How do you convince people to like you and give you a break?
Here’s a core principle of human behavior, so simple: When people receive something they value, they’re more inclined to give back in return. Pretty obvious, right? But it’s absolutely true, and is one of the reasons why those charities send you small gifts in the mail. They’re hoping you’ll find some value in them, and give back in return.
This has been an eventful week for me and my business – a key turning point. This is the week I moved from planning to doing.
It’s scary, but it’s so wonderful to be doing what feels to be such useful activity.
Well, we survived the first decade of the third millennium. It’s been an amazing and ever-accelerating ride for me, and I hope that you can see your own sparks of potential which will help you build your own future success.
Now it’s time to look forward:
When I was growing up as a child in the 1960s, I thought about the upcoming turn of the century – 2000 seemed so impossibly far away. But here we are, ten years AFTER entering this new millennium, and it’s disappeared so quickly!
Ten years I was employed in Hewlett-Packard, just beginning to discover this new emerging field called coaching. I was managing a team that was embroiled in the whole Y2K issue, worried that all our hard preparation might not have been enough to ward off customer problems on January 1st. As it turns out, things went remarkably well.
Sometimes it seems like I’m hard-wired to look for risks, for dangers. Perhaps I am. So here’s a powerful question that I use to help break me out of that mindset:
What’s the best that could happen?
Nobody likes a braggart. But there are times where you need to promote yourself – to your boss, to potential customers, to future employers. How do you promote yourself in a way which doesn’t come across as shameless and inauthentic?
Here’s the trick: You promote in a way which is well-founded, or where promotion isn’t the primary message.
As you might know, I was in London this week attending the followup class to the Coaching Fundamentals class I took back in September. That class was, in essence, the high level overview of the process, so the last few days were much more deep study and practice around some key areas:
How many times do you know what the right thing is to do, but lack the courage to act upon it? Humans are wonderful at rationalizing, at finding creative excuses to avoid doing what’s hard. Myself included, of course.
I had a chance to attend a fantastic workshop this morning, led by the incomparable Gus Lee. Never heard of him? He’s a leader in challenging people to find and develop a core of character in their lives.
There’s more than a little fuzziness around the concept of “soft skills.” “Hard skills” are thought of as those technical abilities which often lend their name to an entire profession: designing, architecture, repairing, nursing, and so on. These are easy to identify because there’s a specific body of knowledge around each, and they’re the kind of things that our schools teach.
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