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| Your Most Valuable Asset Cause or Effect: The Choice is Yours Taking Control, Part One |
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| Your Most Valuable Asset |
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Of all your assets, which one is most valuable? Your investments? Savings account? Coin collection? Which of your assets makes you the most money? Your business? Your career? Your education? While those are valuable, one of your assets is more valuable than all others. This asset is essential to your income. No manager, professional or employee can succeed without it. This asset is key to all of your relationships at work and home. In fact, without this asset your life is miserable. "The most valuable asset we have, actually, is our ability to understand, to do the right thing, to be kind, to be decent." -- L. Ron Hubbard Five Ways You Can Enrich Your Most Valuable Asset 1. How well do you understand people? What can you do to better understand others? Who should you take the time to understand? 2. Do you usually do the right thing? What can you do to do the right thing more often? What right things should you do today? 3. How kind are you? How can you be kinder? With whom could you show more kindness? 4. How decent are you? How could you be more decent? What is the most decent thing you can do today? 5. Answer these questions for yourself. Plan on how you can enrich this most valuable asset. Take action today. |
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Cause or Effect: The Choice is Yours
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| Every aspect of your life comes under two categories: things you are at cause over and things you are the effect of. You either control your job, your relationships, your habits, your future . . . or they control you. When you are at effect of something, it upsets you. It gives you problems. You don't like to talk about it. It makes you act irrationally or emotionally. You might joke about it, space out about it or dwell on it. You are at the effect of it. For example, a car mechanic might be very good at fixing radiators, but not very good at brake systems. He is at cause over radiators and at the effect of brake systems. He looks forward to radiator jobs. He knows every type of radiator there is. He can fix or replace radiators quickly. Customers never come back with radiator problems. He is at cause over radiators. But whenever he gets a brake job, he slows down. He can't find the right parts, can't get the parts to fit and smashes his fingers. He is at the effect of brakes. A receptionist might enjoy working on the computer. She can print out any statistic or piece of data you could ever want. She can fix computer problems, upgrade your system and train others on the computer. However, when it comes to certain people, she has a problem. Anyone who talks slowly, especially older people, drives this receptionist nuts. She simply has no patience or understanding for these people. Normal or fast-talking people are fine. But if a slow-talking person calls with questions, this receptionist gets rude. If they come in, she ignores them or tells them to go home and call later. If they have a hard time understanding her, she gets angry. If a fellow is shy and cannot talk to women, he is effect of women. He may spend all day thinking about them, but turns red and looks down whenever a female talks to him. Once he learns about the mechanics of communication and how to make women feel comfortable, he is more at cause. If you own or manage a business, you have hundreds of business and technical duties to oversee. You are at cause over a duty if you can do it to professional standards. You are at cause if you can train others on that duty and easily improve their performance. You are at cause if you enjoy the duties of the job. The points of your business that put you at effect are where you have your biggest problems. You are at effect of a duty if you don't understand it. You are at effect of a duty if you avoid, ignore it or pretend it's unimportant. You are at effect of a duty if you rely on others to deal with it for you. Employees who are at cause over their post or job are the one's who make the most pay, get the most promotions and have the most fun. Employees who are at effect of their position are the one's who hate their jobs, never have enough money or are unemployed. Same with any area of life. If you feel stressed by taxes, electronics, automobiles, food preparation, legal issues, relationships, housekeeping, finances, goal setting, children, planning, organizing or anything else within your life, you are at effect of these things. These are the points that are slowing you down and stopping your success. You succeed when you are at cause and lose to the degree that you are at effect. L. Ron Hubbard devised a simple, brilliant way to get more at cause over your job. "The only way you can be successful on a post or win at it is to be at cause over it. ". . . write down any and all points where one feels he is NOT at cause over his post. "Then . . . look at points one after another where one can be at cause. "One's vision of this gets bigger and bigger. "And one comes to cause over his post. "Try it." - L. Ron Hubbard Recommendations 1. Write down every point of your post (job), business, family, career or other area of life, where you feel you are not at cause. 2. Choose one point that you can be at cause over. Write it down. See if you can do anything else to get at cause over it. 3. Find another point on your list that you can be at cause in some way. Write it down. See if you can do anything else to get at cause over it. 4. Repeat this step with another point on your list, and another, and another. This alone may put you more at cause than effect. You take control of the area. 5. Using your solutions, work out a plan that brings you to cause over as many points on the list as possible. 6. Do the plan. 7. Continue this exercise until you are at cause. If you are in fairly good mental shape, this exercise will boost your performance. If the exercise does not help you, learn more about Dianetics. When you are at cause, you feel stable, confident, calm and powerful. You reduce the pressure, see the truth of each situation and make correct decisions. Instead of seeing problems, you see solutions. You make steady progress toward your goals. Take a few minutes and try this exercise today! |
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Taking Control, Part One
