You are not a pizza!

You are not a pizza. You cannot please everybody.

I have learned this the hard way. When I started my career some 30 years ago I was a brand manager with Texas Instruments and I loved my job. I was trying to do a good job. And the definition of a good job was for me to make sure everybody I dealt with was happy. My boss, my distributors, my consumers, my retailers. Just everybody. I made long hours in trying to please everybody..

I did a rather poor job, as it was impossible to please everybody. I just managed to do a few things and as I did not had the time neither the energy to do all well, I felt not very satisfied and pleased.

On the hindsight something a lot of well-intended professionals are doing nowadays. Two of the basic core human needs are the needs of Certainty and Significance. The need for safety, stability, security, comfort with the need to have a meaning, to feel special, be needed, be wanted and to have a sense of importance.

All very natural and understandable although for me this ended rather disastrous.

From one day to the other I got a real disturbing chronicle headache and needed to find a way to continue working while not having the same energy as before.  First I felt I could not work and stayed home , but soon realized I needed to move on.

At that point in time and only then I started to learned to stop pleasing everybody, I learned to say NO , to say BASTA and to start managing the world of expectations around me, instead of them managing me. And all that without being a jerk.

I still have that headache. 24 hours a day. But I found a way to work with that and to work around that.

I call that  “ on my way to managing effortless” and continued to do that during the rest of my career , managing businesses up to 100 million $ all over the world.

When you came to the BASTA Academy I will share with you some of my most successful tips and tricks in managing effortless and doing more with less energy.

I know you can do the same.

See you.

BASTA,

Fons