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How do you make decisions? March 18, 2008

If you are like most people, you don’t know the process you go through to make a decision. It happens quickly, naturally, and without our awareness.

The easiest ways to discover how you make a decision, is to take 4 of your friends out to dinner.

When you are handed a menu, place it closed in front of you and watch your friends. Notice how one might ask what someone else is going to have. Notice another might read through every item. Another might glance at the menu and close it. The fourth will do something different.

Once they have made their choice, pick on one of your friends with these questions. (I’ll leave the decision of which one to pick up to you, but if you’ve worked with me before, you’ll know my selection criteria).

“What have you chosen?” Listen closely to the answer. They will likely tell you everything about their decision process. Once they finish, ask:
“What made you choose that?” And again listen to their answer.

If you’re lucky, they’ll say something like “I looked through the menu till I found the dish I had before,” or “I opened the menu and picked the first thing I noticed.” If you’re unlucky, they’ll give you a long rambling story about their childhood. Both will tell you how they made that decision.

Now comes the real challenge. Pick up your menu and use their method to choose food for yourself. This doesn’t mean choose the same dish (although you might). If they choose something they have had before, then you do the same. If they choose the first thing they see, do the same.

Doing this can give you a powerful insight into your own decision method (and might have you eating something new - always a bonus!).

So after doing this, what does that get you?

Notice how the people around you make decisions. Notice how you make your own decisions.

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Stress migraine and how to survive it. January 21, 2008

This is the conversation I had with a client recently after he took two days off work.

Me: “So what caused you to take time off work?”
Him: “A massive migraine. I couldn’t think or move.”
Me: “Do you get migraines often?”
Him: “Not often. But it’s been a repeating cycle for the past 20 years or so.”
Me: “Repeating cycle?”
Him: “Yeah. I get over stressed and I get hit with a migraine.”
Me: “Good to know.”
He looks at me with an expression of “What the hell are you thinking?”
Me: “Think about it. You are very stressed and stress can kill. Your body knows this. Your body also knows a great way to alleviate this level of stress. You call it a migraine. You might not like it, but your body knows it works.”
Him: “I don’t understand what you mean.”
Me: “Think of this migraine as a message. A message that is impossible to ignore.”
Him: “Heh. It’d be better if I got a less painful message.”
Me: “Yeah it would be good if that happened. When was the very first hint that a migraine was coming?”
Him: “That morning, when someone handed me their resignation. I felt a twinge in my neck here.”
Me: “Good to know. What did you do when you noticed that twinge?”
Him: “I ignored it.”
Me: “Uh huh. Has there ever been a time when you felt the first hint of a migraine, but it didn’t happen?”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “What did you do to stop it coming on?”
Him: “I immediately took that afternoon off and went to the beach.”
Me: “Great! Now there is nothing we can do with that last migraine, but we can ensure you don’t have another in future.”
Him: “How so?”
Me: “Quite simple. Next time you feel that first twinge, take time off.”
Him: “I might not be able to do that, there might be too much work on.”
Me: “Well then, you have to weigh up the options. An afternoon off and no migraine, or two days off with a migraine.”
Him: “Ah.”
Me: “See, you do get a less painful message before you get a migraine. In fact I’m sure you get other messages even before that twinge. It’s just that you ignore those ones too.”
Him: “So how do I know what those messages are?”
Me: “Think about all your other migraine events. What are the common feelings or sensations that occur before all of them? They might be an hour, a day, a week or even months in advance. These will be those whispered messages to listen for before your body starts yelling.”

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Do you Communicate with a mirror? 14 ways to see past the looking glass. October 8, 2007

People communicate every day with themselves. With their own beliefs, ideas, values, maps.

You might have had the experience of asking someone a simple and innocuous question and receiving an angry, unexpected or strange answer. Almost as if they are having a completely different conversation.

I remember one time when I was running late for a train. I asked the time from tall fellow that was standing on the platform. He didn’t give me the time, but instead angrily swore at me and then turned away.

Every day we face the challenge of overcoming our own perceptions and communicating directly with, rather than what we expect or imagine about the person in front of us. This can be hard at times, especially with the people we know well already.

