September 22, 2010

How Badly Do You Really Want It?

Take a moment to ask a person about their dreams and they’ll tell you about a fulfilling career, a great relationship, or their own island in the Pacific Ocean.

Take a couple more moments, as I often do in coaching, to ask them what they’re planning to do in order to make their dreams come true, and you’ll often hear the most unrealistic fairytales.

In my experience, most people are simply not willing to do the things which will realistically make them achieve their big dreams, things which happen to also be pretty hard. Thus, they automatically reject the most effective alternatives, they’re stuck with bad alternatives and they eventually abandon their dreams.

Real Stories

Here are three real examples, of people I’ve interacted with in the past few months:

  1. A person who wants to become a top professional in a Fortune 500 company, but is not willing to leave the small town they live in. Why? Because all their friends and relatives are there.
  2. A person who hates their job and wants to go into a new professional field, but is not willing to take the initial salary cut. Why? Because they would have to sell their fast car and take the subway for a while.
  3. A person who wants to have a successful business, but is not willing to work for 2 or 3 years at developing this business besides their regular job, until it becomes sustainable. Why? Too much work.

In all these examples, the path exists. The only problem is that the person is not willing to take the path. They don’t want to make the necessary compromises.

Quitting In the Face Of a Challenge

Now I’m not saying that all compromises are good. Sometimes, the effort to get to a certain place in your life is just not worth it by comparison with the benefits. However, this is not the case I’m talking about.

The real issue in my view is that many people aren’t willing to make even strategic compromises, which in the end would be worth it: the short-term compromise for the much bigger long-term benefits.

In my area of people skills, I see countless examples of people who aren’t willing to accept a challenge and put in the work to improve key people skills, even though they know how much it would enrich their lives. They stop at the level of: “Yeah, I know: I should probably work on this.” And they pay the price.

Reality Check

Let’s turn the discussion towards you. I invite you to look at your life, your career and your relationships, and ask yourself four magic questions:

  1. What are my biggest, boldest dreams in these areas?
  2. What are realistically, the things I need to do in order to achieve these dreams?
  3. Which of these things have I really accepted and decided to do?
  4. Which of these things am I really doing?

If you’re like 98% of people, you’ll find out that your deeds aren’t exactly aligned with your dreams. There is a gap between them which if you don’t face, can become as big as the Grand Canyon.

You may try to find shortcuts and creative solutions to achieve your goals with little effort or struggle. If your goals are high, chances are that you will not find them or they won’t work.

The roads to great places tend to have quite the bumps at some points. The best thing you can do is to accept the bumps in the road and go through them.

In a way, you could say that making those hard, initial compromises to get what will truly enrich your life is the easy way. I say this because if you look at things in perspective, you end up living a much more meaningful and joyful life.

However, the meaningful joyful life does imply an initial level of work, perseverance and sacrifice which only few people are willing to go through. But if you want something big and you want it badly enough, it makes sense to go beyond what most people are willing to do.

If you decide that you simply don’t want if badly enough, no problem. Just make sure that when you’re an old person and you tell stories to your grandchildren about your life, you don’t say that you could have been a great person but you didn’t have the opportunity. It was right there in your face!

Image courtesy of jurvetson

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , , 23 Comments
July 16, 2010

Is the Road You’re On Really Necessary?

“What do you want?” – I ask my coaching client.

“I want to advance in my field; to reach the top.” – he replies.

“Do you like what you do, in this field?”

“No, but that’s beside the point”.

I listen, I ask more questions, I try to understand him. Turns out he wants to advance in his field because he believes once he gets to a certain place in it he will obtain the recognition of those around him. And getting that recognition will give him a sense of validation, of self worth.

“What if you don’t really need to go through all this process to feel worthy?” – I ask him. “What If you just need to work on your self-esteem and sense of intrinsic worth, which is a more direct and effective road?” He looks at me puzzled.

I find that most people are going on roads which are not really necessary to get what they want. They struggle working jobs they don’t really like, dealing with people they can’t stand, having a vague thought that this is the only way. But they really haven’t thought things through. It is more of an automatic reaction to the world they live in. And if they do think things through, they often discover that their struggle is pretty much unnecessary.

This happens because most of us chase things like money, fame, status, without asking ourselves two very important questions:

  1. Why do I want these things, what is the final destination?
  2. Is there a better way to reach this final destination?

When you ask yourself these questions and take some time to explore your motivations, as well as your options, you often become amazed at how much simpler, less stressful things can be, and how much you may have deluded yourself.

I think that it’s a fundamental trait of the society we live in, the fact that it teaches us to delude ourselves. Schools, families, commercials and public figures try to get us chasing all sort of stuff, thinking that it will make us happy and there is no other option. Look just two feet beyond their common messages, and you will often see something else.

