My Own Realizations

I’ve written articles on being humble before and I strive to stay humble when talking and sharing about my own knowledge and skills with others.  I used to have a much more competitive and egocentric attitude which I learned to change.  The problem is that I’ve taken that so far, I often now reserve myself while trying to be humble but it’s at the expense of sharing with others.  If there is an area I could help I often hold myself back to avoid being overbearing or pushy with my ideas.

Interestingly, I recently met David Zinger from Slacker Manager while he was in Calgary and he reinforced something I’ve been told not only by him, but also friends and colleagues recently.  He saw right away at how I shrug off some of my skills and he questioned me about that.  I’ve had this impression of myself that I can be too ‘pushy’ with my ideas.  David recommending getting past that by simply offering your help by invitation.  If you give the invitation to someone else, you leave it up to them if they want to take advantage of it or not.  They don’t have to accept and you certainly are not pushy by offering help by invitation.

So, I guess, having this told to me several times now, and especially when someone I first meet can see me doing it, I realized I need to be more careful of that perception I’ve created and not to limit myself with what I have to offer.  I’ve taken the step to share these findings and my skills by writing here at Learn This and I truly love knowing I can impact people’s thinking, their knowledge and lives.  Now, I need to extend that out by invitation to more people I interact with in person, not just behind this screen.  I hope this site will continue to find me friends and people to meet in person as that is where I hope to extend more invitations of help.  All of this led me to look at ways to offer what you know by invitation and these are some of the ways I feel a person can do that!

Realize What You Have to Offer

You need to recognize your own strengths and know what you are capable of before you can offer help to others. Obviously, there is help you can offer in almost any area even if you don’t have skills for that.  I’m meaning to look more at what your unique skills, talents and strengths are so that you can offer the best you have.  Take time and surveys to think about and outline your strengths so you can find ways to make them available.  There are great resources online in surveys, articles and of course in books (such as Discover Your Strengths, The Strength Finder) to help uncover your strengths.  Ask others you know what they see are your strengths and accept what strengths you have.  Sometimes we ignore our strengths we have because we want to have choose our strengths or give the impression that we have strengths that are not real.  While strengths can certainly be changed, it takes time and practice to learn them and its far more valuable to realize what you already have and take advantage off it.

Don’t Miss An Opportunity to Help

Once you realize the strengths you have, look for opportunities to use them.  Use them for yourself, use them to help others and look for ways to offer to others, the benefits of your strengths.  This might be some expertise, special skills, knowledge, personal trait or characteristic.  Any of these can be helpful in different situations, so pay attention to where you have a chance to use them.

One way to do this is to watch others who you know have a strength in common with you and see if you can see how they use it.  Ask them how they use it and observe their actions.  Seeing it demonstrated is a great step is seeing how you can do the same thing.  Look for ways they take advantage of their strengths and replicate their actions.  As you learn their techniques you can begin to apply the same steps and take advantage of every opportunity you can to share your skills and abilities with others.

Once you know your strengths, practice them and are comfortable with it as well, its helpful to offer that strength to others.  Sharing your experiences and especially your strengths with people will continue to reinforce them and it will give you the confidence to share it at every opportunity.  Make yourself and your strengths available to others.  Offer your services, your skill set, your help.  Putting out what you have to offer to others can take many forms.  Consider all the ways you could do this:

• Face to face communication to others with an offer of your strength
• Invite others to ask you about your strengths.
• Share your story of how you’ve developed your strengths
• Ask others about their strengths to bring attention to the topic
• Advertise your services
• Start a blog, write articles or white papers about your strengths
• Reveal your strengths to others and encourage them to ask for your help

Growing the opportunities you have to help can also expand if you put attention to it.  This tends to cascade where you can develop those areas even further.  Continue to develop that and learn about it by practicing it, learning about it from others, and reading about those strength areas.

Keep The Invitation Open

This relates to not missing an opportunity but I think applies more when you have already helped someone or have been turned down for help.  If you respond to those people and inform that the invitation is always open and that you are willing to offer help, it is far more likely to reoccur.  People unfortunately feel an obligation to pay back what they have gained from someone and so they are often reluctant to ask someone again for help or to continue asking.  You can help to diffuse those feelings by offering your help and extending that invitation again even immediately after helping.  If they know you are still willing and not avoid them to get out of helping, that extra invitation can bring a lot of comfort in having to ask again for the other person.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

Learning is obviously an important topic on this site and while there are many methods to learn, one that is often thought of only in business is delegation. I think delegation has a lot of negative associations in the workplace because people see it not as a learning tool, but as a way to pass the buck. A way for a boss to unload their work on you. I hope to change that impression and look at why delegation is an amazing learning tool!

