Yesterday we started our preparation week for the 2012 “10 in 10 Weight Loss Challenge” by going through the registration process. You can read that by going here. Remember, the 10 in 10 Challenge begins on January 9th with the first of ten weekly weigh-ins.

To give yourself the best opportunity for success, we’re spending this week or Week 0 preparing ourselves and our environment for success.

With the holidays behind us, undoubtedly there are Sees Candy boxes, cookies, ice cream, chocolate covered raisins and gift baskets filled with a variety of sweets laying around your home. Today is the day to THROW THE CRAP OUT!

I know that you feel compelled to finish it all off because there are children starving in Africa, but they’d prefer for the US to have money that can be spent on entrepreneurial efforts like Toby Tanser’s Shoe4Africa than by you eating the extra five thousand calories that are laying around tempting you.

It’s time. Your body will thank you, your mind will thank you, your heart will thank you and at the end of the ten week challenge, you will thank you for setting yourself up for success. Go through your refrigerator and cupboards, and pull out anything that isn’t “healthy”. Look for hidden gems. For me, it’s chocolate. Anything chocolate has to go. I’ve learned this from experience that there are some people that can do things in moderation and there are others who are straight up sugar addicts – I’m the latter.

For everything there is a time and as “Uncle Bob” would say “Time’s up!” when it comes to the crap lying around your home. Think of it like the common ceremony of supporting your child as he or she throws their binky into a fire signifying that they are no longer a baby. It’s pretty much the same. For some of you, this will be tough to do, and I can only tell you that simply by doing this one act (and of course by not refilling the coffers with crap) you will avoid putting on 7-15 pounds of fat next year. That’s just grazing fat because the stuff is there.

So enjoy your Tuesday, grab a trash bag and strip your kitchen and your life of anything that is unnecessary and bad for you. Uh oh, I think I hear Cindy calling with a man-sized trash bag of her own. Hope it isn’t meant for me. See you tomorrow!

What if I lost weight and got healthy? What if I stopped making excuses and started making progress? ~ Charles Barkley

First let me be the thousandth person to wish you a very Happy New Year; more importantly, let me wish you a Healthy New Year. And this year, I’ve committed myself to helping any of my friends who want to “lose weight/get healthy and stop making excuses/start making progress” to do so.

Thanks to our friend Nigel, I’ll be helping to support all of our friends in this year’s 10 in 10 Challenge. I participated in this last year and lost a lot more than ten pounds in the first ten weeks of 2011, so I know this is very possible to do.

The key to the success of the folks who participate in this challenge is in its community support. We’re all in this together and through Facebook and Twitter we can support others and in doing so support ourselves.

The 10 in 10 Challenge begins on January 9th, that’s when we’ll all do our first weigh-in, and that means that you can use this week to set yourself up for success beginning from day #1.

Each day this week, I’ll post a quick entry giving you something simple that you can do to start off 2012 and the 10 in 10 Challenge on the right foot.

What do I do today?

Today you only have to do two things, you have to commit to your goal of losing a few pounds and starting off the year by getting healthy, and you have to register for the Challenge. Don’t worry, it’s free, we don’t collect e-mails, there’s nothing nefarious about any of this – just a group of everyday people wanting to improve their lives by starting the year off adopting good habits while they have other friends there to support them doing it.

How do I register?

We use two free primary tools to administer the 10 in 10 Challenge:

Facebook:

Go to https://www.facebook.com/10in10Challenge and “Like” this page. Read through the info page and through the Notes page. When you complete your weigh-ins, post your progress to the wall on this page on facebook so we can all celebrate your progress however small or large that might be! (Trust me, I had a few weeks last year when I gained, but still came out far ahead of my goal.)

Buckeye Outdoors:

Go to http://buckeyeoutdoors.com and create an account. It’s super quick and easy.

Go to http://buckeyeoutdoors.com/training/challenges and join the “10in10 2012″ Challenge

This is where we will record our actual weight loss. The Challenge is set up to begin on January 9th and last 10 weeks.

