Achieve more in life.
Simon Raybould
This user hasn't shared any biographical information
Homepage: http://www.lifehack.org
Posts by Simon Raybould
Just…BREATHE
May 16th
One of the things I like about my job is that I can do things like watch iTunesU…and claim it’s work.
While doing that recently I came across a lecture by Dr Margaret Chesney of the UCSF Osher Centre for Integrative Medicine. It’s a long (nearly 90 minutes long) lecture ,but the contents are great if you’re trying to find tools for coping and dealing the crud life throws at you. So I’ve put together a summary in this piece.
(If you want the subtlties you’ll just have to listen through for yourself.)
There’s a lot in common with the work of people like Professor Martin Seligman’s work on confidence and happiness (and so on), but there’s a new twist to it too — which is covered a lot more in the video than in this summary.
In short…it’s based on the acronym BREATHE.
B
Be in the moment. Simple. Make a point of noticing what’s going on around you, right here, right now. Try some conscious breathing exercises to help increase your awareness. (You can have a look at almost any writing about ‘mindfulness‘ to help you here, too.) The important thing is to become aware of the here-and-now.
R
Realistic goals – set ‘em. Don’t set yourself targets that you can’t possibly achieve. That way you’re making things worse for yourself because you’re setting yourself up for a continuous stream of failure. By all means stretch yourself but don’t over-stretch yourself. Stretch shouldn’t become ‘strain’.
E
Everyday events – notice them. Dr Chesney has a lovely moment of pointing out to people that they really hate not being able to breathe easily when they’ve got a cold… and they hate it… and they notice it… but how many people notice it when they’ve not got a cold and can breathe easily? Things like ‘gratitude logs’ help here.
Or just stop, right now, and do nothing for a few minutes except jot down the good things around you that you should be grateful for.. and that you are grateful for, now you’ve taken the time to think of them! Let’s start with the fact that you’ve got eyes that work enough to read this (or something to read it for you!) and electricity to work your computer to display it…. you get the idea!
A
Acts of kindness – do ‘em! Creating positive moments for other people makes you feel better and makes you feel better about yourself. Quite apart from that, it makes their day better too! Making the world a better place one act of kindness at a time? Cool!
T
Turn around the negatives. This one’s a challenge. It’s about reframing stuff and finding the ‘silver lining’ to your cloud. Sure it’s not easy and some things just don’t have a silver lining that you can find at the time but a lot of stuff does. Most things in fact. Almost everything.
No one is saying it’s easy or that bad stuff isn’t bad stuff – just that trying to use the bad stuff and mitigate it with a sliver of good is better than just being a victim.
H
Honour your strengths – be true to yourself. Be true to your values. Be true to what you’re good at – and admit that you’re good at things. Make a point of listing them. Don’t pretend you don’t have any – false modesty isn’t anything to be proud of… and people see through it easily enough anyway recognising it as a form of arrogance. So what’s wrong with just accepting to yourself that you’re good at something – and then acting on it!!?
E
End each day with gratitude – check what has happened that day. Go over it and find the good in it. For those things that weren’t so good, decide what you can do about them. What can you learn; what can you do differently? If there’s nothing (really?!!?) let go. Sleep well, knowing that you’ve got a plan and you’re not wallowing in the bad…. :)
I hope I’ve done Dr Chesney justice. If you want the full thing, here you go!
(Photo credit: Breathe via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
When Life Hacks You Off
Apr 19th
How often have you been given some really, really good advice in your life? I’ll put money on it being a lot more often than the number of times you’ve taken it. And conversely I’ll bet you’ve offered really, really good advice far more often than it’s been taken.
(As an aside I’ll wager that the times good advice is taken is pretty similar to the number of times the advice matched what the person receiving the advice wanted to do in the first place! But that’s very much an aside to my main point!)
The point is this: it’s always easier to solve other people’s problems than your own. Admit it, you know it is. It’s the way coaching works, after all. Coaches don’t have answers – what they have are questions. Or better yet, reflections of your own questions – making you look at things (problems) in a different light. And hopefully a more productive one.
