Category Archives: Motivation

Having faith goes a long way – especially when things get rough

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Faith in yourself that is.

Look, I have been through quite a rollercoaster ride lately: got a cataract surgery that turned into a retinal detachment, leaving me stranded at home for 4 weeks. And three out of which I had to spend the whole day (night included) with the head straight up. No driving of the car allowed, just stay put and wait for it to heal. I know understand a bit how prisoners at home do feel. Yeah, punishment.

And this one piled in on another issue of relative exhaustion due to another problem that is now cured. I am glad this is behind me, I can tell you!

As an independent professional, this means an income drop, shifted timelines, and too much idle time on my hands. Having a number of proposals open with prospects, this got me nervous obviously.

Choice is yours

There are two choices here. Either enter the realm of the victim and complain on how unfair things are or take it as yet another opportunity to learn.

And that’s rooted in your faith in yourself. The faith that things are going to be better, that you’ll come out of it better in a way or another. As for anything, the first sale is to yourself!

So, what can be learned here?

Here is my take:

  1. Do not expect to kick back on your feet that fast after full anaesthesia, this will help keeping realistic expectations.
  2. Call prospects and clients to tell them about your issue. Most of them will understand. How would you react if they called you with a health problem? If they don’t do you really want to work with such people? Thinking about it, I don’t.
  3. It is a great idea to have insurance for those cases. I muttered every time I saw the bill but it turned to be a great idea. After talking with a few people, it is astonishing that a lot of them aren’t covered. Look, it is not a matter of “if” here, it is a matter of “when”! Get one.
  4. Make sure you have either credit lines, cash in the bank, or any other form of credit secured at all times. It will come handy when you will need it. Bills do not care about your state. And have faith that you’ll be able to generate enough new business to come back from the deep. Do not wait to be thirsty to go to the well.
  5. Call upon your support system: loved ones, family, and friends. Don’t bury yourself in a hole. It is bad for the mood and bad for the speed of recovery. Ask them to bring you something special, it will lighten the day.
  6. Take care of the quality of your food intake. I am leaning towards organic food and it helps a lot. As a general rule, HiQ nutrients help, especially with brain work. Don’t feast on greasy, oily, sugary foods.
  7. Medical care improves by leaps and bounds. Procedures are much improved from 10 years ago. There are new devices to measure, new materials, new lenses. And I met great people: surgeons, assistants, nurses. These are people who care.
  8. Take care of yourself first. If you don’t, you can’t be fully in the moment when it is needed.
  9. Turn idleness into opportunity. Read (or listen to) new material, focus on something alien to your habits. Open horizons.

So, to reach your top 3 outcomes, even when they just seem to swoosh miles away further, you need to have faith in your ability to resume the quest in a way or another. Yeah, you need to be an optimist!

Until next time, keep the faith!

–Philippe Back

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How to identify your top 3 outcomes?

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Yes, how to identify them? Let’s have a shot.

5 key areas

First of all, let’s look at the five key areas of life:

  • financial
  • intellectual
  • physical
  • spiritual
  • relational

Picture yourself at the center of these 5.

At this very moment in your life, are you financially happy, intellectually happy, physically happy, spiritually happy, relationally happy? Do you want more out of one area?

Pick an area of importance to you.

Of enough importance to make you invest time and energy in getting to the next level.

Write it down. Come on, do it, write it down on a scrap of paper.

A basic question

Now, ask yourself this basic question:

 

How would I know when I’d reach ‘it’ in that very area?

 

Yes, how would you know? Because without an indicator, you aren’t gonna get very real on this one.

The more precise you can get on the indicator, the better. Nobody said it couldn’t be qualitative by the way.

And an outcome doesn’t need to be Earth shattering to be a top outcome. Just that it is of enough importance for you to commit to get in motion towards it. For long enough and with enough resolve so that there is a pretty good chance you’ll make it.

So, now turn your attention to the ‘it‘ bit. Now that you have an indicator, it is much easier to define this ‘it‘ more clearly.

Now write down: 

 

Top outcome in ….. : ……

I’d know I’ll be there when: … is true…

Reality check

You may well have been rationalizing all the way down. Yes, your mental mind may have done all the work. So, what is your gut telling you now? How do you feel when reading back aloud what you just wrote down? Try it. Repeat. Do you feel excitement?, fear?, butterflies in the belly? If there is nothing, you aren’t exactly looking a anything resembling a top outcome.
But if you do, there is something in there!

Rinse and repeat, until you have your three

Pick another area, or the same, it doesn’t matter. Do as the spirit moves you. And go through the process again. You just will have to do the reality check at the end until you have your three.

