The Three Laws of Performance – The Third Law
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Blog – 3 Laws of Performance- 3rd Law
The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
One of the authors, Steve Zaffron, is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Executive Coaching.
In this blog, we will be discussing the third law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.
The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”
The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”
The third law of performance states, “Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.”
What does this mean?
From our previous blog, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts. The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds form person to person.
With this law, the authors create a distinction between two types of language use. The first they discuss is called descriptive language. This is the ordinary way of speaking, which describes the occurring world for a person. The second type of language is called future based or generative language. This is using language as a declaration to say how things will be in the future, which is powerful. This is the type of language one uses to write the future and displace the future that is predictable.
People act according to the future that they see in front of them. Imagine next week you were going to Hawaii. How would your thoughts, actions and feeling be? Now imagine next week you were going to prison. Your thoughts, actions and feeling would be a little different, right? This is because the future that you are living into is giving you your current mindset and actions.
This is what makes generative language powerful. It is used to create a future in which you and those in your company, organization or on your team live into. If you use your language to create a big, bright and inspiring future, people will be inspired as well, and work to have this future become real.
Learn more about The Three Laws of Performance
