by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 57 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Feedforward
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
In the last few posts, we’ve been learning how to change the habits that hold us back. Today we’ll read about another tool to help us in this area. “Feedforward is so simple I almost blush to dignify it with a name,” says executive coach and business guru Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. “Yet some of the simplest ideas are also the most effective. Since they are so easy to do, you have no excuse not to try them.”
Goldsmith points out that “Feedforward is a dramatic improvement on what we traditionally think of as feedback.” And while feedback has its merits, because “it’s a great tool for determining what happened in the past and what’s going on in an organization,” it’s no different than reading history. “It provides us with facts about the past but not necessarily ideas for the future.”
“Feedforward, on the other hand, is feedback going in the opposite direction… [it] comes in the form of ideas that you can put into practice in the future.”
Here are Goldsmith’s four simple steps to obtain feedforward:
1. Select what you want to change. “Pick the one behavior that you would like to change which would make a significant, positive difference in your life. For example, I want to be a better listener.
2. Describe and dialogue. “Describe this objective in a one-on-one dialogue with anyone you know. It could be your wife, kids, boss, best friend, or coworker. It could even be a stranger. The person you choose is irrelevant. He or she doesn’t have to be an expert on the subject… Some of the truest advice can come from strangers… And when a useful idea comes along, we don’t care who the source is.”
3. Ask. “Ask that person for two suggestions for the future that might help you achieve a positive change in your selected behavior—in this case becoming a better listener. If you’re talking to someone who knows you or who has worked with you in the past, the only ground rule is that there can be no mention of the past. Everything is about the future.”
For instance, the dialogue could go like this: “I want to be a better listener. Would you suggest two ideas that I can implement in the future that will help me become a better listener?” The other person could then suggest, “First, focus all your attention on the other person. Get in a physical position, the “listening position,” such as sitting on the edge of your seat or leaning forward toward the individual. Second, don’t interrupt, no matter how much you disagree with what you’re hearing.”
These two ideas are feedforward.
4. Listen and thank. “Listen attentively to the suggestions. Take notes if you like. Your only ground rule: You are not allowed to judge, rate, or critique the suggestions in any way. You can’t even say something positive, such as, ‘That’s a good idea.’ The only response you’re permitted is, Thank you.”
And this is it. Simple indeed. Do steps one through four. Rinse and repeat with someone else. “In seeking feedforward ideas, you’re not limited to one person… You can do feedforward with as many people as you like,” says the author.
Goldsmith swears by the effectiveness of feedforward because, he says, “Feedforward eliminates many of the obstacles that traditional feedback has created.”
So, what are those obstacles and why/how does feedforward work? Goldsmith explains that it works because while we may not like hearing criticism (negative or constructive feedback) we love getting ideas for the future. Also, it works because:
- “We can change the future but not the past.”
- “Helping people be ‘right’ is more productive than proving them ‘wrong.’ Feedback focuses on solutions, not problems.”
- “People do not take feedforward as personally as feedback. Feedforward is not seen as an insult or a putdown.”
- “[When] all we have to do is function as a listener, we can focus on [truly] hearing without having to worry about responding.”
Lastly, the author says, “I’m sure that all of us are surrounded by smart, well-meaning friends who ‘understand’ us better than we ‘understand’ ourselves. I suspect they would love to help us; most people like to help others. But they hold back because they think it’s rude or intrusive to try to help someone who has not asked for our assistance. Asking solves this.”
ACTION
TODAY: Try out asking a few people to give you feedforward. See what happens, I’m sure you’ll get some great ideas!
FUTURE: Keep this technique in mind so that when you feel stuck and want to change something you can ask for feedforward.
Know someone who would like this idea? Please share this post! Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Tools, Willpower
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 12 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: What is commitment?
— From The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow by John C. Maxwell
“Commitment separates the doers from the dreamers,” says John C. Maxwell in his book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. But what exactly is commitment? Much like success, the answer to this question is different for each person:
- To the boxer, it’s getting off the mat one more time than you’ve been knocked down.
- To the marathoner, it’s running another ten miles when you’re strength is gone.
- To the soldier, it’s going over the hill, not knowing what’s waiting on the other side.
- To the missionary, it’s saying good-bye to your own comfort to make life better for others.
- To the leader, it’s all that and more because everyone you lead is depending on you.
Whatever your definition, Maxwell offers three observations about commitment:
- Commitment always precedes achievement.
- The only real measure of commitment is action.
- In the face of opposition or hardship, commitment is the only thing that carries you forward.
