Archive for the ‘Personal Presence’ Category

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Change your mindset

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
change-your-mindset

I have an attractive client, who dresses very well, yet she sees herself as unattractive.  I have a friend who sees herself as disorganised, yet she gets through a monumental amount in any 24 hour period.

I often think we are like flies caught in mindsets that are self-inflicted Venus Fly Traps.   Knowing that you have a self-limiting belief and being able to do something about it are two different things. Often clients are very well aware of their particular negative mindset, but it entices them in with whispers of safety and suddenly, they are stuck.  People might compliment them on looking attractive - whilst their mindset says: ‘No you’re not!’; colleagues might see them as being very organised, but of course they know they are not.  So our mindsets hold us stuck.  We lie there, seemingly alive but inwardly writhing until the life-blood gets drained out of us…..arrgh!

Carol Dweck has produced some very interesting research about the importance of a ‘growth’ mindset is to our success.  It’s great to believe in your talents and attributes, but Dweck’s work shows that far more important is your belief that you can grow and learn.  This means that once you become aware of a negative mindset, you can overcome it if you believe that you can gradually change it. Dweck is talking here about mindsets related to intelligence, but you can see how it could relate to  any mindset. With a growth mindset, we are more likely to keep trying, to learn more about the skill, to seek feedback, learn from failure and eventually get free of our own  Fly Trap.

So through practice and constructive reflection, you can learn how to value the attractive parts of your appearance, or the semblance of organisation that you create.  Maybe whilst your choice of clothes might not get you on the front cover of Vogue, it could be good enough for people to be interested in you.  Probably, whilst you might not win a time and motion study award, your organisational ability might be good enough to get the job done well!

This isn’t about immediately turning that mindset completely around.  It is about believing that eventually we can alter it, working out how to do it, learning from when we fail. If you have a negative mindset, say about being disorganised, you could learn more about where you get that mindset from, work out when you actually feel organised, what you could do to help feel more organised more of the time.. and so on. There are enough flytraps around without creating our own.  Or have is that just a negative mindset?!

Posted in Leadership, Personal Presence | No Comments »

Facing family feuds at Christmas?

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
facing-family-feuds-at-christmas

Isn’t it lovely for families to be together at Christmas…or is it?  The thought is fine, but the actuality can sometimes be a bit different.  Often, we convince ourselves that ‘this time’ we will do better – along comes ‘this time’ and we still all pick up our predestined steps in a  destructive dance. Pity isn’t it?  Family matters.

The Vital Smarts newsletter suggests an innovative approach to this seasonal challenge in their article titled: The Gift of Forgiveness. They recommend thinking about the stories we  tell ourselves about family feuds. Once we have our story, the villains are fixed and keep to character.  We, of course are always cast in the virtuous role.  As the article says: ‘We can’t feel differently about others until we think differently about them.’ Change the story and you change the dynamics.

The Vital Smarts website was developed around the interesting book: ‘Crucial Conversations’. If you want some more depth before you leap into the family fray, this is a good starting point.

Meanwhile, all of us at Communicate wish you a happy (peaceful) Christmas and a great New Year.


Posted in Communication Tips, Personal Presence | No Comments »

Relationship management: The every 90 day principle

Monday, December 5th, 2011
relationship-management-the-every-90-day-principle

A client has recently been thrust into a role that requires him to be far more conscious and strategic about his relationship management than in his previous roles. His challenge is one that most of us face: How on earth to fit this aspect into an already very busy job?

In figuring out the answers to that challenge, remember that the people who are your key relationships don’t need you to be hand-in-hand with them every day. Despite the fantastic contribution you could make to their lives, you will just annoy them if you overdo the relationship building thing.

All you need is for your target person to remember you when you need them to! To achieve this, it appears that the client needs to be reminded of your existence in a reasonably positive way, about every ninety days. That reminder might just be that you have had a brief chat in passing, that you have sent them a useful piece of information, included them in an invite, or, of course, made direct contact.

Every ninety days is only once a quarter. Seems easy and the smallness of New Zealand’s population does make the process easier. Its also it, but surprisingly hard to do in reality. The more you can automate the contact the better. There is a Kiwi networker who does it by his Friday Joke List. If you meet him, he always asks if you would like to be on his Friday Joke email. According to his wife, practically everyone says yes. And there he has it: a regular weekly reminder of his existence. We don’t want everyone doing this, but you could find your own approach.

For some ideas, take a look at Robyn Henderson’s networking tips. Henderson is an Australia, so her ideas are likely to work here too.

Posted in Communication Tips, Personal Presence, Relationship Management, Time Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

No real difference between male and female brains for communication

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
no-real-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-for-communication

I’ve always enjoyed reading Headlines – the national newsletter of the Neurological Foundation.  If you are interested in the brain, its worth donating to the Foundation  even just to get that newsletter. The latest issue has an very interesting article titled ‘The Brain – 10 Top Myths.  The myth  that relates most to communication is #10 Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. 

The author, Laura Helmuth, states categorically that there is very little difference between male and female brains, the few differences are minor and do not affect any ability. In fact she describes the ‘Men are from Mars’ view as: “Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most over-interpreted research in the history of science…”  Now that’s telling us! And she’s no slouch – senior editor for the Smithsonian Magazine with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA, Berkley.

Helmuth says that the research about gender differences of the ‘Men are from Mars’ variety are strongly influenced by the beliefs of the test subjects. So all that handy stuff around spatial ability, empathy, who talks most and  judging people’s emotions , does not relate to gender. Presumably socialisation has a big impact, but any gender differences are not due to the brain’s make-up.

