It’s amazing and rather sad how new forms of addiction join the officially recognized list of addictions every year. We should all stop and ask - what does this picture tell us about the human condition? Why are so many people so out of balance?

Are you addicted to your blackberry (crackberry)? Do you have an “involuntary habit” of checking your Smartphone every 64 seconds? Do you check messages at traffic lights? Do you wake up in the middle of the night to check your messages?

Like with any other addiction, crackberry addiction has side effects and consequences that range from mild to severe and to completely debilitating. Here are some of the dangers and possible consequences of the Crackberry Addiction:

1. Compulsively micromanaging your people.
2. Becoming a disruptive manager and stifling people’s initiative and motivation.
3. Managing the now with an obsessive need for instant report back on every detail instead of focusing ahead.
4. Unwillingness of your people to make decisions they are capable of making because they need your confirmation.
5. Diminishing your own creativity and the creative capacity of those around you.
6. Replacing meaningful conversations with Chatberry.
7. Sacrificing quality coaching and genuine leadership development and holding people back from developing their potential.
8. Building a culture of dependency and preventing the distribution of power and trust in the organization.
9. Confusing “Being Busy” with “Being Effective”.
10. Being so preoccupied with the present that you do not dedicate time and mental resources toward creating a vision and a strategy of realizing it.

Take action
1. Cut back on the use of your Smartphone / crackberry.
2. Create blackberry free meetings.
3. Put it away when you are at home.
4. Discover how productive you can be without Blackberry.
5. If you don’t believe any of this, keep a log for a week. Chart the amount and number of times you spent checking email. Then, take action to reclaim time to think, to connect, to coach and to enjoy what you do.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Mar.07.2008 :: Personal Growth :: No Comments »

Dear Leader,
In a recent leadership summit I asked the participants this question: What defines a ‘bull market’?
As this was not a Wall Street firm the managers looked surprised and eventually someone said: “I thought we were in a leadership meeting not in a seminar about investing. What does a ‘bull market’ have to do with the leadership and personal development conversation we were engaged in just a few minutes earlier?”
“They have absolutely everything to do with each other. The core principles and patterns at the foundation of all things are the same. Unlock these patterns and you discover the secret for all things”, I replied. Click here to find out what do bull markets, great relationships and renowned customer service have in common?
© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Mar.05.2008 :: The Key :: No Comments »

50 percent of coaching insights and decisions that are not acted upon are lost within 24 hours. More than 80 percent of coaching insights and decisions are lost if not acted upon within 72 hours.

The best time to act on your decision and take your insight forward is always now.
Every insight and decision must be validated and confirmed in action. Insight is an energy release. Decision is an energy directive. If there is no action to validate the release and to confirm the directive of energy, then the insight and the decision will dissipate.

Neurons fire for a connection to build a new circuitry. A new insight or a new decision creates a new brain circuitry. The circuitry must then be validated by action or it dissipates. If it is not validated by action, the insight is forgotten, the decision aborted and the coaching value wasted.

What new decisions have you made? What new insights have you had? Take action now!

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Mar.01.2008 :: Coaching :: No Comments »