As we near the end of 2009 and look forward to 2010 I thought it was appropriate to look at how we might form new habits to replace old ones. My inspiration this morning comes from reading a book called the seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. This book has become a staple reference for me over the years as it contains such wisdom. If this book isn’t in your library yet treat yourself and buy it and read over the Christmas period.
For our purposes, we will define the habit is the intersection of knowledge,skill and desire.
Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.
For example I may be effective in my interactions with my work Associates, my spouse, or my children to such constantly tell them what I think, I may not even know I need to listen.
Even if I didn’t know that in order to interact effectively others I really need to listen to them, I may not have the skill. I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being.
But knowing I need to listen and then have to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won’t be the habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions.
I am not a Greek scholar but in many cases they have more words that occasionally are useful. For example their keywords for time chronos and kairos. The first refers to chronological time, such as when he checked the clock to see how long you have to wait for lunch or when you announced that dinner will be at eight o’clock.
Kiaros, on the other hand, reveals an event that happened at a particular point in time. If the 8 o’clock dinner turns out to be the most fun you had in a long time and you feel some relief from the pressures of your life, then it becomes kairos moments as well. Kairos refers to significant event — good or bad — that alters your life. Something happened or something was said that made an impact. It may have even made chronos seem to stand still.
Do you remember the day you were married? How about the birth of your first child? Think about a favorite vacation you took with your family. While these are all kairos moments you cherish. Some kairos events, however leave an impact because of the tragic consequences the death of a loved one, a divorce, an argument with a co-worker, the horrific events of September 11, 2001.
We humans are an analytical lot. What a kairos moment occurs, especially one that stirs up negative emotions, we want to study old events that led to this crisis with the hope of preventing a similar thing from happening again. We think that what we need to learn from our mistakes is how not to ever make that mistake again!
We are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of looking back at the event to prevent circumstances from converging in the same way again, we need to look forward to the growth that we can experience from it. Rather than focusing on what we want to leave behind from experience, we should be practiced about what we want for what from the experience as we move into the next asked of relationship or season of our lives.
One of the most poorly understood terms in use on the Internet today is the term avatar. Let me begin by explaining where the term came from originally. Apparently the term is derived from the Sanskrit word which is to do with Eastern religions which means ‘a representation of one’s self’ in other words a picture, an image or a representation of the person concerned. The modern derivation or application of the term avatar is almost exclusively connected with the use of computers, the Internet, Internet gaming and blogs in particular. Many services like MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM and Skype actually encourage you to have an image of yourself. They seem to work better if the image is of the person concerned. A picture of you has been shown to encourage confidence.
Probably the most common outworking of the avatar format is by using on of a number of free services that link a particular e-mail to a particular image and that image is stored on the Internet at one such service and probably the one most commonly used in the blogging community is a service called Gravatar (www.Gravatar.com) allows you to go and register an e-mail address and then upload a small picture related to the e-mail address. Then whenever you go and post a comment or write an entry on the blog then provided you use that e-mail address then that image that you’ve linked to the e-mail address will pop up in the post or comment. There are many examples of that all over the internet.
Now why is it important to use Gravatars when you’re working on the Internet? We all know the search engines love back links to your site and search engines like Google view them as very important. So let’s say that you have a chosen area and niche area looking for example high performance sailing. If you go and search on the Internet for blogs containing the phrase high performance sailing. Once you find a good site you post a helpful comment and in doing so are asked to provide your e mail and are given the option of providing a web address. Provided your comment is accepted by the owner of the blog then two things happened one is you get a back link to your site which is all cute importance of the just mentioned and secondly your image gets placed adjacent in the comments (if your image is good then people may well click on it. The more you place relevant comments on other peoples blogs the more likely your website is to gain that elusive goal – an elevated Google PR rank. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the number of back links that you need in order to step up from say a Google rank of 0 to 1 to 2, then 2 to 3 and so on but every back link that you have brings you closer to that elusive goal.
Wherever you see an invitation to post a comment on a blog where they require you to put an e mail address to validate the poster then there is a probability that the site is enabled to use Avatars/Gravatars. Each comment that you post acts as a valuable back link. It is for just this reason that spammers try to post comments by the hundred in blogs and on forums.
