Urgency is the baseline feeling in today’s professional world. Securing information and staying responsive is a stated hallmark of good client service. Unfortunately, the mind’s operational systems conspire to misguide our efforts and expectations.
Layering on last month’s newsletter, Smooth is Fast (see it here), this month’s topic is Reducing Friction. I heard the phrase used recently by a friend of mine – Tom Nitopi, founder and CEO of NxGen Payment Services. Tom’s company is a global provider of payment processing solutions. He and his team spend their time[…]
Put driving a Ferrari on a closed race track on the bucket list. Nothing keeps your attention like navigating a $250K car into a hard right turn at 120 mph! The experience gets tattooed into your memory. What does that have to do with productivity? Watch the video snippet linked below and listen to what[…]
My recent collaboration Sean Murray at RealTime Performance has produced a one-day seminar for new managers at his Fortune 500 clients. Creating the program required that we narrowly focus some existing training components to help people who have never supervised others before. The delegation process was one key area that was simplified. It’s a potential land[…]
Even we “experts” fall prey to our base instincts. I was traveling last week. It was 6:00pm. My client dinner appointment was set for 6:45pm. It was a quick Uber ride from the hotel to the restaurant. All I needed was a post-workout shower and I was ready to go. Plenty of time to reply to this one last email….
We generally greet the new year with a sense of hope. It’s an internal time of renewal while everything around us sleeps. This hope is ephemeral, lasting only a month or so, but it is filled with the best of intentions.
Unfortunately, the Gulf of Life separates our intentions from our actions to fulfill them. The day-to-day demands of living clutter our minds and delay our starts. So, too, does the difficultly of change weigh heavy upon moving from intention to action.
Meetings are the most expensive periods of time we spend together. It can be surprising to add up the loaded employee cost of a simple weekly status meeting. Consequently, meetings need to be highly productive to justify the expense.
Communicating is a holistic experience. We use words, tone, and body language when we’re communicating. The famous study conducted by Albert Mehrabian described how much each part of the message content contributed to the listener’s understanding of the message.
The space between our ears contains the entire world, the known universe, existence itself. Everything we are exists between those few short inches.
Don’t fall prey to the notion that people get paid to perform. People get paid to show up and do work. How well they do that work is largely related to how they feel. It’s true: emotions do play a huge role in performance.