March 10, 2010

Ideas With A Kick Is Now People Skills Decoded

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the brand of my blog, in relation with my brand as a communication coach and my expertise in the area of people skills. And I realized it just doesn’t cut it. So I decided to choose a new name and a corespondent domain for my blog.

I am now proud to present People Skills Decoded: the reinvented Ideas With A Kick. I will continue to write on personal development in general, but with a stronger emphasis on people skills and communication skills, which are what my professional life is all about (not to mention a big part of my personal life).

If you are subscribed to Ideas With A Kick, either by email or RSS feed, have no fear, your subscription will change automatically to People Skills Decoded.

If on your blog or website, you have posts, pages or articles with links to Ideas With A Kick, please change the names of the links to People Skills Decoded and their targets accordingly. Thank you and enjoy the new blog brand.

Filed Under: People Skills Tagged With: , , , , ,
January 8, 2010

Positive Thinking Won’t Help You Now

I’m not a big fan of positive thinking as a tool for self-help. I believe that used in the wrong place, at the wrong time, it can be just as dangerous as negative thinking. I’m rather a fan of what you might call strategic thinking in personal development: focusing on the positive or the negative, depending on what serves you best in the given context.

From my perspective, challenging economic times like the ones most of us are living right now, are just some of those contexts in which seeking help in positive thinking can cause some serious trouble.

In the past months, I have seen people loose a tone of money and bankrupt businesses by looking on the bright side and thinking positively. It can be quite shocking to see such a popular personal development tool have such negative consequences instead of providing the promised help.

Why do things like these happen? Because positive thinking means focusing on the good things and always expecting excellent results. In the face of big challenges, this is the equivalent of ignoring important parts of reality. It’s like blinding yourself while speed driving on a mountain road, during a storm, in a convertible. Why the hell would you wanna do that?

For the people I’m talking about here, positive thinking meant they ignored that the status quo has changed and doing what they did before will no longer get them the same results, or the same results where sometimes no longer possible. They blinded themselves to the fact they needed to adapt in a dramatic way. One man for instance, while being in a plummeting industry, convinced himself he can have the same sales numbers he had last year, if he just… tried harder. He called this “being positive”.

You cannot deny important facts and expect good results. Like it or not, we are in a global economic crisis, people have less money, they are spending less and there is more competition between businesses. No matter how good you are at what you do, this will have consequences over you.

Positive thinking is not a panacea, even if some trainers, coaches, speakers or authors promote it in this manner. It will not help you solve all of your problems and get everything you want, doing what you want, all the time. Being positive is a way of thinking which only has power to help you if you use it the right way.

There is a way of using positive thinking that can help you in challenging times. But it does not involve day-dreaming. It involves these two things:

  1. Realizing that even if some negative things may happen, even if you may not get your way now, it’s not a tragedy.
  2. Realizing that times change and in the long run, you will get your way and you can achieve your bold objectives.

That’s it. It’s strategic, realistic positive thinking. A more effective self improvement tool, that can help you handle the challenges of life both practically and emotionally.

Filed Under: Attitude, Career, Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , 21 Comments
December 21, 2009

Change Your Life Today, Now, Forever

Apparently, these or some of the expressions which are searched on the Internet quite a lot: “Change your life today”, “Change your life now”, “Change your life forever”. A bunch load of people are not living the lives they want to live, and they’re looking for ways to change that.

And I think that’s great. Unfortunately, for a lot of them, the search process in itself is setup for failure. Because they’re looking for quick fixes; for magic solutions to improve their lives: “Do this twice every day for 7 days and your entire life will turn around.”

In this era when things happen at great speeds, there is a fascination with fast and easy solutions which create big, lasting changes. And this fascination fuels an entire industry trying to provide them. An industry which for the most part, doesn’t even come close to fulfilling the “change your life today, now, forever” promise.

Let’s take a look at two very common examples:

1. Diets. There are hundreds of diets out there, which promise miracle results. Yet what they really provide is a relatively fast weight loss which does not last and is often very unhealthy.

Any person who lost a lot of weight and kept it that way can tell you what the solution that works is: eat less and exercise more, eat right and exercise right. Not just a couple of weeks, but as a constant part of your lifestyle. This way, you will slowly but healthy loose weight and you will keep it off you. It seems to be too hard for most people.

2. Subliminal tapes. There is a multi-million dollar industry of self-help tapes with subliminal messages on them, tapes which promise to change you life, improve your confidence, attract wealth and so on, just by listening to them. Because, we are told, the subliminal messages which you cannot hear consciously go directly to your subconscious mind and create powerful changes.

It certainly sounds great. There is just one problem: it doesn’t work! Every independent study on the effectiveness of subliminal tapes has reached the same conclusion: they are a waste of money. They only sell with the help of powerful and deceptive marketing.

As a general rule, quick fixes do not work to change your life. So why are they so popular? I think is has to do with a couple of things:

  • People are educated into believing that there are special, secret tricks which if you discover, you can use to change your life today, now, forever.
  • People don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into changing their lives, they lack the patience or the will, so they need to believe that quick fixes work.
  • People have a generally shallow understanding of the principles that generate results, especially the connection between effort, persistence and success.

What does work? The effective solutions to change your life generally follow the same one fundamental pattern: they involve continuous personal development. They involve changing the outcome by improving your skills, attitudes, knowledge and behaviors in an active, gradual, constant and strategic way.

Continuous personal development promises to change your life, starting now but not in a moment. And there is one trait it has that quick fixes do not: it really, truly works.

Although the interest in changing one’s life is a wide spread one, the interest in continuous personal development is much narrower. So if you have this interest, and you don’t allow yourself to be tempted by the promise to change your life today, now, forever – my congratulations!

Filed Under: Lifestyle, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , 10 Comments