Battling Negative Thoughts

Sometimes negative thoughts can creep in and sabotage a leader's ability to keep going in the face of adversity, you know, to get them out of that fetal position as you like to put it. I'm sure that you have dealt with this. What are some of the negative thoughts that come along, and how do you prevent them from stopping you?

Well, I think there's two big kind of negative thoughts. One is, you know, why did this have to happen, and all that. And by the way, this is where the Serenity Prayer comes in. There are certain things you can get drawn and certain things you can't. And when I was going from office to offices in Ariba, I would actually recite the Serenity Prayer. I go, "Guys, you know, we can't do it." By the way, I also used to put up slides because our competition was -- and you know, always the numbers were like this so I couldn't present those. I used to present the 'we suck less' slides, look at our competitors, we suck less than that. So you got to understand what you can control and what you can't. Those can be negative effects. You can feel sorry for yourself. You got to snap out of that one. The other negative effect is you can hold a grudge against somebody. My mom taught me long ago, don't hold a grudge, life is too short, and it's not good karma. And by the way, they might be your customer, partner, you might hire them back, something like that. That's been a very important key in my life. And to be honest with you, people kind of say, "Hey, Krach, that's kind of amazing." I'm just like, "What good would it do?" But I think that's really, really important. Because I see a lot of people holding grudges.

Such a negative force, nothing good comes out of that.

It's a negative force, it's a negative force.