The idea of rejection
No one likes being rejected, told no, or that they aren’t good at what they do. We often do everything we can to avoid the possibility of it by not asking for what we want or not saying we don’t know something. At a recent conference I heard Jia Jiang speak. Jia spoke about his fear of rejection and his 100 days of rejection therapy that he undertook to desensitise himself to rejection or hearing No! If you haven’t heard or seen Jia’s story take a look at his Ted talk on the topic, it has over 5.7 million views …
What’s your release valve?
Sometimes it feels like we could work 24/7 and still not catch up! Whilst working long hours may be necessary in the short term to meet deadlines, in the long term losing the balance of having life outside of work can be damaging to product as well as our physical and mental health. Having a release valve, an activity that releases stress and frustration is vital to enable you to recharge and bring you back to a productive state. It could be as simple as time with family, walking your dog, or a boxing class. Whatever allows you to get …
There is no “ab cruncher” for technology!
I regularly go into organisations and meet frustrated people, and as a result, I get frustrated! Why do I get frustrated? Because so often people made things harder than they needs to be. Everybody is looking for the “Ab Cruncher”. The one piece of technology, the tool or the process that is going to make our lives perfect. Then when that happens when I just sit back and enjoy the ride, right? That’s how it works isn’t it? Not at all. Reality is everyone is looking for the magic pill or thing that will fix everything. It does not exist. …
You may already have what you need you just don’t realise it.
I work a lot inside organisations with their teams and one thing I’ve observed a lot lately is the fact that they don’t realise how much knowledge is sitting in a room and instead choose to go Google to look for answers. I was recently working with a client and we had 13 people from within organisation in one room they had all invested three hours of their time and we were working out what were the things that they needed to know, or wanted to know to make their life easier. As we had conversations and discussed different ideas, …
Needle in a Haystack
I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché about looking for something but not being able to find it referred to as looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a metaphor I sometimes use to describe how we tend go about trying to solve problems. In a lot of instances, we look for a complicated answer. We think is the answer was easy, we would be able to see it straight away. The challenge becomes the fact that we are exposed to so much information every day that our brain is trying to process, and reality is sometimes we just can’t …
It breaks my heart….
I am often called in to work one on one with executives in organisations on Excel spreadsheets. In most, cases the executives are experts in their industry (hospitality, medical, finance, motor vehicles) but their Excel skills aren’t where they need to be to effectively fulfil their management role. Some may have had executive support in a past role that handled anything with Excel, but many have simply gotten by with the limited knowledge they have but often at the cost of eating into their down time. It breaks my heart when executives don’t get the support they need to have …
It’s all in the preparation
I’ve been speaking, training and consulting for over twenty years and one of the things that still surprises me is the comments I get from participants about my presentations. I’m regularly told “gee you make everything seem so easy”, or “how do you remember all that?”. There is no real secret to presenting, making things look easy or remembering things. It just takes practice. I recently presented a program for a client to educate their organisation on some new software. I was familiar with the programs and whilst I could have just turned up and spoken about the programs to the audience, I …
It will take more than 5 minutes!
One of the challenges with being a professional speaker, trainer and educator in the field of productivity with everyday technology is managing expectations. I’ve lost track of the number of presentations where at the end someone comes up and says, “I just have a [quick/simple/easy/or insert other related word] question.” Most of them want to explain their document or spreadsheet to me. What it is doing or not doing and want me to tell them in that exact moment how to fix it. When I tell them I need to ask questions or require more information, they are often disappointed. Some will even say, I “Googled it, …
What do your colleagues know?
I recently worked with a digital marketing manager and one of her team. They were reviewing two sets of data that needed to be compared and decisions made to determine if the data was up to date. They were both quite skilled with Excel…..and that was the problem. They were exploring creating a complicated formula that would check one to the other when I was asked for feedback. A few clarifying questions and some simple suggestions that didn’t require formulas of any kind, enabled them to have a short discussion and support each other in finding a simplistic solution that …
Distractions
When I ask people how long it takes to get back to where they were after they are interrupted by a phone call, a colleague with a “quick question,” an email or instant message ping, I get varying responses. Online learning platform Udemy’s 2018 Udemy In Depth: Workplace Distraction Report found 84% of workers estimated when they are distracted they are able to refocus in 30 minutes, but 60% of Baby Boomers believe they can get back to work in less than 5 minutes. The report quotes a UC Irvine study that indicates workers tend to compensate for interruptions by …
