Authors are advised to avoid writing about politics or religion to improve book sales. However, how my book was created is my backstory.
I am a true believer. I believe there is something bigger than us in the universe. I believe we are all messengers of some kind to each other, or how would God speak to us?
In my experience, 95% of the people who are given a messenger to answer a problem they have been thinking about blow off the message. The rationale is “I don’t know you. How could you know my problem? Why should I trust you?”
I am about to provide you with a message how to improve performance in less time for any job, task, skill, or relationship.
I am a behaviorist and transformational speaker. My doctoral study has been in behavioral, educational, and personality psychology. I am NOT a licensed clinical psychologist. I do not need to learn what is between your ears. If I do not get the correct output, I change the input cue or method, and once correct reinforce that behavior or skill.
I will teach you how to be self-motivated using your feedback to understand and modify your behaviors to be accountable and keep improving to become a top performer. What I teach you in this brief work will help you improve the quality of your life and those around you for the rest of your life.
Like most people, I do not pray and give thanks on a daily routine. I do feel blessed to have acquired my knowledge and skills to be a top performer and share with you now. Whether you choose to accept or reject my teaching is your right. I am a messenger none-the-less.
Twenty-five years prior to publishing Purposeful Intent my first book in 2009 I was depressed. I had two failed marriages and five sons. I love my kids, but I could not be with them like a normal father.
My mother was the spiritual leader of our family. She instilled in me and my brother the values of family. She called it acting like the three musketeers – “All for one and one for all.” All she wanted was for her two sons to become good citizens. She taught us values, and belief in God was one of them.
I was about to turn 40. I had recently left my teaching and coaching position to enter business as a medical distributor sales rep calling on hospitals and clinics. I knew medical terms having been a health education teacher and swimming coach.
Like any depressed son I went to visit my parents who had retired to northern Wisconsin. My lament to my mom was who would even want to date me? I may have well put a big “L” for loser on my forehead.
Her advice was to explain who I was and had become. I was a good father, an All-American in swimming, and I had a good job and Ph.D. My problem was not being patient. Her comment was, “How can the good Lord keep up with you? If plan A does not work immediately you go to plan B, then plan C.” Then she advised, “You go into your bedroom and pray alone like I taught you. And if you want to know more read all of Matthew 6.” What she said next really got my attention.
My dad grew up in Chicago. I had heard every cuss word before I was 10, but mom rarely said a cross word. But this time she said, “Be prepared to wait a year for your answer and keep your eyes and ears open. Only this time, you get the HELL OUT OF THE WAY!” It was as if she had slapped my face.
Three days later I came home to my empty apartment in a suburb west of Chicago, and I broke down. I missed my sons. I wanted to be a family. I did not have much time to date, and the unwritten rule in sales is you never date anyone you call upon. That narrows your search a lot.
I went into my bedroom and shut the door and unloaded my pain. It was not pretty on my knees bent over my bed, my face in my hands tearfully asking God for help. But I had my shopping list because the old me was thinking I was still in charge.
Then halfway through my list of what I wanted – a blonde with blue eyes and nice figure – I stopped. I remembered that God is loving and all-knowing. Who was I to demand anything? So, I ended with a final request for God to help me find the woman and partner whom I could spend the rest of my life with and grow old together. I reasoned that God showed us miracles and Noah to go through life two by two as partners.
It did not take a year! Eighteen-days later I met my wife. We have been married for 35 years! And, finally after five sons we have our daughter. So, now fast forward. I was out of education for twenty years but went back to school in 2000 to get my school administrator’s endorsement to become a principal. After additional graduate courses and two years as a principal I became a licensed K-12 school superintendent.
I grew up with a work ethic and improved large aquatic programs and winning teams. For twenty years in business I advanced from a national sales trainer to rep and regional manager and CEO of my own rep company. I went back to school because I was motivated to make a difference as a school leader.
After four more years as a school superintendent I retired in 2008 to complete my first book Purposeful Intent I had started in 2004. Unfortunately, I wrote it like a textbook few people like to read after school. The design was to show teachers how to self-motivate – intrinsically motivate – their students to higher achievement. I had the book 65% completed when I realized my huge mistake.