There are a few tools you can use yourself to take advantage of this clarity of vision without the expense of a coach and I’ve listed some of them here. They don’t remove the need for a good coach if you’ve got a significant problem but will certainly help for the day to day problems of life…ask yourself this question:
“If a friend of mine came to me with this problem, what would I ask them and what would I suggest?”
There now. Simple…isn’t it!
Let’s take a personal example where life hacks you off. Someone I know is in an abusive domestic relationship. That’s all you need to know from the outside to know what she should do next – leave. From the inside, however all she can see are the reasons why she shouldn’t leave and can’t leave. In other words, all she sees are the problems, not the end/solution.
Okay, I’ve over-simplified to make the point but I’m sure you get the idea.
Less importantly, a friend of mine has a car which is falling apart and he doesn’t have the time or the money to maintain it. At the moment it’s still worth quite a bit of cash but the odds are very much that within the next six months it’ll devalue spectacularly. From the outside the solution is simple – sell – but from the inside it all looks very different. Ask yourself this question:
“I know I don’t know what to do to solve my problem, but if I did know the answer, what might that answer be?”
Yes, I know it sounds silly but what it does is allow you to get past the automatic self-filtering of ideas that everyone does when they sort of know what to do but don’t want to admit it to themselves.
This one is – in my personal experience at least – particularly useful in business settings for problems such as what to do about rising advertising costs, or falling income predictions or a member of staff who’s under-performing…ask yourself this question
“If I wanted to explain the situation to someone else, what would I say?”
Try writing the problem down – the best format is to imagine you’re writing a letter to someone you absolutely trust but who you’ve not managed to keep up to date with – which means they won’t know the ins and outs of your issues.
That in turn means you’ll have to explain the problem to them in simple steps, giving them all the information they need to solve your problem but only the key things they need to know. Often you’ll find that the things you need to do come to you just in the process of writing this letter because you’re forcing yourself to structure your thinking and looking at the problem (and only the problem) not all the fluff and anxiety that lies around it.
If you don’t get inspired by the process of writing, try posting it to yourself somewhere else, so that when you read it you’re in a different environment. Address it to yourself using a different name to the one you normally think of yourself as… in other words, treat this letter as though it was coming from a friend.
Chances are…you’ll spot a way forward.
(Photo credit: Closeup Image of Vision Flow via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
When Life Hacks You Off
Apr 19th
How often have you been given some really, really good advice in your life? I’ll put money on it being a lot more often than the number of times you’ve taken it. And conversely I’ll bet you’ve offered really, really good advice far more often than it’s been taken.
(As an aside I’ll wager that the times good advice is taken is pretty similar to the number of times the advice matched what the person receiving the advice wanted to do in the first place! But that’s very much an aside to my main point!)
The point is this: it’s always easier to solve other people’s problems than your own. Admit it, you know it is. It’s the way coaching works, after all. Coaches don’t have answers – what they have are questions. Or better yet, reflections of your own questions – making you look at things (problems) in a different light. And hopefully a more productive one.
There are a few tools you can use yourself to take advantage of this clarity of vision without the expense of a coach and I’ve listed some of them here. They don’t remove the need for a good coach if you’ve got a significant problem but will certainly help for the day to day problems of life…ask yourself this question:
“If a friend of mine came to me with this problem, what would I ask them and what would I suggest?”
There now. Simple…isn’t it!
Let’s take a personal example where life hacks you off. Someone I know is in an abusive domestic relationship. That’s all you need to know from the outside to know what she should do next – leave. From the inside, however all she can see are the reasons why she shouldn’t leave and can’t leave. In other words, all she sees are the problems, not the end/solution.
Okay, I’ve over-simplified to make the point but I’m sure you get the idea.
Less importantly, a friend of mine has a car which is falling apart and he doesn’t have the time or the money to maintain it. At the moment it’s still worth quite a bit of cash but the odds are very much that within the next six months it’ll devalue spectacularly. From the outside the solution is simple – sell – but from the inside it all looks very different. Ask yourself this question:
“I know I don’t know what to do to solve my problem, but if I did know the answer, what might that answer be?”
