This past weekend, I watched one of the more moving and inspirational videos I've seen in awhile. It's this two minute announcement from Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that she is resigning from Congress this week. It's been just over a year since a gunman shot Giffords in the head and almost killed her at a constituent meet and greet outside an Arizona supermarket. Since then, her recovery has been beyond remarkable.

The video clearly shows how far she's come.

As reported in the Washington Post, there was a lot of speculation and hope that Giffords would run for reelection or perhaps even run for the Senate. Her fundraising was strong and the polling suggested she could have easily kept her seat in Congress.

She sorted through all that and concluded that her ongoing recovery was her first and most important priority. She had the courage to say no and the wisdom to step back from short term opportunities to devote her time and attention to the longer term. When you watch the video, it's clear that she intends to return to public life at some point. I hope she does. For now, though, I have enormous admiration and respect for a leader with remarkable courage and the wisdom to act on her priorities.

I was away for a few weeks over the holidays. It was a nice break and it's good to be back. One of the good things about being back is reconnecting with friends I haven't seen in awhile. One of those is a friend from yoga. We gave each other a hug hello at class the other night and she said, "Well, here we are." My response was, "Yeah, 2012, it's the only year we've got." (Unless, of course, the physicists at CERN figure out time travel this year.)

So, for now, this is the only year you've got. What do you want to do with it? I don't have any idea what your answer is or should be. Only you do.

What I can offer is three questions to guide you this year that have worked for me, my family, friends and clients over the past 15 years. They make up the core of a personal planning model that my wife, Diane, and I developed for ourselves called the Life GPS®. Each of us complete a new Life GPS® every year around this time. Like the GPS app on your smart phone or the GPS system in your car, the Life GPS® is a great tool for setting a destination and making the adjustments along the way that you'll need to get there.

Using the Life GPS® will be the subject of a book I'm writing this year. You can also read more about it in the chapter on Picking Up Regular Renewal of Your Energy and Perspective and Letting Go of Running Flat Out Until You Crash from my first book, The Next Level.

For now, though, here are the three questions that comprise the core of the Life GPS®. Before things get absolutely bananas for you this year, I encourage you to take a little time to consider these questions and write down your answers on a single sheet of paper. If you refer to that sheet on a regular basis this year, I think you'll like the results you get.

Here are the questions:

1. How are you at your best? - To answer this question, think of a recent time when everything was in the groove for you. What are the words or short phrases that describe how you were operating then? If you can't think of a recent time when you felt like you were in the zone, think for a moment about all of the externalities that are dragging you down. If you could magically get rid of all that, how would you feel? The words or phrases that describe how you'd feel are your preferred state of being. Write those down.

2. What are the routines that would make it more likely that you'd show up at your best or move you closer to your preferred state of being? - If you've read my blog for very long or have worked with me, you know that one of my favorites quotes is the line from Aristotle, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." What are the habits that, if practiced on a regular basis, would be likely to help you show up at your best or move you a little closer to your preferred state of being? Those habits will likely fall into one or more of four domains - mental, physical, relational and spiritual. Don't stress yourself out by coming up with a list of 15 or 20 routines that you need to pursue. Pick one or two that are easy to get started and likely to make a difference. The idea is to get some momentum going and build on that. Write your ideas down on the same sheet of paper that you used to answer the first question.

3. What outcomes would you hope or expect to see if you were operating at your best or from your preferred state of being? - So, if you were clear about how you are at your best and practicing routines that reinforce that kind of performance, what outcomes would you hope or expect to see in the three big arenas of life - your life at home, your life at work and your life in the community? Write down the three to five outcomes in each arena that come most quickly to mind. They're the ones that matter to you the most.

So, when you have all of your answers on one sheet of paper, you have a guide for your year. Will everything ever all be perfect at once? Unlikely. Will you have a better sense of the direction you're trying to go and the adjustments you need to make to go there? Highly likely.

I hope you'll give the Life GPS® a try in 2012. I also hope you'll let me know how it's working for you. Also if you have any questions or comments about how to use the Life GPS®, I hope you'll leave a comment or email at scott@eblingroup.com.