Formulation done!

If you are here without cheating, congratulations. If not, let’s wonder why you didn’t went through. Stop reading down and go through, will you?

Good.

Now that you have your list, the first step is set: formulating your top 3 outcomes.

Next in line, materializing these outcomes into the world.

But that will be for another time!

Until then, make sure you get the butterflies in there.

–Philippe

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Apple brings an effective value upload pipe to the world

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Apple released iBooks2 and a new textbook creation app for the Mac (You’ll need Lion for that, and even if these things are free, they’ll end up pocketing money from that new tide of upgrades – I know they will from me).

Keynote already made a huge difference to helping me communicate to an audience (people seeing the presentations tell me regularly: hey, this is definitely *not* a PowerPoint, it looks waay better, and is more effective!).

So, I was using it on my iPad to convey ideas in meetings, where it brings a sense of closeness and bonding that helps in securing business.

But with the textbooks that do come to life, we enter a new dimension. Think about all Seth Godin PDFs in the form of animated Textbooks, think about curated content with comments on a given subject put together and released to the world!

Mmh, in a sense, it is weird that this is announced aroud the time SOPA gets protested and MegaVideo got busted by the FBI. But I may digress.

Anyway, this is a super gift for all of us who have value to share. And sharing this way is really making it all exciting. That’s what Apple products have succeeded in doing: getting people involved in getting excited again. It is not happening with Linux, it is not happening with Windows. It is happening with Apple products, and a bit less with Android phones.

I’ve bet a lot of the farm on Apple. Not because I am any kind of fanboi, but because it is the logical thing to do when a cash-laden company uses it to roll out such innovative and stimulating stuff ot the world.

That’s what Apple is strong with: cash-loaded, innovative, master of their supply chain, and controlling the delivery channel. Walled garden? Sure! But generating money and recognition for the players: very very true indeed! Love, money, recognition: they made it so that you get the three assembled with Apple.

That’s what leadership is about: instilling the motivation to follow and make your best.

So, Apple may lead to people challenging jumping off buildings at Foxconn (and doing something about it, as was reported) but they also deliver us these.

I started with an Apple II eons ago, moved off when they were out of fancy, and am back to them 20+ years later. Yet another proof that you can turn things over given the right decisions. Quite different from Kodak. But quite alike to Fujitsu.

Some more info: http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/this-is-how-apple-changes-education-forever/

 

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To reach your outcomes, you need to be an optimist

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Even if the world seems to be crumbling down

As 2011 draws to a close, with the economy appearing to be sliding down, and Eurozone’s debt going exponentially up, I sometimes wonder if there is any rhyme or reason in all of this. Times are getting tougher, that’s a fact. Kind of stormy would be a better description.

But times are also getting new. And different. Times that do require a better innovative stance and a clear strategy to make things happen. Whoever recognizes this upfront will be better off in the times ahead of us.

That’s why you need to be an optimist.

That’s the rational choice. Being a pessimist will only let you in the dust. You can’t keep the required drive and energy if you let the pessimist side of you takes over.

I am not a natural optimist mind you. The more I look in depth, the more educated I become, the more reasons I get to be pessimistic. Call that being a realist. That’s what you also get from having been formerly trained as a civil engineer: a talent for seeing what could be wrong and how to prevent it from happening. A talent for precision and sharp understanding through cold-blooded examination. That’s what makes planes safe and bridges okay to cross. And machine guns effective.

But that’s not what gets you to your top goals. What keeps you ‘safe’ isn’t what makes you reach your top 3 outcomes (if your outcomes are to be safe, all right. Then what about keeping it so in the long term?).

 

 Beliefs are key

For getting to your top 3 outcomes, you need to believe that it will be okay despite hardship, that hardship is only transient, and that you have all the resources you need to succeed. And that you can brush off failures as something that is not associated with you personally. That events or others made it so. Not you. You need to believe that you are better than others at the game. You need to believe that opportunity is there and will show up. You need to believe that you can find out all the help you’ll need when the time will come.
In a previous newsletter, I told you about the fact that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. As a matter of fact, preparation includes a serious edge towards optimism.

Getting there

All right, but how to turn optimisitic when the general slant of the population is towards pessimism? (We have a kind of depression epidemia upon us in the western world, burnouts abound, as do deeper or masked forms of depression. So, if you are in a medical condition, nothing I say here will be of any use, check with your doctor first).