Yes, I know it sounds silly but what it does is allow you to get past the automatic self-filtering of ideas that everyone does when they sort of know what to do but don’t want to admit it to themselves.
This one is – in my personal experience at least – particularly useful in business settings for problems such as what to do about rising advertising costs, or falling income predictions or a member of staff who’s under-performing…ask yourself this question
“If I wanted to explain the situation to someone else, what would I say?”
Try writing the problem down – the best format is to imagine you’re writing a letter to someone you absolutely trust but who you’ve not managed to keep up to date with – which means they won’t know the ins and outs of your issues.
That in turn means you’ll have to explain the problem to them in simple steps, giving them all the information they need to solve your problem but only the key things they need to know. Often you’ll find that the things you need to do come to you just in the process of writing this letter because you’re forcing yourself to structure your thinking and looking at the problem (and only the problem) not all the fluff and anxiety that lies around it.
If you don’t get inspired by the process of writing, try posting it to yourself somewhere else, so that when you read it you’re in a different environment. Address it to yourself using a different name to the one you normally think of yourself as… in other words, treat this letter as though it was coming from a friend.
Chances are…you’ll spot a way forward.
(Photo credit: Closeup Image of Vision Flow via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
Avoiding Presentation Panic: Dealing With More Questions
Mar 16th
A while ago I wrote about how to predict the questions you might get asked in a presentation – after all, if you can predict them you can prepare answers to them, right? You can even rehearse those answers so that you look really slick.
So much for planning, but it doesn’t always work. With the best will in the world you’re going to get ambushed occasionally.
The best laid plans of mice and men…
So what to do if you don’t have a pre-prepared answer to to the question? Well the worst thing you can do is bluff. Never make it up. Even if you don’t get caught out (and you will, usually) you deserve to.
Your best bet (assuming you’ve not got it covered) is to use one of the formula for improvising. It’s important to realise that anything you say (including answers to questions therefore) consists of two elements
- structure – how you say it
- content – what you say
and if you’re improvising, you have to work on both of these simultaneously. Using a tried and trusted formula to cover the structure means that you can concentrate almost entirely on the content.
Concentrate on your content
There are quite a few of these formulas but the most famous (and perhaps the most flexible) is PREP, which stands for
- Point – a broad, bold statement of what you believe in very few words
- Reason – a logical support of your position
- Example – a personal and emotional example of how your idea would work in practise
- Point – a restatement of your point.
Let’s try and example.
“Yes, I believe women should have the vote.” (Your Point).
“After all they comprise over half the workforce of the country and create nearly half the country’s GDP!” (Your reason).
“For example, in my own household my wife earns about 20% more than I do, which makes her the economic head of the household and it seems silly for the head not to vote.” (Your example)
“Overall then, I’m in favour of women having a vote.” (Your point once more)
Your last resort – Confess instead.
But don’t just confess – confession is good for the soul but not very practical for you as a speaker so you need to follow it up with something. The magic you need is to follow up your confession with a specific and timed assurance that you’ll find out.
Saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” is better than making something up.
Saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know – I’ll find out,” is better.
Saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know – I’ll find out and get back to you,” is a bit better still.
Saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know – I’ll find out and get back to you by X-o’clock on Y-day. Can I check your email address is…?” is your best option of all.
In other words, the more specific you are about when and how you’ll provide that information the more likely it is that your questioner will be satisfied and that the rest of your audience will respect your response, allowing you to move on with your credibility relatively undamaged.
A vague promise to find out won’t fool anyone – a specific promise tied to a time, a date and a medium of communication will. It goes without saying (surely) that if you promise to tell someone by a certain time and place then you actually do that – right?
Personally, however, I’d say that (effective though this approach is) you can only use it twice and should only use it once for any given presentation. To be honest, if you feel the need to use it more than that you weren’t prepared enough!