Learning with Delegation

Delegation is when you engage others to take on responsibility or actions that you would have done otherwise. Those actions are often things others could easily do. Sometimes they need a little guidance or perhaps a lot more than that before being comfortable with doing it themselves. Whatever the circumstance is, there is room for someone to learn some new skills and for the person delegating to learn from teaching. That process may take minutes, it might take months, it just depends on what and who is involved, but there is always some room to learn for both parties.

I’m not going to go into details with each step on how to delegate (at least not today) but the process looks basically like this:

1. Identify something that someone else could do that you currently do yourself
2. Pick someone who is able to take on that new delegation
3. Discuss and make clear that you need that persons help and give them the reasons you picked them
4. Describe what you would like them to do and what the benefits are (personally, for the organization, etc)
5. Have them paraphrase and repeat in there own words to ensure they understand
6. Brainstorm any resources or training needed and who can provide that
7. Plan some actions to get started
8. Agree on how to report back on the delegation

This whole process can be simple and open the door to teach something you are already competent at, and to have someone else learn from you. If you are not in a position to delegate you can definitely ask your boss or even other colleagues if there is something they could delegate to you to help take it off their plate. There is almost ALWAYS something they would love you to do and its a great learning opportunity. Swamped with work already? Ask your boss if there is something they can delegate to you and discuss what YOU can delegate to someone else to free some time.

Delegation is useful as a learning tool between peers as well and if you find someone interested in learning the same way, you can often swap delegation with each other to each practice and to learn something new.

Get Out of Your Own Way!

How many times have you said or heard that people don’t delegate because they don’t have time! This is ridiculous as delegation is the ultimate time saver. Its also the ultimate tool to learning new things in a couple of ways. Most of the time, you are doing what you already know how to do. Those are the tasks you learn the least from and while you may be good at them, if that’s all you do, you can’t spend much time learning. To keep learning and have time for learning, you need to stop doing the things you are already good at and make time for learning new things. Delegation is perfect for this to free up your own time to help you master your skills by teaching them to someone else. I relate this highly to getting out of your comfort zone and taking on new things, all of which are learning opportunities. Look for these chances to delegate, stop doing ONLY the things you are already good at, and quit getting in your own way from learning!

Others Want You to Delegate to Them

I’ve written before about not being afraid to ask others for help and that is the best way to delegate something, by asking. People are afraid to delegate because they think it means telling someone else what to do. That is not delegation at all. The other persons needs to understand why you are asking them and have their own motivation to helping you. Perhaps they will learn something new, perhaps because they are better at doing it than you, perhaps they might advance in the company by taking on more responsibility, whatever the reasons, they need to be motivated and willing to take it on. If you ask, instead of tell you can get around that. You need to be willing to assist if its needed for anything you delegate as well.

Delegation Outside of Business

Delegation is really about accountability and so it’s useful outside of an authoritative position or business position as well. If you always look at asking for help and explaining why you’re asking and ensuring that person is motivated to help, delegation is just as effective outside of business. This might be with your friends, family or colleagues in a volunteer or non-profit organization, they all work the same way. The human component of delegation is the teaching, the responsibility and the accountability to each other. There needs to be a clear line of responsibility so that both parties know what each other will do and help with and that there is joint accountability to each do their own part in the process. The opportunity to learn from each other is just as likely whether its in business or not.

I’ll be expanding on this delegation process in a few days to help you put this into practice. If you haven’t yet subscribed to new content here on LearnThis.ca you can do so here in RSS and here by email .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 8 Comments »

I’ve had plenty of comments about my book reviews I write and one of my readers and good friend, Khalid, asked how I go about actually writing one. Its a great question and I never really thought about it much until asked so I’ll let you know what I’ve learned from book reviews and how I go about writing them.

Keep in Mind the Review

This is something I think a lot of people neglect when reading a book and I think it is very important. To me, it helps me look at the book from a high level and watch specifically for overall themes and concepts that the author is getting trying to make a point of. If you don’t look for these, sometimes you can get through a book and while you may pick up on little bits of useful information, you may not be left with an overall single theme or concept that the author was making. This doesn’t always work since it obviously depends on the author, however, I find that more often than not, if you are thinking about this, it will be more obvious as well.

Look through the chapter headers, reread any summaries that may be given and look for commonalities between different concepts and chapters. There is often a single underlying theme and that is important to capture whenever possible. Put what you discover on paper and describe it in your own words. This is important for your own learning from the book since once you’ve thought about it and paraphrased it, you will remember much longer than if you simple copy or re-write something the author said in the first place.

