Meaning and belief October 29, 2009
Events have no meaning in themselves.
Imagine you’ve planned a huge party. You’ve planned the food, layed out the tables and drinks on your lawn. Put up streamers and lights preparing for a big night. The sun is high as people arrive. Soon the party is rocking, everyone enjoying themselves. Suddenly, within minutes the wind picks up. Dark clouds gather and rain begins to fall. How do you feel about the rain?
As a seporate example, imagine you are sitting at home reading a book. Outside is a cold winters day, but inside is warm and cosy. You’ve just got yourself a nice warm beverage. Suddenly, within minutes the wind picks up. Dark clouds gather and rain begins to fall, spattering the windows. How do you feel about the rain?
As a third example, imagine you are a farmer and your farm has been in drout for the past three years. You’re walking through a dusty field and suddenly, within minutes the wind picks up. Dark clouds gather and rain begins to fall. How do you feel about the rain?
The rain itself is the same, the surrounding events different. All that really makes the difference is not the rain, but the meaning you attribute to that rain.
Beliefs are like this as well. Because of a belief we attribute specific meaning to events.
Today is the day… October 15, 2009
Stressed and under pressure?
Take a breath and put to one side all that stress and pressure that you’re under. We’ll come back to it soon enough.
Now we’ve got a break, let’s ask a few questions to give us some perspective.
What is your outcome from work?
Two years ago, where did you want to be?
Two years ago, what did you want to be doing?
Two years ago, who did you want to be?
What do you want to achieve right now?
What do you want to achieve in two years?
What do you want to be doing in 2 years?
Who do you want to be doing it with?
Who do you want to be?
If you could do whatever you want without failure, what would you do?
What would you be doing if it didn’t mean anything about who you are?
What would you do if it was ok to fail?
How would you know when you achieved your outcome?
How would the people around you get tangible benefit?
Take another breath.
Decide now if you want to pick up that stress, that will sit and wait for you indefinitely, or if you want to do something else. Be something else?
Heritics, questioners, coaches and agents of change June 24, 2009
We’re almost never wanted, but critical to the success of any group.
We’re the court jester – the only person in the whole court that can call the king (or anyone else) a fool.
We’re the questioner – asking the stupid question that have stupidly profound answers.
We’re the provoker – helping (sometimes hindering) other people ideas meet reality.
We’re the objectors – standing up for our and other people’s ideals.
We’re the sword – cutting the knots people and groups tie themselves in.
We’re the outcasts – Outside looking in, offering those inside a different perspective.
We’re the condemned and cursed – For asking the questions, making the comments, and doing what every group needs.
We’re the aliens – Doing and saying things others find strange.
We’re the black sheep – producing wool that others can’t.
The real difficulty in doing this is not that we do, but when and how we do it. We are needed in every group, tribe, culture or society – we are the ones that notice the emperor is naked. Some groups and people embrace us, others reject us, but they all need us.
In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve done much thinking, talking and teaching around this exact point. One example is right here.
Are you a Heritic? A questioner? A coach? An agent of change? Comment below!
Accept the events you cannot control April 20, 2009
And that was just the day to day work – it says nothing of the occasional angry and abusive interactions I’d have with other people. One particular memorable occurrence, not long before I finally snapped, is one of the database admins storming up to my desk within minutes of my arrival.
“Why haven’t you done the changes I’ve asked for?” He demanded.
“What, no hello?” Too early and I’d not yet had my morning coffee.
He looked at me as if I was the only one with the bad attitude. “I put the changes through weeks ago, they are still not done!”
“Ok, slow down. Which changes specifically?” Yes, I talked like that even way back then.
“Don’t give me that, you know the ones I’m asking about.”
I was tired from another late night, lacked caffeine, had not yet read my list of important outstanding tasks and this fellow was acting as if my job revolved around him. I rubbed my forehead.
“I don’t.” I replied, attempting to calm him down some, but it was the wrong thing to say.
“Don’t give me that!” He yelled, “This is the second time I’ve come to remind you.”
Now I didn’t recall the first time, I’d forgotten other things in recent weeks. “Did you send me an email last time?” I asked calmly.
“No! You said you’d take care of it.” He replied indignantly.
“Send me an email and I’ll get to it.” I said turning to my monitor and put on a pair of headphones. He stood for a few seconds with him mouth open and then stormed off in a huff.
This story shows two sides of the same coin. One side is me not taking on someone elses responsibility, the other is the DBA being emotionally attached to and effected by my lack of attentiveness.
Both of us describe one key aspect of being in control of your stress. And that key is accepting events that are outside of your control.
For example, no matter how hard you try, you can’t control another human (or even pet)! You can influence them, ask them, plead, yell, scream and complain, but you can’t control them. That database admin would have loved to control me; instead I just made his life more difficult and stressful.
You can control your own thoughts, emotions, choices, influence and behaviour. You can’t control consequences of your actions, other people’s reaction, or the responses to your influence. That DBA had no idea I’d respond the way I did, and wasn’t able to keep himself calm.
