Focus Confidence Momentum

I found this quite thoughtful. This is the main thing:

To become a writer, you have to follow a few rules: Show, don’t tell. Avoid clichés. Be specific. Try not to repeat yourself.

I try to teach this to the copywriters who work for me. Find the story. Make it matter. No one wants to be lectured to. And that’s true if you’re creating a mobile app, a TV spot or even a PowerPoint.

When I’m helping people with CVs and resumes a lot of time is spent helping them to describe themselves with experiences rather than lectures about how good they are.

I went golfing yesterday and got paired up with three good players who I know slightly. I’m mediocre. It was daunting. And I started out terribly. For the first four holes my play was worse than in a long time. So on top of all my swing thoughts and notes to self about how to play I started analyzing my thought pattern and what else might be impeding my game. I came upon Fear of Shame.

Essentially I was worried that my golf shot would suck and I would be embarrassed. Worried about embarrassment = Fear of Shame.

In my business development coaching practice two of the most frequent hurdles I hear about are how to get over the reluctance to contact a centre of influence initially and how to follow up with people who haven’t responded. It seems to me these hurdles exist for the same reasons that my golf sucked yesterday. Fear of Shame.

Generally, people who market themselves for a living fear rejection. Actually anyone who is selling anything fears rejection. I just think it’s a little worse when you’re the product. And what is rejection. It’s embarrassment leading to a feeling of shame. People hate that feeling and their nature is to avoid it. I know people who don’t get back to me would get back to Brad Pitt if he was calling so my shame is a relative thing. I’m not as important as Brad Pitt [or as good looking], so I get less rewarded and feel less well about myself. Shame.

What to do?

Back to my golf game. I hit rock bottom on the third hole. I couldn’t have been playing worse. The fourth hole was no better. But I persevered. Kept going. Kept swinging. And on the fifth hole I hit a good shot which pumped me up. I started playing better and was my mediocre self for the rest of the round. Good enough.

It was easy for me to persevere. All I had to do was stay there and keep swinging. And it’s the same for my clients. I help them work out something they can easily do [I call it a baby step]. The smaller it is the more likely it will get done.

Some of my business development coaching work is helping clients overcome their fear of rejection. Sales research has identified that everyone in sales fears rejection handles it differently. Some totally ignore their fear [feel the fear and go for it anyway]. Others are paralyzed by their fear. They do nothing. And they might concoct incredible excuses to cover up their fears. For example I heard a lawyer say “I can’t go out for lunch because I’ll put on too much weight.” [Would you hire a lawyer who couldn't figure out how to order a reasonably healthy meal in a restaurant?]

When helping my clients we try to understand their fear as a way to work thru it. Among the more frequently identified fears are; the fear of being seen to be a pest; the fear of rejection; the fear of being ignored and the fear of asking for unwanted social intimacy. I have a response for each of these fears which usually can get some action taken in a comfortable way.

So if you’re not starting and cultivating all the relationships you want to have try to figure out what fear it is that’s holding you back from reaching out to people. When you figure out the nature of the fear you’ll have a chance to realize it is probably unfounded [a hypothetical horrible] and then do something to move forward.

This post may be a little inside football and may not resonate with everyone. Sorry.

Have you ever seen Tom Brady, the excellent NFL quarterback play? What he does every time he’s about to start a play is to thoughtfully survey the defense he’s facing and bark out revised instructions to his teammates.

This image came to mind recently when I was coaching a client who was recounting a job interview he had not won. When we did the Monday morning quarterbacking analysis it turned he had misread the interview panel and asked for too little salary, therefore showing a lack of confidence. Who knows for sure. But that’s what we concluded.

The learning of course is that you have to play every meeting to win. And that’s whether you define winning as you winning or as win/win. You have to analyze all the other players [meeting attendees] and figure out how to either help them to win/win or help yourself. You know that some people are very experienced at this and they get the result they want more often. For you to move up the same experience curve you have to work hard. Here are some question ideas to ask yourself in your analysis. For each person . . .

* Ask ‘what’s in it for them to get the right outcome’? i.e. what do they want or need.
* What can I say to reduce their risk?
* What’s the interaction between them and other players?
* What makes them comfortable or uncomfortable?

I saw Canadian Supreme Court Justice Marshall Rothstein speak last night to a group of law students. The body of his talk was to review some of Malcolm Gladwell’s conclusions in his book Outliers. You may be familiar with them: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be really good at something; January babies have advantages over those born later in the year because they are averagely bigger and smarter; you may be lucky to have been born in the right decade to take advantage of some technological advancement or historical event when you mature into adulthood [e.g. those born in the late 1830's came of age just after the end of the U.S. Civil War, a time of huge economic expansion].

Rothstein did a little personal biography to say that more or less he was on the wrong side of all the typical Gladwell advantages but yet he still did o.k. His point, of course, is that quite often the reciprocal of the advantages have advantages of their own but most important if you pursue your life in control of what you can control while ignoring what you can’t control you’ll do quite well.

In my executive coaching practice clients will tell me of hurdles they face. My programmed response is to say “what luck” and then we jointly try to figure out a workaround with actions my client can control. This works quite well.

I was working with a client this morning about their time management. When you really think about it time management is an active endeavour. It’s more than discipline, ruthlessness and philosophy. You actually have to do things. Delegation is on the list of things you have to do. But many people don’t delegate enough.

Here are a bunch of reasons people don’t delegate. Just to think about. See if any apply to you.

* I can do it better and faster if I just do it myself now
* I worry the person I delegate to won’t do the job well
* It’s going to take too much time to brief someone else
* I [subconsciously] worry the person I delegate to will do it better than me
* This project is appealing to me. Sometimes it’s hard to delegate the fun stuff.
* It’s too hard to slow down in the way that’s necessary to delegate
* I don’t have the confidence to delegate to the trash can i.e. not do something or say no to the person asking
* I didn’t know that I could create and delegate to a policy that would that would help me be ruthless with my time
* I’m not organized enough to delegate to a certain future time [i.e. schedule]
* And even if I was organized enough to delegate to a certain future time, I worry that something will come up to get in the way
* I’m not organized enough to plan what I should do and what I should delegate so I just respond to the loudest request or what’s on the top of the pile

I loved this column by Ross Douthat in Sunday’s New York Times. The message I took away is that individual productivity and therefore earning power is rising so high that we can already afford for only some people to work and support all the rest. It’s still rocky. Many people have too little but increasingly there is so much more wealth to share. As that continues more and more people will choose a life of leisure, maybe with not a lot of money, but with a pretty good quality of life.

The ‘quantum leap’ strategy, i.e. focusing on the top half of earning potential, is one engine that globally is driving the rise in wealth. I advise my clients to focus on what earns them the most money [and satisfaction] and ignore other work even it’s a little profitable. That not so easy to do. It is hard to make a profit and harder still to walk away from it.

So the question is what ought you focus on more and what can you drop?

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Earning What You’re Worth is also the name of a very good book on the subject of call reluctance.

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This is Douthat’s follow-up column.