Nike owns the trademark on “Just Do It,” but it is also part of “The Oz Principle,” as explained in the book by the same name.
Not only should you “Do It,” but beforehand you should “See It, Own It and Solve It,” as authors Roger Connors, Tom Smith and Craig Hickman explain.
They base their findings on the characters in “The Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, made into a 1939 movie that is still shown to audiences decades hence. Basically, the characters journeyed to see the wizard in the great land of Oz to get the things they needed for a fuller, happier life. It turns out, they could have gotten what they wanted all along, through their own efforts.
“The Oz Principle” preaches that you have what you need to get what you want in most cases. But YOU are accountable for getting it. You are not a victim. It’s not someone else’s fault. You just must always ask, “what can I do to get the results I want.”
Empowerment is a great thing. We’d all like to work with entities in which the person you are talking to can get you what you need, and has the authority to make things better for you. Too often, though, we run up against entities in which the voice on the phone, or the person behind the desk, can’t fix things himself, whether he might like to. If the person doesn’t care, kicking the problem to someone else is a perfect out. He can claim that it isn’t his job. If he’d like to help you, one would want him to take the risk of helping you, even if it isn’t his job.
We must also look at our own lives. Some of us have been dealt serious blows, particularly in the last few years. Some of what’s been done to us is not our fault. Still, we must own our own destinies. No one is going to give us a life. What we thought was “safe,” has proved otherwise. We must take control of us and, in turn, hold ourselves accountable for our outcomes.
Gotten laid off, downsized or reorganized out of a good situation? Not only does it happen, but it will probably happen a lot more often in the future. When it happens to us, we cannot be the victim of our employer’s (pick one: greed, bankruptcy, declining market share, merger). WE have the ability to turn our lives around. But, here’s the key: we have to be willing to look outside our comfort zones for something that will give us the opportunity to control our destinies.
That isn’t to say things are not going to happen. We can’t control natural or even corporate disasters. We can’t control the marketplace. We can’t control what someone else does that could hurt us. But we can control how we deal with the situation.
So when your comfort zone is upended, it can’t be that comfortable anymore. Wishing for it to be the way it was won’t make that happen. Only we can make the change that we need, to get the results we want.
When your comfortable chair wears out, you may never find one exactly like it again. But, you have to sit. So, you have to shop around to find a chair that may be different from the one that wore out, but that you can, at least eventually, find comfortable.
Sometimes, chair shopping is easy. Sometimes, it may not be. But comfort zones wear out and new comfort zones are required. If your comfort zone has worn out, visit www.bign.com/pbilodeau. You may find something totally different, but you won’t know how comfortable the chair is unless you sit in it.
We all must see our problems, own them, solve them and do what it takes to get the results we want. No wizard is out there to hand us what we need. We have to create it or find it. Circumstances will hit us, but we have to decide how we are going to deal with them.
We have to be OUR wizards. We may have to travel down different yellow brick roads to create a life, but it has to be our doing. We have to account for it. We have to do it, even if it scares us.
Peter