Flashing Seven

By Ahron Friedberg

Flashing Seven: The Seven Essential Skills for Living and Leading is about leadership, an important subject for our times. Specifically, it addresses the question of how a person can best live and lead his or her life. We take an approach based in learning and developing seven essential skills to achieve excellence in your chosen path. Each skill is playfully labeled as a "ball" because a main metaphor of the book is juggling--keeping your balls in the air.

The seven essential skills we emphasize and elaborate on are as follows:

Ball 1: Harmonize In order to be in harmony with the world, you need to gain a perspective on your life and on your priorities. In this chapter, we help teach planning and taking responsibility for both your successes and your failures. Emphasized is the importance of finding a balance between personal life and career, managing time and responsibilities, and improving organizational skills.

Ball 2: Upload Becoming a continuous learner is central to leading your best life. We help you learn to recognize and change problematic, habitual patterns. You will discover that making mistakes can be a good thing in terms of learning from experience. You are never too old to learn. In fact, you will find that your brain can get better with age if you become a lifelong learner. We'll help you develop the art of relaxed concentration. Most importantly, you'll learn to add humor and fun to your approach.

Ball 3: Energize In order to succeed in leading your life, you will need to take care of yourself to the best of your ability. This chapter will teach you the latest and most important information about exercise, diet, and staying younger longer. You will learn how to harness your energy and get the most out of each day.

Ball 4: Enlighten Being open to new ideas and not simply accepting the status quo is essential for self-improvement. We will help orient you to thinking in terms of solutions, not problems; taking measured risks, and rewarding risk taking; and seeing the world in realistic but positive light. The key ingredient is what we call "Spirit," which we define in terms of passion, conviction, and optimism.

Ball 5: Listen Building relationships based on trust and respect allows a person to lead more effectively. So does becoming a better communicator. The single most significant ingredient in building successful relationships is the ability to listen. Listening is both an art and a skill and can be learned and cultivated with practice.

Ball 6: Excel Leadership involves achieving excellence for yourself and others. In this chapter, you learn to maintain cutting edge skills, to measure the outcome of your work, and to use available technology and resources to push the envelope. We teach you how do become a masterful conductor of your own life and do your personal best.

Ball 7: Lead The final chapter helps you to bring it all together and lead for yourself. You learn to keep all your balls in the air at the same time--seeing the big picture while keeping an eye on the individual balls. We show you how to be an outstanding role model, coach, and mentor. So you can help others to follow your lead.

Flashing Seven is part of the "success" and "self-help" genre. It should appeal to a similar audience as Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Jack Canfield's The Success Principles. It has an academic basis and psychological, cognitive-behavioral orientation. So a well-respected publisher with a broad reach is a good fit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ahron Friedberg
• Release date: Jul 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301319510

Book preview

Praise for Flashing Seven

Flashing Seven is an essential book for all of us who are interested in leading our best life. It teaches the necessary skills to overcome adversity and to fulfill your potential. These practices include keeping perspective and prioritizing, learning continuously, taking care, openness to new ideas, building relationships, and modeling and mentoring. Drs. Hirschowitz and Friedberg are masters at empowering you in leading your life.

David Dembitzer

Partner, Dembitzer & Dembitzer, LLP

Flashing Seven is a unique work melding the tradition of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People with Scott Peck's classic The Road Less Travelled. The authors are leading psychiatrists and expert in leadership coaching. They instruct by way of example, professionally and personally. Their life lessons will help you keep all your balls in the air and even add a few more. In these times, we are in great need of effective leadership. This gem of a book shows us the way.

James Strain, MD

Professor of Psychiatry

Mount Sinai Medical Center

Flashing Seven

The Seven Essential Skills for Living and Leading

by

Jack Hirschowitz, MD and Ahron Friedberg, MD

Copyright 2013 Jack Hirschowitz, MD

Smashwords Edition

To our students, to Bunny Huller, and to

the Veterans Administration and US veterans

Contents

The Authors

Introduction: The Way

Chapter 1: Harmonize

Chapter 2: Upload

Chapter 3: Energize

Chapter 4: Enlighten

Chapter 5: Listen

Chapter 6: Excel

Chapter 7: Lead

Notes

The Authors

Jack Hirschowitz is an accomplished clinician, educator, researcher, and leader. He served as Professor and Vice Chairman for Education in Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He was previously the Chief of Staff at the Bronx Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center and an Associate Dean at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Dr. Hirschowitz is the recipient of a number of awards including the Nancy C.A. Roeske Award for Excellence in Medical Student Education from the American Psychiatric Association and the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine 2003 Award. In 2005 he received the first Irma Bland Award for Excellence in Teaching Residents from the American Psychiatric Association as well as the Greta Herman Award for residency training and was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society.