In particular, I think there are a couple of messages we consistently get, either explicitly or implicitly, which are actually myths and tend to put us on roads we don’t really need to take in order to reach our destinations Messages like:

  • You always need to work hard to get what you want;
  • Work is by its nature un-enjoyable and you just have to tolerate it;
  • More money will make you more happy;
  • The respect and validation of other people is the most important thing to strive for;
  • Your health and your needs come second to the needs of others.
  • You can’t really be happy. Grown people live lives of struggle and compromise.

Do any of these messages sound silly to you? That’s because they are. I can’t name one person I know, who guiding herself by these ideas managed to have a rich and fulfilling life, in a sustainable way. Not even one.

I believe that the best thing you can do is to stop every once in a while, look at the road you’re tacking, fully realize where it’s heading and what alternatives you have. Doing this and acting on your realizations, you will set yourself on a path which is significantly different that the path most people are on, and also much, much more rewarding. It is the path of the wise man.

Image courtesy of Stuck in Customs

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle, Success Tagged With: , , 12 Comments
June 9, 2010

How to Give the Really Negative Feedback to the People Who Really Can’t Take It

One thing I find interesting about the people who have the biggest flaws is that very often they’re also the ones who have the hardest time seeing them and accepting them. If a person is a real pain in the ass, she probably sees herself as a really cool person, with awesome people skills, who everybody loves.

This is the result of a combination of things:

  • A big ego;
  • An even bigger lack of self-awareness;
  • The facts that let’s face it, it’s hard to accept that you have some major flaws.

As a result, giving feedback to these people about their flaws (meaning really negative feedback) will usually leave you wondering what did you open your damned mouth in the first place. I am proud to have a pretty good success rate in giving really negative feedback to the people who really can’t take it, and getting through to them (and by ‘pretty good’ I mean about 50%).

Here are some of the ideas which create the best results specifically with these kinds of people, when you give them really negative feedback:

1. Catch them when they’re questioning themselves. Even the most arrogant and blind person has moments when she’s wondering if it’s possible that she did something wrong, that it’s her fault. When the manager with terrible people skills will lose his 5th employee that month, chances are that at least for a couple of minutes, he’s questioning his people skills as a manager. It’s the best opportunity to deliver the negative feedback.

2. Earn their trust. When a person knows that you mean to help her and that your judgment is sound, even if she usually can’t take negative feedback, she will become a lot more open to yours. I sometimes give pretty brutal feedback in my coaching to people who otherwise don’t take it well. And because I have earned their trust as a coach, they take my feedback well. Find your own ways to earn their trust, and use them.

3. Give it in thin slices. Don’t use one opportunity to tell a person like this about all her flaws, which could be quite a few. It works with some, but more often than not, it just seems like you’re set on butchering her and this is why her defenses will go up. My recommendation is that you point out one flaw in one feedback.

4. Back it up with hard evidence. It will be tough to convince a person like this of a certain flow. When you point it out, she will just deny it. This is the moment when you need to present real, powerful examples of that certain flaw. For example, when you say to this person that she often breaks her promises, she will say: “No I don’t. I never break my promises”. It is at this point that you pull out the big list of real situations when she did break her promises and start reading it. Kidding about the list by the way; you should have them in your head, otherwise is seems like a trial.

5. Whatever you do, do not loose your temper. With this person, it is very likely that as you give her the negative feedback, she will loose her temper and get verbally aggressive on you. In my perspective, if you do the same, it’s game over. Your chances of getting your feedback accepted have gone down to zero. This is why it’s essential to keep you calm, or at least to be able to fake it.

Don’t expect to make every person accept any feedback. No amount of people skills will allow you to do that. But, do expect to be able to break even the toughest shell, at least once in a while. And give it a try before saying no.

Filed Under: Career, People Skills, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , , 12 Comments
December 29, 2009

Smile! Real, Fake, People Can’t Really Tell

As a communication coach, to smile is one piece of advice for improving people skills I can never give enough of. At the same time, once in a while, some people express concerns about it not being real and appearing fake. Although I’m a big believer in authenticity, I think when it comes to smiling, real or fake, the advice is still fundamentally solid.

Here’s one reason why. Let’s start with a test I bet you’ll find interesting. It’s a “spot the fake smile” test and it’s based on the research of psychologist Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the study of emotions and facial expressions.  You can find it here, on the BBC website. Don’t just keep on reading; take the test.

.  .  .  .  .

OK. Did you take the test? How many of the 20 smiles did you identify correctly as being real or fake? The first time I took the test, I got 13 out of 20, which is just a bit more than if I would have picked the answers randomly.

The good news (for me) is that I’m no exception. Most people get similar scores at spotting the fake smile. According to psychologists who researched this area, people in general are pretty bad at spotting a fake smile from a real one. You’ll find out more details about this at the end of the test.

Smiling typically reflects friendliness and a positive state; it’s a great way for social bonding. There are particular ways you can go wrong with smiling and come off as weird, but you can learn about them and calibrate yourself at the context to improve your people skills. The general rule remains: real, fake, smile damn it!

Filed Under: People Skills, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , 23 Comments