Being in the Zone

May 23, 2014 //
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Here’s a phrase you hear quite a bit: I was in the zone. No you weren’t! Well, I doubt you really were.

This is different from another kind of business phrase using the word zone. We should get out of our comfort zone as much as we can to really grow.

Being in the zone is that rare event of moving or doing without necessarily knowing you’re doing it. It’s even rarer than having a purple patch, to coin another over-used term. It feels like gliding, this act of being unconsciously conscious.

I can only think of a handful of times when I’ve been in the zone.  For me it’s a bit like a state of shallow hypnosis, like when you’re driving on the motorway and you suddenly realise that you have no recollection of the previous 15 minutes. The active brain seems to step out and the thousands of hours of muscle memory take over. It happened once when I was coxing a Men’s Eight at rowing and we seemed to fly along the surface of the water. I played table tennis for 30 years and can remember only a few times when I played a rally where I thought ‘I don’t know how I got to that ball,’ or ‘ I didn’t know I even had that shot in my kitbag.’

In maybe 30 years of football I can’t ever remember being in the zone. I think it’s a very rare place. When someone tells you to ‘get in the zone’, they want you to concentrate better. You can’t simply get in the ‘real’ zone when the mood takes you. That’s why professional athletes spend years honing their skills so that they find themselves in that happy place as often as they can manage, and ideally when they most need to.

Here’s a thought for you.  Was there ever an incident when you genuinely got in the zone at work, when your brilliance made your customer, partner or colleague so successful and almost past you by? Somehow, it seems harder to achieve at work, which is a pity since it occupies most of us for most of 5 days out of 7.

 

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Categories Communication, Language

Some Advice on the Word Advise

May 21, 2014 //
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Never know if you should be spelling those pesky little words like practice, advice etc with a ‘c’ or an ‘s’?

As with a lot of things, it depends on the context, that is to say whether you’re using a noun or a verb.

My Dad explained it this way to me once and I never forgot it: You advise some advice, and you practise some practice. As long as you remember to say it practIZE, and spell it practISE, you’ll be laughing.

Easy! Bear in mind, though, that this holds true for British English, not so much so for the other strains of English. Sorry!

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Making It Look Easy

May 19, 2014 //
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The trouble with people making something look easy is that we all think we can do it, so we give it a try and either get an appreciation that’s it not easy at all and try to get better at it, or get depressed that we’ll never get that good and give up.

When you see great sport, or you hear a great song, or watch any kind of great performance, business or pleasure, what you don’t see is the 10,000+ hours of practice that culminated in making something look easy, effortless even. It is the thousands of hours that enables an expert to control time, in the sense that they seem to create more time for themselves or else can execute flawless timing.

We all operate our work, art or sport at certain levels, and when we see someone performing what we do at a level or levels above us, it’s not just that they make the level they’re at look easy. Even though they’re doing the same thing as us – playing the same sport, singing the same song, performing the same job – they’re actually doing something different. That’s when you say, or hear someone say something like ‘now that’s proper tennis/entertainment/marketing’ (delete as applicable).

There are two ways to fix this. One way is to practice more, and keep practising, to get better. The other is to avoid being compared with them.

 

 

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Categories Communication, General

I’m Alright Jack

May 16, 2014 //
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Ach, how to rid ourselves of the scourge of the self-servers, people who always put themselves ahead of others! In English, we say ‘I’m alright Jack’ to refer to these kinds of undesirable people.

In Irish, we call them ‘me feiners’. Here’s a good example of someone – a pretty laconic and articulate Kiwi as it happens, using the word to describe someone else.

It doesn’t matter in what walk of life or work you’re in, the me feiner is to be avoided, shunned even. They don’t pay back, they take but don’t give, they feather their own bed. If you’re in sales or marketing, you won’t last the course if you put yourself first the whole time. Success in those spheres is based on partnership, equity, balance, equilibrium. A fair exchange of effort, investment and reward.

You may be alright Jack, but not for long.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Moustaches

May 14, 2014 //
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Moustaches are odd things. I’ve written about these tonsorial aberrations before. You can only really get away with them if you’re a biker or a colonel.

Or a local councillor. At election time you see posters everywhere for encumbent or would be candidates. An alarming number of the faces have moustaches – or mustaches as our American friends would write.

Local councillors are a bit like the police or traffic wardens. They never seem to live where you do. Where do they live? In a parallel universe perhaps, or perhaps birds of a feather do indeed stay together, preferring their own company.

So I suppose we define ourselves and our company by either choosing to wear a moustache, or choosing not to wear one. For me, there’s nothing quite like it to signal where you feel you belong.

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Categories Communication, General

The Unfavourable Comparison

May 12, 2014 //
2

If matters are within your control, you should avoid comparisons which reflect unfavourably on yourself. If matters are outside your control, it’s a really tough hand.

About a hundred years ago, I applied to join Oxford University. Back then you had to take a few special exams and then name the three colleges within the University that you wanted to attend, in descending order.

As I waited in the ante room of a Pembroke College Don’s rooms, I could vaguely hear a posh chap giving what his audience deemed a very well thought out answer to some no doubt bottomless conundrum.

After he came out – and he was particularly handsome – and before I went in, I got a chance to drill him on his background, to see who I would be compared against. What school are you at? Finished at Eton in the summer. Yikes. How did your Advanced levels go? I got 4 grade A’s. Double yikes. Looks, breeding and intellect to spare, not good for me. I went in.

My only recollection of my interview is being asked to solve this: “Can you explain this conversation? One chap says that 10% of the working class are criminals. The other says that’s because 10% of criminals are working class.”

When you’re in an under pressure situation, and 17 years old – I hadn’t yet taken my ‘A’ Levels yet and was not especially mature for my age – the last thing you need is to have to talk through this little beauty. I rambled moronically for five minutes before we moved on.

