Never.

"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."  -J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

There is no shortage of doubters and naysayers.  They are an abundant and often outspoken lot, whose words have the ability to completely zap the energy from you.

"That's never going to work."

"That's not the way we do it here."

"You'll never finish before the deadline."

"Someone else is already doing it, so don't bother."

Negativity isn't always this easy to see and is sometimes wrapped and packaged as a nugget of wisdom.  Ever heard someone say that "the idea is worth nothing without execution"?  This expression is pseudo-motivational and attempts to elevate the importance of execution, but it does this at the expense of undervaluing the creation of a great idea.  It's impossible to execute on no idea, and I'm sure you can think of several well executed failed ideas.  Of course, even failed ideas have merit if you take the time to look.

The world has met its quota on negativity, so don't let self-doubt keep your ideas from execution.  There is fuel in failure and other's negativity.  These are abundant resources for powering new ideas.

These 3 e-mail tips will increase your productivity and save your sanity

In our always on and always connected world, e-mail represents one of our largest time sinks.  Having a plan to consistently deal with e-mail efficiently and effectively will give you some time back to focus on only what's important.  Here are 3 tips for dealing with your Inbox.

Create an @Action folder for your Inbox.  You are going to need a quick place to put e-mails requiring deliberate attention, and David Allen's GTD organize method will give you that place.  In Microsoft Outlook, creating a folder with the name "@Action" puts it at the top of your folder list.  Having it here gives you a prime landing space for dropping of e-mails that need your attention.  E-mails that go into this folder become part of your to-do list, so having it front and center when you are at a place to work through e-mail saves you from hunting for it.

Think before sending.  Is a response actually required?  You don't need to respond to every e-mail, especially if there is a cast of thousands on the To: line.  Only respond to e-mails where your input is critical.  Will sending a reply or starting a new e-mail  thread complete the communication circle, or rather will it begin the spiral to many more follow-ups?  With the power of e-mail comes great responsibility.  Your choice to send or not to send greatly impacts the size of your own Inbox and signals to others how you value time.  Don't send e-mails to others just as a way to delay having to deal with a problem.  

Finally, once you've decided a response is absolutely needed, borrow another productivity tip from David Allen's GTD:  if a task takes two minutes, then just do it instead of adding it to your to-do list.  You are already in the right frame of mind and have invested mental energy in reading and deciding.  Put that investment to work for you and close the loop.  Any task longer than two minutes goes to your @Action folder and becomes part of your future task list.

Be a good role model, set expectations for responses, and choose the right tool for communication (hint:  it isn't always e-mail).  There is one last question you should ask before hitting the send button.  Are you sending just to vent?  If your e-mail is multiple paragraphs of an explanation or you find yourself feeling you must respond to set the record straight, then go ahead and write that e-mail...just don't send it.  Get the problem off your chest and then just let it go.  Delete.

Action: Take Your Cues from Your Audience to Build Rapport

"All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.  And when all things are not equal, people still want to do business with their friends."  Building rapport and creating an environment that puts people at ease will help you close more deals and win you business, and you can do it by making a few changes in how you interact with customers.  In fact, there are two techniques, "playing actions" and mirroring, that can be helpful when you are meeting someone for the first time in any social setting.

Executive coach, and author of How to Act in Business, Corey Hansen writes about using the same techniques as professional actors to captivate your business audiences.  In a recent blog,  "Your Action? To Assure, of course!", Hansen explains how "playing actions", like projecting confidence through changes in thinking and body language, can positively impact customer interactions.  The key here is to "think about what you do to people, and how you treat them."  In Hansen's example, he helps his client find the ability "to assure" as the action.  Knowing the action, "to assure", enabled his client to make changes in her presentation that moved her and her audience in that direction.  The idea of playing actions is a powerful and proven tool, and you can use this acting technique to move your scene in the direction that you want to go.

In addition to understanding the action-behavior, you can also borrow an empathic listening technique to help you build rapport with someone.  Researchers at New York University published work investigating what they called the "chameleon effect", The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction.  Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh were interested in the social interaction effects that individuals who matched postures, mannerisms, or facial expressions had on their interacting partners.  Their research and experiments not only found that "dispositionally empathic individuals exhibit the chameleon effect to a greater extent than do other people", but also that "mimicry facilitates the smoothness of interactions and increases liking between interaction partners"(Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).  In other words, if you want to get someone to like you, mirror their movements and gestures.  You can also mirror their speech patterns, such as their volume, verbal cadence, and sentence structure.  If they're talking slowly and quietly, then match their volume and speed to help you build rapport.

Pairing playing of actions and mirroring with Annette Grant's three step formula for conquering small talk is sure to have positive effects on your personal and business interactions.

Meetings Are Killing You and Your Creativity

We know that a sedentary lifestyle and sitting all day at work leads to major health risks, even to an extent that Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has said that "excessive sitting is a lethal activity" (Vlahos, 2011).  What you didn't know was that sitting in meetings is not only hazardous to your health, but is negatively impacting your cognitive and group performance, too.

Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, studied 54 groups to simulate a typical meeting environment where meeting attendees work together on a group-based creativity task.  While their control group worked in a typical meeting room with a conference table and chairs (sedentary workspace), the test group environment had the chairs removed from the room.  Knight and Baer found that "physical space shapes performance indirectly by affecting group members' arousal and territorial behavior, which together influence information elaboration" (Knight & Baer, 2014).  In other words, the chairs in the room affected group members physiologically (increased activity, moving around more) and behaviorally (using a physical object like a chair to create boundaries or "territories" of ownership to protect their individual ideas), ultimately altering group dynamics by changing the way they exchanged information and perspectives with each other.

Removing chairs from the conference room isn't going to automatically make you and your teams more creative, but could create an environment where teams collaborate and share perspectives in a way that leads them to better and more innovative solutions.

Check out these links to learn more about non-sedentary work habits:

"Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" by James Vlahos
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html

"Get Up, Stand Up: The Effects of a Non-sedentary Workspace on Information Elaboration and Group Performance" by Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer

http://spp.sagepub.com/content/5/8/910

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.