From 400 personality and psychological variables I singled out 14. I thought if I could teach you these 14, you could be self-motivated. What I failed to see was all the variable interaction effects. For example, 6 with 9 or 10 with 12 and others. It was impossible to explain 14 to the 13th power.
Again, I was depressed and upset. I was driven to find an answer how we could best teach people to be self-motivated. I was frustrated and mad having spent a year of my life trying to create the right message. I made three stacks of papers on my dining room table and shut down my computer. I was done.
Then I sat in my chair and cried for a half hour. In that time, like Job in the Bible, I had some harsh words for God. I was really trying hard to do the right thing to help people. As an educator and administrator and former coach I saw methods how coaches motivate their athletes, but teachers were missing that skill. So, are most parents, managers, and leaders off the mark.
But as it was twenty some years earlier in the beginning, I again realized I was not the one in charge. So, my final request was, “God, I need your help. I can’t do this on my own. I am a health and physical education teacher. We use visual, verbal, and kinesthetic cues to teach how to perform physical skills and take care of your health. Why can’t we come up with a simple strategy to teach people how to be self-motivated?”
I did not think of my request as a prayer in my bedroom with the door shut, but God must have heard my emotional plea for help. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and eleven hours later at 3:30 in the morning not 18 days later like before, I awoke and started to jot down some trigger words on a note pad next to my bed.
I use trigger pad notes to recall what I had been thinking and put those thoughts into action the next morning. Only this time, I was writing pages with sentences! I realized I was getting my answer NOW! So, I ran downstairs and got eight pages out of my printer.
For the next three hours I wrote the foundation for “The Triad Performance Improvement System.” These are the three secret skills of top performers. They are teachable and learnable and transformational.
I kept an open mind and no sooner sat down was told, “Increase Awareness.” I thought about how to teach that and roughed out an outline. Ninety minutes later I felt I had grasped that, so I sat quietly. In only a few minutes, I was told, “Enhance Self-Evaluation.”
I remember printing and underlining that header at the top of the page. Then, I created an outline for pre, during, and post-performance evaluation chapter headings. Again, I sat quietly a lot longer this time, and was told, “Connect Reward with Reinforcement.”
God answered my prayer. I am just the messenger. In the next eight to ten hours reading and absorbing this book you can make personal conclusions and decide to transform your life, improve your performance in less time, and become the top performer that is within you.
Chapter 1 Overview
“Your education and personality identify you for a lifetime.” Andrew Christian
The Applied Transformational Leadership Design
The 3 Secret Skills of Top Performers is self or intrinsic motivation leadership designed to improve your performance in less time. I refer to these three teachable and learnable skills as The Triad Performance Improvement System, a.k.a. The Triad.
Theory and Hypothesis
The theory is when you are aware of a conscious cognitive motive to value and satisfy a personal need or goal you experience repeatable success and gratification. Personal needs, values, and goal setting behaviors will be reviewed.
The hypothesis is valued information is more readily stored and retrieved in the brain through the development of cognitive associational neurons that connect positive, pleasurable, and successful stimulus-response activities.
The theoretical construct for The Triad is that you can more readily recognize, receive, organize, store, and retrieve (RROSR) information you learn to cognitively choose as valuable, meaningful, and relevant from your familiar past experience and your unfamiliar future predicted experience.
Top performers take immediate action while other performers lose time considering what to do or wait to be directed by others. Top performers are motivated by satisfying personal needs and valued goals. When those needs are identified and goals are met, they activate pleasure centers in the brain to repeat those kinds of behaviors.
The Big Four Applications
The benefit of learning The Triad is applying these skills to improve your performance in less time to “The Big Four”: a job, task, skill, or relationship. Like riding a bicycle once you learn The Triad you do not forget it. Few applications fall outside of those “Big Four” to be reviewed later in more detail.
The cornerstone of all motivational behavior is your desire to see continuous improvement in your performance to enhance your “quality of life.” This begins with satisfying your personal needs and goals consistent with your values.
With awareness of continuous improvement, you activate and reinforce the pleasure centers in your brain. You connect the reward with reinforcement. This builds your confidence and motive to experience more pleasurable success repeating like behaviors.
Assumptions
Leadership is applied to groups and individual performance.
Knowledge from reading about top performers will transfer to the individual.
