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The way you practice can be a predictor of success

August 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How you practice has everything to do with how you play.

That thought is not new, of course. It’s pretty interesting, though, when you check your own experience and notice how true it can be.

Think of two past projects, one that worked well and one that didn’t.

What were the differences between these two experiences in:

1. How specific your goal was?

2. How you prepared or practiced for the experience?

3. What you paid attention to as you did the work: progress or problems, anticipating success or predicting failure?

4. The encouragement and support you had from others?

5. The encouragement and support you showed yourself?

6. The energy and enthusiasm you put into the work, and how you did so?

7. The way you monitored and corrected your progress, if need be?

8. How you celebrated reaching various milestones, if you did?

I’ll share one detail from my own experience.

Sometimes when I’m working on something new, I imagine successfully completing each step, and successfully arriving at the finish line. It sounds simple, but it’s valuable. That’s because, by the time I actually do the work, even if it’s new to me, it almost feels familiar already. I spend less time in doubt or anticipation of problems because I’ve already “pre-experienced” successful completion of each step.

What differences do you notice when you compare the successful and less successful projects you completed?

What practices do you notice are most likely to lead you to success consistently?

Filed Under: Business Results, Enthusiasm, Full presence, Knowledge Management, People at Work, Process Management, Your own excellence

Avoiding something? 15 ways to get started so you can get it done

February 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Is there a goal, task, or action you’d do anything to avoid if you could?

Stop resisting, procrastinating, and trying to wish the task away.

Here are a few ways to get started so you can get that work done:

1. Get excited about it.
There’s probably something good about the experience (even if it’s just that you get to scratch it off the to-do list when you’re done).

2. See yourself doing it, and completing it.
Envision the work underway, going well, and see yourself finishing easily. Imagine, also, that if things do crop up that you didn’t expect, you’ll handle them calmly and effectively.

3. Set a goal or milestone. Set a series of them.
Focus on the next milestone and getting that done. Then work on the next one.

4. Plan a reward. Plan a series of them.
Work your way through the task you’d like to toss by pacing yourself with appropriate rewards. Move well – and steadily – through the tasks between here and successfully crossing the finish line.

5. Start focusing on the next thing on the to-do list.
Notice what else needs to be done. Focus a little less on this task and notice what work it’s blocking that may be even more important.

6.  Pay more attention to it.
Look more closely at the task. You may notice things you hadn’t noticed before that appeal to you.

7. Pay less attention to it.
Maybe you’re paying too much attention to some details and immobilizing yourself. Focus a little less, if this is the case. Keep the big picture and long-term perspective in mind.

8. Sneak up on yourself.
Sometimes we intimidate ourselves. Get out of your own way. Let the work through. Almost before you realize it, the work will be underway. Suddenly, seemingly, it will be done.

9.  Cut the drama. Just do it.
Sometimes being a little stern with yourself will do the trick. At other times (and most times, as a matter of fact) encourage yourself as you work and learn. You’re likely to get the most and best work out of yourself this way.

10. “Work. Relax. Don’t think.”
That’s writer Ray Bradbury’s advice. Just start working. Relax as you do. Let instinct, and prior experience with this task, if you have it help you get moving well beyond it.

11. Use this as a chance to learn something new.
Make this a learning laboratory for new skills, in some way, if you can.

12. Add something to make it more enjoyable.
Maybe you can change the location of the work, or the order in which the work is done. Maybe you can add a new person to the team, if a group of people is doing the work.

13. Take something away to make it simpler.
Make the work flow simpler if you can, or use a smaller team of people to get the work done if the team and task are getting too complicated.

14. Focus on the things that could go right.
It’s easy to plan in such a detailed fashion that you see all the problems that might occur. Focus on the things that might go very well, and how you’ll be prepared if they don’t.

15. Focus on how you’ll feel when you get the task done.
Keep that good feeling in mind as you work your way through the task. And then enjoy that finished feeling, fully, when you get to that point.

Filed Under: Business Results, Knowledge Management, People at Work, Process Management

Take the first step to change – accept what is

February 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The first step in changing something – anything, really – is accepting what the current situation is.

It’s not always easy. But it is one of the most powerful steps to actual, sustainable change if that’s what you really want.

Here are a few steps to take to accept where you really are, and the situation you’re really in, whatever it is. Ask yourself these questions:

1. What seems to be true, even though I may not want it to be so?

2. How do I know? What are the facts? (The facts may not be fun at this point, but you never know. Find out).

3. Does the situation still look the same, now that I have the facts?

4. What do I want, instead?

5. What’s the gap between what is, and what I wish were true?

And then, get ready to move beyond acceptance. Ask yourself these things:

6. Can I close that gap? If so, what will it take from me?

7. How can I make the change in the best possible way?

Understand.

