درسنامه اصلی

Moral – Audio

Hi, I’m AJ and welcome to this month’s VIP. Our topic is Morale, morale. This is an important topic for leadership. Most of us are leaders in some part of our life. Maybe in your job your career you have a leadership position. Maybe you’re a parent, mother or father, that’s a leadership position. Even if you’re not a parent, maybe you’re an uncle or an aunt or you have some influence on other people. That’s still leadership.

And I believe that the number one, the number one job of a leader is morale. It’s your first, your very first priority as a leader is morale. Before we get into morale let’s talk about the difference between a leader and a manager, because that’s also important. Because sometimes, especially in the business world people use these two words synonymously, meaning, as if they were the same, but they don’t mean the same thing. So when I talk about leadership or management it’s different. So, in my mind a manager is someone who makes decisions about everyday operations.

So there’s a group, let’s say in a typical business, a job and every day you have these little small decisions to make. Who’s going to do what? How are you going to work on the project? Oh, there’s a problem we need to solve. Oh, two people in the group are having a fight, an argument, someone needs to help solve that. That’s the job of management.

That’s what managers do, the day-to-day operations, the day-to-day decision-making.

But a leader, when I talk about leadership or being a leader, I’m talking about someone who’s kind of at a higher level and the leader does not always make day-to-day decisions, the smaller decisions. The leader makes decisions about strategy, about the big mission, the big purpose of the group. The leaders’ job is to see the big picture and to help the group move towards that big purpose, and an important part of that is morale.

So, what is morale? I keep using this word, morale. Morale is a word used in the military a lot, and it’s kind of a lot of ideas all together. So, morale is kind of positive emotion or enthusiasm and belief, belief in your mission, in the group’s mission. Positive emotion, including the will, the desire to continue fighting. And morale also has the idea of determination, the decision, the willpower to not quit, to not quit. So you put all that together and this is morale and morale can be for individuals, so an individual can have morale. We talk about high morale or low morale.

So, one person can have high morale, meaning strong positive emotion, excitement, enthusiasm, belief and the desire to keep fighting, to keep trying. That’s high morale, and then low morale, of course, is the opposite of all of that. So it’s low energy, low enthusiasm, maybe feeling depressed, feeling powerless, wanting to quit. That’s low morale. So, individuals can have morale, but we often talk about morale for groups of people. It’s probably more common to use this word when talking about groups, because teams and groups and families also have morale. Everyone in a group influences each other and they create a kind of morale, a level of morale, a level of positivity and high strong emotion, and belief and desire to win, to succeed or the opposite.

And the leaders’ job, the leaders first job, the very first job of a leader so important is to influence morale.

In the third year of Effortless English, so my third year after starting the company, I had a huge, huge, huge problem. Suddenly, at that time, Google– the big massive company Google– they blocked all of my accounts. They blocked all my accounts and this was a huge, terrible disaster for my business, because at that time, Effortless English depended on Google almost 100%, especially on Google advertising. That’s how I would get new people to learn about Effortless English, using Google advertising and then also some of their other services. So Google just suddenly, no warning, they didn’t tell me why or nothing they just blocked my accounts and stopped everything and I was like what’s happening.

My whole business stopped, Effortless English completely stopped because of this. And, of course, at the beginning I was just shocked and I was upset and angry and depressed and so the first thing I tried is to contact Google. It’s like why, why did you do this? Why, why, why? It’s like trying to contact any big company, it’s very, very difficult right? You try to call.

You get a recording. You can never talk to a real person. I tried emailing them and they would just send me like a link to some page that had an article. They wouldn’t tell me why they blocked my accounts. I couldn’t talk to anyone directly.

And I panicked and became more and more depressed, and my morale crashed. My

morale… and I just wanted to give up. I didn’t know what to do and my desire to keep fighting just crashed. My positive energy and emotion became very, very negative. I lost all my enthusiasm. I was close to defeat. So I had to make a decision what to do, what to do.

But I was so depressed, so weak really, that I finally realized that the first thing I had to do, I had to change my morale. That it was no use, it was pointless to try to find solutions and start thinking of strategies and all of that, because I just didn’t have any energy or enthusiasm or belief or confidence to keep fighting.

So I realized, I’ve gotta get my morale up first. I’ve gotta get my determination and my power back, then I can figure out maybe some solutions and try some things, but without morale it’s almost impossible to keep fighting. Without morale it’s almost impossible to find solutions. So, we were on vacation, we went to Hawaii and eventually I just said okay, I’m gonna forget about all of this for a while, just enjoy the vacation, try to completely relax, get my mind clear, bring my positive emotions back and I did that. It took some time. It took a while, of course, but finally I managed to recover my morale. I decided I will find other solutions. I will find a way, and then once I changed my morale everything else switched. I realized okay, first of all, I can survive without Google.

