can work to raise your overall self-confidence. It’s a fact. If you know that you can succeed at something, than you will have self-confidence that you can do it. The truth is, it is impossible not to. So the problem is how you can know you will succeed before you actually try something. The confidence course and the fire walks are only two ways of doing this. There are many others.

  Little Things Mean a Lot

  There is an old saying that nothing succeeds like success. This means that success breeds success, or that successful people tend to become more successful. In other words, if you have been successful in the past, you have a better chance of being successful in the future. But how can you become successful until you are successful? It’s like the old question of the chicken and the egg. You can’t have a chicken until you have an egg, but you can’t have an egg until you have a chicken.

  Fortunately, you can have a little success before a big success. And a little success counts just as much as a big success as far as our belief system goes. That means if you can win little victories in being successful at something, your psyche will believe that you can accomplish even greater things in the same area. Moreover, you will project this feeling outward and others will begin treating you differently.

  Champion body builder, movie star, and former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, described how his confidence began to develop while still in high school: “Before long, people began looking at me as a special person. Partly this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself. I was growing, getting bigger, gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before…”7

  Positive or Negative Mental Imagery Can Have Crucial Effects

  Nik Wallenda is a seventh-generation descendant of a family of dare-devils going back to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1780. On 4 June 2011 he completed a 135-foot long, high-wire crossing between to two towers of the 10-story Condado Plaza Hotel in Puerto Rico. This event was particularly significant because his grandfather, Karl Wallenda, known as the greatest tightrope walker who ever lived, had once attempted this “walk” and had fallen to his death. Karl Wallenda had walked across greater distances, and he did so without a net and continued with his breath-taking walks as he grew older. In his sixties he had completed a 1,200-foot walk with 30,000 people watching. He was age 65 at the time. He did the same fabulous stunts in his seventies that he did as a young man in his twenties.

  Walenda’s wife was interviewed on television regarding Wallenda’s last walk. “It
was very strange,” she said. “For months prior to his performance, he thought about nothing else. But for the first time, he didn’t see himself succeeding. He saw himself falling.” Wallenda’s wife went on to say that he even checked the installation and construction of the wire himself. “This,” she said, “was something Karl had never done previously.” There seems little doubt that Karl Wallenda’s negative mental imagery and resulting lack of self-confidence for this particular walk contributed to his falling.

  Nik Wallenda, who was the first to complete a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls and the first to walk across the Grand Canyon, as well as many other death-defying feats, said after the walk where his grandfather fell that this location had haunted him for years. However, “he was not scared at all.”8 Again, self-confidence.

  Positive Images Can Significantly Improve Your Self-confidence

  Just as negative images can hurt your self-confidence, positive images can help your self-confidence considerably.

  One of the leading researchers in the area of imagery is Dr Charles Garfield. Dr Garfield is a unique individual. He has not one, but two doctorates: in mathematics and psychology. I first read of his work in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 1981. The article spoke about Dr Garfield’s research regarding what he called a kind of “mental rehearsal”. Garfield found that more effective executives practised mental rehearsal frequently and less effective executives did not.

  In his book, Peak Performers, Garfield describes how Soviet Bloc performance experts in Milan, Italy confirmed his theories. Garfield is an amateur weightlifter. However, he hadn’t competed in several months. When he had, his best lift had been 280 pounds, although previously when he had worked out regularly, he had done more.

  The Soviets asked him the absolute maximum he thought he could lift right at that moment. He responded that he might be able to make 300 pounds in an exercise known as the bench press. In this exercise, you are flat on your back, you take a barbell off two uprights and lower the weight to your chest. Then you return the weight to the starting position. With extreme effort, he just managed to lift that amount. As Garfield himself said, “It was difficult – so difficult that I doubt I could have done it without the mounting excitement in the room.”

  The Soviet performance experts next had Garfield lie back and relax. They put him through a series of mental relaxation exercises. Then they asked him to get up slowly and gently. When he did, he saw that they had added 65 pounds to the 300-pound weight. Under normal circumstances, it would have been impossible for him to lift this weight.

  He began to have negative images. Before they established themselves in his mind, the Soviets began a new mental exercise.

  “Firmly, thoroughly, they talked me through a series of mental preparations. In my mind’s eye I saw myself approaching the bench. I visualized myself lying down. I visualized myself, with total confidence, lifting the 365 pounds.”

  Much to Garfield’s surprise, he not only lifted the 365-pound weight. He was also astounded to discover it easier to lift than the lighter weight had been earlier.9

  You Can Use Mental Rehearsal to Build Your Self-confidence

  I have used mental rehearsal techniques for many years. I can guarantee that not only will you find them effective, but that they are easy and painless, with no after-effects.

  The secret is to first relax as much as you can, then to imagine positive images. What I do is this: I lie back and get as relaxed as I can. Then I start with my toes and tell myself that my toes are becoming numb. I repeat this suggestion to myself several times.