Learning The Triad improves performance in less time and takes fast action.
The Triad shortens the learning curve.
The 3 secret skills will transform leaders and performers.
All top performers do not make good role models.
Top performers’ work ethic and strategies are worth copying.
Intrinsic comes from within and extrinsic comes from outside.
Quality of life is the underlying driving force in all motivation.
Leaders are assumed for the purposes of this book to be company CEO’s, managers, supervisors, directors, teachers, coaches, and parents.
Performers are employees, workers, students, athletes, and people.
Premise
The intent of this book is to transform leadership using The Triad Performance Improvement System.
Most of us are conditioned to think of motivation as something someone does to us or someone else, or a pep talk from so called “experts” with variable credibility. I believe we are born with an innate drive to improve. Observing top performers in all fields, they consistently report a need to keep improving their knowledge and skills.
The primary motivation for personal performance improvement is to enhance the overall quality of life. There is little motivation to work hard to achieve anything with low value. The value of hard work is to enjoy the rewards rather than be victims deciding there is no hope or future.
Many motivational speakers use the same clichés, persistence, commitment, and others – you have heard them. The message of inspirational speakers is, “If I can do it, you can do it.” Both offer enthusiastic sometimes celebrity entertainment but reflect on what your behavior was like 72 hours later. Did you create permanent personal performance improvement beyond 72 hours?
Both are extrinsic and less valuable. Intrinsic motives are always stronger than extrinsic motives. Telling someone how to do it like they did is a lot different from a transformational talk that teaches you methods and strategies to permanently improve your performance.
Learning the three secret skills is transformational. These leadership skills are modeled from top performers to create permanent changes in your behaviors and improve your performance over time. Like riding a bicycle, you will not forget how to apply those secret skills because they work. You can be the judge.
This is a study teaching powerful lessons in transformational leadership to improve performance in less time. Intrinsic motivation is a personal leadership skill taught with “The Triad Performance Improvement System.”
The oldest method to improve performance is trial and error. You make a mistake and keep correcting your performances. But this takes time you may not have to succeed. A better old-time method is to model and copy top performers. Over the years, I have observed top performers everywhere. They unconsciously follow these three secret skills.
Stephen Covey used this same observational approach as described in his best- selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 1989. That work was transformational. People were happy to say they were a “Covey guy” because they could already do two or three of the seven habits. And they told all their friends about the book.
In my observations, top performers are successful usually doing two of the three secret skills, but not all three. There is a reason why they do not emphasize the third secret skill. Are you curious?
In human behavior, people quit activities when they continually fail and feel pain. Or, as the case with mal-adaptive behaviors, they may cover up the pain using drugs. When you learn The Triad, you gain pleasurable success to repeat and keep improving.
Primary Benefits and Aids to Learning
The Triad are three secret skills used to benefit learning and improve your performance in less time. Self-motivated people identify and provide for their own needs to keep improving their skills. Do you know any top performer who is not self-motivated?
Shortening the Learning Curve
To acquire an education and learn skills to meet your own needs there is a premium placed on “shortening the learning curve.” W. Edwards Deming stated years ago, “Knowledge is king.” Those who acquire The Triad skills early value the knowledge and information and make it more meaningful and relevant.
The main idea for learning The Triad is to improve performance in less time for any job, task, skill, or relationship. Generally, with greater knowledge and skills you have a performance advantage over your competitors.
Definitions and Use of Terms
The Triad – refers to the 3 secret skills of top performers. It is the system to learn performance improvement in less time applied to any purposeful job, task, skill, or relationship.
Needs – are factors that affect your behavior, education, and personality in the environments you choose to live in. Maturity is your ability to provide for your own needs.
Drives – are innate built-in on a subconscious level you are unaware of their operation affecting your behaviors.
Motives – are the conscious awareness of a drive stimulus to purposefully satisfy a personal need or goal. Motives are associated with your intent and behavior patterns. A strategy to increase your motive strength is to be more consciously aware of your needs, values, and goals, and hold yourself accountable to achieve them.
Motivation – is the defined strategy you use to satisfy a personal need or goal. Two performers can have the same personal need or goal, but the stronger motivation will come from the performer who makes a conscious awareness effort to value their achievement. The strength of your motivation is hard to improve when you have no satisfaction of an underlying personal need or goal.