Every human being is unique and special and interesting. Every human being has value (even that guy on the station). Some of the ways to help you break through your own perceptions:

  1. Look or listen for what has changed or different since last time you talked to the person. This might be noticing their clothing, or hair. Maybe they were recovering from the flu last time.
  2. It is your responsibility to make sure the other person understands what you mean to say. Assume that the meaning of your communication is the response you get. In other words, if someone acts offended to something you said, treat the situation as if you did offended them.
  3. Use active listening skills.
  4. Put down the paper, step away from your email or stop doing other things and give the other person your full attention.
  5. Match the other persons ‘energy’ or ‘vibe’. If they are happy, be happy. If they are excited, match their excitement. If they are unhappy, sympthasize.
  6. Apologise when you make mistakes.
  7. Accept their statements as true. Everyone has the right to their own feelings.
  8. Stop interrupting and allow them to finish what they mean to say.
  9. Use the methods for shutting off your own internal dialogue. Sometimes we are having a conversation in our own mind while waiting for the other person to stop speaking.
  10. Similar to #4, set aside your personal history. If you are having a bad day, accept your emotions and don’t allow them to affect the communication. That’s not to say you should ignore past experiences, or what you are feeling - by all means take these into account. Instead be aware of how these changes affect your communications now.
  11. Listen to other peoples opinion, but make up your own through direct experience.
  12. Examine the entire situation. This person is just one person within the whole world. Who are their friends, who are they connected to? What has been happening in their life?
  13. Imagine them wearing different clothes, or with a different haircut. As the saying goes, the clothes don’t make the man but they do change your attitudes to the man.
  14. Understand your position of power. What is your relationship to this person - boss, child, employee, friend etc? Different power roles naturally changes your perceptions of others. Being aware of this can help you understand both your own and the other persons behaviour.

What other methods to you use?

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The worst position to be in is September 30, 2007

When you are making mistakes, and no body is pointing these mistakes out to you.

What this really means that the people around you have given up on you. They might have tried to point out mistakes in the past, but have learnt that it makes no difference. So they keep these thoughts to themselves.

If you can’t accept or don’t get feedback, then it’ll be just like not watering your household plants. You’ll live for a time but eventually you’ll wither and die.

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Ways to boost your confidence August 13, 2007

The words you use might be wimp, spineless, shy or fearful. Other people always seem to be able to tell that you are lacking in confidence and walk all over you, take advantage or just ignore you. And it feels like, after each individual event they build together to make a huge barrier to your success.

This vicious cycle goes on. You try something, forcing yourself past the wall of past failures, but fail and get humiliated, so it makes it harder to try again. Because you don’t try next time, the wall becomes higher and thicker and more difficult to overcome.

Some helpful people might just tell you to “Stop being a wimp and get over it”. As if it’s easy to entirely change who you are. That’s what it feels like; that you’d have to change everything about yourself in order to feel like tackling the world’s challenges.

Confidence, like everything else in life, is a skill that needs to be practiced. When you lose confidence it can genuinely feel awful, and for many people might feel like there is nothing you can do to change it. It’s a common statement, “I just don’t have the confidence to do that.” As though we can walk into a shop and buy a kilo of confidence.

Everyone has times when we feel we can do anything, conquer any fear, take on any project, deal with any problem. The skill of confidence comes in when the situation start to become difficult. Thats when our confidence can start to be eroded.

Confidence may take a while to build, and it can be undermined or lost in a second. All it takes is for something to remind us of that wall and we feel wrong-footed, embarrassed or demoralized. It might be something that reminds us of a past failure or previous time we lost confidence. Think back in your own history, is there a certain situation that you always lack confidence in? It often only takes one episode where you feel humiliated or weren’t sure what to do next, and suddenly your confidence is shattered in that event and possibly future ones as well.

Evaluate what trips you up and what doesn’t

There will be some situations that undermine your confidence and some that boost your confidence. Take a piece of paper and divide the page in two. On the right side make a list of the times and places where you know you feel more confident. You might want to start with listing things you do well. If you know you’re a good listener, for example, you probably feel relatively confident when you take on the listening role.

On the other side of the paper make a list of the times and places where you don’t feel confident. Meeting new people, confrontations, giving a presentation, making decisions, etc.

Now we combine the two sides to create a whole. Pick one or two parts on the right hand side of the paper that you could use to improve your confidence in situations on the left hand side. Let’s say you don’t feel very confident meeting new people, but you do feel confident as a good listener. Get a new page and write these two things on the same line. The left side is again “I’m not confident meeting new people.” and the right is “I’m a confident listener.” In between these two statements combine them into one sentence using the word ‘but’. Now read that whole new sentence aloud. Writing it like this and then reading it changes your experience and understanding. Many people have said this alone is enough to fill them with confidence.