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
How to Improve Performance and Maintain Productivity at the Same Time
Feb 23rd
Fortunately, this article isn’t going to start with an embarrassing confession that I’ve let the car’s tank run dry and found myself stranded at the side of the road… I’ve only ever done that once and I was barely out of nappies! (Honest)
Instead, I’m going to look at the idea that cars do need filling up.
Yeah, I know. Obvious…right?
The thing is, when we’re planning journeys we all too often do something which is barely more sophisticated than estimating how long the journey is on a map, and (assuming an average cruising speed of 50 MPH) dividing that by 50 to figure out how long the journey will take. Then we get surprised by the fact that it always take longer than that.
How much longer?
Well…generally longer than that by the length of time we needed to stop — and that is either for us (food/water/washroom break) or the car we’re driving (filling it with gas). I’m one of those impatient people who regards time spent filling up the car’s tank as wasted time — time not spent actually getting where I’m going.
It isn’t, of course. Because if we dont fill the tank, we don’t get anywhere at all.
So we learn.
We learn to add time for tasks that don’t actually do something (like get us somewhere) but which subsequently allow us to do something (like filling up the car). These are referred to as “Performance Tasks” and “Maintenance Tasks”, respectively.
“Without the latter, the former can’t happen. Without the former, there’s no point in the latter.”
There is, of course, a balance to be struck. Too much Performance Tasks and you end up performing less than your best because you keep having to stop performing and maintain. That’s the equivalent of entering a race, performing brilliantly so that you’re leading during the whole thing and then realising you’ve got to stop for 10 minutes to fill up with gas. On the other hand too many Maintenance Tasks and not enough performance and you don’t achieve anything at all.
The seduction of this latter option is dangerous though, because it is all too easy to think you’re doing something because, well…you’re doing something. It’s just not something that directly leads to an outcome. You can be desperately busy without getting anywhere. Just ask almost anyone who rushes around saying, “There aren’t enough hours in the day!”
So what to do about it?
This is an experiment worth trying; I’m doing it myself. Break down each project into tasks in the good old-fashioned way and then to decide task by task if it’s a Performance Task or a Maintenance Task. I colour-code blue on the ‘task wall’ if it’s a Maintenance Task and Performance Tasks are colur-coded pink. (Note: There’s no great significance to this choice of colour, it was just the first set of Post-It notes that came to hand!)
Then, when figuring out what to do next at any point, I simply think about how my energy levels are. Why? Because my experience is that Maintenance Tasks can be done when you’re half asleep. If I’m below par, then I grab a blue task to do; otherwise I grab pink.
Importantly, I have to decide on my energy levels before I look at the list of tasks to be done – no picking and choosing based on what sound interesting.
The key thing is that it means I force myself to do the blue coloured tasks. Around my office, for example, we’d all rather get things done than prepare things — pink rather than blue, Performance rather than Maintenance. But your mileage may vary. It might help to spend a week or two looking at what tasks you do by preference and classify them after you’ve done them so that you get a feel for your natural instincts.
And then force yourself to do the opposite.
So far the experiment is proving very useful — coloured Post-It notes and all.
(Photo credit: Gas Full Meter via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
How to Avoid Panic in Presentations: Coping with Questions
Feb 3rd
I’m sure you’ve felt it: the horror at the end of a presentation (which, let’s face it, can be a bit of a trauma in its own right) when you ask the following:
“Any questions?”
There seems to be one of two ways things can go at that moment — and neither fills you with delight.
Firstly, there’s the Tumbleweed Option. Silence. Nothing — save perhaps for an embarrassed cough. Was your presentation really so bad that no one could understand it enough to think of a coherent question? Did you run over time so badly no one wants to hold up the next speaker, or – more importantly – get to the coffee break? Did you give such a perfect presentation that all possible questions were answered? (Spoiler alert: You didn’t.)