  From my toes, I go to my feet, legs, and torso. In every case I repeat the suggestion that the particular part of the body I am focusing on is becoming completely relaxed and numb. When I am totally relaxed, I go to work on my positive imagery. In my mind I will picture everything about the situation in detail. After I complete the rehearsal once, I repeat the entire rehearsal again. I do it several times at a sitting. If the situation is particularly important, I may repeat the entire mental imagery process a couple times a day for several days.

  Does it work? Amazingly, I have rarely failed when I used this imagery technique. It is true that reality does not always follow my pre-planned script. Sometimes the changes are significant. However, the results gained by seeing a favourable outcome over and over again has a dramatic effect. I never lack self-confidence in any situation that I have mentally rehearsed.

  With Self-confidence, Your Vision Has No Limits

  George Washington is known as the “father of his country” because he had a big vision of that country’s future. He conceived of an entirely new nation in his vision, with freedom and liberty. He held his vision through the most trying times that this nation ever faced. He was not only general-in-chief and our first president under our constitution, he was this country’s number-one visionary. In fact, although the Continental Congress appointed him commander-in-chief in June 1775, he was commander of only one soldier… himself. There was no Continental Army. If Congress changed its mood and decided to accommodate George III, King of England, Washington would be left “holding the bag”… the most visible and conspicuous of traitors. But Washington’s vision was so large that it carried him and his army through six years of war against the major power of the day to victory. Washington’s vision was unsustainable except for one fact that stands out: his unshakable self-confidence that he would be successful, no matter what. You, too, can develop the self-confidence that Drucker suggested. Just take the first step.

  1 Drucker, Peter F., Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1974, 1974) p. 285.

  2 Lena Williams. “PLUS: BASKETBALL; A McDonald’s Game For Girls, Too,” The New York Times December 7 2001, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/sports/plus-basketball-a-mcdonald-s-game-for-girls-too.html, 26 July 2015.

  3 No author listed, “Steven Spielberg,” Wikipedia, accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Spielberg, 26 July 2015

  4 Drucker, Peter F., Managing in a Time of Great Change, (New York: Truman Talley Books/Plume,1998) p. 79.

  5 Drucker, Peter F., Edited by Rick Wartzman, The Drucker Lectures, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010) p.174.

  6 AFM 35-15 Air Force Leadership (Department of the Air Force: Washington, D.C., 1948) p.30.

  7 Arnold Schwarzenegger with Douglas Kent Hall, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (New York: Fireside, 1997) p.24.

  8 Nik Walendra in No author listed: “Nik Wallenda: King of the High Wire,” Nik Wallendra Official Site accessed at http://nikwallenda.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=109, 28 July 2015.

  9 CharlesGarfield, Peak Performers (Avon Books: New York, 1986) pp.72-73.

  Chapter 13

  Innovation, Abandonment, and the Certainty of Eventual Failure without Change

  There was one sure way Drucker knew that an organization or a company was going to fail, and even though absolutely counterintuitive, it is nevertheless absolutely certain and was an important element in his consulting practice. Simply put, if any organization continued to do what in the past had made it successful, it was certain that it would eventually go under. That sounds pretty strange, but if you think about it, it is not completely illogical and the “failures of success” are numerous throughout history.

  Unlimited Examples of the Failures of Success

  Examples of failures of success are so numerous that we needn’t look far. Why can’t a company or an organization continue to be successful indefinitely with what has made them successful in the past? As Drucker explained, usually the environment changes in some critical way and all the old rules are invalidated. Consider the following changes that are quite normal and happen all the time, but have the power to destroy any previous success, no matter its magnitude:

  • Technology – something new, like the affordable automobile, comes along and downgrades the horse as the basic means of personal transportation. Everything connected
with the horse declines or disappears as well. No more buggy whips, downtown stables and hitching posts, horse-drawn carriages, and the like. These and many other connected industries and products simply disappear... all failures.

  • Economics – the economy falls into a depression or becomes significantly inflationary. The first condition might cause potential customers to hold on to their money to the greatest extent possible; the latter condition might cause them to not only spend more freely, but in a much shorter period of time. In some countries hit by massive and impossibly rising inflation, citizens have been reduced to hauling paper money around in a wheelbarrow rather than a wallet or purse (really!). Companies producing many types of previously successful products and services fail during a recession or depression. Yet many other companies – from breakfast cereal and soap to movies – can flourish. Many argue that it was the Great Depression that created the market for the Monopoly game still popular worldwide today.

  • Culture or social change – it became acceptable for females to wear a lot less at the beach in the middle of the last century. When the bikini was first developed in 1946, the developers had to hire an exotic dancer (some said a prostitute) to model it! She was the only one who would agree to appear nearly nude in public for photographs. Today, young women – and many older ones – don’t give it a second thought.1 Companies that determinedly continued to produce previous styles of women’s bathing attire, which had been the basis of their success, went under.