Given that above example, people love to talk about themselves, so you only need to get them started (and every good listener knows how to ask good questions) and they’ll be off. Then you can listen to your heart’s content because you know you’re good at it. This then in turn increases your confidence of situations that previously sapped your confidence.

There will be many other possible times and places where you can borrow one skill to help you overcome a deficit in another. Even combining two or three to become a whole lot more confident much more quickly than you think possible.

Repetition is the mother of skill

If you put yourself into those times and places where you naturally have confidence more often, you will increase your experience and bolster your confidence, not just in these situations but also into the rest of your life. If you’re good at riding a bike, go on more bike rides.

Confidence is just like a muscle. You have to use it to develop it. Unlike a muscle however, you don’t have to spend any extra time lifting weights or going to the gym. You can build it throughout your daily activities by consciously focusing on improving your existing confidence.

If you do have a bad day, and your confidence has been undermined, focus your attention on the parts of your day where you did have confidence. Dwelling on the bad does not help. If you get stuck, use the above evaluation sheet to help focus on the good.

And there’s nothing wrong with every once in a while deliberately avoiding situations that do stop you. There’s nothing so confidence-undermining as consistently forcing yourself in situations where you know you’re vulnerable.

The Confidence Cycle

Losing confidence can be a vicious cycle. You lose a little bit of confidence, and then because of that you do something wrong which chips away another bit of confidence. This in turn causes another error and we are suddenly plummeting towards jagged rocks.

Of course, I’m being a little extreme here, it’s not always like that. In fact you can reverse this cycle so that anything that happens can make you even more confident. Everyone has some areas of their life where they’re really confident, or at least confident enough. This is when those lists of qualities and skills come in when we look at the Confidence Cycle.

This is how it works: when you are confident, you try new things, and the more you try the better you get. Like public speaking, for instance. Any good presenter will tell you that the more they get out there in front of an audience, the more confident they feel about handling whatever happens. NOT that they feel less nervous (some people, no matter how practised they are, never learn how to be calm on stage), just that they know what to expect and also feel able to deal with the unexpected. If they get unbalanced they have enough experience to get themselves upright again.

But without confidence you won’t try new things. Where do you begin?

The one and only place you can begin is to practise. Practice for success. That means to practice just above your current level so that even if you make mistakes you are successful overall. This might mean you practice where no one will necessarily notice or where you are not in the spotlight.

For example, if you feel you have zero confidence speaking in front of a group, don’t start practising in front of a group. All you are doing in practicing zero confidence. Practice in front of the mirror first. Then practice in front of a trusted friend. Do this until you can do it with confidence. It might feel false and embarrassing, but practising with an audience of one friend is very different than going into the lion’s den of an audience of strangers.

Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance

Alongside practise goes preparation. Whatever the situation is you can prepare for all manner of eventualities. For example, one of the training drills I give to everyone that I train in public speaking is to give a 5 minute talk. During that 5 minute talk they are to make at least 3 obvious ‘errors’. These errors might be dropping a whiteboard marker, tripping, forgetting a major point of their talk, or anything else. This gives them the ability and experience of dealing with something going wrong. Before something like that would undermine their confidence and set them up for more errors. Now it builds their confidence because they have direct experience of dealing effectively with these errors.

Whatever you choose, remember to practice for success. Doing something correctly once is much better than doing something one hundred times wrong.

If you found this article useful you might also like to read how to build self-confidence.

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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.

Bad training gives information, good training gives skills May 29, 2007

I’ve been to many training sessions. In business and out. Most are glorified information transmission. The 8 hours I spent in the room would have been better spent with a book.

Then there are training for sales, negotiation, management, leadership that expect to transfer skills via this same method. The instructor stands in front of the class and lectures using powerpoint slides. Unfortunately a lecture is a very poor method to transfer skill (or anything else, for that matter). If you are lucky, you get a short, contrived exercise that gives you a false sense of the skill.

Even worse are these leadership and group bonding situations. They claim to improve group dynamics, yet all they do is have the group use exactly the same skills and behaviour in a different context. So if the group didn’t work in the office, chances are it’s not going to work outside.

Ideally, training requires a mix of theory combined with challenges and exercises. The theory is to transfer the “how” of the skill. The exercises designed to practice the theory, and the same time stretch the experience of the students and allow then to practice the “how”. The percentage of each needs to be managed with the outcomes of the course and current student skills.