Accept.

Be with what is.

Let it be to let it go.

You have the power to move beyond, to make “what is,” “what was.”

But first you have to accept.

Filed Under: Business Results, Knowledge Management, Leadership, People at Work, Process Management

The power of acceptance (and give a little to yourself)

February 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Acceptance.

I’ve thought about this many times as I worked my way toward some high goal I’d set for myself, or tried to move beyond a difficult life circumstance.

Acceptance is commonly-offered advice for anyone going through challenging times, or great change of any type.

I think of a friend whose husband is helping his mother close down her home and prepare to move to a retirement community. I think of managers who are frustrated by their employees, employees frustrated by their managers. I think of people trying to lose weight, or to do other things to improve their health.

Advising that someone accept a circumstance is easy to say.

But it’s much, much harder to do.

Think about each of these situations for a moment. Consider what it takes to fully DO:

1. Accept yourself, completely.

This means fully acknowledging all your strengths and weaknesses, achievements and mistakes, opportunities you took and the ones you missed or chose not to take.

This means accepting the wholeness of you, just as you are, right now.

2. Accept someone else, completely.

This means fully acknowledging someone else, including their strengths and weaknesses, just as they are, right now.

It means accepting whatever relationship and history exists between the two of you.

3. Accept a situation completely, just as it is, right now.

This means acknowledging a situation fully, whatever it is, just as it is, now.

This may mean accepting the hard work, and the odds that you face as you decide to pursue a goal.

It may mean accepting the resources you need to gather, or the learning and personal change you need to do.

It could mean acknowledging a present situation that’s far worse than what you once imagined, or hoped

What’s the real power in acceptance?

Often you can’t release burdens unless you acknowledge that they exist. You can’t muster the energy and effort to get moving to become what you really wish, or create the situation you really want, to be unless you acknowledge that you’re somewhere else.

Energy that’s invested in pretending, “Everything’s fine!” can’t be released and invested in really making it so.

Take a deep breath.

Accept.

Be with, and let be, what is.

Then, when you’re ready, let go.

Move beyond what is.

And then, make things different, and better.

And accept again at each step, as things change and move forward.

The challenge often isn’t in the doing.

The challenge is in accepting what is fully enough to be able to really, and finally, let it go.

Filed Under: Musings, People at Work, People watching, Process Management

Three big risks on your way to big goals

January 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The challenges of a big challenge are many.

Here are just three of the errors that it’s easy to make if you don’t plan and manage your work effectively:

1. Getting into action without a plan

You’re likely in this case to find out that you’re quickly far afield of where you intended to be.

2. Creating a plan but never getting action underway

You’re likely to be filled with fear about something you think you can’t achieve or a problem you can’t conquer. You never get around to turning your great ideas into results that count for anything.

3. Losing track of your target along the way

Here you start implementing your plan, but you don’t follow up well and consistently. You lose your sense of the destination as well as the path there.

Here’s what others advise about these risks, and what happens if you don’t meet them effectively:

Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.
Mark Victor Hansen

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.
Unknown

Any goal without a plan is just a wish.
Larry Elder

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
Frank A. Clark

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.
Earl Nightingale

If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?
Basil S. Walsh

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.
Confucius

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.
Jim Rohn

“It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves.”
Edmund Hillary

Filed Under: Business Results, Leadership, People at Work, Process Management, Quotes, Strategic Planning

How to outsource the cleaning of your room

December 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Outsourcing can help you get more done than you can do alone.

To outsource well requires many things, including:

- A specific objective and success criteria

- Clarity about each others’ roles

- Simple, effective communication processes

- Clear decision-making processes

- Ways to measure if progress is happening and goals are being achieved

- Having a good process for working through misunderstandings, if they occur.

Outsourcing can also be used to get your room cleaned after you leave home.

I know. It’s been going on for a few weeks here.

My husband is on the phone now with our daughter who lives in Eugene, OR.

Having graduated from college a few years ago and changed locations a few times since then, she’s pretty well decided what things would move with her into the life she has now.

The rest of the stuff she’s left at home.

It’s been a room in limbo…no longer what it was, but not yet what it can become.

We all agree that it’s high time to turn the room into an office/study and guest room which will be her room the few nights a year when she’s home.

Gary created a room-clearing process that has worked beautifully over the miles. Here are the basic steps.

1. He knew what his goal was.

2. He knew the job was not getting done in the expected way, and had to figure out a way to do it in spite of the distance between where we live and where she does.

