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, 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 | Habits, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 55 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
9 Habits to stop NOW
— From: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss’ book opened up the doors to the wonderful opportunity of lifestyle design that has become the dream—or the coveted reality—of many people. Beyond the many fascinating ideas and amusing stories that the book shares, sprinkled throughout is a collection of tips and pointers to become super efficient and productive.
One of these tools is what Tim calls “The Not-to-Do List” where he offers a list of 9 habits that we should all stop doing right now for the sake of maximizing our productivity and keeping our stress levels as low as possible. “Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items,” he says.
Here’s the list:
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers. “It just results in unwanted interruptions or poor negotiating positions.” There are services that can send you a text transcript of the voice mail message immediately after the call to save you time.
2. Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night. (I’m so guilty of this one…) “The former scrambles your priorities and plans for the day, and the latter just gives you insomnia.”
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time. “Request them in advance so that you ‘can best prepare and make good use of the time together’.”
4. Do not let people ramble. “A big part of getting things done is getting to the point.” This may not be as easy as it sounds in some foreign countries, where culture dictates that getting to the point is rude before you go through the appropriate initial niceties that a call or meeting demand. Yet you can always say something to the effect of: I have a hard stop at X time. Since I value our time together, I want to focus on [the issue], so let’s get started on this and we can catch up on personal matters another time, deal?
5. Do not check email constantly—“batch” and check at set times only. Set an auto-responder saying “Due to the high workload, I am currently checking and responding to email twice daily at 12 pm ET and 4 pm ET [or your preferred times and time zones]. If you require urgent assistance (please ensure that it’s urgent) that cannot wait until 12 pm or 4 pm please contact me via phone at [number]. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers. Analyze your customer base: “which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and which 20% are consuming 80%+ of my time? Then put the loudest and least productive on autopilot by citing a change in company policies. Send them an email with the new rules as bullet points: number of permissible phone calls, e-mail response time, minimum orders, etc. Offer to point them to another provider if they aren’t able to adopt the new policies.”
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize. “If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. The answer to overwhelmingness is not spinning more plates—or doing more—it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.”
8. Do not carry a cell phone 24/7. Take a digital detox at least one day per week. “Turn [it] off or, better still, leave [it] in the garage or in the car.”
9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should. “Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting.”
ACTION
TODAY: Focus on not doing right away: select the one or two habits you are going to stop doing NOW. Write them down in a card and keep it near you and visible all day as a reminder.
FUTURE: Pick a couple of habits that you’d like to ditch within a month’s time. Tell family, friends or coworkers about this so that they can help keep you accountable. Further, keep yourself accountable with your favorite system (a journal, an X on a calendar, an accountability/habit app, etc.). After the time has passed, pick another one or two habits—or continue to reinforce the previous ones—and keep yourself aware and accountable of your progress until you have eliminated them. Repeat as necessary. For more on the topic you can read this earlier post.
Know someone who needs to stop doing these things right away too? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Mindset, Planning, Time
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 11 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
Create an intermission to get started on your mission: We need to purposefully take some time off to give deep thought to what we want
— From: This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love by Tama J. Kieves
We’ve all heard the saying: “There are seven days in a week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday… and ‘Someday’ is NOT one of them.” So why do we tend to push our dreams, wants, and longings for someday?
Tama Kieves says, “You have no idea how much your current job [read: business / activities / routines / lifestyle] affects your thinking about your future and keeps you chained to your past. On vacation from my law firm, I got a suntan and what seemed like a brain transfusion… Outside my office, not everybody scowled and snapped and neither did I… I could not assess my job and my life while in the thick of my job that was my life.” She continues, “I’ve just noticed that we only tend to find our mission once we take an intermission from the work life that doesn’t work.”
Finding or making time off to give some serious thought to what you want, or find your true calling, or your life’s purpose is not easy. It’s not a lunch-hour activity or something you can do while running on the treadmill. Bill Gates takes “think weeks” every year, and paid and unpaid sabbaticals are on the rise in corporations. Entrepreneur Mike Karnjanaprakorn wrote about the benefits of his time off in this article. But if you absolutely, positively cannot take time off, then use your weekends to set aside time to think and then time to act.