If you are trying to control things out of your control you begin to feel directly responsible for other people’s actions. You are constantly trapped thinking their actions are your responsibility, but having no ability to change their behaviour. This is a sure path to a short and stressful life.
That’s all well and good, but how do we let these things go? There is an aspect of artistry to this act: How much do we change ourselves, and how much do we change the world?
Primarily it’s a mental shift and difficult to teach directly. To get that mental shift, the easiest way (at least to start) is to focus entirely on exactly the things you can control. I.e., yourself.
With practice, you can change your emotional responses directly. You can only ever change other people’s emotional responses via influence. The main way we influence anyone is verbally (at least in the beginning). If you could only talk, what would you say to get the result you wanted from someone else? How do you respond? Think about the story above, what would you have done as the DBA to get me to respond differently? (Some tips: I don’t respond to threats, yelling or whining. I sometimes respond to bribes, begging and pleading.) Write your responses in the comments below – there are no incorrect (or even correct) responses, so feel free.
The next step, once you achieve this mental shift, is to fully appreciate that your emotions can be directly seen and experienced by the person you’re speaking to. Being in control of your own emotional response dramatically improves your influence! But I’ll leave details for how to do that for a later date.
P.S. If the DBA in the story happens to be reading this, I hope he accepts my sincere apologies.
What’s more important to you, your work or your health? October 14, 2008
An associate asked me for some advice on how to handle his stress. He felt he was under dangerous levels of stress and fast approaching burnout.
As usual, I asked a question: What’s more important to you, your work or your health?
Answer this question for yourself.
If you say work, then you need to get this stress and burnout handled – as it’s already being a drain on your effectiveness and damaging your work and company.
If you say your health, then you need to get this stress and burnout handled as it’s already adversely affected your health. Worst case, you end up in hospital and both are immediately effected.
By now you know it’s a trick question. If you don’t deal with the underlying issues that cause this stress, they will keep reoccurring. Some of the other ways I know to help take the pressure off and assist in making the changes needed are:
1. Look at your daily schedule. Add 10% to every single item. If you complete all your tasks – Leave work. Resist the temptation to pack more in (doing more because you have time has likely got you in this mess in the first place).
2. When you are doing something that’s on your schedule – do nothing else. No email, no phone, no interruptions. (Invest in a ‘do not disturb’ card for your door!)
3. Schedule some time during every single day where you are un-disturbable. That also means turn off the phone and email. Use this time to think. (Again the ‘do not disturb’ card can help.)
4. Delegate like your life depends on it – because right now it does…
5. Deal with meetings effectively. This is a whole topic in itself.
All these are things you can do right now to give you the breathing room to take a good look at who you are. Those of you who have worked with me in the past may wonder why I’ve only told you 5 things to do, and NOT how to do them. This is intentional I’ve written the specific steps elsewhere.
It’s not an easy road to travel – but there is a comfortable seat in front of a warm fire with plenty of good food, drink and company at the end of it. The trick is to start on this road now, it only gets harder the longer you leave it. Starting on this road will also be disruptive to your current situation and this is good because what you’re doing isn’t working the way you want it to.
If you need more specific help, let me know.
Ten Points to help in Selling with Powerpoint June 15, 2008
I’ve talked about PowerPoint before. I don’t like it so much, but many companies insist on using it for everything.
One such company I was recently working with used it for all sales presentations. That’s right; a ‘Death by PowerPoint Sales Pitch’.
I watched one of the presentations, and the sales guy came a distant second to the slides. This destroyed his sales abilities. He was a good salesman when able to interact directly with his clients, but stuck behind PowerPoint, he really struggled. Is it any wonder the companies sales were low?
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be forced to use PowerPoint in our sales presentations. If we are, there are things we can do to improve the results we get.
So we sat down and devised a new set. This set used his sales skills directly in the presentation, with the slides to back him up. This slide set also used little known persuasion techniques from a variety of sources to improve his sales results.
So what did we do? Here is a list of what and why…
1. Each slide is given a unique headline that describes a benefit to the client in one single sentence. This benefit is then expanded within the slide itself. The only time you’d mention a feature is if in direct reference to the benefit the client gets. Some example titles might be:
- Increase your customer satisfaction by 32%
- How XYZ can increase your IT hardware ROI
- Decrease downtime by at least 22%
2. These headlines are written in an active voice. Drop the cold wet fish of business language and use active, first person language. Doing this actively involves the readers brain, and keeps their attention longer.
3. Make the slides about the client, not about you or your company. How can your product and service help the client directly? They don’t care about you or your product and service. They only care about how you can help them.
4. Each slide is to have no more than 5 bullet points (Each point written in active, first person language). The reason for 5 points only, is because there are volumes of research on how the human mind can only deal with 7 +/- 2 chunks of information. Some people in the room might be able to deal with 9, but the actual decision maker might only be able to deal with 5. Why risk it?
