The Hands-Off Manager by Steve Chandler Read Free Book Online Page A

actual power—is your capacity to create results in this moment, right now.
----
Effective managers do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
    —Peter Drucker
----
    Hands-off management means hands off the past and hands off the future. Your focus is the present moment, because you understand that productivity always happens now.
    Then, as your people also learn to create freely in the present moment, success, rather amazingly (and simply), comes to them. When we are in that creating mode, we are advancing upward, evolving and expanding toward higher levels of success.
    Creating always occurs in the moment. Never in the future.
    When our minds are in the future we experience thoughts of worry and fear. When we drift back to the past, thoughts of regret or resentment arise.
    Are any of those thoughts worthy of clinging to?
    Allowing success requires nonattachment to such thoughts.
    Attaching to your thoughts like Velcro
    Professional writers get something they call “writer’s block” when they start believing their thoughts about the future.
    Attachment to those thoughts allows no room for freedom and creativity.
    This habit of attaching, like Velcro, to every passing worried thought and every little judgment leads us into a lifeof emotional teeter-tottering all day long. A life of fearful distractions.
    Sit down with an unsuccessful (unhappy, struggling) manager and you will hear him describe where his focus goes: “I get too many phone calls. I have too many personal problems to deal with. My health is not ideal right now. The person down the hall has their internet gaming site on. I have too many visitors. I’ll never be able to answer all my e-mails. My reports are overdue. I have too many meetings to attend this week. I have to give a talk.”
    Notice all those stressful thoughts crowding in on him. The hands-off manager learns to take just one of those thoughts (“I get too many phone calls”) and work with it (“I’m putting my calls direct to message. I look forward to hearing them later when I’m ready and focused on them”).
    Hands-off managers are creators. They take one stressful situation at a time and create something good from it. Hands-on managers, on the other hand, are reactors. They react to all thoughts, all day, full alarm. For them, life itself is just a series of emergencies.
    We lift ourselves up from that when we become creators. When we speak of God in religious terms, we often call Him (or that force), “the creator.” Which is why Deepak Chopra humorously says, “God is my role model.” He wants to live in the image of his creator by creating. Whether we know it or not, as we go through life, we all ultimately seek and desire an increased capacity to create. To create fulfillment, happiness, and the ultimate in professional satisfaction. What we all want, what’s a part of our very core, is that capacity to create. And we lose that capacity whenever we lose focus.
    As the great teacher of human consciousness Byron Katie says, “If you want to be unhappy, get yourself a future.”
    If we wish to move toward a particular outcome, we have to do something right now to create that movement. We can’t move something in the future. And we certainly can’t undoanything in the past. We only advance when we are in the present moment. Only that sacred place will give us room in which to work.
----
    Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
    —Brenda Ueland
----
    Don’t focus on what you fear
    In business you begin to realize you can never solve a problem by thinking about it in the same negative mood that created the problem in the first place. You can only solve a problem by focusing on it with a higher state of consciousness. Or to put it more simply: You get yourself into a better mood.
    When you become a