Are you growing or dying?

Are you stretching yourself to expand your talents, achieve better results, be a better manager or leader, or develop a new skill? I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on success principles, and what successful people do differently, and how to become more successful as a person. These principles can be applied to our work life as well as our personal life. I have begun to see some patterns or common practices as I learn more about successful people and one of common practices is that successful people constantly stretch or challenge themselves to grow and learn something new. If we are not stretching ourselves to grow and learn we are doing the opposite-dying. With growing comes some discomfort, but with that discomfort come some of your best learning experiences. I help people become more effective in selling products and services and one of the learning activities is video tapping them in a client interaction. Boy does it generate a lot of anxious and nervous learners, but consistently the feedback is positive and that it wasn't as bad as they thought and it’s the most valuable part of the program. They grow more from that 10 minute learning activity than from the entire 2 day program. What are you doing to grow?

People before Policy

We all know what it’s like to be a client or customer. There are businesses that still put their policies before people. When was the last time you heard the proverbial “I’m sorry we can’t do that” or” it’s not our policy”? It happens too frequently and it’s poor customer service in my book. I’ve been working with a client for the past year on improving their customer service levels to external and internal clients and they conducted a survey recently to see how they are doing. Happily I can report that the survey results were better than last year across all categories, but there’s still room to improve in select areas, one being a question concerning whether they put people before policy. Although there has been improvement the EVP of this organization wants to see continued improvement, so they implemented “COP”, Challenge Our Policies”. The employees have been asked to challenge the policies that they think are not in alignment with “people before policy” and must provide suggestions for improvement. It’s working; there have been several suggestions that are being considered for implementation.

Take 10

Have you ever been frustrated about not making progress towards achieving a goal? I know I have and it can feel defeating. I was listening to Rory Cohen, Co-Founder of Entelekey Inc. last night speak about Take 10 Now!, a system to help people take action towards their goals. It's actually quite simple, by taking 10 minutes of focused energy/time towards a particular goal each day, you will successfully achieve it. In fact, the cover story for Entrepreneur magazine features this concept, "Start a Business 10 Minutes a Day". So I decided to put the concept to the test with a very small goal. I've been wanting to organize and set up a file system for a pile of articles/resource material for months, and as the pile grew larger the less I wanted to tackle the goal. Well in just 10 minutes I was on my way to organizing the pile. I tossed half of it-and made smaller piles by topic. I then took 10 minutes the next day and created folders for each small pile. In two days, goal accomplished. And this was a small goal relatively speaking. My final thought is to "chunk" the time you spend on taking action towards achieving your goal into minutes rather than hours. Action is "King" when it comes to ahieving any goal. I challenge you to try this on.