If it's worth doing, it's worth doing NOW!

If you follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or any of the other social media sites, you know I frequently post a thought for the day. The one I posted last Friday keeps gnawing at me so I want to write more about it.

The post said: “Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable are the kinds who usually end up doing nothing.”

Do you realize how true that is? People are always waiting for just the right time. Something is always going on that makes this moment not the right moment. And the reason for delaying action always seems so logical and rational.

I’ve been speaking to groups for over 25 years. You have no idea how many thousands of business executives, after hearing my speech, have indicated interest in bringing our work into their organizations. But the time is just not right, now! We have to get the right people on the team first. We’re doing this installation of something or another and it has us preoccupied. Or we’re just busy at the moment with something else.

In every case, the conversation ends with: please follow up with me in X amount of time. Then we’ll get to work.

Do you know how many times people like that actually take action after the designated amount of time, or one or more extensions of that time? Almost ZERO. There may have been a few over the years, just to be fair, but they are few and far between.

I tell you this because I guarantee you do this. You put off doing many of the things that would be in your best interests because conditions just don’t seem quite right. Heck, I even see myself doing it. I think we all do it.

Why? I think it’s because the dominant conversation in our head is fear-based and rather than looking at the upside of the particular action we are contemplating, we tend to look at the downside. And since we try to avoid pain at all cost, we tend to put things off until somehow it feels better. But it never does.

So I tell you again: People who delay action until all factors are favorable are the kinds who usually end up doing nothing!

So stop procrastinating. If something calls to you to do, do it. Or forget it, one or the other. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing now. If it’s not worth doing now, forget it and move on. Keep life simple and stop driving yourself crazy trying to figure out when the right time will be. There is never a right time. There is only NOW!

Listening for possibility

In my last few blog posts, I said that the phenomenon of listening consists of only two components:

1. Who do you have your attention on?

2. What’s your internal conversation?

I further said that if you want to be a really effective listener, just give the other person your undivided attention. Period. Have your internal conversation be something like: how are we both going to win here and work together.

Still another way to manage your internal conversation is to listen for possibility.

I’m sure there are many times that you find yourself in meetings where the attendees have a particular problem or challenge to deal with and it’s necessary to brain storm to find a solution.

Because of what typically happens in such meetings, people mostly hate meetings. What happens: as soon as someone presents an idea, everyone else listens to see whether or not they agree with what was presented. Since it’s pretty unlikely that they do, someone invariably makes the idea presented wrong or unworkable and presents their contrary view.

Once this is done, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and the meeting turns into a series of conflicting points of view, with everyone arguing why their solution is the right or best one.

The alternative presented here totally stops this from happening and typically results in an outcome that no one could have predicted. The alternative is to have everyone in the meeting put there attention on whoever presents the first idea and manage their internal conversation to be: “what would that make possible?”

When people do this, they just naturally start seeing possibilities that didn’t previously occur to them. So it’s not unusual for someone to then offer another idea that would build on the first, leading to someone else offering still another idea that builds on the first two, and so it goes.

This way of listening unleashes people’s brilliance and creativity, produces extraordinary outcomes, and leaves people excited and enthusiastic about participating in meetings.

Listening for the Gold

In my last few blog posts, I said that the phenomenon of listening consists of only two components:

1. Who do you have your attention on?

2. What’s your internal conversation?

I further said that if you want to be a really effective listener, just give the other person your undivided attention. Period. Have your internal conversation be something like: how are we both going to win here and work together.

Actually, there’s an even more powerful way to manage your internal conversation. The point is best made by telling you a story I heard Zig Ziglar tell many years ago:

Over a hundred years ago, Andrew Carnegie, the first great American industrialist, had many millionaires working for him. One day, a newspaper reporter was interviewing Mr. Carnegie and asked him how he got so many millionaires to come to work for him?

Carnegie answered: “I guarantee you, none of them were millionaires when they came to work for me.

Now being really intrigued, the newspaper reporter asked Carnegie how he was able to develop these people so that they became so valuable he could afford to pay them enough that they would become millionaires.