Unsurprisingly, I was not offered a place. Yes, my friends, avoid the unfavourable comparison if you can manage it.

Categories General

Humour Often Starts with a Mistake

May 9, 2014 //
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Have you ever said something which was accidentally funny? Or made a joke intended to be interpreted one way and someone laughs at a completely different side to it?

I’m sure there are lots of great definitions of humour, but for me it’s simply drawing attention to the difference between an imagined situation and the real situation.

That difference providing the basis for the humour often seems to originate by mistake.  Something you mispronounced, or was mis-heard, or mis-understood. When two or more more comedy writers bounce ideas off each other as part of the creative and collaborative process, I wonder how much of the really good stuff originates by accident and then gets polished.

In the European Football – or Soccer to our North American and Irish friends – Championships of 2012, Group C which featured Spain, Ireland and Italy was called the Group of Debt, a witty variant on the term Group of Death. I’d like to think this elegant play on words originated in Ireland where sometimes ‘debt’ and ‘death’ sound indistinguishable, but apparently it had been coined the year before by a Brit.

My mistake :-).

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Categories Communication

The Mini Roundabout Minefield

May 7, 2014 //
2

What is it with mini-roundabouts? You don’t have them in the US as far as I can remember, favouring instead your 4-way stop junctions and that kind of thing. People’s ability to navigate roundabouts varies inversely according to their distance from the capital city. Out here in the country in the west of Ireland, they’re hilarious entertainment.

At mini-roundabouts with 4 or more approaching roads, people either wait at them politely, even though they might have the right of way, or else they blithely head on through without a care in the world. Farmers are legendary for this, on the rare occasion they venture out from their place of work.

Then you get mini-roundabout that were formerly T-junctions. At this treacherous kind of a roundabout, cars plough across the top of the T at great speed, in both directions, whereas those approaching the T edge up timidly to avoid being totalled, even though they might have the right of way.

So here, dear reader, I offer my rules for mini-roundabouts. By way of disclaimer, I should say that I have no idea if these are the highway code rules for your particular country, so don’t take them as gospel, but they make sense to me anyway. Note that they only apply to places where you drive on the left :-).

1) A mini-roundabout is like a proper roundabout, except that a proper roundabout might have 2 lanes, so your lane position is important.

2) A mini-roundabout is not like a large roundabout with traffic lights on it, or even a huge roundabout with lights on it, or a ‘huge-about’ as my daughter calls them. You simply obey the lights at these kinds of roundabouts.

3) You approach the mini- roundabout and give right of way to the cars on your right. So, if a car to your right is on the roundabout, or is close to the roundabout and if you pulled out you’d cause it to slow down, let the car pass and wait until the road to the right is clear.

4) Once on the roundabout, signal as you’re about to exit the roundabout. This lets the person know who’s giving right of way to you that you are coming off and they can get on.

5) If you don’t use your indicators, or if you keep your indicator on as you pass one or more exits, folk don’t know what you’re doing and will hate you for it.

Being a good driver is as much about communicating to other drivers what you’re doing as it is watching for what they’re doing. Pretend other drivers are your customers. You want to please them and improve their lives, right?

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

UK vs GB Explained

May 5, 2014 //
2

To most Europeans, almost all Americans and a good number of Brits, the differences between Great Britain and the United Kingdom can be a little confusing. The origins of the differences are pretty opaque too.

When you throw in the sporting paradigm, things continue to blur the situation. For example, Ireland – technically speaking The Republic of Ireland – and Northern Ireland are separate countries but unite as one geographical island of Ireland for Rugby Union. England, Scotland and Wales compete in many sports as a separate nations, but then come together as ‘Team GB’ for athletics and to compete in the Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth championship events.

I always think it’s a tad odd seeing winning athletes with a Union Jack flag draped round them, since it’s not the flag of the country they’re from, especially since they’re running for another ‘entity’ called Great Britain. And what is it to be British anyway? The Scots and Welsh don’t like being lumped into the ‘Brit’ melting pot, whereas the English seem to mind less, which probably has something to do with their overwhelming population and about a millennium of history.

Being English and belonging to Britain is different to being in a state like Kansas and belonging to a federation like the US, and different again to belonging to a regional entity like the European Union. Confused yet?

According to my passport I’m a citizen of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but I don’t know what it is to be British. I usually say I’m from England originally, which I find the most accurate. It’s probably best not to go into the politics of nationality, because that’s not the purpose of this post. What is the purpose of this post is this brilliant, witty account in a shade over 5 minutes of what the differences are between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom by CPG Grey. You also get some bonus info on stuff like British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It’s a real education; enjoy.

 

 

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Categories Communication, General

Vote for Blank

May 2, 2014 //
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Poster Epic Fail

Poster Epic Fail

So much of communication is down to execution. If you get the execution wrong, your message is not received, not understood, and not acted upon. Remember the age-old AIDA acronym – Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action.

As I write this, we have some local and European government elections coming up. In the case of the candidate’s poster in the picture above, he – yes, the budding politician is male – is hoping to get your awareness that he’s standing for election, that you will connect with his message, that you will decide to vote for him, and that you will follow through on your decision on the appointed day in the polling booth, when the rubber meets the road.

Hence the epic fail in the picture. The poster has been like that for over a week. Whether blown that way in the wind, or put up that way for reasons that we will never know, the execution of the message has failed – miserably.

This is a lesson to all of us to check that we have executed the communication well. Did you get my message? Do you understand all elements of the proposal? Can you confirm we are OK to proceed?

Always look for confirmation that you can proceed at each step of a process. It’s the short cut to nailing success and avoiding misunderstandings.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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