Inspiration from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins

Feeling like your approach to problem solving or attitude towards taking on new projects isn't quite where it used to be?  Take some inspiration from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins and get back on the path to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Be unconventional. 

Don't complicate things that are simple.

Volunteer for the impossible.

Believe in something all the way.

Be uncomfortable.

Have fun (Laugh).

Be mindful.

Go out of bounds.

With some practice you will be on your way to being "practically perfect in every way"!

Careerfication

Feeling stuck in a rut at work and wondering if it's time for change?  Getting to your next job or finding greater job fulfillment can happen with a little work and planning.  Careers are not finite with clearly discrete steps smoothly transitioned to from job to job, but are more often experienced as fits and starts.  It's time to take your career back and employ careerification, a technique that will let you explore new career opportunities while giving your company the benefit of a newly growing you! 

Careerification starts by finding projects and tasks in your current job that either align with the job you want to move to one day or carves out a niche for you in your current job.  The key is to find work that rekindles that same feeling you had when you first started in your current position.  Like gamification, careerification makes the work seem less like something you have to do and more like something you enjoy doing.

Once you open your thinking to a bit of careerification, you will not only be working toward your next job, but you just may find renewed passion in your current job.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Many times measuring the wrong thing can be more harmful than not measuring at all.  Whether it is personal health goals or goals to grow your business, be sure that what you are measuring actually drives you to make behavioral changes towards your desired outcome, and not away from it.  The wrong measurement could skew your course and lead you to a dead end full of metrics, but with no clear action for correction.

Think through what-if scenarios when setting your metrics.  What's your reaction when your page views are flat?  Do you change direction for future content immediately and declare your strategy a failure?  What do you think constant strategy changes will do to your motivation?  How will the measurement help you understand what changes to make?  Are the outcomes cause and effect or poorly correlated?

Yes, you can over think this, but don't let your brain's System 1 desire to solve your problem be the sole arbiter of what to measure.  Often we chose measurements based on what we think is a typical metric and fail to consider the impact and next step reaction to it.  How many times have you heard to not judge your health by the numbers on a scale?  When you began that exercise program you could not walk a flight of stairs without getting winded, but now your covering three miles a day!

Your metrics should influence your behavior, but plan your reactions.  Understand your bias towards action and use this to drive to success.

Two Introverts Walk into a Bar

Are you uncomfortable in situations where you are meeting someone for the first time and feel at a loss for how to keep the flow of conversation moving?  You may intuitively be good at small-talk, but when asked to share your secret you might be at a loss to explain your superpower to marveling friends.  Anett Grant, president and founder of Executive Speaking, Inc., to the rescue.  She offers a simple 3 step formula for conquering small-talk: match, shift, and pass back.

Grant demonstrates her match, shift, and pass back formula through a conversation between two people discussing their weekend plans.  In Grant's technique, the first step is to match your response to something the other person says.  A typical opening question might be,  "Do you have any fun weekend plans?" In Grant's example, the person's response is, "Yes, actually I'm going skiing with some friends", and your match response might be, "Oh, cool! I've thought about giving skiing a try a few times, but I've never gone through with it."  Of course, if you're an avid snow bunny then you have a perfect jumping off point to trade tales from the slopes.  In the match step, you don't have to share a common interest, but you do need to show interest.  Just like good listening skills, demonstrating you heard the speaker by paraphrasing or restating their comment builds a rapport and sets you up for the next of Grant's steps.

Step two in the formula is to shift the topic, either in an attempt to find a new topic of common interest or to shift to a specific event or particular aspect of the topic.  In Grant's skiing example, you might try to shift to an activity of interest that shares a relationship to the first, like another outdoor, physical activity such as hiking.  She suggests you might say, "I'm generally not much of a cold weather person, but I do like doing outdoor activities in the summertime--especially hiking.”