Happy new year!

Wow, what a year this has been for good, bad, maddening and inspiring examples of leadership. In his column today, the Washington Post's David Ignatius makes the case that historians will look back on 2011 as a "hinge" - a year in which momentous events set the stage for major changes in the future.  The challenge in writing an end of year recap on the leadership lessons to be learned for a year like this is deciding what not to write about.

On the list of things I've written about this year but won't be writing about today are the reaction to the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and other victims in January, the killing of Bin Laden in May, the scandals at Ohio State and Penn State, the end of Anthony Weiner's career in Congress, the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the death of Steve Jobs.  When stories like those don't make the final list, you know it's been a big news year.

What's on my mind most on this penultimate day of 2011 is what's behind Time magazine naming the Protestor its person of the year.   As the year unfolded, the Arab Spring spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Libya to Bahrain to Syria.   In the late Summer and early Fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread from Zucotti Park to cities around the U.S. and the world. As the year drew to a close, more than 50,000 Muscovites rallied in the streets to protest Vladimir Putin's intent to name himself president of Russia for another decade or so.

2011 has been a rough year for autocrats and plutocrats.  It's been the year when followers have banded together and organized themselves to shout out, "Enough!"   One of the images from this year that sticks with me most is an Egyptian in Tahrir Square holding up a sign that simply said, "I Am a Man."  This was the year when hundreds of thousands organized themselves to be heard and acknowledged as human beings.  The technology of the smart phone, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have enabled these movements to grow and spread at breathtaking speed.

As the customer relations debacle at Netflix earlier this year showed, this desire and ability of people to be heard as never before has implications for leaders across the board.  Perhaps the biggest of these is that if you're in a leadership role you have to listen and pay attention. The demonstrated lack of that is likely why most Americans are so disgusted with Congress.  Taking the country to the brink time and again as illustrated in the debt ceiling debacle shows a leadership class that doesn't get it.

If 2011 has anything to teach leaders,  it's that if you don't pay attention to what matters most, the people will make sure that you do and either vote with their feet or replace you if you don't. There's an old quote that's been attributed to a number of people including Gandhi that seems to apply as never before.  "There go my people.I must follow them for I am their leader."

It will be fascinating to see where the people lead their leaders in 2012 and how the leaders respond.

What are your predictions?

It's not often that I write about the same subject twice in less than a month on this blog. Even though I wrote How to Set Your Tebow's Up For Success just three weeks ago, I'm making a brief exception this afternoon. After the Denver Broncos made yet another comeback yesterday in the last two minutes of regulation and then overtime against the Chicago Bears, Tim Tebow has moved from a national sports story to just a flat out national news story.

For as many people who are inspired by Tebow's leadership, story and faith, there may be as many who are puzzled by him or are scared of him. I say that for two reasons.

First, from a pure football standpoint, there are a lot of professional commentators who are having their faith in their conventional wisdom challenged. As I noted in the November post on Tebow, to set a guy like him up for success, you have to challenge the conventional wisdom. In any field, not just sports broadcasting, the people who have a lot invested in the conventional wisdom will get angry and scared when it's challenged. It takes a lot of leadership to go up against that successfully. Kudos to Denver coach Jon Fox and Tebow for doing so.

Second, there aren't many people who are more upfront about their religious faith than Tebow. When the announcers on yesterday's game were saying things after the Broncos win like "if you weren't a believer before this game, you almost have to be now," I kind of wondered if they were talking about football or faith. The inexplicable can certainly puzzle people. From a pure football standpoint, what Tebow and the Broncos have done the past couple of months is rather inexplicable. It does feel bigger than football. What is it exactly? I thought Frank Bruni gave as good an answer as anyone in the New York Times yesterday when he wrote:

"For Tebow that state of mind comes from his particular relationship with his chosen God and is a matter of religion. For someone else it might be understood and experienced as the power of positive thinking, and is a matter of psychology. Either way it boils down to stubborn optimism and bequeaths a spark."

