This is a continuation from this short 3 part series on inspiration.  My original guest post called, “8 Steps to Inspire Others ” and my last article, “8 Methods to Find Inspiration ”. I hope this helps you find ways to spin your inspirations into action.

Research and Learn the Subject

Obviously I’m a big proponent to learning and so learning more about any subject or person that inspires you is a great starting point for activating your mind on the subject.  Once you activate your mind by learning more about the subject and by thinking more about it, it will more easily lead into action in your life.  If you can excite your mind and generate more and more interest in doing something, then the actions come much easier later on.

There is a definite balance here to maintain between too little time before action and too much.  That point will not be equal for everyone and I think it needs experimentation to realize.  If you spend all your time learning about a subject and don’t take any action, then the learning can be more of the inspiration than the action and when it does come time to take actions, then the learning component is greatly reduced.  On the other hand, if you take action without knowing anything about the subject, it’s possible to cause more harm than good by either frustrating yourself or in some cases causing emotional, physical or relational pain because of the actions you took without understanding them well.  Balance this by knowing at least enough about what new things you are getting into and find the right people to help or guide you and you can make the learning experience align with the actions you take keeping the inspiration that drives it satisfied and in balance.

Connect with Others

A great way to act on inspiration is to look to share and connect with others that have similar interests and activities.  As I outlined in the finding inspiration article, this strengthens the inspiration and gives you people to talk with and share more experiences about the events that drive this.

These connections can easily develop into closer relationships and friendships and these will give you friends and colleagues to act out your inspiration with.  You can use each other and work together to achieve the results you want in this related area.

Ask For and Accept Help

Connecting with others is great when perfectly aligned as your energy and synergy can be very motivating, but that is not enough with inspiration.  Inspiration is about change and new things, so there are always areas you will face that will be a challenge to act on.  This is where these connections come in as you now have people to ask for help when you need it.  They can guide you in areas they are stronger at and they can encourage you to drive through challenge far more than you could tackle on your own.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help already , and then be willing to accept it.  Accepting it is the part that means action and there is no exception with that here.

Do the same for others by helping where you can you will continue to promote your inspiration not only in yourself, but also in those learning from you.

Take Action Soon

Don’t wait too long to take action towards something that inspires you.  I already mentioned the item of learning and researching a subject, but there’s more than that.  Often people are afraid to do something because it is so grand or noble or simply outside their comfort zone.  It can be the simple things that as an action, shift from from a wisher on inspiration to an actor on inspiration.

Look at the things that inspire you from the first section on finding your inspiration and pick some action to do more of that or to begin implementing one of these items in this article to make it real.  A small step today that gets you closer just lets you take a bigger one tomorrow and it will send you down the path towards the results you hope to achieve from whatever inspired you in the first place.  If it is a person that inspires you, then contact them.  You’d be surprised how easy this can be, even if they are busy people, famous or in some other way, hard to reach.  People who inspire others, do so because of connections and they know this, so will generally be happy to talk to you, to help or to at least give you some direction to get you started.

The sooner you start doing something real with your inspirations the sooner you will gain the results hoped for.  This enables you to then move on to new inspirations or to grow the original one with more intensity, more importance and dedication in your life.

Visualize Results

Action is definitely more important to take than this step, but this one can give you nearly all the same benefits when the action is simply not possible yet or because of where you are.  The imagination of the mind is a wondrous thing, it simply doesn’t know the difference between what is imagined and what is real.  This gives you a fantastic ability to experience achieving what you want from these inspirations even when you are not doing an real actions on them.  There have been countless studies and brain research conducted about how the mind’s imagination can be used to become stronger, more creative, confident and even better at actions when they are finally performed for real either the first time or after many repetitions.

If you add visualizing your results into your steps for acting on inspiration, you will see the benefits without the practice.  Beyond this, it also helps you to realize what your true desired outcomes are as you can imagine it before it happens.  This visualized results can be a strong motivator to take even more action!

Be Persistent

I’ve touched on persistence before in my productivity series, and it is just as valuable here.  Persistence is about being headed in the right direction , making progress in that direction and consistently steering your actions toward your goals.  Since taking action on inspiration will always be in some way challenging, it’s important to accept setbacks and failures along the way.  If you learn from those, get back up and be persistent by trying again, you will make great progress and eventually be where you want to be.  You can’t let a setback stop you!