I’ll leave you with one last beautiful quote from Tama:
“All you have to do is take a time-out and honor the purpose of that time. Then inclinations start to tap you on the shoulder. Then dreams. Then means. Just clear the space. Consciously let go of what tires you, and what inspires you will take its place.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take some time to think (1) how much time you could take, (2) when you could schedule your intermission to think about your mission, and (3) roughly how much money you’ll need to make it happen. Whether you plan to take time off in full days / weeks / months or in chunks over weekends and holidays, put it in your calendar and honor that purpose. Note that this time to think and ponder about your dreams, aspirations, goals and how to make them happen should not be a burden, nor should it deplete your savings or derail your career. NO! Just the opposite: it should give you a respite from everyday-life’s routines and craziness; and it should bring you great joy to know that you are creating the space and the time to figure out how to do what you love. Enjoy the time that you have set aside for doing this!
FUTURE: In this article from Forbes, Helen Coster quotes Dan Clements, author of Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, who talks about three steps to put your plan into action: “[1] Start an automatic savings plan, and sock away anything from $10 to $1,000 a month. [2] Choose a departure date and a length of time, and book it on all of your calendars. [3] Then tell a handful of people about your sabbatical plans, so that they can both help you plan and make sure you follow through with your decision. ‘If you don’t carve that time away, it tends to be taken from you,’ says Clements. ‘A sabbatical is one of the easiest things in the world to not do.’”
Psst! Do you know someone who could use a sabbatical or intermission? Please share this post with them and tell them to join us for daily ideas and inspiration!
by Helena Escalante | Mindset, Networking, Planning, Resources, Tools
TODAY’S IDEA:
There is a method to “hack” networking events for best results.
— From: Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People by Vanessa Van Edwards
Happy Friday! It’s social Friday. And whether you are at a social event for business or pleasure this weekend, you may find yourself in a room full of strangers and need to make the most out of it. Instead of dreading it, now you can hack the social scene in your favor.
Vanessa Van Edwards, behavioral investigator, and her team at Science of People studied superconnectors (those people who make the most quality contacts and who have the most robust network on LinkedIn). Science of People studied many networking events by placing cameras on the venues and looking at the patterns of people. They analyzed the foot traffic of those individuals who easily worked the room as a way to see if there were networking hacks that could be learned and applied by anyone. The verdict? Yes, there is indeed a way to work a room successfully!
Take a look at the room. “Whether you are at a networking event, holiday party, wedding, dinner at a friend’s house, or in a conference ballroom, most events have this basic setup… a social map… the start zone, the social zone, and the side zone.”
Image courtesy of Portfolio/Penguin
The start zone is where you check in, enter the room, hang your coat, etc. This is where you land when you arrive to the event and where you get prepped to network. This, as well as the side zone (where the rest rooms are or around the food tables, are the not the best zones to stay in, psychologically speaking, as people in these zones are not necessarily ready to network at that moment. Areas marked with X in the map are traps to avoid.
The social zone is the best part to stand in, optimally, as people exit the bar (areas marked with stars and the triangle between them). That is when they turn around, drink in hand, and are ready to meet and greet. At that point they’re thinking: “Who do I know?” “Who do I talk to?” And you become an instant savior if you stand there and say “Hi! It’s so nice to meet you.” It is right then and there that they will be ready to network and you can start making meaningful connections.
Who would have thought… Makes total sense, doesn’t it? Want to learn more about this? You can read here and here, and watch this five-minute video. Also, since I adapted this post from a longer book review that I wrote for The New York Public Library, you can read that here.
ACTION
TODAY: If you are going to an event today, put this to the test! If not, simply study the zones and make a note in your schedule to revisit this when you have a social event next.
FUTURE: Figure out when your next networking/social event is taking place. Make a note in your calendar to come back to revisit this post. Then when you get to your event, remember the social map, identify the zones and work the room. Once the event is over, analyze how you did compared to other times. What worked? What didn’t? How can you adapt the learning for future events?
Make a note in your calendar to come back to this post after your event and let me know how it went in the comments, please, I’d love to know.
Happy networking! 🙂
