CHAPTER 14

“But It Didn’t Work!” Read On…

If you have read and applied what we have shared so far, you are ahead of the average person when it comes to Getting It Right When It Matters Most. As a review, you have learned about:

According to experts on the circulatory system, it takes about one minute for the heart to pump blood out of the left ventricle and carry it through the whole body before returning it to the right atrium, where the process starts again (“How Long Does it Take For Blood To Flow Round The Body?” 2020). Similarly, SOAR is a never-ending cycle that lasts as long as we live. (Just do not expect our model to be finished cycling in a minute!) While our hearts bring in oxygen-poor blood and pump out oxygen-rich blood, implementing SOAR converts ineffective habits and refreshes them by updating your Self, Outlook, Action, and Reflection—especially during your important, complex, and relational MTMs. Each time you Reflect on what you have learned, you can update your best version of Self for your next MTM.

Am I Doing It Wrong? It Did Not Work!

At times, you will do the very best you can to achieve a successful outcome for your MTM, and for whatever reason, it does not go the way you planned. When that happens, your best tool is to invest in Reflection. Answer honest questions about yourself and your approach:

If you did all these things and still did not achieve your desired results, reflection may uncover where things started falling apart. List what you did well. Then list the things you want to do differently next time.

If after Reflection you still find no room for improvement, the problem does not likely fall at your end. Not everyone wants to change, get along, be agreeable, or find solutions. While some people seem programmed to resist your best efforts, fortunately, these people are in the minority.

If It Did Not Work, Why Should I Keep Trying?

In a perfect world, we could all circumvent free will by using Jedi mind tricks on people we wished to change. We could just wave a hand and say, “This person makes perfect sense. I should listen to him.”

But alas, free will cannot be easily manipulated. You will face MTMs where you will do everything within your power, yet the other person will not see things your way or even try to work with you. What then?

Following are reasons why you should practice SOAR and the numerous tips in this book even if you do not see instant results.

Your Well-Being Is as Important as Your Results

In the Self phase, we recommended that you increase your self-awareness through various personality assessments and ask others for feedback about the parts of your personality you cannot see with ease. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, aligning yourself with your core values, activating Your Best Self, and practicing self-care helps maintain your emotional well-being.

People with higher well-being have a greater resilience to stress, deeper relationships, higher self-esteem, and more energy (“How to Build Good Emotional Health” 2020). Pharmaceutical companies seem to have a pill for everything. But by prioritizing Your Best Self to show up in how you approach others, you do more than any one pill can accomplish. And, you might just avoid a doctor visit, co-pay, or prescription.

Practice Makes Permanent

Remember when you learned to ride a bike? You looked in front of you, steadied the handlebars, leaned and steered into turns, avoided obstacles, figured out how to stop, and kept pedaling all at the same time. Once you learned the basics, you could ride and steer with no hands! It did not happen instantly. But the more you practiced, the easier and more natural it became.

While not every MTM will come to a satisfactory conclusion, the skills you practice as you strive for mastery will equip you to make other MTMs SOAR! Over time, you will use these new skills so often and with such fluency, you will not remember a time when you had to think about them consciously. And that is the goal: upgrading your new operating system to something that works.

Preventing Faux Pas

Only a sociopath wakes up in the morning wondering how to make someone else’s life miserable. The vast majority of us do the best we can, and treat others the best we can, throughout each day. But, we still make mistakes.

Sometimes it isn’t the words we say but our faces that betray our negative emotions. We spent much of this book sharing tips to regain emotional control when triggered. Some may struggle with implementing parts of the Action phase, but everyone can benefit from pausing, breathing, and labeling their emotions. Practicing these simple tips can prevent faux pas, saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Your Reputation Is Built One MTM at a Time

Even when an MTM does not work as planned, wins often come later. Think in terms of your reputation. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Every leader we know wants to be seen as self-aware, level-headed, fair, and effective. But how do leaders earn that reputation? They are habitually self-aware, level-headed, fair, and effective. That does not mean they win arguments, are right 100 percent of the time, or have the loudest voices in the room.

One of the authors had a colleague, Nabila, who had been assigned goals and responsibilities that overlapped his own. The two of them met multiple times and could not find common ground to move forward. Both parties left these interactions feeling frustrated, neither having received his or her desired outcome.

Fast-forward five years when both worked at different companies. Nabila reached out to the author to see if he would be interested in partnering with her and her team with some really interesting and important work with developing their companies’ leaders. Why did Nabila reach out in a way that benefited the author professionally and financially? Because the author had become known for handling differences in a constructive way.

When you approach an MTM with a “growth mindset” that tells you that you can be effective, you can bring Your Best Self forward, you can better understand the other person’s perspective, there is a good chance that you will achieve those things. But even when you do not, you will have further cemented your reputation as one who is self-aware, level-headed, fair, and effective.

The Platinum Rules

Not every moment in life matters as much as your most important, complex, and relational ones. You have heard that “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” When it comes to your MTMs, such a low accuracy rate would mean you would experience chronic failure when things mattered most.

The Platinum Rule states that we should do unto others the way they want us to do unto them. So how do you accomplish that? You interact with others…

And everybody wins—either by advancing their MTM or learning valuable lessons for Getting It Right When It Matters Most.