Set Goals

All of this is based on getting somewhere new with inspiration and so you can’t do that without some goals in mind.  It may be some new ability to learn, material possessions, or a special talent or ability, no matter what it is, you won’t easily get their without setting some goals for guidance.  Goals are a brilliant tool if used well and typically abysmal failures if not understood well or planned properly.

Your goals must connect to something with meaning in your life.  Luckily this topic of inspiration largely addresses this as inspirational expectations are usually seated in something already important to a person.

Goals must also be measureable.  This inherently makes them something you need to consider and be realistic with as you will have to have a way to measure it.  Something to count, to see or specifically identify and recognize.  Go ahead and set audacious goals but if you do, ensure you can easily recognize progress and keep driving forward.  If you struggle with goals, be a little less aggressive and set easier goals to train yourself and gain some ground with accomplishment while acting on your inspirations.

Also, ensure your goals are time based with specific dates so that you can focus on them and know when they need to be checked, changed and rewritten.  Don’t leave your goals to be static.  Taking on a challenge with something that inspires you will be new, and so will the goals so you can’t expect to set them early and never need to adjust them along the way.  Go ahead and drive towards them, work hard to reach them but don’t worry if they need to be adjusted along the way.

Be Enthusiastic

I just love this one!  It is so powerful and yet so under used by people who want to act on something that inspires them.  Even more of a crime is when people are inspired by another person, and that person is extremely enthusiastic yet that doesn’t seem obvious to the person looking to then act on that enthusiasm.  Well, I can tell you, if you put more enthusiasm into your actions, you will make much faster progress.  Enthusiasm will build confidence as well and it automatically attracts others and inspires them to find out more. Wouldn’t that be impressive to act on an inspiration and take it full circle, by inspiring someone else with the same thing!  I think so!

Not only will enthusiasm drive even more inspiration but it will help to engrain deeper beliefs in your mind.  Energy and excitement in the mind build stronger neural connections with new activities and things you learn so that enthusiasm can slowly turn into a deeper passion or conviction.  This will ensure you lock in place the beliefs needed to act on that inspiration at any time.  The passion will become stronger and in turn, that will continue to then be something you express, where once again you’ve come full circle as you begin to inspire others with it.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 14 Comments »

This is one part of a whole series on leadership.  Check the leadership introduction here for all articles in the series.

It’s impossible to cover the topic of leadership without focusing on people.  You can learn about leadership , understand yourself , develop your leadership skills and have all the right things in place to be a leader, but it’s all for nothing without remembering that leadership is all about people.  It’s about having influence with others and about the relationships and connections you build as a leader.  These skills are the people skills needed for leadership and there are five major areas I’ve learned that make up those people skills.  I hope you’ll go back in this series and read the previous 4 articles if you’ve missed any and please do sign up for my RSS feed or by email to get the next articles in the series if you haven’t yet signed up.

1. Awareness

Wake up!  You need to be aware of things around you as a leader.  You need to be more alert to opportunities, to easily see change and to recognizing solutions easier than the next guy. These will enable you to be thinking and discovering just ahead of your likely followers and gives others that perception of being first.  Little things here can make a big difference.  Just putting more attention to things can easily bring the small percentage increase on a consistent basis that will help you deliver more and more ideas and content before others.  Presenting your thoughts first, offering to take on new challenges and noticing change before others will not only have you demonstrating your willingness to lead but it will give you opportunities that others miss out on that you can further develop and prove your skills with.

Leadership is About People

Not only is being aware of opportunities important but also the interactions with others.  Being aware of when others need help, are struggling or feeling left behind is the best time to show leadership by helping, waiting or encouraging them to continue.  This capacity to see what is going on with the people around you demonstrates great leadership.  Look for times you can give decision or choices to others or even hold your own ideas to ensure those presented by others feel more important.  Often a few simple steps here can gain long term followers as they begin to respect you without seeing you in their way.  You can still lead people without slowing them down and by being aware of these signals with others ensures you do not step outside the boundaries of good leadership.