We’ll show you how to enter your weight in a separate post or you can check out the facebook page to see where we’ve already described how to do this.)

Lastly, if you are a Twitter user, go to https://twitter.com/10_in_10 and “follow” 10_in_10 to keep up to date and engage in the banter there.

You won’t lose 10 pounds or become a healthier person just by registering, but you will have taken the first steps to making this commitment real. I promise you that if you do commit to this, and see it through, the benefits will last long after the ten weeks are over. The little secret is that while the first ten weeks will help you to lose a few extra holiday pounds, by doing so you will adopt better habits and behaviors that will give you more energy, better health and make you feel a whole lot better about what you can accomplish in 2012.

Say hi when yo get onto Buckeye or Twitter, will ya? You can find me as @CoachAdam on the latter. Happy New Year!

If you ask a triathlete what their greatest risk is or what they fear the most, new athletes might answer drowning, while more experienced competitors might answer not being able to compete; and when pressed further as to what might cause that, they may point toward a fractured collar bone or another similar injury from a  bike accident. Few would answer death by brain eating amoeba although three people died last year from swimming in water inhabited by Naegleria fowleri, a “brain-eating” waterborne amoebic meningoencephalitis, which causes headache, stiffness, fever and nausea before leading to almost-certain death.

Many more got sick from ingesting or inspiring non lethal but severely painful bugs that can be found in pools, lakes and rivers. This has become such an important issue that the CDC ran a video contest to raise awareness of how to avoid these issues. Here is the winning submission:

But why as we enter the winter month of December are we talking about waterborne risks commonly found in warm waters. For two reasons, fist because triatletes move inside into pools during the winter months that are shared with youth swimmers that probably haven’t heard of these risks and even if they have, they don’t much care. Adults also assume that chlorine kills all of the urine and fecal borne bugs introduced by little swimmers wearing floaties. It doesn’t.

The second reason I bring this up is because winter brings winter colds and with more and more people resisting the use of antibiotics as a quick foolproof solution, many are turning to the use of nasal irrigators, some over the counter, others through the time tested use of nasal irrigates or nasal douches like the Neti pot. A Neti pot is used to pour warm saline water into one nostril drawing out any infection and contaminants as they are swept out the other nostril and into a sink. In most cases, this is a very safe and simple procedure, but just as noted above, there have been cases, where people have gotten and died from meningoencephalitis while using a Neti Pot.

To protect yourself during swimming, you can close off passages of entry including using goggles, not swallowing pool water, and by using ear and nose plugs. To do the same while obtaining the health benefits of using a nasal irrigator such as a Neti pot, use only distilled water, keep your pot clean and only use it for short periods of time. It doesn’t take any more effort and you can virtually eliminate all of the associated and completely preventable risks.

There are other pros and cons of using nasal irrigation as a course of action, many of which are identified in this WebMD article. http://www.webmd.com/allergies/features/neti-pot-nasal-irrigation-pros-and-cons

Hopefully, you’ll pass through this winter getting in great swim workouts and without getting ill; but if you should, remember these few simple tips.

“I don’t get men like you, you’re dangerous men. You start wars and then let other people fight them for you. You come in and say ‘do this, do that, think like this, become this kind of person’, you put a sign in somebody’s hand and say ‘follow me, I have all the answers’, but all you do is get people killed!”  ~ Richard “Dickie” Coombes

The only thing constant these days is change. The economy sucks; it’s sucked for years and it looks like it’s going to suck for a good deal of time going forward. If you are lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably now doing the work for two and have managers looking over your shoulder asking you why you can’t do even more, because they have managers looking over their shoulders who have managers looking over their shoulders. To state that we are all living under a considerable amount of stress is a ridiculous understatement.

In times such as these, success or failure is determined in days or weeks, not months or years. Deliver or die and fail fast are mottos many managers are living by these days. If the performance isn’t there quickly, make a change and make it quickly. The furious pace of change is business’ version of the fight or flight response. And this carries over to the people that are being put into new roles because they know that if they don’t show results immediately, they will be the next casualties of this war.