Carnegie’s answer was that developing people is like mining for gold. When you go into a gold mine, you expect to take out a ton of dirt for every ounce of gold. But you go into the mine looking for the gold not the dirt.

So that is an unbelievably powerful way to listen. Listen for the gold. Inside of every human being is a bar of solid gold. I know it doesn’t often look that way but that is the truth. What you often see that you don’t like is people’s behavior, but that’s just how they are behaving, not who they are.

Who people are and how they behave are separate and distinct. If you understand that distinction and train yourself to always listen for the gold, you will be far more powerful than you can now imagine in dealing with those unacceptable behaviors.

Try it. It works. And you’ll be a lot happier and nicer person too.

Listening with Compassion

In my last two blog posts, I said that the phenomenon of listening consists of only two components:

1. Who do you have your attention on?

2. What’s your internal conversation?

I further said that if you want to be a really effective listener, just give the other person your undivided attention. Period. Forget all this nonsense about active listening, whatever that means, eye contact, body language, and the rest. Just give the other person, whoever it is, your undivided attention. Have your internal conversation be something like: how are we both going to win here and work together.

There are certain times when it is highly desirable to generate a particular internal conversation and I’m using these posts to discuss them. If you want to read about this in detail, get yourself a copy of my book at www.UnshackledLeadership.com.

Can any of you say that you never ever get upset? Surely not. Living your life trying to avoid being upset can be very upsetting! So being upset is predictable.

Now the question is: what do you say when people around YOU get upset? Some of the answers I’ve heard over the years are: calm down, it’s not such a big deal, what are you getting so upset about?, chill out, take a pill, it will be OK and relax. Are you clear you say some of those things?

Well, don’t. They are not appropriate. Every human being has an upset mechanism that was hard wired into him or her when they were very young. So, when people get upset, they always think they know why, but they really don’t. Why people get upset, most of the time is because something happened that triggered their upset mechanism. To say any of the things listed above just makes matters worse. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Instead, get your attention on the upset person and just listen with compassion. If you have to say anything, just say, “I’m so sorry you’re upset” and leave it at that. Let them be upset. If you’re willing to stand in the face of their upset for just a few minutes and listen with compassion, the upset will take care of itself and pretty quickly go away.

Try it. You’ll be amazed at how well this works.

Listening for the Commitment

In my last blog post, I said that the phenomenon of listening consists of only two components:

1. Who do you have your attention on?

2. What’s your internal conversation?

I further said that if you want to be a really effective listener, just give the other person your undivided attention. Period. Forget all this nonsense about active listening, whatever that means, eye contact, body language, and the rest. Just give the other person, whoever it is, your undivided attention. Have your internal conversation be something like: how are we both going to win here and work together.

There are certain times when it is highly desirable to generate a particular internal conversation and I’ll use this post and several future ones to discuss them. If you want to read about this in detail, get yourself a copy of my book at www.UnshackledLeadership.com.

I’m sure you experience times when people come to you with a complaint. And what do we tend to do when we see a complainer coming? Close your door, get on the phone, take a bathroom break, etc. We do this because at that moment, we have our attention on ourselves and the complainer shows up as an annoyance.

Instead, get your attention on them and ask yourself internally: “I wonder what he’s committed to that he’s complaining?” In the vast majority of cases, when people complain, it’s because they’re committed to something that’s not happening. If you listen for their commitment, you’ll hear it every time.

So then you say to them: “it sounds like you’re committed to . . . and it’s not happening and you’re frustrated about that. Am I hearing you correctly?” The likely answer is: “yes.”

So then you say: “what do you want to do about it?” Not “here’s what I recommend you do about it.” This is critical. You have to teach people to come up with their own solutions to their problems and not be running to you every time something doesn’t work.

This is hard for most men because we love to solve other people’s problems for them. Don’t do it. Teach people to think for themselves.

Worst case scenario: you ask what they want to do about it and they answer: “I don’t know.” Simply reply: “what if you did know?” You’ll be amazed at how that question forces people to come up with a solution.

In conclusion, rather than being annoyed by people’s complaints, use them as an opportunity to empower them, a much more useful approach.