Take Notes, Underline or Highlight Important Content

Marking important points in a book is very valuable. I use a technique of simply drawing a line down the page beside any content I thought was very important or useful. Just a simple mark in the margins and nothing more. That way, I can easily flip through a book and quickly see the pages that have points of interest on them and I can reread those parts and refresh my memory. This is particularly useful if you reread a book a year or more later and have forgotten a lot fo the content. Rereading just those important areas will quickly let you remind yourself of all the important points in the book and it just takes a few minutes to have a great refresher!

Some people (and I’ve done this too) will write notes, underline or even yellow highlight important text right in there book. Not everyone will be willing to do this and I’ve had discussions with some friends that would NEVER write in a book since they want to preserve the authors writing without adding your own thoughts for the next reader. You can always make notes in a notepad while you read or just jot down page numbers to come back to that you felt were particularly useful. Tear that page out and leave it in the book so you can easily come back to it at a later date.

Always Include Your Own Opinion

People are social beings and love the opinion of others. They like to make their own opinions as well, but for something new, they will latch on to yours until they form there own, so your opinion is particularly useful for a book review. Think of these two examples, which are you more likely to read?

1. This book was a superbly written and one of the best books in its genre, but I really didn’t enjoy reading it personally, I couldn’t relate to it.
2. This book got bad ratings and some people said they didn’t like it, but I absolutely loved it! It is now one of my favorite books of all time and I’ll definitely be reading it again sometime!

Did you pick #1, or #2. Most people pick #2, especially if that is from someone they know, since we all value a personal opinion more than ratings or a critic.

A book review should always include your personal opinion of the book and how you felt about it. Did you like it, was it enjoyable, useful or easy to relate to? How did it make you feel? Was it easy to read? Exciting? Boring? Whatever you felt while reading it, capture that in your review. It’s often great to make comparisons to other similar books as the reader may have read that book so will easily connect your references to your new review.

Apply Something From the Book and Your Review

The best part of any book is remembering it and whenever possible using that in your life somehow. A great way for this is to look for at minimum, one thing, you will definitely apply from the book. I usually have a few items that I look to apply and if you always plan to apply something from a book, its much easier to find things that are practical and easy to apply, no matter how subtle they are presented in the book. Mark them down, remind yourself of them after the book and schedule yourself a follow up to check if you’ve done it in a week and then a month later. No matter what it is, applying something from a book will help you remember other content from the book as well, as actions are always more tightly associated in your mind so those actions help strengthen your memory recall with others portions of the book as well.

Tell Someone Else About the Book

One more things that makes your review even more useful and easier to remember is to tell someone else about it. Whether this is written or just spoken with a friend or colleague, its great to share something you’ve learned from a book. Its even better to share with them what you plan to apply and your opinions on the book if they are curious or interested in reading it as well. Even though I put up a review of many of the books I read here on LearnThis.ca , I always make a habit of telling someone in person about my latest book I’ve read as well. Don’t always tell the same person about every book you read unless you know they are interested. If you own it the book, always offer to lend it to them if they are interested in reading it themselves after your recommendation or review.

I hope this was useful to see not only how to write a review about a book, but how to take something from reading any book. I started reading reviews on books as a tool to remember them and that eventually spun off into a desire to write other topics which is why I started this blog in the first place. I’ve certainly refined my reviews in the last couple of years and I’d love to hear from others any way I could improve them further and if you have any suggestions on writing great book reviews. If you are just interested in reading and learning them well, here is a great article at The Practice of Leadership called, How to read a Business Book . Enjoy!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 3 Comments »

Obviously I write a lot of articles about learning things on this site. Learning is a great way to gain knowledge and you probably already know if you read many of my articles that I like to also talk about what you can actually do with that information or what steps you can take to put it into practice. That is the key with making change in your life because it is not enough simply to know something or learn it, you need to actually practice it. That is one reason I love the blog, "Practice This ", which is a blog on that topic I regularly read with a perfect name!)

This is important for influencing and leading others as well. You want to demonstrate what you know, instead of just talking about it. Its easy to come across as being arrogant or even a hypocrite to some if you are not able to demonstrate or practice what you preach. So, always look for ways to show others what you know through your actions, not just from talking about your wealth of knowledge. When you read an article, a book or take a training course, look for some specific things you can practice from that as soon as possible. Take some actions steps to ensure you do something to make a shift and you are not just talking about it.

