Think Excellence: Harnessing Your Power to Succeed Beyond Greatness

By Chaim Y. Botwinick and Steven R. Covey

In this practical guide, an educator shares nine principles aimed at helping readers achieve excellence in their careers and in life.

We live in a world that places importance and value on achieving the highest levels of personal, social, and professional performance. Think Excellence was born of a concept used to help motivate others to create a mindset that assesses individual and collective potential and that encourages the pursuit of consistent improvement. It’s also a call to think beyond self-imposed limitations to think boldly, creatively, tactically, and strategically. The challenge here is to stretch your potential, your capabilities, your imagination, and your capacity in the hope of excelling toward a point of maximum potential. Botwinick presents nine power principles that lead to an understanding and an appreciation of your full potential—all in order to achieve high levels of excellence while challenging your ability, capacity, and willingness to strive for greater heights. This book is about aspiring to be the best while learning to harness the untapped power within all of us. Welcome to Think Excellence!

With a foreword by Dr. Stephen R. Covey

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781612547930

Book preview

PROLOGUE

We currently live in a competitive society which, for better or for worse, places significant importance and value on attaining the highest possible levels of personal, social, and professional performance. This cultural preoccupation and global competitive obsession is anchored in the belief that in order to succeed we need to be the best we can be and that an average performance is barely acceptable.

All too often we are pressured to go from good to great—only to realize that great, once attained, may not always be good enough. This reality is embedded in a culture that encourages and thrives on promoting, encouraging, and in some cases, demanding excellence and superiority. Whether it is job-embedded performance, academic achievement, physical stamina, or competitive sport, we are continuously being challenged to achieve maximum levels of attainment. Anything less may be either disregarded or rejected.

So what is Think Excellence all about, and how does this book differ from others which motivate and inspire us to raise the bar and improve our human potential?

The purpose of this volume is to provide you with a straightforward understanding and appreciation of your full potential in order to achieve high levels of excellence, and at the same time challenge your ability, capacity, and willingness to strive for greater heights.

Think Excellence is a concept that I often use with my colleagues and coworkers to help motivate them to create a mindset or value proposition which continuously and consistently assesses their individual and collective potential. At the same time, this encourages them not to be totally satisfied or content with the status quo. The concept is intended to help in the pursuit of a course of action, a critical path, and an upward trajectory toward continuous and consistent improvement.

Think Excellence is also a term I developed several years ago to motivate educational and nonprofit management teams to think more boldly, creatively, tactically, and strategically, beyond self-imposed limitations. I wanted to challenge them to stretch their potential, capabilities, imagination, capacity, and above all, their conscious willingness and self-confidence to excel beyond a given point toward a point of maximum potential.

How often do we hear comments like, I gave it my best shot, or if I only had an opportunity to do it over again, I would have … I should have … I could have … Or perhaps, It was totally out of my control. How often do we second-guess our final decisions only to reach the not-so-obvious conclusion that if we only thought about the issue more thoroughly or strategically, our final decision would have been significantly different from the one we originally made?

Think Excellence is about you and me. It’s about the power of how and why we make the decisions that we do. It’s about aspiring to be the best at what we do based upon the decisions we make or are hesitant to make. Think Excellence is harnessing the power from within and the untapped power we all possess to raise the bar in ways which may not have been be readily evident to us or were never before imagined.

Welcome to Think Excellence!

Part One

POWER PRINCIPLES

Introduction

The What and Why of Excellence:

An Uneven Playing Field

The term excellence, as we know it today, assumes a state of excelling or superiority as defined by the norm and standard of the environment in which we live, whether it is in the home, at school, or in the workplace. It can also assume a product, idea, project, or initiative is outstanding and of exceptional merit. These assumptions inform our understanding about what it means to be excellent and how we think about excellence. More often than not, our appreciation of this concept is influenced by social, personal, political, and cultural standards. Therefore, what is perceived as exceptional to one party may be viewed as average, mediocre, or inferior to another. In other words, excellence as a global concept is somewhat subjective and is perceived through the eyes of the beholder.

In order to establish a working definition of excellence, it is important to note that there really is no one-size-fits-all definition. In fact, the concept of excellence and its ambiguity from both a theoretical and practical perspective is played out continuously on an uneven playing field.

In light of this ambiguity and wide range of standards, the concept of thinking excellence will therefore be defined (in the following chapters) as promoting, encouraging, and thinking in a manner which challenges us to reach our fullest potential. This indistinctness therefore begs the question: How do we define fullest capacity for potential? By whose standard? And, once defined, how do we know that our potential is actually being realized to the fullest extent possible? Simply put, what is our capacity or potential? How does this impact on our ability to excel? What is the process through which to achieve this maximum capacity or potential?

Each and every one of us, irrespective of occupation, disposition, or particular circumstance, has the potential to reach pinnacle moments which inspire, encourage, and support excellence. I use the word potential because it assumes that for most of us, our abilities, motivation, and understanding (irrespective of passion) remain relatively untapped or dormant until they are challenged, stimulated, ignited, and eventually unleashed.

In order to illustrate how Think Excellence informs the decisions and choices we make (or don’t make) and how we possess the power to reach the highest potential possible, the following chapters present nine power principles which were developed for this purpose.

These nine power principles for achieving excellence are not linear in nature, nor are they presented in consecutive or chronological order. Rather, they have a cumulative effect on the manner in which we either attain or aspire to attain high levels of performance, achievement, and accomplishment. Therefore, each principle that is employed can be viewed as a link in a chain of guiding values—an essential ingredient for achieving excellence. The more principles that are applied to reaching your goal, the more they increase the probability or likelihood for reaching your full potential or performance apex. In other words, each principle can be viewed alone and freestanding or can be grouped together as a group of guiding principles.

The Nine Power Principles for Thinking Excellence

The following table illustrates the nine power principles and their corresponding descriptive values. Each of the sections that follow will focus on a specific power principle, followed by a concluding thought on how to harness your untapped potential in order to begin the exciting journey to excellence.

See chart on following page.

One

Always Target Your Power Goals

Be Focused and Aim High, Not Wide

Goal setting is one is of the most powerful processes for thinking about how to reach your desired target and, in turn, will help you determine exactly what you ultimately want to achieve and eventually how your goals will be achieved. The clear articulation of goals, whether they are personal or professional in nature, may well be the most essential ingredient for reaching or attaining levels of excellence.

One way to target your goals is to ensure that each goal is clearly defined, focused, and measurable. Focusing your attention on mega- or big-picture goals is the first step in targeting your power goals. This process is followed by breaking down the mega- or big-picture goals into more finite goals, with greater levels of specificity and focus. A targeted goal must therefore be Timely, Attainable, Realistic, Guided, Enduring, and Tangible.

The following examples illustrate how to create and utilize targeted goals as a way to achieve your maximum potential. These examples are based on the assumption that your outcomes (in the