There are other ways of advertising. There are other ways to reach people. There are other social media, this is not the end of Effortless English. It might reduce our business, but we can keep going and survive. The second thing I decided is I’m going to find help. So Google won’t talk to me directly, so I’m going to do research, I’m gonna find some group, some agency, a lawyer, somebody to help me talk to Google, find out what the problem is and solve it. So once I had the morale I could start making I could start making decisions and getting ideas again, and of course, Effortless English is here now. Effortless English continued, so obviously the problem did get solved and everything’s fine.

But, the morale is so important and this is true not just for a business, it’s true for your family, it’s true for any group at all. See, the problem in a group is that emotions, morale is viral. When we talk about something being viral online it means something can spread from one person to another very quickly. Well, that’s especially true in a group, a team, a company, a family. We know this it’s contagious, so let’s say you have a nice happy family, but then you have one person in the family who’s super negative all the time and they just keep saying negative stuff and complaining all the time, all the time, all the time.

Well, eventually, if you let them continue to do that their negativity will start to affect everybody else and then the whole family will start to get a bit more negative and more negative and they can destroy the morale of the entire family. That’s the bad news and that’s the danger and why low morale is very dangerous. Of course, the opposite is also true and this is the good news is that one person, you especially, the leader, can raise the morale of a group, because positive emotion, positive energy, confidence, determination these are also viral. It means if you were very positive all the time and you’re helping other people to be more positive and you’re constantly saying good things, positive things and you’re confident and encouraging other people all the time in your group, in your family.

Then, you will also raise the morale because it’s contagious, because these positive emotions, these positive ideas, these positive beliefs, high morale is also contagious or viral.

And that’s the good news, you can raise morale in this way. See, in many ways success… ultimately, success in anything is dependent upon morale. It probably depends more on morale than strategy for a group, because as we know with individuals, the main reason people fail at things is because they quit that’s the main reason. For example, with English, the reason people fail to speak English fluently is simply because they quit. And why do they quit? Low morale, they get tired, they get bored, they give up, they quit. Well, this is also true for groups, for teams, for families. They get weaker and weaker, most of all from low morale. Every individual in every group will always face challenges, will always face problems, will always face disasters this is life, it happens.

Just like with the story I told about Effortless English. That was a disaster at that time. You can’t avoid these disasters all the time. You can try to prepare for them. You can try to prevent them and avoid them, but sometimes bad things happen. There are always challenges. There will always be problems, and morale is key for solving those problems and getting stronger as a group, instead of weaker. See the problem with groups, what makes groups a little different than individuals is that, with an individual you can kinda go off alone and you can figure things out by yourself, but with a group, when a group faces a problem, a challenge, a disaster, it can cause the group to break apart.

If the morale drops, if you let one or two people destroy the morale and bring it down, then all the relationships in the group can get weaker and weaker, more and more negative and it can just shake that group apart. It can completely destroy the group. We know we’ve seen family’s that just fall apart. We’ve seen teams in sports, you see teams that just, they just lose and lose and lose, year after year after year. They got the same problem this low morale, they can’t get passed it. It doesn’t matter, they try to bring in different techniques, bring in different players, but there’s just this kind of sickness of low morale they never get passed it. Can’t do that.

So, when your group faces a problem, when your group faces a disaster, your first reaction probably will be, let’s solve the problem. Let’s think of solutions. Let’s think of strategies to solve this problem, but that’s a mistake don’t do that. That’s what we naturally want to do first. The first thing you should do before you solve the problems, before you think about solutions, before you think about strategies, the first thing you should do is look at the morale of the group. You have to ask yourself, is this problem affecting the morale? Is the group morale high and strong or low and weak? You have to look at the morale first. Your group cannot succeed if the morale is low. So you must look at this first.

If the morale is high, fine, then start working on the solutions and the strategies. But, if the morale is not good, if it’s so-so or if it’s low that must be your first priority, your first focus as a leader. Just don’t worry about the strategies or problem-solving, until you get the morale high. You gotta raise that energy. You gotta raise the belief, raise the determination, raise the power of that group, the powerful positive emotion, so that they’re able to think of solutions, so they’re able to continue fighting and moving forward. That is super important and it’s your number one job as a leader.

All right, now in the commentary I’m going to teach you some specific techniques. I’ve talked about general ideas and why morale’s important, but in the commentary you’ll learn very specific techniques and ideas for raising morale, especially when a group starts to lose their morale, when the group starts getting negative and weak, I’ll teach you some techniques for changing that so that the group starts feeling strong and powerful again.

So I’ll see you in the interactive lessons and in the commentary.

Bye for now.