This weeks recommendation is in two parts:
go to www.gravatar.com and register – it is free. For each email address you want to use just have a small image – preferably different to upload.
then make a decision to visit one blog (search on Google for ones similar to your niche) and post a helpful comment. The box on “start something today” looks like this but you may only see a ‘Comments’ link on some sites.
It is essential that we keep our eyes and is open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is that we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.
Some dramatic and well known examples of disruptive change are:
Who ever uses a cassette tape or a vinyl record today?
Where are the typewriters of yesterday?
Toyota and the Hybrid car
the electric light displaced the gas or oil lamp
With regard to the changes around us – are we looking for them but not seeing them, are we reading about them but not understanding them, are we noticing them but refusing to listen to the lessons they give? Sure, you can trundle out hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under resourced or restricted by the management but in reality these all just excuses.
If you take repeated action that is not pushing you in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to infer how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behavior. It has been referred to colloquially as the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, to believing that all is rosy when it is actually not, and making some changes for the better. First you have to notice that all was not rosy.
The beauty of being a flip star is that you can always do the opposite of the what the world suggests – Google’s founders did this beautifully well – in truth they created an environment where change was seen as good. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is David Grable, an author, speaks of the loss of ignorance with sadness:
“Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal; once it has been displaced by knowledge,
it can be hard to get back. After it’s gone, we are more apt to follow a well-worn path to find answers
than to exert our sense of what we didn’t know in order to present new options.
Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved sometimes disastrously so.”
2000 years ago people “knew” the universe was created in the week. 1000 years ago humans “knew” the sun moved around earth. 500 years ago people “knew” the earth was flat. Imagine what you will know tomorrow? What knowledge or practices do you hold on to that are no longer empowering? What behavior that once drove your success do you and your team now need to unlearn?
Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway. Why:
decisions lead to actions. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
Decisions creates momentum. The action that follows your decisions will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making a decision in the first place, and now you’re off on a positive upward spiral. Action leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, confidence leads to another decision and now the decision warrants action and so on.
Decisions create confidence. The decision gives you not just a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you get your team or, if you’re a CEO your whole company moving in the right direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence.
Decisions create that confidence.
Let me give you a simple but profound question. When will Apple cease to be a computer company that has an interest in music downloads to being exclusively a music and media company?
There has been much talked about Mentors and their roles. However, how many people in business have one and really understand how to get the best out of them. Having a mentor is all about having a 2 way relationship, a conversation, that enables and facilitates accountability. A mentor is:
not all mentors need to look like this
approachable – can you walk with them or they walk with you
experienced
easy to talk with and listen to
often the one person who will ask the difficult questions
encourages self development
models good behaviour
hold you accountable for actions, choices and decisions
probably slightly disconnected from what you are creating
A mentor is not:
not infallible
is not a scapegoat for things that don’t go as we want
available endlessly – there has to be some movement
Mentoring is about one person helping another to achieve something of real importance to them. It is about giving help and support in a non-threatening way, in a manner that the recipient will appreciate and value and that will empower them to move forward with confidence towards what they want to achieve. Mentoring is also concerned with creating an informal environment in which one person can feel encouraged to discuss their needs and circumstances openly and in confidence with another person who is in a position to be of positive help to them.
Mentors are probably confined to helping in a relatively narrow area and you may actually have several mentors at any one time each of whom assists in a different area.
One concept of a mentor is a person who holds up a mirror and annoyingly asks those questions that you might not have asked yourself.
A mentor might be someone who is around for just a few short months or may be much longer term – it all depends on the area you are working in.
So the call to action for today is this. Who is your mentor? Do they know it? How often do you talk with them about the important things you are trying to create?