3. He envisioned a process that might work and wanted to try it out.

4. He proposed it to Anne in a way that it wouldn’t feel insurmountable, as clearing the room had felt up to now. She agreed to try the process.

5. He sorted through the many things that had gathered here, grouping like objects, making judgments about what he thought should be kept and what could be tossed.

6. He scheduled ten-minute calls with Anne each weekend for about a month, going over just the things they could review and she could decide on in that time.

7. In the call each week, he described each item that was up for a stay/go decision as well as he could.

8. She made a decision about each one, or asked me to supplement her instincts about it with what I knew about the item and its probable place in her life, before making the final call.

9. I’m the final arbiter on this end of the outsourcing process because I know, and will adhere to her decision criteria more consistently than he will.

Her decision criteria are:

- Do I love it?

- Will I use it again?

- Did it come from a person I love?

Gary’s decision criterion is simple:

- Is there any way I can get rid of this?

10. We’re making regular stops at Goodwill and the Salvation Army and someone who loves each item now will take it home. There may even be some people who will get a Christmas present of an item that Anne was long ready to let go, but just didn’t know it yet. For them, it’s a new item to love.

And to share just a small sample of this process (which has worked beautifully, by the way), here’s just part of my husband’s side of today’s call:

“It’s a red heart pillow, kind of like a Valentine. It has a big stain on it.”

I laughed to myself when I heard his description.

It was clear to me he thought the heart-shaped pillow should move out. He was focusing on the stain, not the heart, describing it in a way that would lead to the decision for which he’d hoped.

In this case, he got what he wanted. The stained heart-shaped pillow is moving on.

Are there lessons for you in this outsourced process?

1. Is there a large task you’ve been avoiding but need to do? How can you create break that big task into a smaller series of decisions and actions that allow you to make progress on getting that intimidating task done?

2. Is there a process you’ve outsourced that isn’t working well? Of the key steps in good outsourcing, is there a step you skipped or need to improve? Clarifying goals, roles and communication processes and mechanisms can do a lot to improve teamwork and effectiveness in any process or group.

Filed Under: Business Results, Measurement, People at Work, Process Management, Serendipity

Are you reading the signs of change right?

October 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A single sign of change can mean very different things to different people.

How you interpret that sign can lead to radically different decisions about what action you need to take next.

The benefits of being right when you read that sign correctly can be great.

The consequences of being wrong can be very high, as well.

In an everyday example recently, our cat returned sick from the kitty kennel where he’d been staying while we were on vacation.

Shadow was sneezing, having trouble breathing and showing signs of distress, though he’d been fine when we dropped him off. And we’d used this kennel before, and had had no problems with it.

Our dilemma was to decide whether we could let the cat ride the illness out and get healthy on his own, or whether we needed to get him to the vet in what might be a very expensive and unnecessary visit.

To complicate our reading of situation, it’s significant to know that the cat is 16 1/2 years old…very old for a cat.

We’ve had very good – and very feisty – years with him but we want even more.

And on top of that, Shadow and our son, now 18 and a college freshman who lives several hours away, grew up together.

Matt can’t imagine life without the cat, or our two dogs…and isn’t ready to get a call so soon after leaving home to hear that one of his beloved pets is gone.

Aggressive measures, if need be, were in order, for a variety of reasons.

Before the story completely unfolded, four people were involved in reading the signs, and making the call.

- The kennel owner thought the cat would be fine without the vet visit.

- My husband did, too – or hoped that would be the case.

- I hoped we could avoid a vet visit, too, but when I watched the cat’s labored breathing, I knew we had to get him into the vet as soon as possible.

- The vet initially thought Shadow had heart failure, given his signs and previous history, and gently warned me before he took an x-ray that the cat might not be long for this world.

How did the story play out?

The cat has a serious upper respiratory infection, and is on a long course of penicillin.

To survive the worst days of this medical adventure, he had to be force-fed his medicine, water and food.

He’s weaker, and bowed but not broken. And we are all wiser to the reality of his long-term condition.

We are so thankful he’s still around, as is his best friend in the family, our son.

What did we learn from this adventure?

1.  Keep an eye on the big picture.

The cat IS an old cat. We must finally admit that. Still, we aren’t ready to let him go, if we don’t have to.

2.  Know what the significant details are. Pay attention to them.

The key signs in this situation included the cat’s very labored breathing, food and water that he wasn’t taking in or wasn’t holding onto, and his lack of awareness, generally, of what was going on around him.

3.  Watch for trends.

We watched the signs closely to see if the cat was getting better or worse. I was watching him very closely, so could tell when there were changes more easily than my husband could, who was watching him from a greater distance.