Option two is worse. The Killer Questions Option. At least with the Tumbleweed Option you’ve got the silver lining that you get to leave the stage sooner. With the Killer Questions Option you get to stay there and risk exposing your ignorance. For all its problems at least you can control the main body of your presentation — during questions everyone can hear you scream.
These are some of the most reliable ways of dealing with questions that I’ve researched. found or observed…
Know your subject
Yes, yes, everyone says this but I still see presenters who think they can research just enough about a topic to be able to deliver the presentation in question and no more. I’m sure there are valid reasons for doing this, but I can’t think of any offhand.
Take a break and go over your presentation with a fresh mind (or better yet, give it to a friend) and see what questions spring to mind. The advantage of using your friends is that they’ll have a clearer mind. I know its obvious but it’s a great way to figure out what you might be asked.
Buy the local newspaper and The Daily Mail (in the UK). Between them you should get a reasonable idea of what the burning issues are for the area you’re speaking in. You’ll be amazed at how often a member of the audience will find a way of asking a question which is relevant to both what you said and what their personal or local issue is. If you’re talking about exercise, someone will ask you about the proposed local swimming pool. If you’re talking about using social media, someone will ask you about the ‘horrible new proposed mast’ for the mobile phone network (and whether it’ll cause X, Y or Z in the neighbourhood).
Have a Question Bank
if you ever get asked a question you’ve not been asked before, note it down, decide on an answer and record that answer for next time. By the time you’ve given a presentation half a dozen times you’ll have covered most of the bases.
Draw yourself a mind map of the the presentation — or better yet — draw one on the whole topic area that you’re speaking about. You’ll have the big idea in the middle, secondary ideas going off as ‘tier one’ and smaller issues going off those as ‘tier two’ and so on. Most questions come from the outer fringes of the mind map, so look carefully at those and prepare your answers.
Most people care about their own lives, not the big issues — or at least how they intersect. For example, if you’re talking about the advantages of online training over face-to-face training, questions are less likely to be about the cognitive/recall issues of electronic learning (which is perhaps a tier one issue) as they are to be about whether your training will be accessible on their particular browser (as though they’re the only person in the world using that browser) despite the fact that you may have been very clear in your presentation that your material can be delivered on any browser.
Wrapping up
So there you have it – the some great ways of predicting and handling questions, based upon years as a presentation skills trainer, researcher and so on… of course (and this is based upon personal experience!) there’s always the option you don’t know the answer! :)
I know, I know…some of these are obvious. But they’re not so obvious that people do it! Others, such as the Daily Mail and the Mind Map, are techniques we’ve developed ourselves over the years and work for us.
And given that we’re professional presenters and trainers, we can’t afford to screw up…so they’re pretty thoroughly tested.
(Photo credit: Many raised fingers in class at university via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
Making Your Presentation Worth the Cost
Dec 30th
Let’s face it, no matter what your business is, or who you work for, the chances are that you’ve been on the receiving end of bad presentations. My working definition of a bad presentation here is one that costs more than it saves or makes for the organization involved. If it’s a business presentation, that’s obviously the company employing whoever the presentation involves – there’s always (almost always) someone who’s responsible.
Of course, it’s hard to work out how much a presentation will save or make for the organization in the long run: on the other hand, the costs are pretty easy to calculate. Firstly take the hourly rate of pay for everyone in the room and double it – because that’s what it costs the company. Now add the double-day-rate costs for each hour the presenter spent getting things ready. Finally, add the obvious costs for room rent, refreshments and any travel costs for everyone. It won’t be long before such presentations begin to cost thousands of dollars an hour. And that’s before you add in the costs of lowered productivity and damaged moralle.
And yet a cost-effective presentation isn’t difficult. You don’t have to be great – just good enough to justify your costs!
All a presenter has to do in a presentation is think of two things.
- What do I need to tell my audience?
- How do I need to tell them it?
Whatever else you do, or don’t do in your presentation should be measured up against those two simple criteria. The Devil is in the details, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to answer those two questions – to be honest, most presenters don’t even bother to ask them so if you do, you’ve a good chance of being a cost-effective presenter.
