Greg's Right FIT #398

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Understanding
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Understanding

• Not sure? It's okay to say, I don't know."What's your take on this topic?" "I don't know. I haven't really thought about it."

• Seek understanding, not fault. Prioritize solutions over blame. Instead of asking, who did it?, ask, how can we prevent it next time?

• Recover from a setback at your own pace. Rushing slows healing. After a bad result, rather than charging ahead, spend time understanding your feelings.

• Reflect on experiences, don't reject them. Missed quota last month? Instead of wiping the slate clean, review it to see where improvements can be made. 

Being Human - Looking back

"I'll be back, and I'll be the luckiest man in the world." 

I've been watching a few documentaries, and anecdotally it seems like there's a bunch of new ones featuring old men looking back on their life. Specifically, I'm thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill Walton. At 76 and 70 they aren't ancient, but after retiring from competition at the highest levels of their chosen fields, they're ready to tell stories. 

The nice part about reflection is the stakes are lower for them today. They aren't fighting for fame or titles, so they can marvel a bit on how things worked out, or didn't. 

Reflection is powerful. It's a way of organizing our stories, and as we know, we are the stories we tell about ourselves. It's part of being human. As such, this kind of reflective storytelling can be an effective technique for improvement, even if we aren't at the tail-end of our careers. In my upcoming book I talk about the technique, Autopsy Now. 

As you know, an autopsy is an examination done after a death to determine the cause of that death. In business, we don’t want to examine dead bodies, but we like to make up stories. Autopsy Now is the technique of making up a story about a future event. Specifically, we make up a story about not reaching the goal we set for ourselves. We imagine coming up short, then autopsy now to tell ourselves the story about why we didn’t make it.  

When we know a story about what went wrong, we can take actions to prevent this particular story from coming true. In this way, Autopsy Now helps us avoid some of the traps between where we are today, and where we want to be tomorrow. 

It's just one of the many things you can learn in, "The Sales Momentum Mindset," coming to a mailbox near you this winter. 

Good stuff. 

Random Stuff

“The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing." – artist Pierre Bonnard

Living in the Omaha area, one gets exposed to Gallup Strengths Finder. They are HQ'd here, many local people list their top 5 strengths in LinkedIn, and sometimes strengths are displayed prominently in placards in offices. If you haven't heard of it, it's a self-assessment that identifies your strongest talents. In the 2000's it grew into a popular management tool for knowing who your people are, and why they might do the things they do. It's supposed to help with hiring, and improve interactions with co-workers.

There are other, similar, tools to help managers and in the mid-2000s I took a fancy, expensive one at the behest of one of my investors. He thought it would improve our interactions. This version was similar to Gallup's, but it was done with phone interviews, recordings, transcripts, and a debrief with a licensed psychologist. I don't know if my investor ever looked at the results, but I remember exactly one tidbit from the exercise. 

Go for a walk multiple times a day. 

This was something I did at the time without prompting. When the daily press of business started to build up overwhelm, I got up and took a walk. Sometimes around the building, sometimes around the block. It helped me work through whatever was jumbling up in my brain. Looking back, I wonder what the investor was hoping would come from this exercise? Our communication never improved. I'm not sure those tools help with that anyway. "Interesting thought Greg, but of course you'd say that, you're a Flummigator," seems ineffective. 

I thought about this episode in my life earlier today when I found myself wandering through the garden searching for cabbage worms. Gardening must be my new walking. A mindless activity that lets my brain unwind the knots forming from work problems. I don't go on walks through the building anymore. Instead, round and round the yard I go. 

The fall crops are planted and like magic all my brassicas are filled with cabbage worms eating their leaves. They grow fast! Overnight they'll take down a leaf and be 10X their size the day before. The best way to get rid of them is to grab and flick, or squish. All my current problems are worked out as I interrupt these little lifecycles.

And stand back if I happen to see an egg dump from a moth. I go into hyper-destroy mode like Ripley in Aliens. Squish, squish, squish. Get away from my cabbages you bitch! 

Nature might need me to go back to walking.