After putting that into practice, the next progression for change is to become reliable with it, or habitual. This is the point where you no longer have to think or work hard to make it happen, it is just something you regularly do without even putting extra attention to it. And finally, once you are truly reliable in these actions the final step would be to teach it to others to really demonstrate your mastery of that subject.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 3 Comments »

One of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned is to master the control of my state of mind. I first learned this from Anthony Robbins’ books and audio courses and I’ve since reinforced and enhanced this learning by studying the mind, dreams, and other authors and teachers of the mind and psychology. The premise behind what this is about, is that your state of mind affects everything you do in life, either directly or indirectly. Your state of mind has a direct impact on many actions within the body and these are highly tied to your emotions, or how you feel. So if you are willing to learn to control those things that affect your state of mind, then you can have whatever state of mind you like which ultimately leads you to feeling however you like!

What Affects Your State

Many physical attributes affect your state of mind as well as your experiences, words, actions and even things like your diet. However, a number of physical attributes are directly under your own control and so once you learn this, you can understand ways to control your own state. Here are some important things that have a direct response in your mind and on your body.

• Body posture – Hold your head up high and your shoulders back and its an automatic response in the mind of more confidence.
• Breathing – Slow deep breathing does many things for your health and body to remove toxins, this also delivers needed oxygen to your brain which affects your state.
• Facial Expressions – The most significant here is smiling. Its physically impossible to really smile and NOT affect the mind, its subconscious and automatic.
• Energy Levels – How well you energize your self including your activity, exercise, and health affect your mind as well.
• Diet – what you eat has an impact on your state of mind as well.
• Thoughts – Directly and massively impact your state of mind.
  

So, all these things are important, yet the most critical of all is your thoughts. It affects your emotions completely and the good thing, thoughts are controlled entirely by the conscious mind, nothing else! What this means is that the way you feel and your state of mind is controlled by your thoughts.

Remembering a Specific State

The reasons this is important is that you can learn to remember a specific state of mind, and by thinking about that and visualizing everything about that state of mind, you can easily reproduce it and the response of feelings that it generated. You do this by:

1. First pick the feeling you want to reproduce. For most people this is joy or happiness or peace or satisfaction.
2. Then, think of the times that you completely feel that way. Spend some time to remember the details about those feelings and pick what has been the most intense moments of those feelings.
3. Visualize the things you saw in that moment, put yourself into that surrounding, see the colors, the lights, the objects. Spend time visualizing the major components as well as the minor details, the imperfections you can see, the textures and shading, the shadows and reflections if there are any. Remember as many details as possible. Close your eyes if it helps to really visualize it in your mind. There is an interesting article on Practice This about closing your eyes to see more which is about visualization.
4. Now remember the things you could hear in that moment. Think of all the sounds every object makes, or the actions or nature in that environment. Think of the sounds that each object makes when put into motion or moved.
5. Move on to the sense of smell next. What specific smells can you remember. What season was it, can you smell it? Can you smell and sense the air, the humidity, the people and objects in that setting?
6. What feelings or senses of touch did you have. What were you feeling in your body? What clothes are touching you skin? Can you feel anything against your skin, the wind perhaps? What are you touching and how does it feel exactly. Rough, smooth, what other textures. Spend some time and just imagine feeling all those things to put yourself into the same place that you experiences this emotion you are after.
7. Change your own body or face to match what you remember. Were you smiling? Were you moving about in motion, if you can, do those things while visualizing all these other senses to put yourself back exactly into that memory.

All of these steps will bring back memories of that same emotion and state of mind which will in turn, leave you feeling that same state of mind just from remembering it.

Activate that State

The best thing to do with the ability to follow these visualization steps to get into a state of mind is to next, associate that state of mind with something instant. This allows you to activate that state and learn to call upon it whenever you want. One technique for this is to associate that state of mind with some words and actions you can do and say. Pick something that isn’t common for you to do and use that to activate that same state of mind. You want something unique. It could be to snap your fingers, clap your hands, a funny face, a specific body stance, a weird or loud word or phrase, any of these things could be used to associate with your state of mind. To associate it, just do your action or say your words and immediately begin thinking of all those feelings and memories about that state. Do this out loud and in action a number of times over and over. Put some energy into it and be enthusiastic. Keep repeating it until you seem to be able to really feel that every time you activate your state with your words or action you can feel or sense that state of mind and memories it is generated from.

Practice Switching States

And finally practice is where this all becomes useful. To change state, you need to not only associate that state but practice switching states quickly. Pick another state of mind (ideally something quite opposite to the state you first picked) and go through this process again. Do all the steps to learn that new state and really identify with the feelings and senses for that new state. Make a new association (or action) and repeat it a number of times.

Now, you have two separate states, each with its own action. Practice switching between these states by alternating your activation. Start off by giving yourself about 15 seconds in each state. Practice to change faster and faster until you can literally change your state of mind in just an instant. You should be able to activate all those feelings, your memories, thoughts and even all the senses in just a short moment. This can take a bit of time to practice, but just 10 minute sessions for a few nights in a row can really get you quick with this.