Less is more
The more a presenter tells his or her audience, the less chance there is of them remembering any given thing they’re told. With that in mind, it’s not hard to get the idea that you should filter out everything – and I mean everything – that isn’t your absolute core message.
For every slide, for every paragraph, every image, ask yourself, one slide at a time, “Does this give my audience something they need to know?” If it does, fine. If it doesn’t, ditch it. Once you’ve done that filtering, give yourself a break that’s long enough to mean you come back to the material with a fresh mind-set – and do another filter.
Two hours doing something else is minimum. Two filters is usually enough because of the next point.
Too much is never enough
Only experts make presentations. By definition if you’re giving the presentation you know more about your presentation than anyone else. That almost always means you know more about the material, too, so don’t be put off by thinking other people know more than you do. That’s great. What it can mean, if you’re not careful, however, is that you begin to take things for granted that your audience needs to know.
They won’t know your jargon, they won’t know your workings and they won’t know any of your assumptions, that is unless you tell them.
Once you’ve done your filtering do your checking for assumptions. Just like you went through every slide and every paragraph and every image, go through them again and ask yourself what each is built on. If it’s not built on the previous paragraph or slide then at the very least it’s in the wrong place.
More likely, however, is the problem that you’ve taken something for granted, something that your audience probably won’t know about. You need to put that – whatever it is – into your presentation.
What’s next?
Not much, to be honest – there’s a whole load of tips and tricks for moving your presentations from ‘good enough’ to ‘good’ but from the point of view of your boss, ‘good enough’ is exactly that. And you can bet your bottom dollar that your boss measures ‘good enough’ as not costing more than it’s worth.
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
The New Year’s Question: Are You Starting Again…Again?
Dec 28th
Time in pubs with friends is rarely wasted. At the very least you get in a good chat with your friends, and at best you get a life-changing revelation. This one started out as the traditional:
“If you knew then what you know now, would you do it again?”
We worked on it and developed it and made it into something ‘more’. We made it into this question:
“Knowing what you know, would you start again from where you are — if you had the choice?”
From that, we developed a whole process for deciding what to do next when it comes to the big ideas in life and so on. The idea is simple — and is particularly useful as we head into a brand new year…
Step One: Value What You’ve Got
Ask yourself a question: If some super-intelligent alien race arrived tonight and asked you what you’d got and you told them — and they did the same to everyone else, they’d probably have a pretty good idea of how much you had was worth in the grand scheme of things. The ‘alien bit’ is important because it implies that they have a complete understanding of what’s going on, but no emotional or sentimental attachment to things.
What you get at the end of that is a notional value of, say, ‘X’ thousand pounds, dollars, euros, yen, smarties or whatever.
Step Two: Play or Fold
This step is designed to make you think about your circumstances a bit. If they offered to take what you’d got and give you that fair valuation for it, would you take it? Again, the fact that it’s an alien is important, because it’s important that the X thousand they give you is absolutely, objectively fair.
If you’d take it, fine. If not, also fine. But not taking it implies there’s something above and beyond the economic value of your stuff. It implies that there’s an emotional attachement. Great. It means you believe in what you’re doing and it means you’re likely to be passionate about it. Good for you!
Step Three: Starting Over
Starting over is the most important one – and it assumes you were forced to sell to these strange aliens, whereas the previous step assumes you have a choice.
If you got a fair amount of money for your stuff, what would you do with that money? Would you buy back your own stuff? Alternatively, knowing what you now know (which is different from what you knew when you first got your stuff, obviously – and critically) would you buy something different?
It’s all about ROI – return on investment. If you’re happy to buy back your own stuff (emotional attachment aside), it follows that you must believe your stuff represents the best portfolio of ‘stuff’ that you could have. On the other hand, if you think you can get a better return on your money, knowing now what you didn’t know when you first got that stuff, you shouldn’t buy back your own stuff. Instead you should buy different ‘stuff’.