So how do you step into a new situation and give yourself the best chance to succeed and succeed quickly? Here are two recommendations.

1. Get inside and form your own opinion before making any changes. Beyond listening to those who asked you to take on the role, ask the people in the trenches and ask your customers. Take the time to identify the problem you are trying to solve.
2. Move quickly to make the changes that will motivate your employees and increase the confidence of your customers

“You can’t reform the system if you’re not in it.” ~ Lilian Gray

The truth matters – Chances are, the person who asked you to take on the role has already shared their opinion of what he problem is and how you are best suited to solve it. That said, whatever you think the situation is from viewing it from the outside, don’t rush to conclusions until you’ve gone inside and seen for yourself. Often new managers feel that they need to immediately make wide sweeping changes in order to be seen by their boss as having the right stuff to be effective and gain their confidence. Unfortunately this strategy can often backfire both on the objective and on the new manager. Unless that manager is going to do all of the work him or herself, he is going to have to rely on the people in the trenches to get it done. Swooping in like a white knight does nothing but alienate you from those that are already battle scarred from fighting the fight on a daily basis. Before passing judgment, get inside and find out what is really going on. It’s okay to start with a hypothesis, this approach will allow you to move quickly, but be as open to proving that hypothesis wrong as you are to proving it right. What you are looking for is the truth – the real problem that needs to be solved. Getting the problem statement wrong leaves you open to criticism, heading down the wrong path, and making decisions that will immediately undermine your credibility as an effective leader.

“I don’t see playing politics with the truth.” ~ Henry Brubaker

A terrific example of this method of transition management is found in the 1980’s film Brubaker, where we first view Robert Redford’s character Henry Brubaker as an inmate in Wakefield Prison in Texas witnessing first hand the mistreatment of the inmates, the corruption of the guards and the deplorable conditions. Brubaker quickly sees who is effective in their roles and who isn’t. We all quickly identify people with characteristics and values that aren’t being effectively used and those in leadership who aren’t contributing at all. We see who “gets it” and who is just passing time. So when Henry Brubaker, still in his prison garb, breaks up a volatile situation by telling an inmate he’s the new warden, we are both surprised and curious why he didn’t just come into the prison the normal way by letting everyone know who he was and asserting himself in his appointed role.

The answer is simple, if he had, he never would have found out the truth – what problems needed to be solved and who he could count on to help him to do it. Instead he might have wasted valuable time trying to solve the wrong problem, or simply been rendered ineffective.

Beyond asking the employees on the ground, ask your customers. Voice of the customer isn’t just about branding. One of the worst things you can possibly do is walk in and make sweeping or critical changes that disrupt your customer or client experience without even consulting with them. By doing this, not only will you lose credibility with your own people but you will lose credibility with your customers. Trust may be hard to make up with your staff but you still have institutional power to lean on. With customers, you have no such authority and the savvier the customer, the more they will form an initial opinion of you of a poor manager and someone they won’t find value in dealing with. That will be even harder to rebound back from.

“Be quick, but don’t hurry” ~ John Wooden

As stated above, once you have figured out the problem you need to solve, move swiftly. By listening to both your customers and the people in the trenches, you’ll quickly hone in on a few critical changes that need to be made and equally which things you should absolutely leave alone. Make quick changes of personnel and tactics that immediately will be seen by your customers as addressing their needs and by your employees as improving their opportunity for success.

I’ll provide you with an example from one of my own clients, a finance executive who was asked to come out of running the finance side of the liquor division to run that of a larger entertainment business. He didn’t have to play an “undercover boss”; he just made sure to spend enough time to ask the people on the ground the right questions. Once he identified the problem to be solved, he quickly wound up sacking the finance VP and promoting a controller two levels down because that was the right person to lead that function. The business results spoke for themselves and the new leader had an inspired employee group to take his strategy forward.