And to improve commitment, Maxwell shares the following thoughts:
Measure your commitment. “Take out your calendar and your checkbook register. Spend a few hours tallying up how you spend you spend your time and how you spend your money. Look at how much time you spend at work, in service, with family, in health and recreation activities, and so forth. Figure out how much money you spent on living expenses, entertainment, personal development, and giving. All these things are true measures of your commitment. You may be surprised by what you find.”
Know what’s worth dying for. “One of the questions every leader must ask himself is, What am I willing to die for? If it came down to it, what in life would you not be able to stop doing, no matter what the consequences were? Spend some time alone meditating on that thought. Write down what you discover. Then see if your actions match your ideals.”
Use the Edison method. “If taking the first step toward commitment is a problem, try doing what Thomas Edison did. When he had a good idea for an invention, he would call a press conference to announce it. Then he’d go into his lab and invent it. Make your plans public, and you might be more committed to following through with them.”
I’ll leave you with a great story from Maxwell’s book to fuel your commitment, because it’s only you who can do that. “Former pro basketball player Bill Bradley attended a summer basketball camp at age fifteen conducted by “Easy” Ed Macauley. During that camp, Macauley made a statement that changed Bradley’s life: ‘Just remember that if you’re not working at your game to the utmost of your ability, there will be someone out there somewhere with equal ability. And one day you’ll play each other, and he’ll have the advantage.’ How do you measure up to that standard?”
And speaking of commitment, I had a crazy idea and shared it with you in another email that I sent earlier. Check out that email, and I’ll hope you’ll join me in committing to end 2018 strong!
ACTION
TODAY: Follow the exercise that Maxwell suggests to see where your commitments are based on your schedule and checkbook. What does this tell you?
FUTURE: Think about your commitments. Which ones do you love and gladly commit to them every day? Which ones do you not love, but commitment carries you through and you don’t even question them? Which ones are you half-heartedly or not-at-all committed to? Can you drop these last ones in favor of those you love? Or find someone who can do a better job than you to take over in this area, thus freeing you to commit in other areas?
Know someone who is fully committed to something? Please share this post with that person, he or she deserves recognition for being a doer, hats off! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 18 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 6 Techniques for Installing Good Habits
— From The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy
In the last two posts (here and here), success guru Darren Hardy has taught us how to eliminate bad habits that can lead us in the wrong direction if left unchanged. Now is the time to create and instill new, good habits that will lead us to the success we desire.
“Eliminating a bad habit means removing something from your routine. Installing a new, more productive habit requires an entirely different skill set. You’re planting the tree, watering it, fertilizing it, and making sure it’s properly rooted. Doing so takes effort, time and practice.”
Hardy points out that, “you can change a habit in a second or you can still be trying to break it after ten long years… The key is staying aware.” If you want to ingrain a good habit, pay attention to it, and positively reinforce yourself at least once a day over a minimum of three weeks, and you’ll be more likely to succeed.
Here are the author’s six techniques for installing good habits:
1. Set yourself up to succeed. “Any habit has to work inside your life and lifestyle. If you join a gym that’s thirty miles away you won’t go. If you’re a night owl but the gym closes at 6 p.m., it won’t work for you.” Hardy talks about his addiction to email and how he can lose hours of focus every day if he doesn’t control it. Thus, he set up the habit of checking email three times a day. Period. No more falling into a time vortex.
2. Think addition, not subtraction. The “add-in principle” works wonders: instead of focusing on what you are sacrificing to get rid of your habit, focus on what you are adding to your life. For instance, if you’re trying to eat healthy, don’t focus on not being able to eat french fries (e.g. I can’t eat french fries). Instead, think of what you can have (e.g. I’m having a yummy salad with fresh fruit for dessert). When you think of what you can “add-in” to your life, the results are stronger and powerful.
3. Go for a PDA: Public Display of Accountability. “Want to cement that new habit? Get Big Brother to watch you. It’s never been easier with all the social media available… Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell Facebook and Twitter. Get the word out there…” Once you tell the world what you are going to do, it’s much easier to stick to it, as you’ll be held accountable by those who know you. Also, there are online apps like Stickk.com where you are held accountable for your goals in your own terms.
4. Find a success buddy. “To up your chances of success, get a success buddy, someone who’ll keep you accountable as you cement your new habit while you return the favor.” Hardy shares his experience of having a Peak-Performance Partner: “Every Friday at 11 a.m. sharp, we have a thirty-minute call during which we trade our wins, losses, fixes, ah-has, and solicit the needed feedback and hold each other accountable.”
5. Competition and camaraderie. “There’s nothing like a friendly contest to whet your competitive spirit and immerse yourself in a new habit with a bang. […] What kind of friendly competition can you organize with your friends, colleagues or teammates? How can you inject fun rivalry and a competitive spirit into your new habits?”