Intrinsic motivation is the performer’s internal desire to satisfy a personal need or goal.
Extrinsic motivation is another person’s need or goal imposed on an individual or group.
Bias is the unreasonable personal judgment or prejudice of an expected outcome prior to the performance or events.
RROSR is an increase awareness strategy I introduce as a meme to easily remember its use. Each letter represents a word – Recognize, Receive, Organize, Store, and Retrieve information.
The Value Concept
Value is the cornerstone of The Triad. There is a big difference between what someone tells you to value (extrinsic), and what you consciously decide to value (intrinsic). A leader, manager, parent, teacher, or coach can tell you the value of a bit of knowledge by creating a need to learn. The trick is making the new information meaningful and relevant to your current level of understanding. This uses your prior knowledge and familiarity with each task so you will intrinsically value and remember how the new information can be applied for your benefit.
Hypothetically when you do not intrinsically value new information, you store these data in less retrievable parts of your brain. This is like creating a word document file on your computer and placing it in a folder inside another folder. By the time you perform those three iterations to retrieve the document file, the timing of the performance to be successful may be lost. You can learn to organize and store valued information in a more readily retrievable structure via associational neurons and specific access parts of your brain at will on demand.
Brain mapping studies indicate visual patterns are stored and associated with like patterns in the occipital lobe. Verbal and kinesthetic feeling skills are stored in other lobes. This suggests information input must be as accurate as possible in demonstrations and explanations.
The Extrinsic-Intrinsic Controversy
Leaders must understand the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. An extrinsic motive is provided by someone else in the form of a tangible product or service with the expectation the one providing the extrinsic motive will gain something in return. This is a Quid Pro Quo. Examples are money, paid vacations, candy, gifts, jewelry, clothing, praise, special recognition, grades, plaques, bonuses, and so forth in return for more productive work, affection, better behavior, and leadership conformity. An extrinsic motive is another person’s need or goal imposed on the individual or group.
An intrinsic motive is the performer’s internal desire to satisfy a personal need or goal. An intrinsic motive comes from within the performer understanding their personal needs, values, and goals. Personal assessment of the physical and mental abilities, skills, and strengths to meet personal needs is required. The perceived performance value comes from feelings of success, self-worth, and image exhibited by enthusiasm and passion to produce quality results.
Value of Intrinsic Motivation
The Triad skills adapt to all your needs as they change over time. For example, my neighbor told me his story about quitting smoking. He said when he was a young man, if someone had told him smoking was bad for his health, he would have ushered the person out the door. His health needs were invincible then. Years later the need increased his awareness for quality of life and he quit.
Unfortunately, we all have a hard time projecting our future needs. We often wait until it is too late to see greater benefits from changing our behavior because without the skills to know how, we are not motivated to do so. As you mature and grow with experience your Triad skills help you to project future personal needs to a higher relevant value to control this notion.
You also use these skills to be a better consumer to apply critical thinking skills. Advertising works against The Triad skills. Ads seek to lure you into being part of a bigger more accepted group behavior instead of thinking through the best value for you.
When you focus on identifying and meeting your personal needs with The Triad, you achieve above average results. If you follow the masses and resist changing your behaviors putting stress on your personality, then little will change in your life. You are extrinsically motivated to meet the needs of others who manipulate your need for acceptance and will do what everyone else does. This is poor leadership.
The Triad Performance Improvement System
The book is organized into three parts with several chapters to suggest how to learn and teach each secret skill in The Triad. In only a few hours you can grasp The Triad and take immediate action to modify your behaviors and begin your journey of self-improvement when and where you choose to be a top performer.
The three secret skills of top performers are learned independently but interrelated when applied. The skills overlap like the spheres in this figure. As you learn each teachable skill, a light bulb goes on. Like water boiling it gets excited and agitates or bumps into the other two skills. Then one of those gets excited and bumps into the other two and so on. This continuous improvement process goes on for the rest of your life. You choose to apply when you feel the need to improve your performance for any job, task, skill, or relationship.
In your process of learning The Triad, I will explain the importance of needs, values, goals, paradigm shifts and strategies. They are essential to understand how and why to make permanent behavioral modifications to become a top performer.
