by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 50 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Launch a search party for the opportunity
— From Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff
Change is hard. Change is uncomfortable. Change brings an unknown factor into the equation. Most of us don’t like or accept change easily. Jon Acuff, in his book Do Over, rightly says that “upon being confronted with change, our first reaction is to brainstorm reasons it won’t work: I’m too old. I don’t have enough money. It’s too risky. I’m not qualified enough. Someone has already done that exact same thing. There are worse jobs than the one I currently have…” and the litany of excuses goes on and on.
“For minutes or maybe even lifetimes, we do our best to rally the troops around why we shouldn’t do something. And this tends to be the approach we take for ourselves and even other people.” For example, say that you ask a friend to do something that he really doesn’t want to do. Your request is met with resistance, so what’s the next thing you do? Very likely you’ll find yourself asking, “Why don’t you want to do that?”
As common as that question is, Acuff says it’s the wrong one to ask. He cites the book Instant Influence, by Michael V. Pantalon, PhD, where Pantalon says, “when you ask someone a question like this, you unknowingly invite them to brainstorm new reasons they don’t want to do something. That question is an invitation to sit in the no and work yourself up even more than you were before.” By asking a negative question we use our imagination in a negative way.
This applies to any scenario, personal or professional, from asking your boss why you can’t work from home one day a week, to asking a service provider why they can’t give you a discount to… Ha! Remember when you asked your parents why you couldn’t go to that party or why you couldn’t hang out with that particular group of friends? Now we know why and how they came up with all those reasons at lightning speed!
What should we do about this?
Acuff says the solution is to ask the opposite. “Instead of launching a search party for opposition to an idea, you launch a search party for the opportunity.” In the example above where you encounter resistance from your boss to work from home, ask instead: ‘‘what’s one reason you could see me working from home as possibly a benefit to the company?”
You don’t need lots of reasons. Once you have a good one, you’ve succeeded at establishing a positive foothold in your or the other person’s mind, and you can start to build from there.
ACTION
TODAY: Identify one area or one task where you’ve been asking negative questions. Where have you been building up a reservoir of negative reasons as to why you don’t want to do something? Or where have you given someone the opportunity to nurture reasons why not to do something? Flip that around and launch a search party for the opportunity. What question will you ask yourself or someone else that will shed some positive light in favor of doing something?
FUTURE: Keep this tool handy and make a habit of asking a positive question versus a negative one. Your life and that of the people who surround you will be all the better for it, as there will be less friction and less stress when facing any kind of change.
Do you know someone who is finding a myriad reasons why not to do something? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Drop the Story
— From: Habit Changers: 81 Game-Changing Mantras to Mindfully Realize Your Goals by M. J. Ryan
The reason why first impressions are so important is because, in those first few seconds, the brain takes in the new information and gives it some meaning. M.J. Ryan, leading expert on change and human fulfillment, says that this meaning is built on information, stories, conclusions, and assumptions based on filters from the past.
“[Our brain] does this automatically, below our conscious awareness. Like everything else our brain does, this has an upside—we couldn’t function well if everything coming in were new to us… But there’s also a downside: our unconscious story can get in the way of our seeing the new information so we can respond in a fresh way.”
And right after the initial story we tell ourselves, comes in confirmation bias: “the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.” (Britannica). This happens to everyone and in any situation, not just at the beginning of something.
So what can we do to think clearly and in an unbiased way?
Ryan suggests being aware that we need to “drop the story.” To illustrate this point, she tells a story of a client of hers whose sales “were tanking and he was convinced it was because he didn’t have the right person at the helm. Why? Because years ago he’d swapped the role out and sales had gone up.” Ryan asked him, “What would happen if you drop the story that your problem is caused by the sales leader?” To which he replied, “I’d have to look to other factors, like market forces.” Turns out that he discovered the real problem: “his products were not competitive anymore, and quickly made manufacturing adjustments to cut costs.”
Dropping the story, in any situation (whether personal or professional) brings a fresh approach to thinking. It allows us to depart from our unconscious assumptions, focus on other ways to look at the problems and find solutions.
ACTION
TODAY: Where are you stuck? What one issue has been in your mind that you can’t seem to find a solution for? State what you think your problem is, and then drop the story. Examine other angles and ask why 5 times to get to the root of the problem. Once you have correctly identified what it is, you will be able to move forward to solve it.
FUTURE: Keep this “drop the story” mantra in your toolbox. It will come in handy the next time you are trying to solve an issue. It works well by itself and is also a great complement to asking why 5 times.
Have a friend who is racking his brain about something? Please share this post and tell him to drop the story via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Resources, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Prioritize your priority
— From Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
In his wonderful book, Essentialism, Greg McKeown eschews the idea that “you can have it all,” because it is a damaging myth. “It results in stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already overscheduled lives.” I can definitely relate.
The word priority (meaning “the very first or prior thing”) appeared in our language around the 1400s and continued that way, in singular, for centuries. “Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple ‘first’ things.”
The problem with this approach is that we have many competing things, all of them appearing to be the most important, and as we try to juggle them all at once, we give our control away. “When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important.”
“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”
The key, however, is to be cognizant that prioritizing our priority (I just had to write that!) doesn’t mean just saying no. It entails “purposefully, deliberately and strategically eliminating the non-essentials, and not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good opportunities as well.” There are always going to be trade-offs, and some decisions will be very hard to make and require lots of careful thinking, especially when the opportunity in front is very attractive.
Ask yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” Remember that when an opportunity presents itself, it’s either “Hell, yeah!” or “NO.”