2. Impactful

This can be the most difficult people skill to develop as a leader as it is often counter to what is first believed.  I’m suggesting here that you need to have impact with others without authority, without position power and without necessarily having the respect or experience to immediately convince someone.  Impact is about earning respect but doing it in a way that you demonstrate your values and leadership characteristics.  Some of those techniques are:

• Trusting others

You must build trust as a leader.  Do this with honesty and sincerity with others.  Offer trust before it is deserved whenever possible as this will gain favor in return that far outweighs the negative impacts from not trusting others as a leader.  Look for places to trust others, tell them you trust them and then show them by accepting their ideas and accepting the consequences without blame.

• Welcome good conflict

Conflict can easily be a bad thing if it becomes personal or in any way an attach (physical, verbal or mental).  However, it can also be a huge team builder if done well and it quickly lets a leader demonstrate their ability to work on difficult problems with others no matter what.  Conflict in this sense is as simple as disagreeing on decisions or methods to use and it sparks discussion.  Look to draw out both sides and seriously weigh the pros and cons of each side of a conflict before trying to move ahead.  Get people to think of all consequences and thank people for participating in any disagreements.

• Be dependable

If you want to have impact on people, you must be dependable on what you say you will do.  Be ruthless in completing any commitments you make and make yourself available to help as often as you can.  This lets others depend on you and proves that you can deliver what you say.  Be careful not be make commitments you cannot keep and don’t ever make commitments for others unless they are involved.

• Show confidence AND openness

As a leader, you want to have impact on others by stepping ahead and having them trust you and depend on you to steer things forward.  You must have confidence in those decisions to convince others to come along and you must also balance this while remaining open minded enough to ensure you are not going down a path, dragging others with you that leads nowhere.

3. Recognize Behavior Patterns

I considered whether this section should be on it’s own or otherwise part of adapting and communicating but I thought it deserves it’s own attention, especially when covering leadership from the people perspective.  I love examining others from the perspective of behavior instead of my own interpretations or opinions.  Behavior is real and is always something you can see or hear from someone else.  It is about what they did or said and not a personal character judgment.  There is no value in judging others and will never help you as a leader so it’s much wiser to use behavior as a foundation for examining others instead of any personal opinions.  Look at what they did and consider that, instead of what you might "think" or  "imply".   Judging others is very dangerous and will completely destroy your ability to lead.  It will blind you, guide you by prejudice and create voids in relationships that are difficult to ever close back up.  By using behavior, you can look at something as a single action, not a flaw or personality problem and get past it.  This is not only with others, but yourself as well.  If you put judgments on yourself, you will find you impose the same limitations on yourself.

Here are a couple of previous articles I’ve written about judgments and the dangers of it.

• Happiness Suffers from Self Judgments!
• Don’t Judge Others, Be Helpful Instead!

Understanding others of course requires awareness like the section above but it’s much more than that.  There should be a deep understanding of people in order to enable that awareness and allow communication.  I highly recommend learning the DiSC behavior model and seeing how it fits into understanding other people better.  It’s made a huge impact to me as a leader and I find it far easier to apply than other personality types.  Seeing real things with real behaviors is a key step to finding change as a leader and to then work on changing those behaviors.  Remember, you can’t change someone’s personality, but you can certainly change some of their behaviors.  Plus it is a whole lot easier and more enjoyable since behavior is easy to see.

4. Communicate Meaningfully

Since leadership is really about people, you have to look closely at communication to be a great leader.  Some think there is a specific type of communication style or method that is best for leadership, but I really don’t think that is necessary or required.  I think that communicating well simply means to get through to other people in a way that you impact them and can build the trust and relationship needed for you to successfully lead them.  If that is happening, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to make that happen, I think it depends on the individual as a leader and any followers.  Everyone communicates in their own way and so being genuine and personal is the important points here.  Does it help to be regularly communicating, laying out direction, having clarity and to be a good well voiced speaker?  Sure, but I don’t think it limits you to not be those things either.  Put attention to communicate your meaning, involve followers, give them the communication they want and that works for them and don’t worry about how you communicate, it just doesn’t matter that much.

