The Hands-Off Manager (16 page)

I recently coached a business owner named Milo who had a large team of salespeople in the real estate field. He kept talking about how hard it was to get real producers on his sales team and keep them there.

He talked about the volatile market, the attitude of young people today, and the poor hiring system in his HR department. These were outer manifestations of his own scarcity thinking—his erroneous belief that he never has enough of anything.

“What do you want?”

“An all-star team of producers, instead of this high-turnover joke of a team I’ve got.”

“Then create it,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Build it. Stop wishing for it. That will push it away. Start building it.”

Milo took a long time, but he finally began to see that he could build his team from within. He let all his company members participate in recruiting. He changed his compensation system so people had higher incentives to stay a long time. Then everything began changing from within.

Milo soon realized the insanity of trying to fix what had already happened. Why try to undo history? You can’t do that. It was time to let it go and dive back inside. To connect with his inner spirit, the only true leverage point for change.

Success comes from three worlds

Allowing success requires that we create an understanding within ourselves of the existence of three worlds. Worlds that we live in every moment of every day, simultaneously. These worlds are spirit, mind, and body (or the physical world). And you can’t actually see most of what happens in those three worlds.

Duane explained his theory of three worlds one warm Sunday morning in his home while my tape recorder was running. He produced a diagram he had made (see the end of this chapter) to illustrate his point, and said, “If you’ve ever seen a scientific analysis of the spectrum of visible light, all the way from infrared down to real slow waves, there’s only a little tiny sector in the middle that’s visible. And it represents a very small percentage of what’s actually coming at us. Our whole lives are like that spectrum.”

“How do you mean?”

“We have three worlds that exist in us simultaneously at all times. And the important thing to understand about these worlds is where the power really lies. Where the potential for success in life is located. It’s not in the physical world, as we all assume it is.”

Duane explained that we spend most of our time focused on the physical world. But the physical world is just the manifestation of what has been created in the inner two worlds. By the time you see it, it’s too late to change anything.

“Because the physical world is nothing more than manifest destiny,” he said. “The real change happens internally, not externally. Change only becomes
visible
in the external world.”

So our ability to make a difference and change the results we’re seeing does not happen by focusing on and fixing external events. Our access to destiny occurs earlier in the process than that. It occurs when we focus on spirit (our intuition and inspiration) and mind (our thinking and planning). That’s the only domain where we can exercise free will and free choice.

“You don’t get to choose whether the sun’s going to come up tomorrow.” said Duane. “Nor do you get to choose how other people are going to behave or react to a given circumstance. But you do get to choose
who you are being
.”

Our behavior is nothing more than a reflection of our inner way of being.

“So if you think you can control your behavior without altering your inner being, you’re living in a dream world, not in the world of reality.”

Employee surveys will confirm it

Notice that all the employee surveys that show people’s dislike of being “micromanaged” and “distrusted” and “not communicated with” reflect the manager’s misguided and ill-chosen attempts to manage things that have already happened. The second-guessing and criticism runs rampant through the workplace because the manager is not operating at the source.

Hands-off managers know all three worlds and, therefore, become masters of mind and spirit, as well. They know that the world of spirit is universal. It’s an interconnectedness of everyone and all things. It has unlimited potential.

Duane explained to me that the world of the mind is another world inside us: It’s our thinking and our beliefs. It’s our fears (generally caused by judgments) and anything we’ve incorporated into our thought process.

Our negative thoughts are the very things we should be working on clearing out so that more of our potential can come through.

“And then there’s the physical world,” Duane said as he pointed to the “physical world” section of his diagram. “This is going to sound strange, but it’s an imaginary world.”

“In what way?”

“It is made up of images!”

The Native Americans were once criticized because they believed their waking hours were imaginary and their dreams were real. Consider that this may not have been too far from the truth, because what we see is not really what has happened. It’s only how things have come together in the end.

This has been referred to as the Iceberg Principle.

The Iceberg Principle would say that what you see above the surface in the ocean when you look at an iceberg is only about 10 percent of the entire iceberg. The other 90 percent of the ice floats below the surface and is not visible to the eye.

“That’s exactly what’s occurring in our own world,”

“That’s exactly what’s occurring in our own world,” Duane said. “What we see coming through in physical form is a very tiny portion of all that’s actually happening.”

Duane added the metaphor of electricity to illustrate his point. He recalled an electrician friend who went to the Middle East as part of a job. His friend was trying to teach people in a remote village to run electrical wiring in their houses. Duane said:

You know how we hide wires in the walls here? He couldn’t do that there. They wouldn’t accept it. They wouldn’t believe that a light switch that had no visible connection to a light at the top of the room would ever be able to turn it on and off. It was inconceivable to them that that was possible, even when he showed them how to do it! As soon as he covered it up with drywall or plaster or some sort of surfacing material, they would not accept that it would be possible. They would think it was dark magic. And so my friend had to rethink how he taught people to install electricity in their house, because they could not do it in the American format; it was unacceptable to these people
.

We may be surprised at the ignorance of those people. “But we are equally ignorant,” said Duane, “about something more important than wires in walls. About the spectrum of life itself.”

We think the world outside us is the only real world. Because all we’re really seeing is the world of manifestation. We don’t understand how that world was created and the influence we have over the 90 percent of what we don’t see.