Whether you love him, hate him or are scared of him, it's almost impossible to deny that Tim Tebow is a leader who gets results. What's your take on how he does it?

There's an interesting article in the New York Times today for anyone who has ever had to improvise madly when their boss makes an unexpected public commitment. The subject is Dan Akerson, who's been the CEO of General Motors for 15 months. Akerson is not a "car guy." He made his bones in telecommunications and came to GM from the world of private equity investments. He's had a lot of successes in his career and is fond of speaking his mind. That's not what they've been used to at GM the last couple of decades and he's shaking up the company's culture.

The latest example is when some potential problems developed with the battery in GM's showpiece hybrid, the Chevy Volt. Here's how Bill Vlasic of The Times described Akerson's response to the Volt situation:

"The problems with the Volt are a case in point. A few days after the conference call, Mr. Akerson went well beyond the discussion that day and told The Associated Press during a visit to New York that G.M. was willing to buy back Volts from concerned owners. Back in Detroit, company officials scrambled to explain the offer as a gesture of good will to its customers, denying that Mr. Akerson was setting policy on the fly."

That's a pretty interesting response on the part of the company officials. It sounds like they placed as much emphasis on the fact that their CEO wasn't setting policy on the fly as they did about generating good will with customers.

If you're a senior manager or executive in your organization, perhaps you've been in a similar situation where your boss says something that you regret. How do you handle that? My thoughts might surprise you.

Recognize that it's not about you: If you find yourself getting torqued when your boss gets out ahead of you, you might ask yourself what about that bothers you? Is it because you're going to have to scramble to meet the boss's commitment? Is it because you weren't consulted? Is it because you're chagrined that you didn't make that recommendation yourself? Is it something else? I'm not saying that the answers to any of those questions are invalid. I'm just saying that it's useful to check your perspective and headset before you act.

Check the source of your response: Are you responding from the perspective of years of conventional wisdom or are you responding from the perspective of what you're trying to accomplish in the future? It's easy to get caught up in the "We've never done that before," mentality. Look for the opportunities - expected or unexpected - to help create the future.

Lean in: Focus on the bigger picture and lean into it. You can either tell yourself a story about how crazy things are or tell yourself a story about how cool it is to be part of something new and not boring.

Look, I know senior executive bosses can do and say some pretty crazy things and it's not always easy to deal with that. All I'm saying is that there may be times when they're doing the right thing for the future and a lot of people haven't caught up with that yet.

What do you think?

If you haven't been paying much attention to the Eurozone debt crisis, now might be a pretty good time to start. A relatively small crisis that started with Greece not being able to repay its debts, has spread to Italy and Portugal and it looks like Spain and even France are at risk. It's a complicated story but it makes a big difference because a lot of the big banks around the world hold a lot of European debt. If they have to write that debt off their books, then they have to cut back on lending. It's a lot like the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008 only bigger. The Eurozone could break up as a result leading to even bigger problems.

All eyes are turning to Germany as the only European economy big enough and sound enough to provide the financial assistance that could stop the bleeding. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera eloquently explains, the Germans don't want to do that because they feel like they've been prudent with their economy and should not have to bail out the countries who were partying on their credit cards. That's understandable but will lead to a terrible outcome for everyone including Germany. Its economy is driven by exports and if its primary markets collapse, it's going to get squeezed hard too. In a sign of how nervous people are about all of this, the Polish foreign minister said this week that for the first time in his life he was more worried about Germany not taking action than taking action.

If you take out the scary implications for the global economy, what's happening between Germany and the rest of the Europe happens in organizations all the time. One or more parties make bad decisions that lead to bad outcomes while another party plays it by the book and is then asked to step in and fix everything. It doesn't seem fair and it's usually not. It's understandable that the party that played it down the middle would like to just let the offending party fend for itself. The problem with that, as is the case in Europe right now, is that the let them fend for themselves approach can bring down the entire organization.

It takes a lot of leadership to make the moves that place effectiveness at a higher level of value than being right. Being right can feel good, but what's the point if everything else blows up? The best leaders understand they and their teams are part of an ecosystem. Sometimes, for the good of the whole system leaders need to suck it up and help out the people who screwed up even if it doesn't feel fair.