Actually Using your State of Mind

So, now that you know you can change your state of mind just by activating it and changing your thoughts and since you’ve conditioned your mind to instantly change its state basically on command, you can do this whenever you want. I’m assuming most people picked a positive set of feelings to learn to associate so you can now use that to change your perception, mood and responses in more difficult or not as friendly environments. Maybe its with someone or something you don’t like but want to kill the negative emotions that go along with that? Well, this will work for that too. As long as you have a stronger associations with your activation to put you into that state of mind, than the things in that situations to put in the state you don’t want, then you can instantly change your mindset make things more like how you really want them.

The more you use this, the more you’ll look to use it and the more you will train your subconscious to recover from feelings and mind sets you don’t want to experience. You can literally get to a point where anything you consider bad or to be replaced state wise, happens automatically by your mind once you’ve become so practiced at doing this.

So, I encourage you to look for ever opportunity to use your knew state associations and practice it. Learn new associations and use them as well. You will eventually be doing this to every negative response subconsciously or automatically without even thinking about. You can experience a lot more joy and happiness in life if you change the way your mind responds to stimuli. My next article I’m going to publish is about how you can use this idea of controlling your mind to impact EVERY response you make in your life.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 8 Comments »

Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan

From the authors of Crucial Conversations (another highly recommended book), Influencer is another brilliant guide book to day to day things that have a massive impact on people’s lives. This book in particular focuses on a specific set of strategies that anyone can use to influence people in difficult situations. It is not a motivational only type book or a set of vague principles, it has specific steps and real world examples from some of the world’s best influencers which help guide you to learning an effective approach. This book is also NOT a guide to getting people to say yes, its much deeper and longer laster than that, where you want to influence and change people’s lasting behavior!

The book is written in 2 parts, each worth the price of the book on its own!

Part 1 – The Power to Change Anything

The premise of the book is based on learning from the best influencers in the world and everything is presented clearly based on various real life studies that demonstrate each of the author’s findings perfectly. The reader is encouraged to learn more by seeking out and studying the best examples in the areas of interest and the author’s have certainly put that into practice throughout the book as well. Doing this helps to identify areas of influence in a situation, this is something I particularly liked. I’ve always believed that if you have something to learn, its most effective to seek out and learn from the best. Another major premise of the book is looking at behaviors of people and how that can be used with influence. This behavior based analysis is also very dear to me and reinforced with specific techniques well in the early chapters of the book. The last section of Part 1 is about various methods of changing people’s minds. I really like this section as well with regards to using story telling to influence others and change their minds. I’ve always been a good story teller which I now recognize as one of the reasons why I’ve had as much influence in my life as I’ve had. By this point in the book (only about 1/4 of the way through) I figured this is by far one of the best books I’ve EVER read. The rest of the book easily holds up to this as well. This is a book with so much actionable content and techniques, you could easily have to re-read this book each year to really practice and implement all the principles outlined.

Part 2 – Make Change Inevitable

The second part of the book focuses on the strategic model that works to master influence. Its outlined with great clarity using specific real life examples of each of the 6 sources of influence. The sources are categorized as follows:

All of these 6 sources are areas to overcome to be a great influencer. Its important to learn to recognize each of these 6 sources and learn to address all of them, not just one or two. Having a lasting influence requires major work and needs each of these areas to be recognized and addressed before a significant difference can ever be made. Learning to see these is the first step and the book’s examples show how difficult, yet effective it is to see each one. Putting effort into several of these sources (or all) will result in significantly more influence than if they are acted on individually.

I found the stories used as examples to be captivating and impressive since they are areas that most consider the toughest situations to deal with. One illustration of these techniques comes in stories about annihilating the nasty Guinea worm from villages in Nigeria. Another example throughout the book is in studying what Dr. Silbert has done at Delancey with transforming lifelong felons into productive citizens. There are other examples as well used throughout the book.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic book, but it is also not an easy take it and apply it kind of guide book. The data used to come to the conclusions is obviously massive and the work it takes in the stories of influence presented in the book are also huge. However, the book challenges you to change your thinking and to look outside your normal view when wanting to have more influence. I think scaling the steps and the model from the book into day to day life is fairly easy, since simply knowing what to look for helps in how you choose to respond. The difficulty is in how far you take the influence strategies presented. So, its a great book and I highly recommend it if you have ever wished to have more power to change things.

Note: If you’re interested, one of the author’s, David Maxfield, posted a short comment and summary about this book from another review here.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 3 Comments »