Tag Archives: write

Understanding yourself will make you more productive

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Understanding yourself and how you respond best can be a great advantage to you in both personal and business situations. It can help you be more productive in many different ways.

There are a multitude of personality test out their Myers Briggs, Insight and various NLP communication model tests. These all have their place for detailed analysis and team dynamics, but at the most basic level you don’t need them. All these tests look in depth at the way you respond your communication style and prioritise the methods that you are comfortable with.

But you already know this, maybe only unconsciously but you know it, you are the one answering the questions you are the one having the responses. Therefore, at the most basic level, if you simply look at:

  • the things that you do naturally,
  • that you enjoy doing,
  • that you are comfortable with,

you will instantly have a better understanding of what makes you work efficiently.

To give you an example.

I have always felt that I was bad writing. I struggled with GCSEs and A-levels. I was doing science courses, which required me write essays and reports. I knew I had the knowledge but I couldn’t get it down on paper. This came to fruition when I failed my A-levels and seriously needed to do something about.

So I went to one of my lecturers:

I knew I knew it, he know I knew it and we needed to work out how to make sure that the examiners knew I knew it.

I had all the fears and anxieties of failing and not knowing how to communicate effectively. My lecturer took these away by simply talking to me by getting me to talk through the answers rather than writing them down. Being able to verbally express my thoughts  helped me create the structure and then fill in the detail of what I want to talk about, i.e. the essay question.
By applying this technique of having the conversation rather than writing an essay I was able to go back to my A-level biology exam and get a B grade. Since that day I will known that my best style for communicating these verbal. I’m far more comfortable discussing a topic than writing about. Even to this day I prefer picking up the phone to writing an email.

At this point, I’ll mention that my handwriting has always been very poor. Therefore, I didn’t enjoy writing. So my first solution was to type. By having my laptop available to me. I would make notes by typing them up. This enabled me to get details down. I learnt to touch type, although I’m no personal assistant or secretary, I could get by.
But it was still not comfortable. It was still not easy for me to produce documents. My internal dialogue is always far faster than I could type and I would lose my thread as my fingers were catching up with my brain.

Those of you that follow the AIM to Succeed page on Facebook would have seen my comment about Dragon NaturallySpeaking and how enjoying using it. In the last few days. This has freed my creativity, being able to talk naturally and think on my feet (I’m literally wandering around as I write this) has given me new impetus and a new mode of expressing the things I want to say.

I have given you this is at this as an example, so that you can look at yourself and those around you to see if you can spot something that you consistently struggle with. Once you’ve identified this look at how you would like to do it, changing the style in which you work could dramatically increase your productivity, effectiveness and happiness.

Many of you will look inward and you will find your own answers, whereas others will see nothing but problems.

If you would like to find out more about how we could work together please look at the ‘Ideal Clients‘ and ‘How I work as a Business Coach‘ sections

What is more powerful than Why, yes it is.

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‘What is more powerful than Why’ is a statement not a question.

I saw this tweet by Jamie Dunn @ JDEntrepreneur this morning

‘The “Why” should always be bigger than the “How“… Focus on the reasons why you’re doing something, instead of how you’re going to do it.’

Which is perfectly correct in that when you focus on ‘How’ you are going do something you lose the spark of energy, the passion for the initial reasons are you doing it. These reasons are the real insight into ‘What’ you want to achieve.

 

If you look at the recent disturbances, they were termed Riots but once they got past the initial activity were just opportunist looting in the main, and ask two questions with the same intent yet different structure, you will elicit different responses.

Qu: Why are you kicking that window in?

Answer: Cos I want that pair of trainers

Qu: What will you (do you hope to) achieve by kicking that window in?

Answer (if they actually had an agenda):
I hope to make a political statement about the unjustified shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham
or
I hope to make a political statement about the lack of opportunities for young people in the job market
or maybe even
I want to get that pair of trainers so i can sell them to get £20 so that I can put some dinner on the table for my family tomorrow night.

Unfortunately the more likely answer from the looters is:

I want to look cool in a nice new pair of trainers.

 

When you ask ‘What’ you as the questioner are prompted to add the ‘do you want to achieve’ or ‘are you hoping to get out of’ etc therefore making your initial question more explicit and focus around what you want to achieve.

Why did I write this blog?

Because I enjoy playing with the language we use day to day.

What do I hope to achieve by writing this blog?

I want other people to question the language they use and challenge themselves to get better outcomes.

So I will leave you with 2 questions that you can ponder.

Why does that person annoy/frustrate/upset you?
What do you get out of letting that person annoy/frustrate/upset you?

I am not expecting you to be able to fully answer the second question (or understand the answer you come up with), that is where coaching comes in all I want you to see is that you get two totally different answers.

If you would like to find out more about how restructuring the language you use day to day can help you change your perspective and therefore the results you achieve, please call me on 0118 324 1010.

7 Habits of Highly Social Media – Habit 6: Synergize to Engage with your audience.

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Involve others where possible, hopefully from within your organisation, or seek outside assistance to discuss and create ideas.

As the Social Media coordinator within your organisation you are may feel you do not have all the knowledge, experience or content or time to do it all. That is where others come in.

The best people to write engaging content about your companies activities are the people doing it. Get the sales people to write blogs and discuss new technologies, ask the engineers on the road to write about preventative measure that could help avoid some of the smaller problems.

These same people can then actively engage in the discussion they create drawing people to your content. This all shows that your organisation has a variety of people with expert knowledge rather than just someone with a twitter or facebook account.

References and Inspiration in 7 Habits of Highly Social Media – Intro

The Social for Business Revolution, How to effectively write for social media.

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Having just spent the weekend at the JCI UK Inspiration day hosted by JCI Reading (www.jcireading.co.uk/ID2011) focusing on Social Media and obtaining the best from it alongside what JCI means to some of its members, I thought a short article on Social for Business may be of use to some people.

We regularly hear that social media is taking over in terms of lead generation and that we should all be blogging twice a day and tweeting, facebooking, LinkinIning (think I just made that one up) about our informative blogs.

The reaction I see from most people when there here this is either;

I don’t have enough time to do that, I have actual work to do
or
What the hell am I going to write about without giving away all the knowledge I have spent years learning.

So let’s address these two point. So in reverse order, What and How:

What do you write about?
Whatever you write about it must be done with some enthusiasm, something that draws people into what you are discussing and shows that you are keen and able to help. One easy what to identify these is to know both your company and personal values. Once you know what you care about (and why) make sure you supply a consistent message to your readers. It also allows you to release responsibility to others to write some of the articles as you know everyone is ‘on message’.

How do you write without giving away all your knowledge?
By picking subjects that show you have knowledge you can are actually giving yourself ‘status’ showing that you are an expert in your field. A vast majority of what you know you discount as being valuable because you have already moved on to the next concept, idea or speciality. Therefore spending time working on what you do know that you can tell people ie Identifying your Resources, will be time well spent.

Moving onto having the time.

One of the main reasons most people feel they do not have the time is that they do not know the What and How, therefore they are constantly questioning themselves and what they are writing about. As soon as you know what is ‘on message’ and that you can quickly check that you are encouraging interest rather than giving away secrets you instantly cut out most of the time taken to write articles.

Therefore whenever you have an idea about what you want to write about you will be able to effectively write a short article that you can share on your blog.

Happy writing.

>> Related article ‘Begin with a blog behind‘