6. Celebrate! “There should be a time to celebrate, to enjoy some of the fruits of your victories along the way. You can’t go through this thing sacrificing yourself with no benefit. You’ve got to find little rewards to give yourself every month, every week, every day—even something small to acknowledge that you’ve held yourself to a new behavior. Maybe time to yourself to take a walk, relax in the bath, or read something just for fun. For bigger milestones, book a massage or have dinner at your favorite restaurant. And promise yourself a nice big pot of gold when you reach the end of the rainbow.”
The last piece of advice that Hardy shares is that we need to be patient with ourselves because change is hard. “Creating new habits… will take time. Be patient with yourself. If you fall off the wagon, brush yourself off (not beat yourself up!), and get back on. No problem. We all stumble. Just go again and try another strategy; reinforce your commitment and consistency. When you press on, you will receive huge payoffs.”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Will Durant
ACTION
TODAY: Figure out what is the best way or ways to keep yourself accountable. Do you need to tell the world via social media? Work with an accountability buddy? Set milestones and determine how you’ll celebrate when you reach them.
FUTURE: Give yourself the gift of installing a new habit that you’ve wanted to have for a long time. Read this post about 100% commitment and commit to doing it this time. No matter what. You know you want it!
Know someone who wants to create a new habit? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 48 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Run a vice check
— From The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy
Yesterday we learned from Darren Hardy, entrepreneur and author of The Compound Effect, about 5 strategies for eliminating bad habits. Today we will learn another strategy to make sure that we are always in control of our behavior.
Hardy emphasizes that he is not suggesting you cut out every “bad” thing in your life. Almost everything is good in moderation, yet sometimes habits take the reigns of our existence.
To avoid that, precisely, is that Hardy suggests running a vice check to ensure you are in control at all times. The author explains:
I believe in testing my vices. Every so often, I go on a “vice fast.” I pick one vice, and check in to make sure I’m still the alpha dog in our relationship. My vices are coffee, ice cream, wine, and movies. I already told you about my ice cream obsession. When it comes to wine, I want to be sure I’m enjoying a glass and celebrating the day, not drowning a bad mood.
About every three months, I pick one vice and abstain for thirty days… I love proving to myself that I am still in charge. Try this yourself. Pick a vice—something you do in moderation, but you know doesn’t contribute to your highest good—and take yourself on a thirty-day wagon run. If you find it seriously difficult to abstain for those thirty days, you may have found a habit worth cutting out of your life.
There you have it. I suggest that next to the list of bad habits you started yesterday, you include a list of vices to check. And then start checking them every so often to ensure you are always in control.
ACTION
TODAY: Add a list of vices to check next to your list of habits to change. Pick a date to get started and note it on your calendar.
FUTURE: Set a 30-day period on your calendar to do your first vice check. Test it out once and see if you’d like to do it again, just as Hardy does, about four times a year.
Know someone who would like this idea? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 19 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 5 Strategies for eliminating bad habits
— From The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy
“Habits and behaviors never lie,” says Darren Hardy, entrepreneur and author of The Compound Effect. “If there’s a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, I’m going to believe what you do every time.”
Based on what we do, Hardy suggests making a list of bad or not-so-good habits that we want to eliminate. Take a good look at your actions, they speak much louder than your words. Hardy says,
If you tell me you want to be healthy, but you’ve got Doritos dust on your fingers, I’m believing the Doritos. If you say self-improvement is a priority, but you spend more time with your Xbox than at the library, I’m believing the Xbox. If you say you’re a dedicated professional, but you show up late and unprepared, your behavior rats you out every time. You say your family is your top priority, but if they don’t appear on your busy calendar, they aren’t, really.
Habits take us by the reigns unless we consciously make an effort to change them. Let’s look at five strategies to “uproot those sabotaging bad habits and plant new, positive, and healthy ones in their place.”
“Your habits are learned; therefore, they can be unlearned.”
Hardy shares some game-changing strategies, yet the overall key, he says, “is to make your why-power so strong that it overwhelms your urges for instant gratification.”
1. Identify your triggers. After you finished your list, look at the habits you want to change, and identify “The Big 4s” that trigger those habits: (1) who, (2) what, (3) where, and (4) when.
2. Clean house. “Get to scrubbin’,” says Hardy. “And I mean this literally and figuratively. Get rid of whatever enables your bad habits.” Depending on what your goal is, get rid of all the things that trigger even the slightest thought of it. For instance, he says, “If you want to eat more healthfully, clean your cupboards of all [that’s non-healthy], stop buying the junk food—and stop buying into the argument that it’s ‘not fair’ to deny the other people in your family junk food just because you don’t want it in your life… everyone in your family is better off without it.”
