Report Before The Meeting

Before an important meeting it is good preparation to think it through in advance. What is the ideal and most likely outcome you want to achieve? Go through the meeting in detail in your mind. Who is speaking? What is being said? How do the others in the room react? To focus your thinking even more, write down the meeting report in advance, before the meeting. Now you are prepared and most likely much better than all the other attendees.

Responses To Conflict

People respond to conflicts differently. How we respond can depend on circumstances, the opponents and the relationships involved. In the context of a negotiation there are five distinct styles you can play; you can respond competitively and become aggressive, be accommodating to wants and needs of other party, compromise to maintain relationships, avoid the conflict and walk away or be collaborative and seek to find a mutually beneficial win-win agreement. How do you usually play?

Fast Cash?

Be suspicious of promises of fast cash! If something looks too good to be true, it usually is. When someone offers you a get-rich-quick scheme it is a scheme to get rich alright; for them - while you have to pay for it! Years ago I was conned to buy three leather jackets with a bogus brand name, from an Italian guy in a parking lot. How stupid can you get!? Research the proposition thoroughly before you jump in. If it looks like it could be your lucky break it is usually nothing but a scam.

Hard Questions - Easy Life

If you only ask yourself easy questions you will have a hard life. Easy questions are questions about what to eat for dinner, what television show to follow and other shallow, relatively inconsequential matters like that. If you ask yourself the hard questions you will have an easy life. With hard questions I mean questions that trigger more reflection about values and shaping definitions of goals and related plans to reach those goals. What are you going to do about asking those hard questions?

Recipe For Success

To bake a cake you need certain ingredients to get it right. The ingredients you need for success are direction (know where you are heading), action (doing it), passion (energy and drive), attitude and measurement (follow up). If there is too little or one ingredient is completely missing in the mix, the result will suffer. When you follow the recipe you will produce great results. Do you have all the right ingredients?

Monologue Or Dialogue?

Much communication is done in monologue style with little room for dialogue. For example, people tend to express themselves as definitive where opinions are stated as facts. Variants are the exaggerated, with categorical statements such as "John is always late" and the forcing and commanding; "you must/should." Instead I suggest you use personal I-statements; "In my opinion/I feel/John is often late/Next time it would..." This way you become more personable and invite others into dialogue.

Work While Alert

I recently came across a graph showing the levels of alertness of working people between the ages of 18-65. (Teenagers seem to have a distinctively different sleeping pattern.) It shows, that on average, we are the most awake at around noon, three o'clock in the afternoon and during the early hours of the evening. How come we take breaks during the periods we are most alert? As a high achiever schedule your working hours for the times you are the most alert.