ACTION
Scales of Justice
TODAY: Figure out what is your one priority. A very simple way to do this is to compare the items on your current list of priorities one at a time, as if you were putting them on the scales of justice, to see which one weighs more. Say you have 4 priorities: A, B, C and D.
- Take A and B and compare them: which one is more important? Let’s say A. Keep A as your priority so far and park B aside.
- Now take C and compare it to A: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Keep C, as it has become your priority so far, and park A aside.
- Now take D and compare it to C: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Park D aside.
With this method you have just determined that your priority is C. Period. Congratulations!
Now look at A, B and D and decide whether they make the highest possible contribution towards your goal. Yes? Great, schedule them in the order in which they’ll make the greatest contribution too. No? Then don’t do them if you can get away with that: delegate them, change them, get rid of them or further park them in your “that would be nice to do” list for a future. Or if you must absolutely work on them, do so only after you have done what you need to do today to advance C.
FUTURE: Question the validity of all you do so that you can focus on your priority. Look at your activities for the upcoming week or for the full month. Which ones contribute toward your goal? Keep them. Try to do away with the ones that don’t. Notice that I said, “try to” because in a week/month it’s going to be hard to focus solely on your goal and get rid of everything that doesn’t fit. We’ve all given control of our agenda to others, so it will take a bit of time to gain it back; but if you make a habit of questioning all actions and activities, in a very near future you’ll be focusing much more (if not completely) on your goal. Another great way to prioritize appears in this post: How to choose what is important? Principles of priority.
Know someone who’s trying to do it all and have it all, and is spread way to thin? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Growth, Marketing, Planning, Sales
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 20 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The optimal way to keep your customers happy
— From Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers.
What is your business’ mission? Are all the policies and procedures in your business designed and geared toward fulfilling its mission? How about the tiniest of details? Hmm… this is usually the last part to get attention because it’s easy to overlook or to simply be as vanilla as everyone else… yet the optimal way to keep your customers happy is by paying attention to the smallest of details.
Let me share with you the story of Derek Sivers, Founder of CD Baby, a company that sells indie music online. When an order for a music CD had shipped, he had a standard email message to notify his customers and to thank them for their business. However, his mission was to make people smile, and that message felt completely incongruent. So, he took 20 minutes and wrote this instead:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
I bet it achieved its mission of making you smile! It’s silly, funny, and adorable—all at the same time—and it’s also incredibly smart as a way to convey CD Baby’s mission and brand personality. As a matter of fact, if you Google private CD Baby jet you’ll see that, as of the date of this post, there are 1,010,000 results that reference this email (and when I publish this it’ll be 1,010,001 and counting…).
Clearly, Sivers could not have anticipated this outcome when he wrote his email. Yet being true to his mission—even in the smallest of details—endeared the company to its customers and “that one goofy email created thousands of new customers.”
“When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.”
ACTION:
TODAY: Take that one tiny detail about your business that bugs you… yes, that one… We all have that one little thing that drives us crazy (and that we tend to overlook because it’s so tiny that we think we should not give it all that much importance). Now is the time. What do you need to do to make that one detail congruent with your mission? What is your equivalent of Derek Sivers’ taking 20 minutes to write his email to make his customers smile?
FUTURE: Make an inventory of all the touch points in your business’ customer journey. What can you do to make sure every single touch point is congruent and reflects your mission in the most favorable way? Map out and list the actions that you need to take to ensure this happens, then get to work on them. The result will be a stronger bond with your clients, greater loyalty and increased sales. Well worth it, don’t you think?
Know someone that could use a smile from Derek Sivers’ funny email? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Creativity, Growth, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 30 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: You are part of a creative lineage.
— From: Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
How many times have we heard that nothing is original and that there’s nothing new under the sun? In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon shares a great way to get inspired to create your art (whatever form that art takes*) based on the work of many other artists from which you draw ideas and inspiration.
“If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.” After all, “every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.”
Kleon illustrates this by focusing on genealogy: you are the genetic combination of your mother and your father who, in turn, were the genetic combo of their parents, and so on. “You are a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors. [And] just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don’t pick your family but you can pick your friends… the music you listen to… the books you read… You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.”
“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” – Goethe.
Our job, then, is to selectively collect good ideas. “The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
Kleon’s method for growing and climbing your creative family tree is this: “chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch. […] Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff.”
Google everything and everyone. Read as much as you can. Nowadays people leave digital footprints everywhere, so it’s easy to learn from the people you admire; and if you can connect with them via social media or in person, even better. But if your mentors are no longer with us, Kleon says, “the great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.”
ACTION
TODAY: Start building your creative lineage: What do you want to do? And who do you want to learn from? Make a list of your dream-come-true mentors. Then select the one mentor from whom you’d like to start learning and search for his/her work on the Internet.
FUTURE: Continue learning from your selected mentors and follow their paths. Bask in their recommendations for books, blogs, resources, podcasts, etc. Learn until you know that mentor’s life in and out, as if it were your best friend’s. Once you know this, do a brainwriting exercise to see what ideas come to mind about your art with your newfound knowledge. Then select the next mentor based on your previous mentor’s recommendation. Repeat, repeat, repeat… and never stop, make it a habit, and always be learning and growing. (Of course, if you are reading this, you are very likely a lifelong learner… fist bump!)
Do you know someone who could benefit from building a creative lineage? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
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* I’m subscribing here to Seth Godin’s description of art in his book The Icarus Deception: “Art is not a gene or a specific talent. Art is an attitude, culturally driven and available to anyone who chooses to adopt it. Art isn’t something sold in a gallery or performed on a stage. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another. […] Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map— these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.”