This site is about people, just ordinary ones like you and I, who do extraordinary things. Some start businesses, some start a charity, some just help people but one of the best examples is a lady called Erin Gruwell. Ten years ago (roughly) she was appointed as a new teacher with a class of what appeared to be hopeless write-offs in the Longbeach area of California. Her passion for teaching and getting the best out of this class became a story that has been published in books, made into a film and is now a growing world-wide movement. It is called the Freedom Writers Foundation and is just about the perfect example of someone doing what this site is all about – Start Something Today. She did and many children and youngsters have been the major beneficiaries. I applaud her and support her work – go and take a look too. Buy the film – if you aren’t touched at a very deep level I’d be astonished. If you fancy it you can make a small donation to the Freedom Writers Foundation – it would help many people.
For a few weeks now I’ve been thinking about about wisdom and what it really means.
Many of the simple lessons that we learn as young adults and children make up the bulk of the wisdom passed down through the years. For example why did our mothers and grandmothers tell us they need to eat parsnips only when the first frosts come? Another example being feed a cold and starve a fever! How do you cook a chicken?
I’m an avid follower of Seth Godin (founder of squidoo) and his simple wisdom often astounds me. His latest post on his blog is all about the simple truths that form the foundations of full employment:
Sales – if you can make sales you’ll be always employed
Additive effort – if you can add value to what others do then you too are likely to be valued
Initiation – if you start new things then the wise business owner will grab you with both hands and more but sadly most people who are initiators are misunderstood by the masses.
Just the other day I was thinking marketing and my thoughts turned to relationships. In business the overriding emphasis is placed on finding new customers, selling more products, and making more money.
I have a problem with this classical view of business and seem to be swimming like a fish against the tide. My emphasis in business has changed over the last few years and today my focus, and going on record here is dangerous, is on making better relationships rather than just making more relationships. The reason it is dangerous for me to go on record as saying “my focus is on making better relationships” is I lay myself open to criticism.
My preference would be to maintain and improve 10 existing relationships by adding value than trying to add 10 new relationships. It is easier to maintain a relationship than it is to add a new one.
One of the most influential books I’ve read in recent years is The Five Love Languages – It is a Christian book but contains such practical wisdom that it should be standard reading for everyone in a long term relationship. I actually learnt how my wife prefers to be communicated with. My preferences are quite different and just understanding that difference has made the world of difference in our relationship.
I’m not talking about the brown things that monks wear when I talk of habits. I’m talking behaviour and thought patterns.
On one hand habits are like suitcases and bags that get in the way. On the other hand habits of behaviour that help us achieve what we desire.
Much has been written by many skilled authors over the years about habits. How to break them, how to improve them and I’m not about to try to compete with those writers. Just recognising that you have a habit is the first step and 90% of the solution.
In very simple terms habits are things that we picked up and employ every day without even thinking about it. As before they can be both positive and negative. The same dynamic is at work in our work. If you walk into any business and start looking around you’ll see good and bad habits. The good habits might be good customer service. For example following up with customers who have reported a problem with your product or service. A bad habit might be as simple as having a cluttered desk and being unable to find something when you need it. I just looked at my desk and realize that’s one of my bad habits.
So how do you decide whether a habit is good or bad? It’s really very simple. The question I would ask is “does my habit take me nearer my ultimate goal?” If the answer is yes all well and good I’ll decide to keep that habit. If upon examination my habit does not take me nearer my ultimate goal and then I have to conclude, based upon the creative process, that it’s a bad habit.
The more difficult ones to assess are those habits that are so small that I do not even recognize them as habits. So how do I assess them? It may be you need the advice and help of someone close to you who can dispassionately assess your activities and help you to see what is good and what is less good. You may find it helpful to diary your time and keep a record in 15 minute increments of when and how you spend your time.
In order to assess your habits in this way you need to have a very clear picture in your own mind of what you’re trying to create. If you tend to drift through the day without a clear idea of what your end goal is then I would suggest that you read Your life as Art by Robert Fritz. In this book he explains a very simple process, but once you understand what he is recommending, you’ll never look at your life goals in the same way again. Julia Frances put it so eloquently – “common sense in a poetic form”. It may not be the easiest book to read but it is one of the most profound in my experience. He also has a weekly newsletter which can be subscribed to at www.RobertFritz.com.
For our purposes, we will define the habit is the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire.
For a few weeks now I’ve been thinking about about wisdom and what it really means.