5. Adapt

The last section I have about leadership from the people perspective is about a leader’s ability to adapt.  Not only are circumstances always changing that you need to adapt to, but so are the people you are leading.  They will grow themselves, challenge you as a leader both positively and negatively and continually change. You must be able to adapt to these people changes as well.  All the above pieces can assist in adapting and they will continue to need changes as long as you hope to lead.  Leadership really is all about change so if you cannot adapt to the people you want to lead, you will never successfully lead them.

Expect people to change that you lead.  Some people will come, some will go, others will follow you for ages, and some will hope to or even pass you in leadership skills in a short time.  You must enable this, encourage it, allow it, and welcome it as a leader.  Know the changes will occur, don’t get discourages by them and certainly don’t hold back anyone else to quickly adapt, even if it’s faster than you can as the leader.  There are ways to adapt yourself, demonstrate this and then use it to lead others as well by showing the results of it.  Look to teach others to adapt and adapt them into your own leadership to take the journey with you.  If you can adapt with the people you lead, instead of only adapting yourself, you can enable a large following to not only deeply believe in you and have trust and respect for you as a leader, but you will develop more leaders and yourself along the way.  Now, that is leadership with people my friends!

Examples of Leading When It’s About People

I have a few points listed here to help illustrate examples of some of these ideas and what it might look like to lead with people more than simply leading them.  I’d love to read your stories and examples of leadership, so please comment them below…

• Integrity – hold your values strong and don’t sell out for anything
• Always give (or at least include) your followers the credit for your successes
• Take the responsibility and blame for your follower’s mistakes
• Do not self-promote, learn to be a humble leader
• Give decisions to your followers or at least include them
• Regularly ask for others’ views and never judge them
• Share your vulnerabilities
• Help your followers anytime they need it
• Be fair and treat everyone equally
• Do what you say and hold others accountable for the same
• Encouraging your people to grow, to learn and to take on as much as they want to, at a pace they can handle
• Show compassion for others and what they share with you
• Be confident and positive in all your actions
• Read good books in your field and always encourage learning
• Be a storyteller
• Smile, have fun and be passionate about your goals!

Posted by Mike King under Success | 23 Comments »

This article is last in a series called, "Maximum Productivity " in which I’ll explore the topic of connections.

See the rest of the series here:
Intro: Maximum Productivity: Series Introduction
Part 1: Maximum Productivity: Perspective
Part 2: Maximum Productivity: Attitude
Part 3: Maximum Productivity: Focus
Part 4: Maximum Productivity: Persistence
Part 5: Maximum Productivity: Adventure
Part 6: Maximum Productivity: Connections

After writing so much on specific areas to maximize productivity, I’ve found myself continually wanted to add points that belong in this last section.  Looking at productivity from the angles of perspective , attitude , focus , persistence and adventure leave me with a challenge to in some way connect all those together and to help you anchor in not only what it is that fits these puzzle pieces together, but also why?  I hope this article can portray that and show where that has become much more apparent to me in my life.

You Can’t Do It Alone

It seems obvious that you can’t reach your maximum productivity on your own.  You need to have resources, learning material, people to motivate you, give you feedback and to help you along your way.  Even though we all know this when we stop to look at things, we still have this weird natural tendency to do it by ourselves.  There is this strange force that is drilled into people (and I think even more so in North America) that you should learn to be independent and able to handle anything on your own.  We separate ourselves from others and then hope to achieve great things.  I’ve learned one thing, that doesn’t work!  You will not ever reach your maximum productivity or potential in other things on your own.  You must rely on others and build connections!

Of course there is some room for argument in this but I think those arguments only apply when looking at a small slice of time.  Yes, it is possible to be very productive on your own, for certain things but I’m thinking of productivity now on a much grander scale where it applies across some longer period of time; weeks, months and even years.  That definitely requires connections to make it last and to be able to sustain it.  Life has it’s cycles up and down and there is no easier way to get out of a slump than to have close relationships to rely on.  Stuff happens, bad stuff happens and close friends and relationships make it whole lot easier.  This enables us to move on with things in our lives and keep that productivity up.

Connections in Numbers

Human beings are social animals.  We always have been.  We always will be.  Having others in our lives gives us everything from security and confidence to trust and accountability.  Having more than ourselves is valuable for getting things down as well.  Momentum can build by involving others, you have access to more ideas, and creativity.  You can easily be more productive by getting help from others!