4. Know whose opinion to value the most, when many opinions are offered.

When we got to the vet’s office, he had the data about the cat’s health, of course, thanks to his experience and a few expensive tests and an x-ray.

He didn’t know how important the cat is to our freshman son who, a few hours away, didn’t have a chance to say good-bye, if that were necessary.

5. Know what the worst-case scenario could be, and what the early signs are likely to be.

The fact that the cat was not taking any any food, medicine or water on his own was a sign that we might not be able to save him. It meant force-feeding to prevent a dire outcome, if need be.

6. Know what the best case scenario could be, and what early signs are that things may have taken a great turn.

We hoped to see the cat’s normal fight and feistiness, and we’re seeing it now. That first slightly ticked-off tail switching when he didn’t want to take the medicine? It was wonderful to see.

7. Remain flexible.

The vet gave us a diagnosis, prognosis, medicine, and long-term advice. He didn’t advise us what to do if the cat couldn’t keep anything down, and may have thought the cat might not survive this bout.

Even though the cat wasn’t fighting for himself, at that point, we had to fight for him. We tried meat-flavored baby food delivered through the medicine dispenser, a device something like a little turkey baster.

That worked, and gave him enough nutrition that he turned the corner.

8. Celebrate small signs of success, if you’re working out of a difficult situation.

I never thought that after our great vacation, we’d come home to find the cat dancing at death’s door, as it seems he did. We celebrated each small sign of progress, and continue to.

At this point we know our often-ornery feline friend will, thankfully, be around a little while longer.

Filed Under: Knowledge Management, People watching, Process Management

Find the rate of change that works best for you

October 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Change is inevitable.

And because it is, the better you learn to accept and work with change, the better it will work for you.

One way is to find your best rate of change.

Then find ways to modulate or speed up future change so that it happens (or seems to happen) at the rate that works best for you.

Here are a few steps you can use to do that:

1. Recall past times of change.

Remember circumstances when you:

- Felt fully alive, very engaged and interested in what was going on around you.

- Felt overwhelmed.

- Were bored, and felt that life might never, ever change.

2. Remember what was happening in each case.

- What was the circumstance?

- Was change occurring in that situation?

- Was it happening fast, at a nearly perfect speed, or far too slowly (or perhaps, not at all)?

- Were the changes ones you sought, or changes that happened to you?

3. Recall how you responded each time.

- How did you feel about the changes that were underway?

- What did you do to handle each circumstance – speeding it up or slowing it down?

- Was each approach effective? In other words, were you able to do your best work in each circumstance, despite how you felt about the situation?

4. Knowing what you know now, plan ahead for how you can handle future times of change.

- How could you have improved the way you handled difficult circumstances of change, particularly feelings of a) great overwhelm and b) great boredom?

- What were your best ways of handling difficult circumstances, such as when change seemed to be happening too fast, and when it was unfolding too slowly?

By noticing and reinforcing your skills of adapting to undesirable rates of change, you’ll increase your ability to manage and adapt well when such circumstances happen again.

For like it or not, change often happens at its own too-fast or too-slow rate.

Learn how to manage yourself best in each case so you can work well with it.

And as you consider these experiences of change and how you handled them, consider these thoughts:

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take – choose the bolder.
William Joseph Slim

Perhaps the greatest gifts to creativity are time, problems and deadlines.
David Baird

Filed Under: Knowledge Management, Leadership, People at Work, Process Management

Simple, elegant execution leads to customer delight

May 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The last macarons
Originally uploaded by jcgr

It often doesn’t take that much to create customer delight.

Just an excellent product, well-tuned into what customers want.

Simple, and elegantly-designed.

Perfectly executed.

Fresh.

Well-offered, well-sold at the right price, and the right place and time.

Voila! Customer delight.

Here, the last of a box of simple, but simply wonderful macarons.

I so hated to see this gift come to an end.

Filed Under: Business Results, Customer Focus, Images, Process Management

Stuck in a rut? How would someone else do the job better?

April 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Stymied?

Stuck in a rut?

Or is there a problem you’re tackling that you know must have a better solution than the solution you have – but you just can’t see it yet?

Pretend you’re someone else.

Try to solve the problem, or plan how you would, in the way you think they would handle it.

Imagine, for example:

How would someone who works faster than you do, but still produces a great result, get the job done?

How would someone who likes this job or task better than you do handle the job, or meet this particular challenge?

If you outsourced this project or task, how do you think that person would get the work done?

How would the person whose work you most admire do the job?

How would your customers expect you do the work?

How would your manager expect you get the job to be done?

How would your most successful competitor get the job done, as well or even better than you do now?

Filed Under: Customer Focus, People at Work, Process Management
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