Some key insights:

  1. Realize that optimism is a learnable competency. Yes, it is.
  2. Get educated about positive psychology. Recommended reading: Martin Seligman’s learned optimism.
  3. Focus on leveraging your strengths. Stack the odds in your favor by taking the road that helps you instead of the hardest road of all.
  4. Build a support system and get rid of pessimistic mavens that chant doom and gloom. Especially if they do that for a living.
  5. Formulate a strategy and focus on making it true by executing, nothing beats sharp focus when it comes to leaving pessimism behind. Action and anxiety are mutually exclusive.
  6. Take time to relax. When the storm comes, the most exhausted get taken away first. The physiological informs the mental. And back. Without a conscious decision to take care well of yourself, how could you ever be optimistic?
  7. Check you diet. Eating crap with tons of sugar will for sure not help keeping you positive and optimistic when sugar and insulin take you to a roller coaster ride thrice in a day.
  8. Make space for fun. All work and no play makes anyone a dull person. How optimistic can one feel when chained for all day long? My dog isn’t. Why would you?
  9. Naysayers can only go so far. Do not become one, it will not help you in any way. You do not want to develop any “create own deep frustration” skill, right?

And do not become nervous about becoming too much of an optimist: hundreds of thousands of years left enough of a trace to keep you safe in the world no matter how optimistic you become!

Wishing you a (very) happy (wonderful) new (optimistic) year,

Optimistically yours!

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Getting luck on your side

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It is a fact of life that we have a limited amount of time available.
Much less than we usually think.
That’s why it is very important to be careful about how we allocate it if we want to reach our top 3 outcomes.
To reach our top 3 outcomes, whatever they are, we would love to have luck on our side. There is indeed a component of luck involved in reaching our top 3 outcomes. A lot of factors can sway our efforts in the wrong direction. Bad things happen.

So, what’s luck in the first place? As far as I concerned I define luck as “preparation meeting opportunity.”

Yep, that’s it, preparation. You need to be prepared to jump right away on the opportunity as it presents itself to you. The unprepared will say “well, you know, I was unlucky and I was unable to seize the opportunity…”

And the more you prepare, the more you’ll be able to spot opportunities as well as you’ll hone your skills.

But beware, do not drown yourself in preparation. Make sure that you prepare on real cases, not just looking at books or discussing without purpose.

That’s the difference between knowledge and skill. Skill is what you are after. Skill is knowledge that has been applied to real world situations. You have been through the issues, you have a real solid learning. That’s not fluff. That’s not hot hair. As a side note, it is much better to have a grain of skill than 100 cubic meters of hot air on a given subject, no matter what the noise the hot air crew makes!

But then the next problem occurs: which skills are going to help us meet the opportunity we want to seize? And what opportunity are we interested in in the first place? In the previous newsletter we looked at a bunch of questions to help you do just that. Identify your outcomes. At least the areas where you want them to be.

There is no way to get away without this. You need to be clear on youroutcomes first. And with a kind of metric so that you know when you are there, or close enough to consider it reached successfully.

Which leads us to the most difficult thing to do when you want to reach your top 3 outcomes: saying no to a lot of other stuff. You see, if you choose to pursue your top 3 outcomes, or even one of them, you’ll need to stop chasing other things. And that means saying “no.” It means that you have made a choice. And making a choice is saying no to what is not that choice.

Say you want your firm to be well known in the marketplace so that it attracts customers for its very specific value proposition. All right. But if you want to get there, and get there fast, you’ll need to focus on making it true. Learn how to do it, maybe staff for getting it done. Channel your resources to make it happen. No matter what, you’ll have to say no to other things because nobody has infinite resource (not even Microsoft, Google or Apple: they all let go products that do not catch up).

So, this month, let’s reflect on what you’ll say no to:

  • letting go of old habits that make no sense in the pursuit of youroutcomes (these are just time leeches)
  • letting go of people that do not contribute to your outcomes, or people who are sabotaging your effort (what a relief!)
  • letting go of projects that have been on the backburner for too long and have nothing to contribute to your outcomes (it will make more space available in your mind)
  • stop making commitments just to “look nice” and “because you have to.” (2 minutes to say no, more satisfaction for hours by focusing on what matters instead of pleasing others)

Choosing is saying no. And if you do not choose, others will do it for you.
Wouldn’t it be better to act on your agenda rather than on theirs, by default?

Until next time, let’s say no to crap and yes to luck!
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Leadership and dogs

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The old way: get the dog to comply through usage of fear. Also know as: the owner as oppressor and dictator. Negative reinforcement.

The new way: get the dog to commit through the usage of leadership. Also known as: the owner as leader and guide. Positive reinforcement.

I find it very interesting that dogs and humans have so much in common here. And I never really understood why people in charge too often choose the dictatorship avenue.

So, if you really are interested in positive outcomes from a committed team, you know what to do!

 

 

 

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