Of course, people like to talk about themselves, and asking a follow-up question becomes the pass back that allows the other person to respond by disclosing more information.  Grant's example uses the pass back question of "Do you like to hike?", but you could also use the opportunity to get the other person talking more about themselves by asking an open-ended question.  For example, you might seek to understand if skiing is an avid hobby or if this is the person's first time out.  An open-ended question not only passes back conversational control to the other person, but can lead to deeper engagement with surprising results.

Grant's match, shift, and pass back formula is simple in its design, but powerful in its execution.  It's worth repeating two key elements that can add dynamite to your dialog.  First, try using non-leading, open-ended questions.  Instead of questions with simple, one word answers or questions in which the answer comes almost without thinking, try questions that elicit thoughtful and unprepared responses.  It's a conversational trick used by psychologists and therapists in counseling sessions to get their clients more fully engaged in conversation without making it feel like an interrogation.  Second, and the single most important thing to remember, is to approach your interactions with a sincere desire to get to know the other person.  Rather than focusing on yourself, invoke your natural sense of curiosity to learn something new.  In the end, that something new might even be something about yourself.


"3 Steps Anyone Can Take to Master Small Talk" by Anett Grant
http://www.fastcompany.com/3043228/work-smart/3-steps-anyone-can-take-to-master-small-talk

Elephant, It's What's for Dinner

You've probably heard the saying that you "don't need to eat the elephant all in one bite" in the context of breaking down larger tasks into smaller ones, but there are a couple of techniques that you can use to improve your productivity no matter what the task.  Start by focusing on what's important.  You want to be sure that the work you are choosing to do has meaning, and you understand why it's important to you.  The importance doesn't always have to be life changing, but knowing that you are choosing to do this task instead of any other saves your brain having to fight the cognitive dissonance battle.

This next part is critical.  Stop multitasking and turn off all of the external multitasking enablers, like Outlook toast (those pop-up messages that appear every time you get a new email) and calendar reminders.  Put your phone and IM status on Do Not Disturb.  You need to create as much of a distraction free environment as possible.  The key here is to prepare your mind and put it at ease.  With notifications muted, your brain can move from a multitasking, high-alert status to one of flow.

Once you've settled on the importance of the task and removed distractions, it's time to implement a planned working duration.  In a typical Pomodoro Technique, the duration is usually 25 minutes with a 5 minute break, but it can vary.  Time Management Ninja, Craig Jarrow, recommends breaking up large tasks into 10 minute sessions.  In fact, 10 minutes is probably a perfect place for you to start even in Pomodoro.  Be sure to set an alarm and make it the only reminder that will disturb your work.  After just a couple of days of working in these ten minute sessions, you will find that you can purposely extend intervals by 5 minutes more until you can comfortably and successfully work for 45-60 minutes.

Throughout your intervals, you absolutely must take breaks in between sessions.  Again, the Pomodoro Technique recommends 5 minute breaks.  However, you are going to be working to stretch from 25 minutes to 60 minutes, so taking a 15 minute break between sessions will ultimately prove the most beneficial.  It sounds counter-intuitive to only work for 10 minutes and then to take a 15 minute break, but over time this investment will pay its dividends in higher productivity and greater concentration.  Alternatively, Scott Tousley, in his post, "The Unusual Concentration Technique That Transformed How I Worked", recommends working in 90 minute sessions, with 30 minutes breaks between intervals.

One more thing...do something physical during your breaks.  If you aren't using a standing desk (and why aren't you?), get up, walk around, and stretch your legs.  Studies have shown the benefits of exercise and its positive effects on cognition, including actually increasing size of the brain's hippocampus, so turn your work breaks into life-long brain enhancements!


