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!
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.
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.
In yesterday’s post, we read about Dave Kerpen’s incredible story of determination. I received many great emails about this, and while most of you were in awe and somewhat encouraged by the story, there was still a little shadow of a doubt lingering as to whether such persistence would be perceived as rude.
I don’t think so. As long as you do it in a charming and polite way, always emphasizing that you are looking to add value to the person and his/her business, I think you will be fine. Just as Kerpen was.
Want further proof? Let’s take a look at what one of my favorite entrepreneurs says about persistence.
Derek Sivers is an entrepreneurial guru that I greatly admire and respect. You can read the ideas that I’ve highlighted from his book, Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, in these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 (don’t miss post #5 for a good laugh from a very creative approach to customer service).
Since Sivers is a genius who has the gift of brevity and conciseness, here’s his entire piece, verbatim, on why persistence is polite:
As teenagers, we learned the hard way that if you contact someone and they don’t reply, they’re just not into you. If you keep trying, you must be a total loser.
But in the business world, it’s the opposite. If you don’t keep trying, you’re a loser!
If someone doesn’t get back to you, it probably wasn’t intentional. Everyone is busy, and their situation has nothing to do with you.
Imagine two different scenarios:
1. Someone doesn’t reply, so you get upset and decide they’re evil and clearly meant to insult you. You resent them for life, and speak poorly of them forever.
2. Someone doesn’t reply, so you assume they must be swamped in work. You wait a week, and contact them again. If still no reply, you feel sympathy that they must be really overwhelmed. You wait a week, and try again. If still no reply, you try to reach them a different way.
Now, which one was rude, and which one was polite?
There you have it. It’s simply a mind shift.
Need more? Here’s Sivers in a quick video interview (3:36 min) talking about a story of persistence and politeness. (Note: at the 1:58 min mark approx. there is one phrase—lasting 2 seconds—with strong language.)
Give yourself the gift of being persistent beyond what you ever imagine you could be. You never know what wonderful opportunities will present themselves based on your polite and charming persistence. Try out polite persistence as an experiment. Think of something that you really want but has been very hard to achieve. Once you know what this is, then determine the frequency of your persistence. Will it be daily, weekly, monthly? A combination?
If you’re still not comfortable with this, take a look at this example from Ari Meisel, in his book Less Doing More Living. He tells the following story of how he automated persistence and finally got the info he wanted. See if there’s something that you can do along these lines.
In a building where I teach, Verizon FiOS [Internet] service was supposed to be available. For three years, the Verizon website said it was available, but it wasn’t. There’s an email address that you can write to check on when FiOS will be available at a location, so I wrote to them and set up a [daily, automatic email] until they replied. Finally, after sixty-four days, someone wrote back. “Please stop your annoying reminder service. We don’t know when service will be available in your building.” I responded, “Why didn’t you tell me that sixty-three days ago?”
As you can see, all sorts of experiments can be set up to start training your persistence “muscle” if you think it needs strengthening. I’ll close this post with a great quote and with an invitation to continue to send me emails to let me know your thoughts about this or any other post.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge
Have a story of persistence you’d like to share? Send it my way and I’ll make a compilation and publish them in a future post!
ACTION
TODAY: Figure out what your experiment in persistence will be about. Then think about what you have that no one else does. What is your equivalent of Dave Kerpen’s Radio Disney that you can leverage to your advantage over everybody else? Use this when being persistent as it will differentiate you and open many doors.
FUTURE: Try out your experiment. Set your schedule for persistence and stick to it. Remember that this is something that you really want, no matter how small or insignificant (like Meisel, he really wanted to know about the internet service in his building). Then get to work. Only by trying out persistence in little steps will you strengthen and grow it to where you will feel more comfortable shooting for bigger goals each time.
Know someone who could benefit from seeing persistence from a different angle, such as the polite one? Please share this post with them! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
“Using your memory to store everything is stressful and unreliable,” says Ari Meisel, productivity guru, in his book Less Doing, More Living. He points out, rightly, that trying to hold all thoughts in our head is inefficient. “The problem with trying to remember everything is that in doing so, you run out of space in your head to actually think about the task at hand. What’s worse, it doesn’t always work.”
How many times have we made an effort to remember something and we still forgot? I’m so guilty of this: I know I tied that string around my finger to remember something, and later I couldn’t remember what that something was… I rest my case.
Enter the external brain. “It stores everything reliably, offers instant access, and frees your mind for more interesting work,” says Meisel.
So, where do I line up to get one of these external brains??!
We all have it at our disposal and it’s more low-tech than you can imagine: “The heart [mind?] of the external brain is note-taking. If an idea is in your head, get it out… we have to create idea flow for good ideas to come out… When you let your ideas flow freely, you get more ideas, and that leads to more good ideas.”
You’ve heard me quote Seth Godin before as saying, “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.” This is exactly how we make that happen. Meisel says the same thing: “Not all ideas are good—out of ten ideas, you may have eight that are bad or irrelevant. But even bad ideas can lead to good ideas. You want to get them out of your head not only because they may be blocking a good idea from coming out, but also because they may come together with some of your other ideas to make a good idea.”
Meisel suggests finding a great tool or set of tools that enable you to capture the info and ideas outside of your head. His favorite app is Evernote. And if you are like most of us who get awesome ideas in the shower, he recommends AquaNotes (water-proof notepad).
