Feed! Lead! Succeed!

Why is STAYING Hungry so important to YOU!

Over the course of my lifetime it has been my great pleasure not to be in prison but rather to meet with people on the inside of prisons. Recently I was working with a large number of correctional institutes to encourage and inspire the leadership qualities of their correctional officers (COs) through Leadership/Team Regeneration Sessions. Visiting inside has never bothered me but during my last visit inside with guards and prisoners my eyes were really opened. I was taken by the guards to their storage center for confiscated criminal contraband, and what I saw there shook me to my core.

The prisoners had become incredibly creative making this contraband. Some of these people spent their living hours inside creating knuckle-busters out of plastic chairs, knives out of tooth brushes, and switchblades out of pieces of plates and table tops. I became angry and frustrated because these prisoners were (as we are going to talk about) maximizing their creativity and for a short time in a high performing mode ... but for what?

It's not enough to be our best or to beat our best. Being our best for the best, pure purposes of our life is the key to personal fulfillment and sustaining maximum performance. When we don't bring our very best to the table we often sense that we have cheated our team-mates, friends or family, but we seldom see producing less than our very best as cheating ourselves.

Australian Matthew Kelly, author of "The Rhythm of Life," says the essential meaning and purpose of life is to become "the best-version-of-yourself." Kelly reminds us that what we do in our lives may bring us financial rewards, status, fame, power and possessions.  But genuine happiness and lasting fulfillment are not the by-product of doing and having [or steeling.] Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do or what you have.

Kelly says, "It is the quest to improve ourselves, to be all we are capable of being, to test our limits, and to grow steadily toward the-best-version-of-ourselves that brings meaning to our lives."

Here's my point: Sustaining Maximum Performance comes by Actualizing Personal Purpose... and this is where the Hungry Spirit comes in.

Indeed, as our inside game develops we grow a new and better perspective as Mark Twain so humorously described: "When I was fourteen years old, my father was so ignorant I hated to have the old man around. But when I was twenty-one, I was surprised to see how much he had learned in only seven years." Emily Dickinson wrote, "Things may happen around you, and things may happen to you, but the only things that really count are the things that happen in you." This book is focused on the inner energy, the heart stuff, the inside motivators that maximize our outside actions. We call this focus the Hungry Spirit.

Success in professional sports, business, and life is created through constant improvement from the inside-out. The key to life is to be proactive and not reactive. When we take responsibility for shaping our heart, our courage, our enthusiasm, our hungry spirit, our will to win is intensified. That will to win, in turn, delivers our outer victories. It's been said that you have to be a champion before you can win a championship.

Secondly, Hungry, as we will explore, is often personally influenced by the culture we are closest to. George C. Marshall said; "It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit which we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It's morale that wins the victory." That spirit, that morale that wins, is what we call the Hungry spirit!
              

I am convinced that every person alive today is hungry at some level. The hungry spirit for some may be injured or suffering. For others it's full and firing on all cylinders. My hope is that ryanwalter.com will inspire your hungry spirit to its highest level, and by doing so increase your impact on your team and a world desperately in need of your very best!