The next time you find yourself gossiping about someone, or getting sucked into a reality television program, or letting destructive thoughts about that so-and-so invade your good humour, remember these words from Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
Rise above it all. The air’s nicer up there. Easier said than done of course, but you gotta keep trying, keep pushing.
I use a day book for work and play. It’s full of my appalling scrawl, which only I can read, occasionally. I like to take notes; it helps me commit things to memory.
Some people prefer to abandon paperwork altogether, preferring to keep their notes digital. I like to have my book with me and scribble away, unless I’m taking meeting minutes, in which case I will go digital too to save on time and avoid duplication.
Writing, or at least holding a pen, helps me think, and helps the thoughts flow and find meaning through meaningful connections.
My day book is my bible. It would be almost as bad for me to lose my day book as it would my laptop. I don’t like other people writing on it. I was once in a meeting with someone senior who I had only met that day, and who wanted to answer my question with an illustration. In a weak moment, I said he could use my notepad. He turned the page to the next double spread and scrawled away in the middle of it, a small two-by-two matrix he could have easily verbalised for me. In later days I ‘fenced off’ his scrawl and wrote notes from later meetings around it.
Here are some of the things I do to make my day book as useful as possible.
Day books are great. They’re your indispensable companion for the weeks, months and years.
Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.
Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.
A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.
Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂
A well organised, well prepared team will always beat a disorganised, unprepared team with a few stellar players. We’ve all seen it, from amateur teams all the way through to the elite professional levels. The world-beating teams are there because of their painstaking approach to preparation, strategy and execution, and having stellar players doesn’t hurt.
I was recently watching the BBC annual sports love-in called Sports Personality of the Year. It’s not really about personality as such, although you do get the odd winner with personality, like cyclist Bradley Wiggins a few years ago. Last year’s winner was tennis player Andy Murray, who freely admits he’s a touch short-changed on the charisma front and who gets tagged a lot with the d-words: dogged, dour, determined.
Except that Andy Murray beat out the other 11 finalists – who were all world champions and world number ones – to take the crown. Andy is at the time of writing world number 2 but won no grand slams or the end of year bash last year. He won it principally because Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time in about a thousand years. As a side note, thank goodness it’s a Britain thing, because England would be in the bottom tier if the 3 nations competed separately.
The Great Britain team also won the team award as well.
A good team trumps good individuals. It’s the same in business, and especially in sales and marketing. All the more reason for us to stay focused on preparation, strategy and execution.
Do you know what really helps accelerate the sales cycle? Intensity.
Oftentimes you’ll hear about sports people – players or pundits – talking about having good intensity, or lacking intensity when their performance was flat. Intensity is about being fully engaged in the sale, and fully engaged with the customer, for want of a better word.
Intensity in a sales and business context is a word similar to the phrase ‘rightful impatience’, which a former boss of mine used to use. And you can add to that adjectives like enthusiastic, passionate and committed.
When you have the right intensity, you’re ‘in the moment’ more often with your customer, in sync with their requirements, their hopes and their concerns. This has the effect of bringing them more swiftly on the journey towards buying from you. You’re sweeping them up with your emotion, in a good way, a way that is focused on the mutual goal of their satisfaction.
In a selling relationship, it’s often not okay to be intense. This is a characteristic that some customers find difficult to work with. However it’s good to have intensity in your approach. There is an important difference here. Good intensity make good things happen more quickly.
Sometimes, when you’re too busy to see the work for the trees, it’s difficult to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyse if you could be doing it better.
Process is so important to what we’re doing. You have to get the right steps in place and then make sure you’re doing the steps in the right order.
When I was much younger I was staying in my Uncle’s pub for a while and I was washing his car. After a few minutes he came out and said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m washing the wheels,’ I replied. You see, the wheels are the fiddly filthy bits that I wanted to get out of the way first.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but now the water’s filthy for washing everything else. Start with the windows and glass first, then go from the top of the car down to the bottom. And start again with clean water.’
Process. You have to get the order right, and you have to do the right things too.
Workflow, as the name suggests, is about the flow of work, the process you go through. If you don’t get the workflow as good as it can be, you work slow, or you work poorly.
You hear the word ‘engagement’ all the time in business. ‘How will we engage on this deal?’ ‘We’ve got to get the customer engagement right,’ and so on.
It’s an unhelpful word to my mind. It’s not a customer-centric or friendly word. It’s all about ‘me’.
There’s a ‘me’ in engagement and it’s my view that the word makes us think on our terms and not on our customers’ terms. I don’t feel like I have the problem correctly framed nor the priorities right when I’m using the word engagement.
We engage our enemies in battle, because it’s about us and we want to win. We don’t engage (with) our customers, we want them to win.
My Mum has recently acquired two baby tortoises. They’re about 3 months old and both of them would fit on a dollar bill with plenty of room around and between them.
She’s called them Yin and Yang, because they’re quite different in personality. In fact they’re opposite, which makes their names pretty inspired I think.
It got me thinking about how you have to look at the other side of something to help you fix the first side. There are often two sides to every story or situation so it makes sense to look at both.
I blogged recently about staying positive. Of course, one of the best ways of staying positive is to remove the negative, to strip it away so that it becomes emasculated and weedy.
Staying healthy in body and mind, in business and in leisure, is a lot about stripping out negativity. Negativity is like a weight around your neck, pulling you down into the vortex. Free yourself from that weight and rise up. Fire up the hot air balloon and chocks away, to mix one’s aviation metaphors…
When you’re in a discussion about something, and in descends into an argument, it inevitably becomes emotional. This is especially true and unhelpful in business.
In these situations you tend to get a lot of ‘heat’ and not much ‘light’. In other words, there’s too much emotion and not enough inspiration.
I have a short temper and I find it’s easy for me to let a discussion descend into something unhealthy. There should be no room for emotion when you’re trying to fix or improve something, yet we find it very hard not to give it a seat at the table.
I find it much easier to do in business, but you have to demote emotion and recognise it for what it is, an instinctive response to change, stress, and a loss of control. The better you can remove emotion from the equation, the easier it is to get the right answer, to get the sums to add up.
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