Further Reading:

"The Unusual Concentration Technique That Transformed How I Worked" by Scott Tousley

http://www.getsidekick.com/blog/ultradian-rhythm-pomodoro-technique

Wikipedia:  Pomodoro Technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

"How to Eat an Elephant in 10 Minutes" by Craig Jarrow
http://timemanagementninja.com/2011/01/how-to-eat-an-elephant-in-10-minutes/

"The Positive Psychology of Flow" by Patty O'Grady
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positive-psychology-in-the-classroom/201310/the-positive-psychology-flow

"Taking a Walk Can Make Your Brain Grow"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2561708/Taking-walk-makes-brain-grow-Energetic-stroll-three-times-week-increase-size-organs-memory-hub.html

The Road Less Traveled

Seth Godin recently wrote about variance versus deviance, and the mental choice we make to distinguish the two in any given instance.  It's a perspective you choose to take to define what's expected or normal.  Are songs that don't hit the top twenty deviants or rather simply not a reflection of the masses' taste in music?  Is Henry Ford's quip that you can have a car any color you want as long as it's black still the norm or has customization proven variation offers opportunity?

The long-tail exists outside of products, too, and you can choose to embrace variation or suffer frustration as entropy unfolds in the actions of employees (or bosses), colleagues, and customers.  What's more, as Seth Godin puts it, "when you expect (or demand) that people don't deviate, you're robbing them of their dignity and setting yourself up to be disappointed."  It turns out that there are indeed more roads less travelled and each can lead to success.

Seth Godin's Blogs

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/variance-or-deviance.html

#mondaymover

You're Still a Terrible Listener and It's Written All Over Your Face

In an earlier post I talked about the importance of listening and how a few changes in your behaviors can make you a more empathic listener.  Although it may seem counterintuitive, looking inward and being more self-aware during your interactions will actually help you become a better listener.  In his book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Daniel Kahneman describes two brain types, System 1 (fast, automatic) and System 2 (slow, controlled) thinking.  System 1 is responsible for quick, action thinking, while System 2 is much more deliberate.  

This seems similar to the research that Art Markman cites from social psychologist Arie Kruglanski.  Markman, in his recent FastCo post, "How One Simple Change Can Make You a Better Listener", talks about a "doing mindset" and a "thinking mindset".  Our challenge in becoming a more empathic listener is to resist our "doing mindset" or System 1 thinking and instead focus more on System 2 or "thinking mindset".  Ever have the uncontrollable urge to interrupt someone mid-sentence?  That is your System 1 doing what it does best, taking action.  Learn to recognize this trigger, hold back your interruption, and redouble your efforts to make sure that you can successfully sum up the other person's main points before jumping into action.  Dr. Markman offers this analogy, "Taking the thinking perspective is the conversational equivalent of the carpenter’s saying, "Measure twice, cut once.”  Slowing down will likely help you avoid missing the other person's intent.  Additionally, your thoughtful listening and measured response will provide a good foundation for listening reciprocation during delivery of your message.

But how can you recognize these habits and curtail them?  One technique involves facial and body gestures.  Generally, these involuntary facial and body expressions are used by observers to distinguish our true feelings from our words, but if you can be in-tune with your own nonverbal cues you have another tool to use towards epathic listening.  According to Joe Navarro, a 25 year veteran of the FBI and author of "What Every Body is Saying", facial gestures like rolling of the eyes, eyelid flutter, pursed lips, or squinting of the eyes is a likely indication of dislike or disagreement.  Another good indicator is tension in your body or hunching of your shoulders.  If you are engaged in a conversation and begin noticing any of these behaviors, then this is a good cue that your System 1 is already making a decision and plotting your automatic response.

You Are a Terrible Listener
http://mondaymover.blogspot.com/2015/02/you-are-terrible-listener.html

How One Simple Change Can Make You a Better Listener
http://www.fastcompany.com/3042330/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/how-one-simple-change-can-make-you-a-better-listener

Body Language vs. Micro-Expressions
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201112/body-language-vs-micro-expressions/

Biases, I've Got a Few
http://mondaymover.blogspot.com/2015/01/biases-i-got-few-wysiati-and-action-bias.html