By

Bill Cottringer 

Effective teamwork between quality thinking, healthy emotionality, disciplined behavior, and spiritual intelligence invariably results in long-term success, along with authentic happiness, genuine peace of mind, and inherent satisfaction. ~The Author.

     Here is the simple Success Team Formula that tells you what to do and how to do it, with the why built in:

Quality Thinking + Healthy Emotionality + Disciplined Behavior + Spiritual Intelligence = SUCCESS.

     Each of these four key performance indicators of success are listed below with some commonsense tips on developing the required knowledge, skills, and abilities:

Quality Thinking

     The quality thinking team player is developed by the following activities:

·         Realizing what you think you know may not be so and then learning what you don’t know.

·         Learning and reading more than others with an insatiable appetite for knowledge.

·         Hanging around other quality thinkers.

·         Viewing and reconciling polar opposites as just different sides to the same coin.

·         Stretching your thinking by seeing past what you are looking at.

·         Looking for silver linings in dark clouds.

·         Listening to and understanding others’ perspectives.

·         Paying attention to the connection between how you define something and how much or how little of the thing you have.

·         Separating what you think you want from what you know you need.

·         Starting the notice what you have been failing to notice all along.

·         Using mindfulness to dismiss the distractions of mind wandering back to the past or off into the future.

·         Seeing through illusions that hold you back, such as time and inseparable sense of self.

·         Asking better questions than responding with clever answers.

·         Being flexible in varying your approach in problem-solving until you find something that works.

·         Accumulating important governing principles about how things work.

·         Asking more why questions than what or how ones.

·         Solving the easier problems in life quickly and without too much thought, saving time for deliberating more on the difficult ones by breaking down their complexity into more manageable parts.

·         Learning from experience, especially the failures which can often provide clues for being more successful the next opportunity that comes along.

·         Daring to be the one goose out of the formation when the flock might be off course.

·         Relying on intuitive decision making as much as analyzing the pros and cons, rationally.

Healthy Emotionality

     Healthy emotionality involves:

·         Managing your ego and moods.

·         Taking a genuine interest in others.

·         Being appreciative.

·         Striving to be optimistic, trusting, hopeful, and positive.

·         Developing a likeable personality and communicating that way, by being agreeable, positive, honest, empathetic, and supportive.

·         Being instrinsically motivated.

·         Learning to love unconditionally, especially when certain conditions seem irresistible.

·         Connecting with other people and the rest of life with empathy energy.

·         Learning to do something not many people have figured out how to do—in developing a common language to help your head, heart and soul communicate and collaborate better with each other.

·         Becoming more comfortable with the emerging world of uncertainty, volatility, ambiguity, and constant change.

·         Replacing aggressiveness and passivity with assertiveness in exercising your rights without unnecessarily offending others.

·         Becoming happier and more successful by helping others get those same things.

·         Experiencing people and situations fully without making personal quality judgments.

·         Celebrating noisy differences in others’ beliefs, values, and perspectives rather than getting annoyed and being critical.

·         Leaning towards being optimistic, but always having a plan B in your back pocket just in case Murphy’s Law turns out to be more true than false.

·         Enjoying other people’s success without being resentful or jealous.

·         Realizing other people can’t make you happy, only unhappy.

·         Having the courage to share your insecurities and vulnerabilities at the appropriate times.

·         Engaging in stress-busting, relaxing activities.

·         Having a realistic self-concept congruent with how others see you, allowing for periodic self-doubts.

Disciplined Behavior

      Disciplined behavior requires:

·         Following the Golden Rule and committing to the ultimate moral principle of only doing good, without doing harm.

·         Practicing the virtuous behaviors below:

·         Cooperating and collaborating more than competing. If you must compete, then do it against yourself.

·         Setting goals, planning, staying focused, persevering, and following-through.

·         Leaving situations in better shape than as you found them.

·         Listening more with your two ears than talking too much with your one mouth, especially hearing what is not being did and what is being said apart from how it is being said.

·         Putting most of your efforts into improving relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and even enemies.

·         Knowing you can always get further by smiling and having a gun in your back pocket.

·         Learning the connection between the choices you make and the consequences they bring.

·         Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and looking for ways to apply these strengths advantageously and avoiding situations that may exploit your weaknesses.

·         Avoiding situations with too much temptation, leaving something out of sight, out of mind.

·         Practicing daily diligence by developing new habits and rituals.

·         Improving the perception of your will power—what you can conceive, you can believe and then achieve.

·         Expanding your physical, mental, and emotional comfort zones.

·         Making do lists and writing goals down with high visibility.

·         Exercising daily, eating healthy foods, avoiding drugs, and drinking alcohol in moderation.

·         Remembering to reward yourself for making progress.

·         Being accountable for mistakes but being resilient with setbacks.

·         Mixing alone time with being around others.

·         Embracing inevitable discomfort, pain and suffering as temporary situations.

Spiritual Intelligence

       Spiritual intelligence overlaps with all these other success factors, but can be increased independently by practicing these behaviors:

·         Focusing on and getting answers to deep why questions.

·         Humbly enjoying a small place in a huge universe, with childlike awe.

·         Being comfortable in situations where dependence, independence and interdependence may be required.

·         Celebrating diversity, equality, and inclusion fully and enthusiastically, without hesitancy.

·         Having an abundance of compassion, empathy, and love.

·         Being very forgiving.

·         Offering selfless service without expecting anything in return.

·         Having a highly focused vision and being value-driven to get there.

·         Seeing larger holistic patterns, relationships, and connections.

·         Understanding the wisdom of insecurity but still having a deep sense of belonging.

·         Being free to be spontaneous more than being held hostage to contrived strategies.

·         Seeing human potential as virtually unlimited.

·         Being acutely aware of self and surroundings.

·         Having a sharp sensitivity to moments of opportunity vs. ones of danger.

·         Exercising respect and reverence for all things large or small.

·         Using adversity challenges for character-building.

·         Reframing situations from a distance to see a bigger picture or wider context.

·         Learning from and growing past mistakes, setbacks, and failures.

·         Having a strong sense of vocational calling.

·         Behaving in ways just because they feel inherently good and right, without any artificial justification   or rationalization.

      Yes, if you are just starting this process, there certainly is a lot of work to do, but there is some good news. The beauty of this formula is that these things are all inter-connected and can easily and quickly snowball into cumulative and compounding results.