Now what about helping others? Wouldn’t taking precious time away from your productive tasks prevent you from getting your maximum productivity?   I’d say absolutely not.  At least not in a longer time scale.  What it does is bring on an even higher level of productivity, but with delay. It amazes me how inclined others are to help if you simply ask or offer it first yourself.  Building the numbers with connections enables more of this and gives you access to so many helpful resources it can make any task something much much easier to be productive at.  Having that strong network for help and support not only gives you access to more resources it enables you to utilize all the resources to be productive.  That is something I’ve learned about teamwork and productivity that has an absolutely massive payoff.  Take some time and think about whether you are really using ALL the resources available to accomplish what you want.  What about doing research and learning from others?  Isn’t that where having a large number of connections improves productivity?  I think so.

Depth of Connections

I personally know that even in blogging, these connections and number of relationships is a crucial component to be productive.  If you have a network of people who inspire, question and challenge you, support and help, you can much more easily research topics, come to conclusions, put down ideas and have discussions that take that even further.  That same principle applies in work, fun and relationships in life.  I think that allows people to understand things with more depth and coverage  and reach a higher level of productivity because of it.

While I certainly don’t want to contradict myself, I do want to mention that I feel that the depth of connections you build is MORE important than the number of connections. In the sense of productivity, relationships are key to getting things done. The accountability, rapport and collaboration that is available through others far outweighs any offsets of time lost by utilitizing these traits.  I wrote on technology already in the focus article in this series but I think it again needs to be carefully balanced here for building connections.  Technology makes it easy to quickly connect with many people.  However, it doesn’t inherintly enable us to make deeper connections.  That takes time, commitment, trust and LOTS of communication.  While things like website and blogs certainly help to find like minded individuals that allow you connect immediately at a more personal level, they don’t do much to ensure you take that deeper.  It’s up to you to do that with or without the technology.

By building deeper relationships I mean where you understand each others dreams, hopes, needs, fears and you really KNOW the person. You spend time together and you are genuinely interested, caring, compassionate and wanting to spend time with them.  It’s not another friend in facebook, another visitor to your site or a contact in your cellphone.  It’s someone you could rely on in the time of need or someone you’d help out without a second thought.  These type of deep connections enable all those characteristics of productivity through others to be at their highest level.  That brings on maximum productivity!

Feedback For Improvement

Productivity obviously doesn’t happen on it’s own and perhaps this series is a little overwhelming as to what it involves to really reach your maximum productivity.  However, I think the that feedback in that cycle of improvement is really the easiest way to progress.  This also relies on your connections so builds that area at the same time.  Feedback to and from others is as simple as asking or informing others of what they do well, don’t do well or could change by specific suggestions.  Feedback should address specific things a person does so that it isn’t taken personally and it should also be something you go looking for.  If you want to increase your productivity, start asking others around you how they think you could do that.

Connecting It All Together for Maximum Productivity

These topics have been a great way to explore productivity and I personally believe that they all tie together in this connections segment.  Without this area to explore things with others, I can’t put much value on productivity outside of selfish and short term thinking.  The connections that develop and enable us to be at maximum productivity are the things we will remember, value through our lives and have the most impact to others.  So that is what it’s all about for me.

As well, I think this series has led me to understanding the purpose of productivity better.  I think it is simple and explains why anyone would want to reach their maximum productivity:

To become the best person you can possibly be!

Special Thanks and Shout Outs from this Series!!

Talking about how connections are so important I can’t help but send some shout outs to all of you who helped me out with this series.  Many of you helped promote it on digg, stumble upon and even your own sites and I’ve tried to respond in return in those social arenas.  Thank you so much for this!  I’ve also had some great discussions in this series and so wanted to sent out a few shouts to those of you who’d been commenting.  I love the similarities you write about and I think that is why the discussions come so easily.  I urge people to check out some of the sites below as these people have all been a big part of this series for me and I definitely appreciate it!