The world of concept, which is contained in the world of spirit, and the world of creation, which is contained in the world of mind, facilitate and create what is manifest in the physical world. So by the time anything happens in the physical world, it’s out of our control. Do you notice that in the workplace?
By the time a new system for sales commissions is implemented, the all-too-common negative reaction to change is happening and the push-back is the new problem. The influence and impact we might have had on acceptance of the system has already been undermined in the other two worlds by people’s belief that change is bad! The physical world is just the end product.

The hands-off manager will say, “Focus on the process, not the results.” The process is the mind and the spirit inside. It’s the heart of your organization. If you focus on the process, the results will unfold naturally from that. So if you have an inner process that creates a quality sales force, good customer service, a reliable product, and a good marketing plan, you don’t have to worry about how to be successful. It flows easily into fruition from that. The creative work has already been done.

The difficulty arises when you
don’t
have those ingredients and you try to produce an outcome anyway. It’s similar to trying to bake a cake with no recipe and no ingredients and still expecting it to come out delicious.

You can’t get there from nothing.

The hands-off manager sets himself apart by understanding the creative process and shifting the focus of his energy and attention to where he
can
make a difference. You can do this, too. You can shift your attention to your own thinking. That’s where you can have an impact on what shows up in your life and what shows up in the world.

The sword and the spirit are the two mightiest forces in the world. Yet the spirit is mightier of the two.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

The spiritual world is the world of essence. It’s that part of you that you’re learning to bring through. It’s the best of who you are, your higher self, and your most unlimited potential.

The mind is the world of the ego. Your ego has value because it identifies you as an individual and gives you access to your unique experience. Ego individuates you and brings your experience of being a singular being in physical form.

The physical world is just the world of activity. It’s the world in which you can joyfully follow through on and act out the part you’ve created internally.

The world of spirit is the world of possibility. The mental world is the world of choices. The physical world is the world of destiny.

So now you can begin to focus on where you can really cause change. If you want to make a change, it starts in the worlds of mind and spirit. Your spiritual world becomes the world in which ideas, inspiration, and insights originate. When you have an open mind that is free of judgment and expectation, you receive at a much higher level. The mental world is where you create plans; it’s the world where you use thought, analysis, focus, and attention to bring into being that which you desire to contribute to the world.

The physical world is just the world of events, of information. It’s where results occur, where data is collected, where the object is manifest, where the outcome happens, and where the action takes place. It’s the last stage of the process.

Walter owned a small manufacturing company trying to produce a better product. He was old-school and full of fear. So his approach was to simply get angry about the customer response to the product he now had. But he was making no changes in his assembly line. He didn’t understand that you can’t change a result without changing the ingredients that went into producing the result. The true ingredients that create the result are contained in the world inside you, not in the world outside you.

Walter finally sold his business at a great loss. If you truly want to make a difference, you focus on your inner systems because that’s where you have power. You don’t just focus on what’s happened in the world. All that does is act like a mirror; it reflects back to you what you’ve been thinking. Duane says:

I try to communicate to people an understanding that experience is not final truth. And they really have a hard time with that. I say, “All experience tells you is what you’ve been thinking. It tells you the results of the beliefs and ways of thinking you’ve had in the past. That’s what experience tells you. It doesn’t tell you what’s true. Just because you failed at this once, doesn’t mean you have to fail at it again. It means you never believed you could succeed, and therefore you have manifested exactly what you believed.”

Life will not bring you what you want. Life will bring you what you believe. Wanting it actually pushes it away!

And the reason it does is that
wanting it
creates a belief that
you don’t have it
, and that maybe you can’t get it. It creates inner lack and a sense of scarcity regarding that subject.

So how can you stop wanting something you really want?

Instead of wanting it, you can shift your thinking to, “I’ll create it.” Because you now understand that the true creative process begins on the inside, not the outside. You comprehend that the creative potential that exists within you comes through your thinking, which arises through what’s in you. It’s an inside job.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the best examples of using all three worlds as opposed to just one, is contained in a comparison of the lives of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Malcolm X tried to erase already-existing racism. His whole approach was that racism is bad, it’s wrong, and we need to get rid of it. He was trying, through his justifiable anger, to alter the already-existing physical world. So he wasn’t in three worlds, he was in one. He kept trying to chop off the tip of the iceberg.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., approached the issue differently. He went inside himself to the level of spirit. He was a minister who knew how to meditate and pray for inspiration. Finally, when it arrived, he said to the world, “I have a dream.”

Dr. King’s dream had black people and white people going to the same schools and the same restaurants, and being treated equally by the law. That was his dream. He didn’t talk about racism in his dream, because racism was history to him. And in his dream racism would no longer be relevant.

So now we celebrate a holiday in his honor. There isn’t a holiday for Malcolm X. Despite his courage and brilliance, Malcom X has had very little lasting influence. His time on earth did more to fuel the anger of his followers than it did to create anything new.

But because of King, a lot is different now; he found his leverage at the level of a dream, at the level of an idea, instead of the level of outer historical manifestation. He was accessing spirit, not physical form. King exemplifies someone who goes into his inner world of the spiritual to adjust something in the outer world—as opposed to the way most of us handle life: complaining about what’s already out there.