Tag: focus

Who else wants an effective and productive meeting?


Death by meeting. That may be the cause of death of many a business leader and a lot of corporate folks. Seriously, one important item that gets overlooked by the vast majority of meeting facilitators is the meeting room set up (Click to tweet this).

How a meeting is supposed to feel to the attendees should be on your mind. Seating arrangement, temperature, food, drinks, rest room access, etc impact how your attendees feel about the presentation / work shop you are trying to hold. Ever tried holding a speech in a stone cold room? Good luck with that one.

Effectiveness is largely driven by how people either face their team members or the facilitator. A class room setting will not work well if you want the team members to have a communication for interpretation or understanding. It just does not feel right.

It is these little bits of micro level information that provide each meeting attendee either with congruence to the meeting topic, or they mentally check out. Congruence is what you want to shoot for. There is a direct connection to your own personal brand and that of your company and the impression the meeting made on each team member.

It really does not take that much more time to plan this out ahead of time. In the download section please find a meeting room planning guide (there is also a meeting planner). Have fun experimenting with the different set ups. As always, please pass the tools along to anyone who may benefit from this post.

Ralf

Check your aim towards big goals with small bullets first


You have that big goal, the brilliant idea, great invention and you want to go for it big time.  Now that you know what you always wanted to do and you put all your eggs in one basket and just start hammering away at it.  Now you are using one big bullet and you are taking a shot at it – hit or miss, you are counting on hitting the target the first time.  What if you miss though?  You could lose it all because you do not have a reserve.  Sound familiar?

It is not the great idea that carries you through towards having success in business or life in general (Tweet this).  It is the execution and even more so how you home in on hitting your target and how you make sure you have enough oomph left to hit it all the way when you need it the most – at the end of this process, which marks the beginning of your success.

Therein lies the secret.  To further use this analogy, imagine you are on a ship with a main gun and you need to hit a target on land and you have a finite amount of shells and gun powder.  Would you want to use the biggest shell and all your powder right with the first shot?  Or is not better using smaller shells with as little powder until you have homed in on the target?  No trick question here.  Of course it is the latter as you can explore all the little variables that spoil any shot:  The wind, weather, distance, obstacles, the waves, etc.  There are many variables that you need to address before you get out Big Bertha.

With your own example of course you want to not obliterate anything, but you had better want to really totally crush this one.  It is your big aspirations at stake here and you do not want to take a fatalistic view on this one, trust me.  The more you know about all the little variables that stand in your way to making your dream to come to live, the greater the chance that you will actually make it.

And that is just the point.  Make sure to start delivering small pieces of your product, service or your life goals.  Get rid of more and more variables this way.  Smaller bad surprises are handled much easier than few big ones.  Save the best for last.  Under promise and over deliver and you will have made a quantum leap towards sustainability of your dreams.

Ralf

The tiresome issue of climate change – Shift your focus instead


Photo:  Ralf Weiser

Chances are that you are also quite tired of the polarized battle between folks who argue that it exists and the ones that it does not.  Most of the time I think some of these battleax swinging folks (on both sides of the spectrum) start with a conclusion and find a way to justify it.  What a fallacy!  Why not park the question whether or not it exists for a while and shift your focus to asking different questions.  Here would be such examples:  How can you leave our following generations a more sustainable world?  Knowing that there are so many better ways to be a good steward of our resources you could ask yourself: Is what we are doing right now the best – or better – way, or how can it be improved?

Keeping asking ourselves whether or not climate changes exists will likely not make anyone better off. Rather than losing time and nerves getting tangled up in a relatively fruitless argument, we can make a huge difference every day by making better decisions.  Think of how many choices you need to make on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.  Whether or not you ponder if and what you can recycle to what car or house you need to buy, there a good, better and best answers when you reflect upon the question of what more YOU can do to help stretch out resources and making life more sustainable.

Let there be no illusion:  We live in a closed system.  Some resources are more limited than others and all of those will not come or grow back.  Think about what kind of legacy you want to leave behind and what your children (and the generations following them) might say about our generation.  What will we be known for?  What would your best guess be? Finally ask yourself this question: What more can I do?

Ralf

PS: Our generation will be recalled as being the one that…..  Try finishing this sentence for me. 

Focus on the boulders and you will surely hit them


Sounds counterintuitive but it makes sense:  Picture yourself in a canoe going down a small stream and around a bend all of a sudden you see a bunch of boulders directly in your current path.  You paddle like crazy and you focus all your attention on the boulders in trying avoiding them.  Guess what?  You just doomed yourself because you will surely hit them straight on anyway, because you trained your brain to lock in on the rocks – and not where you should have gone. 

Anyone playing golf, soccer, football etc gets to use this concept.  Getting the ball hitting the target works best when you imagine the ball in the place where it needs to go.  Now reflect upon your social and work life.  What and where are the boulders that you have your eyes set on?  Do you want to hit them?  Flip this around by pondering and imagining a desired and positive outcome for yourself.  Voila!  You have reset the clocks and can now tap into the power of intention. 

Ralf