Lance – Jungle of Life
Ross – Will It Change You
Avani – Avani-Mehta
Jennifer – Principles For Peace
Stephen – Balanced Existence
Viriya – Tedded
Robert – Reason 4 Smile
Armen – Timeless Information
Bryan – The B.Wilde Column
Jeff – Getting Better Television
Stella – How to Talk With Confidence
Laurel – Laurel Plum Online
Nathalie – Billionaire Woman
Nicolas – Time Management Master
Nick – Be Good Ventures
Juliet – Life Made Great
Rahul – Take 20
Daniel – Daniel Richard
Husain – Strength in Diversity
Karl – Work Happy Now
Simple Meditation – Optimum Self
Richard – Self Improve Blog
Ananga – Living By Design

And of course Sam and Ben!

Please take a minute yourself to create another connection by subscribing to my RSS feed or by email .  I’d love to hear from you and get to know you better and please don’t hesitate to ask for help as well!

Posted by Mike King under Life | 15 Comments »

I’ve looked at various topics here at LearnThis.ca around improving your productivity in your life through techniques, tools, skills and practices but I’ve never linked or presented many of them together.  This is an introduction only for the start of a series of articles that do just that and it will look at maximizing productivity in all areas of your life.  I’ve learned from everything I read that personal development has a fairly high level of overlap in how things can be applied and even though there are very specific things to look at with each article, book or coaching idea, there is also a lot of overlap between them.  This series will examine how those overlapping themes can be learned, applied and mastered for maximizing our productivity.  So, please read through the topics and come back for the rest of this series!  Subscribe to my RSS feed or email feed to ensure you don’t miss any!

Perspective

I guess the first point to understand is what is productivity.  While productivity as a definition is simply producing readily and abundantly, that itself leaves a huge gap as to what you are producing.  And that is where I will start things off in this series by looking at your life, tasks, work and everything you do and wish to do from a perspective that matters to you!  Being productive is useless if it’s not on the things that matter to you.  So perspective is first.

Attitude

Next in the series will be to explore attitude.  So much about personal development and certainly this site is about your attitude towards things.  This is no less true when it comes to learning and mastering productivity.

Focus

The right knowledge and attitude towards something is useless if you have no time or attention spent on it.  Focus is absolutely required to become productive and really, it is a key part of the action steps.  We’ll look closer at how to apply focus in our lives and to gain the most from doing it!

Persistence

Productivity is something that seems to come and go for a lot of people.  We all go through phases in life so of course there will be variation, but maximizing productivity is about applying the right techniques to be consistent.  With all the things that can get in the way, we need to be very persistent to make this happen.  We’ll look specifically at how to do this once you’ve captured segments of great productivity.  Keeping it going is the real payoff!

Adventure

Everyone knows how challenging life can be and that it seems to throw stuff in our way all the time.  Most people think of those things as obstacles to avoid and prevent but what about the adventure that comes with those obstacles.  Most of the great stories in life and of people are always about ridiculous odds, crazy circumstances, difficult challenges, surprising events, and all kinds of other things that just don’t happen every day.  Looking to make some of these things happen is a great way to expand your ability to produce and we’ll discuss how those adventures can improve your productivity.

Connections

All this work is lost within a single person’s life if it isn’t shared with others.  You’ll also require the help of others if you really want to be at your maximum productivity.  This article will explore the value of connections and relationships in maximizing your productivity.

See the rest of the series here:
Intro: Maximum Productivity: Series Introduction
Part 1: Maximum Productivity: Perspective
Part 2: Maximum Productivity: Attitude
Part 3: Maximum Productivity: Focus
Part 4: Maximum Productivity: Persistence
Part 5: Maximum Productivity: Adventure
Part 6: Maximum Productivity: Connections

Posted by Mike King under Life | 9 Comments »

One of the simplest things I’ve learned about improving your relationships is an important habit to develop.  Its simple, but not that easy to put into practice without paying attention to it, which is the point of this article. Its so simple its often overlooked when people teach about communications and relationships.  The idea is to never talk negatively about anyone.  What I mean by this is to avoid all the typical team / relationship killers that go on in normal office politics such as:

• Talking about someone’s performance with anyone other than them
• Rumors and gossip in the workplace or friendship circles
• Telling others what someone else did without a reason or something to be learned
• Using others’ negative behaviors as an example without their permission

These are just a few examples of how simple communication might be unintentionally harmful but end up being very harmful indeed.  Even the most innocent discussions about someone else can easily get retold and end up in the ears of the actor in the story which can easily be taken the wrong way.  Things get misinterpreted and told differently each time its communicated.  The best way to avoid this is just to never talk negatively about anyone.  Keep in mind that anything you say could get back to that person and so if you’re not willing to say it to them directly, then you shouldn’t say it in the first place.  If you do have something to say, why not tell them directly and deal with the issue, instead of complaining to others about them and making the situation worse.