While reading, pause and try to visualize a mental movie using suggested strategies applying The Triad to specific jobs, tasks, skills, and relationships you are familiar with and need to improve performance.
Einstein imagined learning everything in multiple senses so he could create huge numbers of associational neurons. Then, if he couldn’t recall a bit of information, he may have used a different sense to locate the knowledge in another drawer of his brain’s filing cabinet. Top performers use this multi-sensory approach to make new information meaningful and relevant.
I introduce RROSR as part of that strategy and suggests increasing awareness can increase your intelligence. But remember intelligence is specific. You can be smart in one area and unknowledgeable in another.
The three parts of The Triad are the 3 secret skills: Increase Awareness, Enhance Self-evaluation, and Connect Reward with Reinforcement are the foundation for all motivation. Once learned you will never forget them. When events trigger your need to improve any of those Big Four – jobs, tasks, skills, or relationships, remind yourself with a mental image to practice applying the skills.
The first part secret skill is Increase Awareness. To appreciably increase intelligence, you must learn how to increase your awareness at will on demand. Top performers do not operate at 100% all the time. They sense when to increase their awareness to recognize essential cues, mobilize their energy, and raise their level of performance to be successful.
Four key words are: AT WILL ON DEMAND. You choose when and where to apply The Triad. Increasing your awareness also creates value to organize, store, and retrieve differentiated information you find meaningful and relevant to successful past performance experience.
You perceive value from associating past familiar to new unfamiliar experiences. The frontal lobe behind your forehead does the thinking, predicting, and reasoning. The pre-frontal cortex immediately in front of the frontal lobe acts like the cache ram memory in your computer. As you acquire more knowledge and experience with specific tasks, you create an array of associational neurons linking the information stored in various parts of your brain.
When you learn to value information, you hypothetically store new information differently than non-valued information. But with more associational neurons you facilitate retrieval at will on demand to perform at higher optimum levels. Top performers use the pre-frontal cortex to retrieve valued information and hold in short term memory.
Then they modify and correct past performance mistakes by reviewing the sub routines or specific parts of the whole skill using mental practice and visualization strategies. These strategies create slow motion mental movie videos to fully rehearse the stimulus cues and response connections about to be performed in each part.
After the corrections have been made, the pre-frontal cortex executes the connected sub routines without having to think and interrupt the whole performance. Non-valued information is not as readily retrievable like a file stored in a closet instead of your brain’s desktop. A long retrieval sequence hinders learning and performance. It is harder to associate pleasurable past experiences to self-evaluate past performance and improve your motivation to strive for a goal and connect to a reward.
The second part secret skill is Enhance Self-Evaluation. No top performer ever waits for the approval of another. Creative performers and leaders value their self-evaluation criteria and feedback more than to wait on their critic’s opinion who is less familiar with the work. Can you imagine the great modern painter Picasso, waiting for the critic’s opinion to decide what to paint?
Great leaders and performers consult with others, and they do not wait for the approval of a critic with less talent or skill to proceed. Our schools, organizational, and business systems condition and reinforce exactly the opposite. We explain to students, trainees, and performers what is meaningful, relevant, and valuable instead of showing and teaching them a self-evaluation system or rubric to objectively score their performance.
Learn how to discover the answers to learn how to learn and be self-sufficient. We all know quality when we see it, but we cannot always describe it or the reward we feel. Performance evaluations are often vague or non-existent because no feedback system has been taught to the performer. In the end, it is not the extrinsic evaluation the teacher or evaluator thinks. What matters the most is how performers intrinsically evaluate their performances.
The third part secret skill is Connect Reward with Reinforcement. Routine performances and familial relationships are subconsciously automated. They are unaware of a connection between reward and reinforcement to improve future performance. The strategy is to move from unconscious to conscious awareness and attach significant value for each performance.
Mundane tasks are routine and boring, so you are not as motivated to improve until you become consciously aware of small improvements to value enough to feel any reward. You cannot reinforce a reward you do not feel or value from exerting a conscious effort. By increasing awareness to work with your innate drives, you immediately enhance self-evaluation and self-reward.