In summary, to be not only seen as effective but to be effective in a new leadership position remember to  ask the people on the ground and form your own opinion of what the problem is and who can help you to solve it, and once you do figure it out, move quickly and decisively. You know what they say, you never have a second chance at a first impression and understanding the situation clearly is much more important than trying to establish yourself as a hero when you haven’t even gotten your clothes dirty yet.

This is my mea culpa for not having posted anything to this blog in ages. Truth is that I have posted on my blog only when I have thought I had something valuable for others to read. When I’ve simply wanted to vent, I found Twitter or facebook to be convenient receptacles for my raving and sometimes mindless rants. So if you’ve done your math, you get to the inevitable point that for months, I haven’t felt like I have had anything valuable to share. Until now.

About a week ago, I woke up in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles hotel feeling like someone was stabbing me in the back and my right arm was on fire. I wish I could tell you exactly what’s going on but I can’t yet and more than a week later I’m still trying to figure it all out.

What I can share is that now that the pain is no longer intolerable, I can actually type full sentences on a keyboard and figured that my experience here is something that someone else might find useful in case they find themselves in a similar situation. I openly confess that I have no idea how this is going to end, but I can promise that I’ll be sure to share what I learn and what works and what doesn’t work for me in the hope that someone else might benefit.

More to follow…

It’s always the plan but not always the result that supporting a great cause actually is combined with a great event. Saturday night’s Thalians Gala at The Playboy Mansion delivered on both raising appx. $1 Million for The Thalians and Operation Mend by having the right location, the right cause, the right atmosphere, the right honoree (Hugh Hefner as Mr. Wonderful) and the right entertainment program. The night was balanced with just the right amount of fund raising combined with entertainment that included performances by comedians Felipe Esparza, Jeffrey Ross and Rich Little, and a ridiculous, “Please let Them Play All Night” performances by energetic and contagious musicians and singers Joy Enriquez, Christopher and Kyle Massey, Billy Morrison, Matt Sorum, Donovan Leitch, Mark McGrath, Steve Stevens, Franky Perez, Grant Fitzpatrick and a sensational closing number by Taylor Dane and Camp Freddy. The only thing that stopped the event was The Playboy Mansion turning the power off – Hef does need his beauty rest after all.

Most importantly, as an upbeat and humorous US Marine Corporal Aaron Mankin – who has undergone more than 60 operations to repair his face and body from burns incurred when an IED exploded in his vehicle killing 7 of his troops – stated, it allowed a bunch of US Marines to come to spend a few hours at an open bar, and gave us all a sobering reminder of the sacrifices that our service men and women make each and every day to protect our freedoms. The only thing that would have made it better is if President Obama’s message about the demise of Osama bin Laden had been received that evening in front of all of those that had invested so much to make that happen.

Now that would have been a once in a lifetime experience.You owe it to yourself to learn about this great organization and this great cause by watching this short video on Operation Mend

As it was, it was a tremendous evening put on by a great team led by event chairs Bob and Kira Lorsch and Thalians Board Chair and Force of Nature, Ruta Lee.

Here’s a little snippet of the event through our eyes from start to finish. It even includes your own private tour through The Playboy Mansion.

The evening ended as perfectly as it started, at The Rainbow Bar and Grill with good friends and family, midget wrestlers, a cat wearing magician and an amazing pizza. Just another Saturday night in La La Land.

Disclaimer: For those new to this blog, I have committed myself to lose 40 pounds in 2011, hence the #40in2011 Challenge, and weekly I will post progress towards my objective. This report covers progress through week 8 of 50.

Disclaimer: For those new to this blog, I have committed myself to lose 40 pounds in 2011, hence the #40in2011 Challenge, and weekly I will post progress towards my objective. This report covers progress through week 7 of 50.

Disclaimer: For those new to this blog, I have committed myself to lose 40 pounds in 2011, hence the #40in2011 Challenge, and weekly I will post progress towards my objective. This report covers progress through week 5 of 50.

Disclaimer: For those new to this blog, I have committed myself to lose 40 pounds in 2011, hence the #40in2011 Challenge, and weekly I will post progress towards my objective. This report covers progress through week 4 of 50.