Step Four: Repeat the Repeating
This idea of starting over (and over) is an interesting one. It’s probably possible to take it too far (daily? weekly?) but it probably has merit as the process for a monthly review – or perhaps an annual review of what you’ve done, not done or might do in the future.
It’s an idea that encourages you to be honest — brutally honest — with where you are and what you should do next. Doing it regularly means you’re constantly assessing where you are and asking yourself if you’re making the best use of your resources.
The Downside
There’s always a downside, right?
The big one we found as we tossed this idea around is this – it doesn’t take account of the cost of change. Implicit in the alien’s approach is that it costs nothing to change from where you are to where you should be, objectively, and sometimes the cost of change is greater than the benefit of doing that. Cost, of course, can be measured in money, time, effort and energy, peace of mind and a host of other ways!
So one last step is to ask yourself this:
“If you think you should move to something else – is it worth the effort?”
And if you’ve decided not to move, the question should be whether you’re using the cost of changing as an excuse.
(Photo credit: Concept image of a signpost via Shutterstock)
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!
Staying Strong When It’s All Going Wrong
Nov 29th
Photo credit: `◄ccdoh1► (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Learned helplessness is the condition when we’re so used to being able to do nothing that we, in effect, give up trying to do anything – even though the circumstances might have changed so that we could do something if we tried.
It can be learned by animals when given electric shock and by babies who, for example, get no feedback from their mother: They learn that nothing they do gets any response. (Presumably human babies can also learn it from receiving unavoidable electric shocks, but to my knowledge this particular scientific experiment has never been published!)
As you can imagine, it can have massive implications for us as adults – if we believe nothing much we do can influence how things will turn out we’re fare less likely to try and do anything to improve our situation. We’re therefore much, much less able to be able to cope when things go wrong.
The universe doesn’t hate you – honest
Things go wrong for everyone – the universe doesn’t have a grudge for anyone in particular. How we cope with the inevitable setbacks of everyday life is one of the things that differentiates between those people who are ultimately successful and those who aren’t.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that at the individual level some people aren’t unlucky and that others don’t get away almost without challenge by life – but in overall, big-picture terms our responses dictate a great deal of how life treats us.
It’s this approach which appears in such trite sayings as “If life throws you lemons, make lemonade”. They may be trite, but there’s an element of truth in them.
One of the big issues about learned helplessness is that we tend to regard the negative things in life as ‘permanent, pervasive and personal’. In other words, we tend to subconsciously believe that a bad situation will never change; that a bad situation in one part of our life is generalised to the rest of our lives; and that it’s something to do with us in some way that is our fault.
To challenge these assumptions, all you have to do is find a set of tools which encourage you (or force you) to look at things objectively, rather than dwelling on the negative. By getting a greater sense of perspective it puts the our setbacks in their place, cutting away at the effects of the Permanence, Pervasive and Personalisation agenda.
Two simple but massively useful questions to ask yourself when things get you down are these (there are others!):
If this was someone else’s problem, what would I do?
It’s always easier to solve other people’s problems than your own, isn’t it? After all, the chances that you can give someone else good advice is greater than the chance of you accepting good advice that someone gives you! Find ways of making the problem objective, so that it feels more like it belongs to someone else – getting distance from the setback is a very powerful tool.
Examples might include such things as writing the problem down in a letter to yourself (perhaps addressed to yourself at work if you’re at home or visa versa and perhaps using your middle name if you have one). Post it second class mail so that it takes a few days to arrive…
On a scale of one to ten, where ten is dying, how bad is it?
A seven? A five? And having established that it’s not the end of the world, don’t dwell on how bad it is – instead ask yourself the killer question “What’s the one thing I can do, now, to move from a five to a four?”. There’s always something – but as humans we tend to simply get over-whelmed by the big picture of how bad something is and dwell on the enormity of the issue, effectively saying to yourself “I can’t solve this, so I might as well not try”.
And you’re probably right – you can’t get from an eight to a one, probably, but there’s no reason to give up and stay at an eight. Seven is better than eight and there’s always something you can do.
Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!