This connection reinforces and increases your motivation to improve skilled performances with more purposeful training and effort. RROSR is the strategy to improve all parts of The Triad. It is your ability to properly recognize, receive, organize, store, and retrieve information to value as meaningful and relevant to improve any performance and feel rewarded.
Imagine your reward feelings in doing a task well. Now, imagine a task or event you did not do well. No one likes to fail. No one says, “Boy that was fun! Let’s do it again!” The oldest behavioral notion is the tendency to repeat satisfying performances and avoid repeating painful ones.
To override routine subconscious behaviors and condition positive conscious behavioral responses, selectively focus on the correct cues to associate with purposeful correct responses. In other words, get clarity why you are performing what you do.
By enhancing your self-evaluation be aware of your personal feedback system to associate quality of effort with quality of reward. This builds value and a stronger personal reward system to overcome occasional failures. This is the best way to build your confidence and self-esteem. No one can convince you with words. It must occur by your own actions and intrinsic motivation.
The inner overlap (PI) is your purposeful intent. When you know your purpose for performing any job, task, skill, or relationship you improve your performances in less time. Compare this concept with lack of awareness simply going through the motions in your daily routines.
As you read these chapters stay focused on learning and applying these skills over time to put yourself in position to succeed. No great performance was ever created with a few trials. If you apply these principles and make them a part of your daily routine, you will see measurable consistent improvements in your performances and relationships over time. Use The Triad to learn your purpose and experience consistent improvement and success.
Without a purpose your odds for success are maybe 50-50 like flipping a coin to be heads or tails. This seldom motivates you to work hard to improve your performance and assure your success. If you subscribe to be a servant leader, and learn you are a messenger to others, I thank you for spreading the word.
Tenets of The Triad
Some scholars believe you cannot teach intrinsic or self-motivation. Based on my observations, personal research, and experience intrinsic motivation is a learned skill. As an All-American athlete, teacher, coach, sales trainer and regional manager, business owner, and school superintendent, I learned useful methods from my professors, coaches, and mentors who created an awareness of personal needs and values to motivate performance improvement.
Needs and values are the primary tenets. They evolve over time with the kinds of experiences you create in your environment – good or bad. How you choose to spend your time to gain useful feedback determines your outcomes.
Intrinsic or self-motivation revolves around satisfaction of personal needs. The problem is understanding needs are different from wants and be aware of their operation in your personal system. Some innate sub-conscious needs are powerful. You can learn to identify and discover how to bring those needs to a conscious level to enhance your motivation.
As you mature and gain experience you learn to value or discard new information. You do not waste your energy trying to store non useful information. The key is to be aware and show others you lead how to make new information meaningful and relevant to value and store as experience to apply to future events.
The secondary tenets are you choose when and where to apply The Triad to improve performance in less time for any job, task, skill, or relationship.
Using The Triad to Improve Your Performance Skills
As with any unfamiliar task, learning the process will seem confusing until you become more familiar with each task. The Triad concepts and skills you acquire will make more sense when you begin to apply them. You will become more aware of your subtle performance improvements to feel your success and enrich the quality of your life and those around you.
The Triad is a performance improvement system:
#1 A learned skill that must be practiced over time to achieve consistent results. Use it or lose it.
#2 Formed by the sum-total use of your personality, education, past performance, experiences, needs, values, and goals.
#3 Conditioned by your abilities, skills, attitudes, biased beliefs, and prejudices and motives in your responses.
#4 Not hard to learn but neither a quick fix nor opportune motivational system that lasts for 72 hours. Permanent changes take time and are motivated by knowledge and understanding of how intrinsic motivation works to improve performance in less time.
#5 Intrinsic motivation is based on proven psychological principles and observed behaviors common in top performers.
#6 The skills learning process can seem complex because many interrelated variables are difficult to control. Become conscious of the specific variable interactions to control and use their intrinsic motivational effect on performance improvement.
#7 The 3 secret skills are described in chapters under Part One, Two, and Three. These skills are learned independently but applied interdependently.
The following chart shows 7 steps to improve your performance with The Triad. Some personality adjustments will take time to condition and self-reinforce to make routine. You will notice these changes when you begin to master the awareness skills taught in Part One. As you read, practice applying these skills to yourself and those you lead.