When we are thinking about a communication challenge, don’t make excuses for the brain!  Here’s a link if you want to think about this similarity in the context of your love life. You can expect yourself to be able to  pick up on emotions plus shut up and listen – regardless of your gender.  Now where’s something else to blame?

The other nine myths?

  • We only use 10% of our brain:  WRONG
  • Snapshot memories are accurate: WRONG
  • Its all downhill as we age: WRONG
  • We have five senses: WRONG ( she mentions two other senses)
  • The brain is hard wired and can’t be altered: WRONG
  • A blow to the head can cause amnesia:WRONG
  • We know what will make us happy: WRONG
  • We see the world accurately:WRONG

Posted in Communication Tips, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Negotiation Skills, Personal Presence, Relationship Management | 2 Comments »

Slides as handouts? Two into one won’t go

Sunday, August 28th, 2011
slides-as-handouts-two-into-one-wont-go

Imagine you are sitting in an audience.  There’s quite a complicated presentation going on and you are attempting to follow it.  The presenter is using a lot of slides with several sentences on every slide.

What do you do?  Keep listening to the speaker and ignore the slides completely, or attempt to read the slides whilst the speaker keeps talking?  Neither option works.  Either you try to ignore the distraction of the slides and listen – hard to do.  Or you can chose the opposite – while you struggle to read the slide, the speaker has moved on to a new topic.

Don’t try to use slides as hand-outs for the audience to take away.  They are attending a face-to-face communication, not reading a book. Reading and listening are two completely different forms of communications, using different mental processes.  Audiences can’t read slides and listen at the same time. In fact, If you have too much on the slides, they are very hard to read on their own, even without the complication of listening.

I’ve talked previously about how brief good slide content must be.  Basically – hardly any words.  Let’s face it: If the slides were any use to someone who hadn’t attended the presentation, they probably didn’t communicate well during it!

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has a good example of using speaker notes plus slides for a reasonable compromise on the slide+hand-out front.

Posted in Personal Presence, Presentation skills, Public Speaking, Speeches | No Comments »

Goals and a Tour de France cycling trip

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
goals-and-a-tour-de-france-cycling-trip

I am just back from cycling parts of the Tour de France with Adventure Travel.  We biked most of the big climbs and although I’d trained a lot by my standards, it was still long and challenging.  Given that my cycling is in the category of ‘weekend warrior’, biking those climbs gave me plenty of time to reflect on the challenges of working towards goals.

From the depths of huffing and puffing, here are my thoughts:

  1. Whilst your goal can seem totally daunting when you gaze up at it, once you really set out  it is never quite as hard as it look.
  2. You may be slow, but when you have committed to the goal, it really is a matter of just keeping on doing what you have to do until you get there.
  3. Take all the advice you can get – you never know what small thing can make a big difference.
  4. Find some spectators to offer encouragement – they help enormously.
  5. When you finally make it to the top, take the time to look back down where you came from – wow what a feeling of satisfaction!

Posted in Community involvement, Leadership, Personal Presence, Time Management | No Comments »

Gaining some positives from difficult events

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
gaining-some-positives-from-difficult-events

Ever felt that life has thrown you a tough one?  Are you facing some major difficulty, or lack a talent you really want to have?  A friend enabled me to rediscover a legend that once helped me find a way through a difficult period in my life.  Here it is:

A  water bearer in China had two large pots hung on the ends of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the perfect pot would always be full of water, but the cracked pot would arrive only half full. For two years, this went on every day, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor and cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do. After two years of perceived bitter failure, the cracked pot spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.” The bearer replied to the pot, “Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and everyday while we walk back, you water them. For two years, I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers. Without you being the way you are, there would not be this beauty and grace in this house.”

When I first read that legend, our son had suffered a very serious brain injury.  The story caused me to seek  positive ways of responding to what was so sad and confronting. Very slowly I learnt that drastic as it was, there was still a lot to value in the situation.

Every experience has its value and what is very difficult right now may enable you to create a richness in life that was unavailable before.  It’s what you do with what has happened that creates happiness.

If you feel you really need a regular fix on positivity right now, tap into the Positivity Blog

Posted in Communication Tips, Leadership, Personal Presence | No Comments »

Feedback: Would the real problem please stand up?

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
feedback-would-the-real-problem-please-stand-up

Someone asked me last week what to do about a situation where the team member might fix all the examples of some aspect of poor performance that were discussed and yet that aspect of  performance will still  not really  improve.  

Get ready to dig deeper.  The disjoint  probably means that the discussion is not focusing on the real cause of the problem. Uuntil the team member owns the real problem, the rest is just window dressing.

  1. As you think about the issue, make sure you are focused on the right level.  Is there a deeper trend here that just shows up as a series of surface issues?
  2. Ask a source question: Why is this pattern occurring? Have you faced similar issues in other roles in your life? As you pose that question to the team member, don’t be the next person to speak!
  3. You can also state a neutral observation: ‘Even though you have suggested some changes you will make, I am getting the feeling that this isn’t going to improve the underlying problem’… and see what happens.

Remember there may be underlying issues you don’t know about.  This article suggests some possibilities.  The poor performance will be caused either by something to do with the staff member, or something to do with the system within the work team – or both.  If your goal is to create positive change, you may need to look around and look deeper.

Posted in Communication Tips, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Personal Presence, Relationship Management | No Comments »

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