What are your thoughts and experience on this? Have you ever had to hold your nose and do something as a leader that just didn't seem fair to some of the people involved? What factors and messages did you consider when you did?

In what ended up being a pretty close game, Duke beat Michigan State at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night. In the process, Coach Mike Krzyzewski set a record by winning his 903rd Division I basketball game. With the win, he passed his former coach, boss and mentor Bob Knight who was sitting court side calling the game for ESPN. It was a pretty compelling moment made more so by the way Coach K conducted himself in the minutes after the game.

As you can see in this interview with ESPN’s Andy Katz, the coach showed grace, gratitude and perspective after setting the record.

If you’re fortunate as a leader, there will be times when you can see a big win coming up before it happens. In Coach K’s case, it was a lock that he was going to break the record this season, it was just a question of when. By thinking in advance how he wanted to handle himself if he won at MSG in front of his old coach, he created an opportunity to show leaders how to win gracefully.

Here are three lessons from the coach that stood out for me.

Show grace - When the buzzer sounded, Coach K hugged his staff, walked down the sideline and hugged his long time friend and rival, Spartans coach Tom Izzo. He then proceeded to shake the hand of every MSU player just like he does at the end of every game. He then walked over to the broadcast table for a long embrace with Bob Knight. Coach K recognized that all the eyes and cameras were on him and conducted himself with grace and dignity.

Show gratitude – When the time came for the post game interview at center court, the first question was about what he said to Knight during their hug. Coach K said, “I told him I love him and that I wouldn’t be in this position without him.” He then expressed his appreciation for his circumstance and shared the credit by saying, “When you have really good players and a great school, you’re going to win a lot of games.” On a night when it could have been all about him, he didn’t make it all about him.

Show perspective – One of the last questions for the Coach was after setting this record, winning championships and Olympic gold medals, what are you going to do next? His simple, quiet and immediate response was, “Developing this team. We have some great kids and we want to have a really good season.”

Coach K is clearly a winner and a leader. He’s not perfect. None of us are. That said, he set a good example on Tuesday for leaders who experience a big win.

Think of leaders you’ve seen who won with grace. What have you noticed that stands out?

In the days of the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker became famous for asking the question, "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Today, the same question is being asked about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and administrative officers at the University. It's easy enough to find the details about the horrific sexual abuse allegations and indictment against a former top assistant to Paterno so there's no need to recap them here.

It is stunning, however, to consider the damage that was done after top officials including Paterno were made aware of eye witness accounts and decided to not turn the case over to law enforcement. One can only assume that the decision to keep the information in-house was to protect the institution and the program. The conventional wisdom is that the cover up is worse than the crime. If the allegations against the assistant coach are accurate, the conventional wisdom is wrong in this case. The crime is worse, but the cover up is both sickening and instructive.

Paterno has been the head coach at Penn State for almost 50 years. If you're in a prominent leadership role for that long, the odds are you're going to be confronted with some tough and ugly issues along the way. Keeping that question from Senator Baker in the back of your mind seems like a good guidepost for tough times. If the question, "What did he know and when did he know it?" puts a knot in your stomach, that's your signal to get everything out on the table as quickly as possible. You owe it to yourself, your institution and, most importantly, the people who are being hurt to do so.

This is one of those "learn by doing the opposite" kinds of posts. It's inspired by a few New York Times stories earlier this week on a new book that the surviving son of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff has released. I don't intend to read the book but I noted with interest that the son had talked his mother, Ruth Madoff, into giving some interviews to promote it. If you can get past the outrage that Bernie Madoff induces, there were some poignant and instructive lessons about integrity in what his wife had to say.

Apart from the huge amount of money he stole from his clients, I think the biggest source of outrage with Madoff is the way he presented himself as a pillar of the philanthropic and financial communities when, in fact, he was running a criminal enterprise. In her interviews, it seems that Ruth Madoff was as fooled by her husband's double life as just about everyone else was. She sounds devastated that the man she thought she was married to was not that man at all.