5. Each and every slide and each and every point of every slide must defer to the sales person to explain and expand on. If the points are well written, everyone in the room with is waiting with anticipation for the sales person to discuss it.
6. If you must read the slides out loud, then use a laser pointer so people can follow along. Otherwise they’ll be reading at different speeds, and starting to get annoyed as you fight directly with their own reading style.
7. This goes for every sales situation, but get excited! Your excitement in the slides will be directly transferred to your listeners. If you are sitting at a desk, watching your laptop, it’s hard to get excited. You might have to stand up and move around.
8. Make sure your regular set of objections are covered somewhere in the slides! The more regular, the sooner you cover it.
9. Have different endings to your presentation. There is a well known adage in sales; “When the customer is sold, stop selling”. It’s difficult to do this with another 15 PowerPoint slides remaining. Within PowerPoint you can create a web site like structure, so instead of going from one slide to the next, you can jump around. Giving more details on a direct benefit the client is interested in, and skipping the ones they’re not.
10. On each slide as the last point, ask a question that is answered by ‘yes’. This can help test for closing and uncover objections on each slide.
Bonus Extra
11. Use pictures. If you can’t find a good picture that describes what you want, then use a picture of a face. Humans are hard wired to recognize and respond to faces. Doing so will keep attention focused and make the slides more memorable.
There are a few more subtle methods we used that were directly related to his client’s problems, but these should get you started on redesign.
Any other ideas or pointers you have used to get good results?
Meeting the objections in meetings May 20, 2008
Part of the work I’m passionate about is helping teams work better together. Some time ago I was working with an IT company that had a great team, “…if only Peter wouldn’t shoot down every idea.” (Once again, names are changed to protect the guilty.)
So there I am, Tuesday morning, watching my first meeting. I don’t remember what they were talking about specifically, but it had something to do with a client problem.
Someone offers a suggestion for a solution, and Peter immediately jumps in and says that it won’t work because of this, this and this.
Everyone at the table rolls their eyes. They’d been through this before. Yet I’m fascinated that someone could come up with so many examples of why it wouldn’t work so fast (and this guy was fast!)
This cycle goes on for a bit. Problem, suggested solution, Peter shooting it down in flames.
After about the fifth iteration I jump in and thank Peter for his input. This shocks him as he’s treated like, and acts like an outcast. I don’t think he’d ever been thanked for shooting down other people ideas. Then I go on to say that his comments are not just important, but critical to success. Now I have the entire table shocked.
I continue to Peter, “And, you’re jumping in too soon. You need to allow the potential solutions that are being offered to be fully formed before you offer your feedback. Hold off until they’ve finished their entire suggestion, or to put it another way, give them enough rope to hang themselves. ” Peter smiles at this. Everyone else was too shocked to comment.
Still, the rest of the meeting, Peter is responding differently, taking his time, allowing a solution to be presented and he would point out a specific problem, with only part of the solution (and thus improving the eventual solution). The team is suddenly more effective. And after a few more subtle changes to do with accountability, they are working together nicely.
Many meetings have this issue; Not a Peter, but a disorganised sequence.
Just like calling someone on the phone, you have to type in the right sequence of numbers to get the person you want. It’s the same with meetings. With the right meeting sequence, you can have a meeting achieve agreement in much less time (and have influence over which side that agreement is on), reach decisions faster, and best of all, shorten the length of the meeting!
Coaching the Uncoachable June 9, 2007
As someone who regularly coaches professionally I read with interest Seth Godin’s discussion on coaching the uncoachable. While I agree with his point, one of the main presuppositions in the post is just plain wrong.
He describes some of the symptoms of uncoachability and almost all of them imply that coaching is about the coach, when in facts it’s really about the person being coached. These symptoms also point to failures within the relationship between the coach and coachee.
* Challenging the credentials of the coach
This is a requirement. Of course, the challenge should be in regards to understanding how the coach can help your performance, not as a methods of discrediting their suggestions.
* Announcing that you’re being unfairly singled out
If a coach offers you a suggestion, you are being singled out. The coach (we hope) is professional enough to see in your behaviour things that can be improved or modified. It makes very little sense for the coach to single someone else out for your mistake.
* Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
Yep, the coach may have been wrong in the past, and may be wrong now. It’s not about the coach, it’s about you.
* Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
Yep. Those other people are not you. If your results are as good, or better than the person you identify, then we can discuss this further.
* Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach
This is just ridiculous behaviour. The coach is there for your benefit, your improvement or the benefit of your team. If you want to act like a two year old child, is it any wonder that the coach begins to treat you like one. This, of course, just increases the difficulty and tension felt by both parties. Luckily, this behaviour is very easy to deal with by a competent coach.
Does this mean you roll over and do whatever the coach says? Of course not. It does mean you have to stop treating the coach like a parent and more like a peer. While this might cause different conflicts with your coach for a time, a professional coach will (should!) be able to modify their own behaviour to match.