3. Swap it. “Look again at your list of bad habits. How can you alter them so that they’re not as harmful? Can you replace them with healthier habits or drop-kick them altogether? As in, for good.” For instance, Hardy says that he loves something sweet after eating, yet if there’s ice cream, it’ll turn into a 1200-calorie binge fest. Instead, he simply eats two Hershey’s kisses that only add 50 calories to his diet. What can you replace progressively or swap out completely?
4. Ease in. “For some of your long-standing and deep-rooted habits, it may be more effective to take small steps to ease into unwinding them. You may have spent decades repeating, cementing, and fortifying those habits, so it can be wise to give yourself some time to unravel them, one step at a time.” Hardy tells of a time when he and his wife decided to cut caffeine out of their diet. Instead of going cold turkey, he recalls, “We first went to 50/50—50 percent decaffeinated and 50 percent regular for a week. Then 100 percent decaf for another week. Then Earl Grey decaf tea for a week, followed by decaf green tea. It took us a month to get there, but we didn’t suffer even a moment of caffeine withdrawal—no headaches, no sleepiness, no brain fog, no nothing.”
5. Or jump in. “Not everyone is wired the same way. Some researchers have found that it can be paradoxically easier for people to make lifestyle changes if they change a great many bad habits at once.” Hardy tells stories of people who have come out of surgery and have changed their lifestyle and dietary habits completely. Or people who have gone cold turkey.
On these two last points, Hardy likens it to wading into a body of cold water or jumping in. Each one of us is different and we know what will work best for us. To determine this, he suggests asking yourself, “Where can I start slow and hold myself accountable?” and “Where do I need to take that bigger leap? Where have I been avoiding pain or discomfort, when I know deep down that I’ll adapt in no time if I just go for it?”
ACTION
TODAY: Make a list of the habits that you’d like to change and identify your “Big 4” triggers. Think of whether there is a way to swap it or if you prefer to eliminate it altogether.
FUTURE: Clean house and determine if you’ll ease in or jump in. Then do it. Make sure you have a strong enough WHY to help move you forward. Give yourself at least three months to ensure that the old habit is gone and that the new one is getting ingrained.
Know someone who’s trying to kick a habit? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 14 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Actions to improve teachability
— From Success 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell
Yesterday John C. Maxwell warned us against resting on our laurels and, instead, gave us five guidelines to cultivate and maintain an attitude of teachability.
While those guidelines were great to keep in mind, the question that came up revolved around specific actions that we could take to improve our teachability. Fortunately, Maxwell foresaw this question and, in today’s post—from the same book, Success 101—he offers the following three actions to ensure we’re always growing and always cultivating and maintaining an attitude of teachability.
1. Observe how you react to mistakes. “Do you admit your mistakes? Do you apologize when appropriate? Or are you defensive? Observe yourself. And ask a trusted friend’s opinion. If you react badly—or you make no mistakes at all—you need to work on your teachability.”
2. Try something new. “Go out of your way today to do something different that will stretch you mentally, emotionally, or physically. Challenges change us for the better. If you really want to start growing, make new challenges part of your daily activities.”
3. Learn in your area of strength. “Read six to twelve books a year on leadership or your field of specialization,” says Maxwell. “Continuing to learn in an area where you are already an expert prevents you from becoming jaded and unteachable.” Besides those books in your area of specialty, I know of a blog that can help you keep learning and growing daily… 😉
Finally, I’ll leave you with a story and a thought that Maxwell tells about Tuff Hedeman, a professional bull riding cowboy at rodeos. “After winning his third world championship, [he] didn’t have a big celebration. He moved on to Denver to start the new season—and the whole process over again. His comment: ‘The bull won’t care what I did last week.’ Whether you are an untested rookie or a successful veteran, if you want to be a champion tomorrow, be teachable today.”
“The most important thing about education is appetite.” — Winston Churchill
ACTION
TODAY: I challenge you to try something new as explained above. Today go out of your way to do something that will stretch you.
FUTURE: Create the habit of challenging yourself daily. Whether it’s 5 more minutes on the treadmill at a slightly faster pace, or recalling the names of 10 of the Saturn moons, or giving a genuine and caring compliment to a colleague whom you don’t like that much (Eek… I tried this one and it’s so hard!), do whatever stretches you where you need it most on that day or that period of time.
Know someone who is always growing? Please share this post with that person: email, Facebook or Twitter. Thanks!