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| Like money or nuclear power, control can be used for good or evil. You can use it to harm, suppress or destroy lives. Or you can use it to help people, increase your income and improve the world around you. Negative, destructive control gives control a bad name. Yet positive, constructive control is essential to successful living. No control over your job, family or life leads to failure. When you are not in control of your sphere of operation, you feel stress, fear and frustration. When you are in control, you make progress, enjoy your work and achieve success. Taking better control of yourself, your time, your career, your staff, equipment, files, computers, marriage, family, house and so on is much easier when you understand and apply these five facts about control. 1. Control is the biggest difference between success and failure. 2. Control consists of three parts: Start, Change and Stop. 3. Your control problems are based on your weaknesses with starting or changing or stopping. 4. If you try to control people or things outside your sphere of operation, you fail. 5. To succeed, you must let others control you. In this first of five articles, we cover the first fact. All quotes by L. Ron Hubbard in these five articles are from The Problems of Work. You can buy this book at www.tipsforsuccess.org/problems-of-work.htm or at www.bridgepub.com. 1. Control Is the Difference Between Success and Failure "What is control? "Whether one handles a machine of the size of a car or as small as a typewriter or even an accounting pen, one is faced with the problems of control. An object is of no use to anyone if it cannot be controlled. Just as a dancer must be able to control his body, so must a worker in an office or a factory be able to control his body, the machines of his work and, to some degree, the environment around him. "The primary difference between 'the worker' in an office or a factory and an executive is that the executive controls minds, bodies and the placement of communications, raw materials and products, the worker controls, in the main, his immediate tools." -- L. Ron Hubbard Consider two different restaurant owners. Steve owns an Italian restaurant and Kate owns a French restaurant. Steve loves to chat with customers while Kate loves to improve her operations. Steve hires an accountant to handle his bookkeeping while Kate stays late to figure out how to do her own books. Steve hires an attorney to write the employee policies and keep him out of legal trouble. Kate goes to a labor law seminar, writes her own employee policies and has a lawyer check it over. Steve believes his personality will keep people coming back while Kate decides good food and well-trained servers will keep people coming back. Steve has no idea how to cook, clean the kitchen or balance the books. He can only hire experienced people to do these jobs. He must bend over backwards to keep them on the job, despite their bad attitudes. Kate and her cooks invent their own recipes and keep them in a book. Kate establishes checklists for the staff for setting up tables, cleaning and so on. She also enjoys training inexperienced cooks, servers and other staff. Who is in better control? Who is making a better profit? If Steve's top people quit working for him, what will happen to his restaurant? If Kate's top people quit, what will happen to her restaurant? As another example, two medical transcribers, Jill and Sue, are hired by a large hospital on the same day. They are expected to type medical reports explaining the patients' treatment so the hospital can collect its fee from insurance companies. Jill decides to be a robot and simply type whatever is in front of her. One day, her computer goes down. She calls the technician and paints her fingernails until the computer is fixed. She has no idea what she is typing as she cannot understand the medical terms. She decides to just pretend it is a foreign language. She types every word placed in front of her without using the computer shortcuts. She produces 20 reports per day. Sue wants more control of her position. As well as typing the reports, she learns about the computer. She reads the help screens to learn shortcuts in the program. She learns to copy and paste large sections of text and other time-saving actions. She produces 30 reports per day. When the computer goes down, Sue carefully watches the technician and asks questions so she knows what to do next time. Sue finds a medical dictionary in the storage room and starts to look up the terms in her reports. She buys lunch for a nurse so she can ask about medical procedures. She even listens to tapes about insurance code rules. Who is in better control of her job? Of her career? One day, Jill types a report about a one-year-old receiving treatment for Alzheimer's disease. She types it exactly and sends it to the insurance company. That same day, Sue is typing a report for a eighty-year-old man's immunization shot for chicken pox. She knows this is a mistake and sends it back to the nurse. The nurse realizes the patient names were switched. Another day, Jill's computer goes down. She learns the computer technician is unavailable and asks to go home. Sue overhears the request and offers to fix the computer, which she does. Who is the more valuable employee? Who should get the next promotion? If business slows down, who will keep her job? Certain symptoms show how well you control your job. |
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| Signs you are not in control l Easily fatigued or exhausted Work area is messy and disorganized Job is not interesting Easily stressed Need constant help See no way to improve performance Easily confused by others while on the job Frequently think of quitting Frantically react to emergencies You cannot conceive of greater productivity |
Signs you are in control Energized, motivated Work area is neat and organized Work is interesting and enjoyable Feel challenged, not stressed Effectively supervise self Constantly looking for ways to improve Rarely confused while on the job Frequently thinking of more responsibility Rationally respond to emergencies You have good ideas for increasing productivity |
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On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being in full control, how do you rate your control of your job? Recommendations 1. Make a list of all your duties. 2. Rate your control of each on a scale of 1 to 10. 3. Work out a plan to take a little more control of your weakest duties. |
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Copyright © 2003 TipsForSuccess.org. All rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard. Programmed in the United States.
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