This works not only for negative things you have to say, but also for positive.  Its not much point in telling someone else about the things a person does well or poorly, you might as well tell them directly.  If you do have feedback for someone, then base it on what they’ve done and don’t make it negative about the person themselves.  I learned this topic primarily from the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People ” which I definitely recommend if you haven’t read it.  It covers so many critical life topics on relationships you’re missing out if you haven’t learned the teachings from it.

What is an important rule you follow for building relationships?

Posted by Mike King under Relationships | 3 Comments »

Something I believe is truly valuable in life is to reach out to others, new ideas and new experiences. Many people tend to settle into their routines where they can keep change to a minimum and feel comfortable in their lives. One major downside to this is that many people simply fall into a life of complacency never looking to expand. They just continue to live the same thing over and over again. This isn’t always bad but considering most people do have desires and plans to change some things and improve areas of their lives, its important to look for ways to practice that. I also believe that new experiences and people is joyous so definitely worthwhile pursuing. A few of the areas I recommend that you make a monthly effort (at least) at to ensure you don’t find yourself getting stuck in a continual drone cycle are the following:

• Get out of the office at lunch and meet with someone you rarely see. Rarely is someone you haven’t seen in over a YEAR! Call them up, invite them for lunch or coffee sometime and get away from your usual daily crowd.
• Step out of your circle of friends if your in a group and make a real effort to talk with someone else or someone new. Its great to have a close knit group of friends, but that shouldn’t limit you to ONLY those friends. Take some steps out of your normal group and introduce your self to someone new, or have a talk with someone you really don’t know that well or have just met recently.
• At work people often focus ONLY on what they are directly involved with. Its amazing to see how many people need help, struggle in their jobs and hundreds of nearby employees don’t do anything to assist them, even direct peers. Get away from your own focus, your own ego or competitive mindset and for just a few minutes think about the colleagues around you. An offer of help to teach them, simply to listen or maybe even to help them get something done goes a LONG way to develop a lasting relationship.
• Doing something for a complete stranger. Even having a brief conversation and introducing yourself in a public place. Try it sometime if you take public transit. Ask questions about that person, listen more than you talk and you can leave a lasting impression. How about complimenting a stranger. If you’ve ever done that you know the feeling when you see the HUGE smile it can put on another’s face.
• One step further (which you might include in a step above) is doing something for the poor or needy. I assume most people reading this blog have it fairly well off and live a very comfortable live. Get out of that comfort zone, don’t just let life slip by without making an impact on others. How about volunteering or serving the poor or inviting someone over or out for dinner.
• Break out of your normal reading and writing habits. Read a type of book or topic that you don’t normally read. Often our reservations are routed more in fear of change than anything else so you can discover new interests and insights by expanding your exposure to new ideas. If your a writer or blogger (common on here) then write to a new audience. How about writing about an uncommon or unfamiliar topic. Do some research and write about your findings in a new area.
• Tackle your fears and do something to face them instead of avoiding them. Maybe that is public speaking, some adrenaline sport, extreme activity, heights, whatever, just take it head on and get out of your comfort zone in doing it.
• Change your food and try some new things in your meals.

All of these things help you adapt better to change and makes stepping out of your comfort zone when you NEED to much, much easier. Its a lot easier to adapt to change and try something new if you’re well practiced at it. Change is good and it provides a path for learning, accomplishment and satisfaction. Eagerness to change is a mindset of many leaders and is a valuable trait when exploring your self and how you impact others.

So, I hope this gives a few ideas to reach out of your comfort zone and learn to accept the challenge quickly, look for the opportunities in it and to develop a mindset and positive attitude toward change. This personal strength builds great character and an ability to continue to analyze things and improve one-self. A great trait to have, and definitely one that is important for any reader of a blog like this. It will differentiate you and help break you free from areas of complacency in your life. You really DON’T have to be like everyone else. Its just seems so many people think they do nowadays.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 2 Comments »