In thinking about how Madoff scammed everyone who was closest to him including his wife, the word integrity kept coming to my mind. As I've noted here before, the first definition of the word integrity in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is "Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code." In a case like Madoff's it goes without saying that, by definition, integrity was not in the picture. The third definition of the word offers a more nuanced guidepost for those of us who are not inclined to engineer a massive financial fraud. Here it is: "The quality or condition of being whole or undivided, completeness." The definition goes on to explain that the root of the word is the Latin word integritas. The word, integrate, has the same root. The primary definition for that word is "To make into a whole by bringing all parts together. To unify."

So, all of that leads me to this conclusion. A life lived with integrity is one that is integrated. It's one in which everything hangs together and there is internal consistency. Sure, integrity is about honesty and ethics, but it's more than that. It's about living, leading and presenting yourself so that your actions in one domain are integrated with what you think, do and say in other domains. When you start to notice that your actions across domains are not integrated or unified that's a sign that your integrity is at risk.

I'm pretty sure that that wasn't much of a concern to Bernie Madoff. He made a conscious decision to go in the other direction. For the majority of us, though, challenges to our integrity can sneak up on us. Regularly stepping back to assess your level of integration can be a useful way to stay true to yourself and guard your integrity.

What do you do to ensure that you live up to your goals around integrity?

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings must be feeling a little bit like a team that ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated and then started losing games. Last year, Hastings was on the cover of Fortune as its Business Person of the Year. This year, he's getting slammed for what he acknowledges are a series of poor decisions and mishandled customer communications. It's kind of like the dreaded SI cover jinx.

After raising the price for the Netflix DVD and movie streaming package over the summer, Hastings publicly apologized but didn't change the terms of the deal. Then a few months later, he announced that Netflix was going to be just for streaming movies and a spin off company, Qwikster, would handle DVD rentals. Customers would no longer have a master movie queue online at one site. They'd have to go back and forth between the sites if they wanted both streaming movies and DVD rentals. Customers hated that idea and Netflix killed Qwikster a few weeks later. A lot of customers decided to just bail out. Netflix announced a few days ago that they lost 800,000 customers in the last quarter. The company's stock has declined by around 35% in each of the past two days.

Hastings has given a couple of interesting interviews to the New York Times this week - one for the Sunday magazine and one for the Business section. I've been sifting through those articles trying to come up with some leadership lessons from the Netflix slide.

Here are three lessons that jump out at me:

Trust and loyalty are fragile things: People loved Netflix because they could keep their movies as long as they wanted for a flat monthly fee. None of those annoying late fees that Blockbuster used to charge. Netflix basically crushed Blockbuster's business model with that approach. Netflix customers loved and trusted them because the company made their lives a little more enjoyable for a nominal cost. That was the essence of the relationship. The changes the company implemented this year broke that quickly. People trust and have loyalty to other people or companies because they live up to their promises over time. With the changes they made and the way they made them, Netflix broke their promise. Customers walked.

Don't get blinded by the data. In the interviews with the Times, Hastings talked a lot about how the data showed that DVD rentals had probably peaked and were declining. As he found out, the data didn't show how people felt. His comments in the interviews suggest that his decisions were largely driven by the data. Leaders have to tune into the people behind the data.

Stay curious. Ask broad questions. Listen. There's a great story in one of the articles about Hastings sitting in a hot tub with a friend and telling the guy that he was going to spin the DVD rentals out of Netflix and into Qwikster. The guy told Hastings that it was a terrible idea. Hastings ignored his friend because he thought CEO's shouldn't put much stock in their friends' opinions. When the company ran focus groups on Qwikster, all they asked about was what people thought of the name. In the interviews Hastings referred to some of the decisions he'd made as arrogant. That seems fair. One way to avoid the arrogance that can come with success is to stay curious, ask broad questions and listen.

I'm sure many of you are Netflix customers. Are you sticking with the company or have you already left? From a leadership do's and don'ts standpoint, what else have you learned from the way Hastings has handled things this year?