Earlier this year, I wrote a mini-paper for class about a business model called the Service-Profit Chain. The idea is that if a business starts off strengthening the first link in the chain, internal service quality, and then strengthens each successive link in the chain, then the result will be greater revenue growth and profitability for the business. You can see an exhibit of the Service-Profit Chain model here.
So over the weekend when I was reading John Maxwell’s Thinking for a Change, I read about his idea that if you want to change your life, then you will need to first change your thinking. He details this change process in a series of six steps that initially seemed to me very similar to the Service-Profit Chain model:
Step 1: Changing your thinking changes your beliefs.
Step 2: Changing your beliefs changes your expectations
Step 3: Changing your expectations changes your attitude.
Step 4: Changing your attitude changes your behavior.
Step 5: Changing your behavior changes your performance.
Step 6: Changing your performance changes your life.
There is a big difference though. With Maxwell’s steps, a person doesn’t need to proceed through each step, consciously changing and strengthening all of these areas. The idea is that if we learn to be a better thinker and improve the way we think, then the rest of these steps will happen automatically and our lives will have positive results.
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This makes me thinl of a diagram I saw years ago. I can’t reproduce the diagram, but it showed how a thought effects a destiny. The ‘chain’ went like this: a thought produces a habit, a habit produces character, character produces a life, a life results in a destiny. Makes one think about what we’re thinking! Thanks for the post!
I remember hearing something like that one too, but I couldn’t remember where I first heard it. (Maybe in Covey’s 7 Habits?) I just tried googling it, and came up with various forms of it attributed to a bunch of different people. It is the same idea though!