On the other hand, in his bestselling book Getting Things Done, productivity guru David Allen, suggests—even for the most high-tech oriented among us—a stack of plain paper to capture each thought in its own sheet or card. Allen recommends:
Write out each thought, each idea, each project or thing that has your attention, on a separate sheet of paper. You could make one long list on a pad, or in some digital application, but… there is a discipline required to initially to stay focused on one item at a time as you process it. So giving each thought its own placeholder, as trivial as it might seem, makes it that much easier. Go for quantity. It’s much better to overdo this process than to risk missing something. You can toss the junk later. Your first idea may be “Implement global climate change,” and then you’ll think, “I need cat food!” Grab them all. Don’t be surprised if you discover you’ve created quite a stack of paper during this procedure.
According to Allen, “It will probably take you between twenty minutes and an hour to clear your head onto separate notes.” And as you go through this exercise, “You’ll find that things will tend to occur to you in somewhat random fashion—little things, big things, personal things, professional things, in no particular order.” To help you clear your head, Allen has put together a wonderful Incompletion Triggers Listthat you can review to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. Also, you can listen to this podcast where Allen guides you through what he calls a mind sweep session to put down, in paper, what is now occupying space in your head.
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen
Create your external brain and get those ideas flowing!
ACTION
TODAY: Take some time to figure out the “external brain” system that will work best for you, and then go through David Allen’s list or mind sweeping exercise to get everything out of your mind.
FUTURE: Once you have created a stack of notes, start prioritizing and processing each one based on your goals. You’ll likely see that some are not all that important, and some others become great ideas that you definitely want to act upon. What is the next action that you need to take? Determine it and take said action (it may take a while to get through all, but keep pushing through). It’s important to take this step because if you don’t do anything, the items from the list “will creep back into your consciousness, since your mind would know you weren’t dealing with [them],” says Allen. If there is no next action to take, then he suggests, trash the item, incubate it, or file it as reference material. That will be your action and your mind will now be unstuck and free to produce more ideas.
We’ve come to the end of this miniseries on how to find a minimum of 5 extra hours per week based on the recommendations of the book Learning to Lead. I hope you have learned a lot of different ways that will help you make the most of your time emergency, that way you’ll be able to crush it when you decide to go into monk mode!
Let’s look at the last 3 concepts from Fred Smith’s 20-point checklist:
18. Put curiosity on hold. This is an important one. Smith emphasizes that we are strapped for time we must swallow curiosity and not ask questions. He says, “I make statements [instead]. Normally in good human relations we ask questions. But if we want to save time, we don’t. If we ask, ‘How’s your mother-in-law?’ it often takes some time to hear the whole sad story. It’s just as warm to say, ‘Hey, I’m glad to see you,’ and keep going… [Or if] I see a group in the hallway… and I enter the conversation, I’ll stay and talk—and there goes my time… Curiosity costs a lot of time.”
19. Stay out of sight. The author advises to lay low: “I try to curb my exposure during a time of emergency. If I stay out of people’s sight, I don’t have to offend them with my hurry.” Work out of home fully or partially if you can for this period of time, or stay out of sight in whatever way works best for you.
20. Leave meetings first. The author relays having fun with many an executive on this point. He says, “I tell them the most important person in the meeting leaves it first. Once I finish my speech, that remark empties the hall faster than anything I’ve used before.” And this is actually true: “The most productive people leave a meeting first. They don’t stand around shaking hands and swapping stories… People hang around a meeting to be liked, not to accomplish anything. The business is done; only the social frills are left. […] Busy people using a time battle plan can’t afford the leisure.’
And there you have it. Now you have the full 20-point checklist to create a battle plan if you ever decide to declare a time emergency. As good as it sounds, the author warns us again, “This plan is not at all about how to speed up. [You] are already going fast enough. What I’m getting at is how to gain some time… you ought to use part of it for loafing.If you’re already panicky, harried, frantic and worn out from the pressure, don’t spend your new time doing more work, or you’ll be right back in the same problem. […] If every time you get an hour you fill it up, you’ll have no concept of what a normal lifestyle is.”
As far as how to use our time, Smith shares some wise advice, “we need to move beyond fighting battles, losing them, fighting again, losing again, and fighting once more. We must move to a new way of life. Waging a battle is certainly better than not winning at all. But battles remain second-best to achieving a lifestyle where we stop worrying about time control… I’ve provided a battle plan. It will work in a pinch. How much better to win the war.”
“Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.” – Thomas J. Watson
I hope you enjoyed this miniseries and learned a lot. What was your biggest takeaway? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: As you put in place these 20 points for going into monk mode, don’t forget the importance of loafing, as the author says. Resting, exercising and spending time with your loved ones are all important activities, make sure you include them in your newfound hours.
FUTURE: As you go through this time emergency mode over the next few weeks, keep a list of the lessons you learn. At the end of the period review it. Using the war analogy of the author, I’m sure this list will be helpful to point you in the direction of how you can win the war as opposed to focusing on fighting a battle again and again.
Know someone who could use an additional 5 hours per week during a time emergency? Please share this post or the entire miniseries with that person. Thank you! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
TODAY’S IDEA: Feedforward