Dr. Hirschowitz is highly active in the education of residents and medical students as well as a broad range of administrative and leadership personnel. He is an Examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and he is a faculty member of the VA’s Leadership Institute as well as the Institute for Healthcare Communication. He has served on the Boards of Disaster Psychiatry Outreach and The Project for Psychiatric Outreach to the Homeless Mentally Ill. For a number of years, he chaired an APA Task Force on the homeless mentally ill. He is currently a New York representative to the Assembly of the APA and is the President Elect of the New York District County Branch of the APA

Dr. Hirschowitz has been the recipient of a number of federal research grants. He has authored more than one hundred and fifty research publications and abstracts and has presented his work nationally and internationally. He has made significant contributions to the fields of phenomenology, psychobiology and pharmacology.

He received his medical degree from the University of Cape Town and is a fellow of the Faculty of Psychiatrists of the College of Medicine of South Africa. He is Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Hirschowitz is also an accomplished juggler and winner of a number of gold medals at the joggling world championships (Joggling: running and juggling at the same time). He has appeared on Fox TV’s Fox Magazine news magazine, and he has been interviewed and had his work profiled in magazines, newspapers and on the Internet. He has joggled the New York City Marathon four times, and he holds the record for the oldest runner to joggle a marathon.

Dr. Ahron Friedberg is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he served as an Associate Director of the Division of Psychotherapy. Dr. Friedberg also served as National President of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians. He has been Managing Editor of International Psychoanalysis, an online psychoanalytic resource, and is currently Managing Editor of IPBooks. His publications include Between Us: A Father and Son Speak, which he co-authored with his father, and Love's Way. He has published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is an accomplished poet. Dr. Friedberg has appeared as a cultural expert on CNN and Fox 5 and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal.

Introduction: The Way

The way which can be told is not the way.

Laozi

Find your way

How can I best live and lead my life? This is the fundamental question that each of us faces every day. When you wake up in the morning, the question in one form or another is always there. Brushing your teeth you may think, What do I have to do today? Over that first cup of coffee, you may ask yourself, How do I begin? On the way to work, even if you have a home office, you may be reviewing or revising your mental to-do list. Such considerations help orient us to the day and, hopefully, make the most of it. Even if you spend time relaxing, which is often not a bad idea, a question that comes up is how to most enjoy your rest and leisure. The week also has its rhythms with its tasks and deadlines, and the month its goals.

For some people, the answer to leading their best life involves having projects and aims and striving to achieve as much as possible. The basic idea is that the more we make of ourselves, the more we are. Such an attitude is nicely encapsulated in the Army’s motto of Be all you can be. This purpose-driven approach to life can lead to certain types of gains and achievements, but it’s not necessarily a source of contentment and fulfillment, or even of the greatest success. For a person who is always striving to be or to have more, it sometimes is hard to enjoy who he is and what he has. In life, being able to enjoy who you are or what you have is often important, even essential, to healthy and balanced personal growth.

For others, being in the moment and letting life unfold as it will is the chosen way to go. Their idea is that rather than doing battle each day, you go with the flow, rather than struggling for some ultimate aim, you live in the moment. It’s good to have a path in mind, but a person must also see what’s possible in the moment and live in it. Sometimes you have to bend, go around, or even retreat to move forward. Being in the moment can help you connect with others more fully. This can often contribute to personal advancement as well as help you feel more a part of things and more fulfilled.

One good approach is to try to be content with and grateful for what you have while working to become and attain more. Of course, personal problems and internal conflicts can often be impediments to your success. Not effectively assessing the reality of a situation can also lead to difficulties. We can only become as large as our burdens allow and as great as the work at hand requires us to be.

Surely, there’s some wisdom in the Taoist notion that the way which can be told is not the way. Each of us must find for himself or herself a right balance in life—of being and doing, of appreciating and bettering, of having and sharing. Still, some good advice is often useful. It can help to have a coach, teacher, or mentor. So let's do our best.

Learn seven essential skills

In terms of living and leading your best life, we recommend and teach the development of seven essential skills. The idea of acquiring and practicing skills to excel is an old one, even ancient. It dates back before the origins of the word itself. A skill was something that distinguished a person and made a difference. Its origin is from the Old English skil meaning distinction. In contemporary usage, it has to do with ability, coming from knowledge and practice, to do something well. This kind of competent excellence can relate to a craft or trade, such as doctoring or carpentry, or an art, such as dance or music. The core tenet is that while different people may have more or less natural ability, skill can be developed through practice and learning from experience. There's no magic in the number seven, but if you can keep seven or so key skills going on at one time, it's an excellent formula for success and achievement. We playfully label each of them as balls because the metaphor of juggling—keeping your balls in the air—is a main one in this book.

Here are the seven skills we will emphasize and elaborate on:

Ball 1: Harmonize. In order to be in harmony with the world around you, you will need to gain a perspective on your life and on your priorities. You will need to plan your life and take responsibility for both your successes and your failures. You must find a balance between your personal life and career, manage your time and responsibilities, and improve your organization skills.

Ball 2: Upload. Become a continuous learner. Learning new things can be your way of life. Learn to recognize and change habitual patterns. Discover the