The metaphor I like to use is: describe to someone how to ride a bike. You can read all the theory in the world, talk to BMX and Tour de France experts, and watch thousands of hours of video. Then, when you get on a bike you realise it’s not as easy as it looks. Learning how to ride a bike contains about 2 minutes of ‘theory’ (this is how you steer, this is how you go forward and stop). Then about 30 to 60 minutes of direct experience, trial and error. From then on, it’s practice.

So next time you attend a training seminar that claims to teach a skill ask yourself the question. “When I finish this training do I know how to ride a bike, or can I ride a bike?”

How to waste millions of dollars worth of skill… April 10, 2007

A fascinating article in the Washington Post. Joshua Bell, one of the worlds best violinist, combined with one of the worlds best violins, goes busking for small change.

The article is a fantastic example of how our identity can change in response to our environment. This musician easily fills concert halls. Yet in a subway his identity shifts. To quote from the article:

So for the people rushing to get to work, he was just another starving artist. His ideas and beliefs started to change in response to the behaviour of the people walking past.

As a child prodigy, he has spent his like expecting attention and applause. Yet within the subway, his years of experience and expectation is shifted very quickly to appreciate ‘even a slight glance’.

What this means for us, as leaders and persuaders, is to be aware of the context around us. Are the people around us helping? Is the culture a barrier to success? Are we settling for ‘a slight glance’ when we want more respect and appreciation? Are we offering only ‘a slight glance’ when words of congratulations and support would improve performance?

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The 8 keys to giving powerful feedback that gets listened to March 5, 2007

Some call it criticism, comment, praise, judgment, evaluation, and even just opinion. I prefer the word feedback. Giving feedback in the right way empowers yourself and those around you. Giving feedback in the wrong way destroys relationships and damages your credibility. As I often say I’m a glutton for feedback, unfortunately not everyone treats feedback as highly as I do. The reason I think this is the case is because many people don’t know how to give feedback in the right way so as not to offend, upset or otherwise antagonise the listener.

Many conflicts and arguments are started because feedback was offered in an inappropriate way. This might be at the wrong time or in the wrong tone of voice. Just think of your own experience when you were offered criticism you didn’t ask for. In a perfect world, we could give, and be able to receive any and all types of feedback without getting upset. Unfortunately, we all have a way to go.

There are eight steps to be aware of when you offer feedback.

1. The first is timing. When do you offer feedback? Praise (something I consider different than feedback) is best done immediately after the behaviour or event so there is a strong connection. In most cases, when offering anything more than praise it is best to wait some time before offering feedback. This time can vary, but I usually say about 24 hours is ideal. Whatever the timing, quite often the best time is when you ask “can I give you some feedback?”

2. Before you start giving feedback, ask yourself what is the intent of giving the feedback. If your answer is anything other than to help them get better, keep the feedback to yourself. Sometimes we only give feedback to lay blame, get noticed or shift responsibility. Giving feedback with ulterior motives damages your credibility, and your listener almost always knows you have an ulterior motive.

3. There is a very old method of dealing with ‘negative’ feedback (I don’t believe any feedback is negative or positive - it is all information for you to use or ignore). This old method says to ’sandwich’ the ‘negative’ with two positive statements either side. While this was good advice, almost everyone expects this format. If you have ever offered someone a single piece of ‘positive’ feedback as was met with the response “…but?” or “…yes…and?” you will know what I mean. The method I use and teach is to give the feedback that might be taken as negative first, then give the ‘positive’. This does two things, gives them the information they need to get much better, and leaves them on a high note.

4. When you do put the feedback into words, make sure it is known to be your own opinion, and not universal truth. So I might say “I think …” or “In my opinion”. While not everyone needs to know that your words are your opinion, some will assume they are, and others will assume a personal attack. (I might expand on why this is at a later time, and how you can tell who you are talking to just by looking at them).

5. At all times focus on the person’s specific behaviours and never the person. Consider the difference between “You are wrong” and “The information you provided has been proved wrong”. This is one of the most common errors in giving feedback. Most people have a very difficult time receiving feedback about their identity, so focus on their behaviours only.

6. When you focus on the behaviour, describe the behaviour as explicitly as possible. For example: “You made me very upset” tells the listener very little about their behaviour. “When you ignored my question, you made me very upset” give then listener a specific behavioural event to focus on. When you discuss the behaviour, talk in sensory based terms. In other words, if someone who didn’t see the behaviour is able to know what you saw and heard, then it is sensory based. Compare: “You looked angry” is not sensory based while “You frowned, closed your eyes to slits, furrowed your brow and spoke with a raised voice” is.

7. Your feedback can also include an action step. This is offering a possible behavioural alternative, an exercise, book or other training material that would assist in getting better results or overcoming the challenge.

8. Once you offer the feedback, let the issue go. If you continue to raise old failures you risk an antagonistic and offensive response. Think of feedback like giving a gift. Once you hand it over, feel good, and let the receiver do with it what they will.

To summarise, the steps are:
1. Find the best time to offer the feedback
2. Become aware of your own intent
3. Use a proven format.
4. State your words are your own opinion
5. Give feedback on behaviour
6. Describe the behaviour in sensory based terms
7. Give an additional action step
8. Let go of the feedback

And the goal, I hope, is that we all offer feedback as a way to improve ourselves (use these steps when giving yourself feedback!), the people around us, and our relationships.

And to help me get better - send me feedback, either via the comments, or email!

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How to silence your internal dialogue December 11, 2006

Your infernal internal dialogue can be brought under control. You might, at this time, think that it doesn’t slow you down that much. I can assure you, unless you have control over it, it does.

Some examples of how internal dialogue hamstrings you include:

There are many more examples of how your performance can improve once you stop talking to yourself. Internal dialogue has it’s place I want you to understand that. Unfortunately most of us over use our internal dialogue, at the wrong times and wrong places.

I had breakfast the other day with friends who have an 8 month old child. I was awed by the silence in her (One of the common experiences that occurs when your internal dialogue is off, is that you can sense other people’s). She was simply there, watching, learning and experiencing the world. Of course, being 8 months old, she does not yet have the capability for any dialogue, let alone internal. And after reading Kathy Sierra I decided to build this list.

So without further delay, here is a list of methods you can use to get control over this internal dialogue. When I remember or find more, I’ll add them to the list. If you have any of your own, please add them in the comments!

  1. Restate your internal dialogue immediately after hearing it. This brings your internal dialogue under your conscious control by breaking the pattern.
  2. Move the location of your internal dialogue into your voice box. Most people listen to their dialogue coming from a specific location. Often from the back of their head and off to one side. Move that location to where you physically speak from and it usually silences the chat.
  3. You can also extend on #2 by moving the voice to different locations for different effects. Some locations work great for motivating you, others for de-motivating. Experiment.
  4. Further on #2 and #3, you can externalise the voice. Set up a chair, and hear the voice coming from that chair. You can then have a proper conversation with it!
  5. Pick a personal mantra, then use it. “Shut the hell up” is one such mantra:-)
  6. Not really a method, but helps understanding. Who, when your internal dialogue is chattering away, are you speaking to?
  7. Using the 6-step reframing method from NLP. This method uses a signal system to set up with your unconscious mind that allows you to negotiate the times and places to turn on or off your internal alogue.
  8. Imagining a volume control knob. Turn up the volume of your internal dialogue, and turn it all the way down.
  9. If you have internal dialogue that you don’t like very much, changing the tone often helps. Turn the tone into the most seductive, most sensual voice you can imagine. How do you feel about it now?
  10. While rare, sometimes the voice we hear is actually another voice - a parent for example. In these cases, give the voice back to the original owner.
  11. Writing out the words your internal dialogue speaks often helps. Usually it runs out of things to say very quickly. With critical statements, you can also then write out counter examples stating how untrue or over generalised these statements are.
  12. Act. If there is something that you want to do, for example talking to a stranger, hesitation will ensure you talk yourself out of whatever action you considered. If you hear that voice, ignore it and act.
  13. Remember the silence. While you read this sentence, I want you to read it out loud. Half way through a word in a sentence, pause. You mind will, naturally, go on silent hold. Remember this ‘feeling’ and you can bring it back when you want by doing the same with your internal dialogue. With proper practice, you can keep that pause indefinitely.
  14. Wide peripheral vision. Imagine you are balancing an apple on the top of your head. Now move the apple about 2 inches back. Keep your attention on the apple. Now look at the world around you and notice your hands on the keyboard, the top of the monitor, the walls on your left and right and the other objects around you. Notice them all at the same time. Chances are your internal dialogue has quietened down.

Add your comments with your own methods for silencing the harshest of critics!

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