3 Steps to Cultivating Confidence

After two decades of working with individuals, managers and leaders at various levels, I have observed and identified 3 behaviors that lead to intentional, predictable and repeatable results. Practicing these three simple behaviors will put you on the fast track to cultivating confidence.

The three behaviors are as follows:

1. Self-Reflection – We can all get caught up in the activities that our jobs and personal responsibilities require. The tendency during the busyness can be to ‘act’ or ‘react’ without paying attention to whether that was the best course of action to take. Furthermore, because the focus tends to be on the task at hand, one can fail to assess if the action taken is achieving the results originally intended. For this reason, setting some time for intentional, self-reflection can shift your focus back from results, to behaviors that create the results.

When a person is more intentional about changing their behaviors to best achieve the results, and evaluates their intention in comparison to the outcome, significant learning takes place that guides your future steps.

Self-Reflection = Intentionality. I call this ‘succeeding on purpose.’ When a person intentionally reflects upon behaviors that contributes to the result, and achieves their expected result, the byproduct is greater confidence.

2. Write it down. Documenting your observations…even in the briefest of forms…is the least fun, but most rewarding when you start to see patterns. For example, consider a recent example of a person on a new diet.

Everyday, around 2:30 pm, Steve eats a candy bar out of habit. Before documenting his eating habits, Steve was aware that he had a candy bar on many days, but not sure exactly when in the day, how often, or even why he ate candy for that matter. After reflecting on his behaviors and documenting his observations, he recognized that he snacks in between two meetings as a sort of distraction from the next meeting. It wasn’t that he was necessarily hungry after lunch, craving sweets or needing an afternoon pick-me-up. He simply needed a non-work related distraction before his next meeting.

Once the pattern was observed, he recognized steps he could take to improve his eating habits by keeping granola bars on hand at that time of day. Even better, he later realized that taking a 10-minute walk outside provided a more healthy distraction before stepping in to his next meeting.

You can improve or change that in which you are aware. Without awareness, you are just guessing, which is the number one killer of confidence. Self-reflection of your behaviors, followed by documenting your observations, allows you to start seeing patterns, which creates predictability.

Documenting = Predictability. Similar to the infrequent golfer who never knows where the ball is going with each swing, so it is with the manager that can’t predict outcomes based on their actions. Just as Babe Ruth used to do in pointing to where he would hit the ball, we too have the ability to accurately predict outcomes. Predictability contributes to confidence.

3. Debrief your actions. An important, and often over-looked, activity that benefits all who do so is to debrief each action taken. The Army refers to this as an After-Action Review (AAR). This process of debriefing includes all members of the team and asks questions such as:

What was supposed to happen?
What actually happened?
What can be learned?
What should be done differently?
Who else could benefit from what was learned?

A thorough and proper debrief directly contributes to continuous learning and improved results, which enables a leader, individual and/or team to have, and repeat, success in the future.

Debriefing = Repeatability. Those that know how to repeat their successes are invaluable to organizations and to others. The ability to intentionally and predictably achieve a successful outcome at will…or repeatably…is an asset every organization would love to have.

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.

1 Easy Step to Shorter Meetings

Problem: Habitual Thinking About Time
Think about a meeting you typically schedule for your team. How long do you schedule for the meeting? For sake of discussion, let’s assume it is an hour-long meeting. Is an hour really needed, or is scheduling an hour just a habit in thinking about time in 30-60 minute increments?

We have become accustomed to increments of time that are rounded off…and most often, rounded up to greater increments of time. For example, consider human behavior with New Year’s resolutions.

What is normally considered a goal, becomes a resolution because it was set on or around January 1. Then most people stick with it for as long as they can…typically a couple weeks…then say to themselves, “I will try harder next year.”

While we are accustomed to think habitually in terms of year-long resolutions, when what is really needed are week-long or even day-long resolutions. Why wait a whole year to make adjustments to what didn’t work after a few weeks.

Shorten your time increments. Similarly, when we schedule meetings, we tend to look in 60 minute blocks of time, when what really may be needed is 45 minutes or perhaps even 20.

Solution: Plan for Less

To Meeting Organizers – Reduce meeting time by 25% or more.Before scheduling your next meeting, first be a responsible organizer and do the following:

Ensure there are clear decision points
Communicate to all necessary attendees in advance of meeting
Determine how much time you think will be needed for the meeting
Then recognize you are thinking about time in traditional ways and reduce the time by at least 25%

This is counter-intuitive, but you will be amazed at how properly prepared attendees that know the meeting time is short, will focus in on the essential decision points. Longer meeting times suggest to the participants, that there is plenty of time, so settle in and pace yourself.

To meeting participants – Plan to leave early.
For your next scheduled meeting, let the meeting organizer know that you will have to step out [25% of the meeting] early (i.e., leave 45 minutes into an hour-long meeting).

Ask the meeting organizer to cover the key points while you are there
Identify a colleague to get a recap for the last 15 minutes missed
Congratulate yourself for taking intentional steps to reinvest valuable time
Recognize this is a short-term solution, so address it at the root by sharing these tips with others

I understand this is not possible for all meetings, particularly meetings that your supervisor called. In those instances, what you can do is share the concept you read here. Let them know these methods have increased staff productivity levels in excess of 25%. What supervisor would not be a fan of that?

“Less talking, more doing!”

This really works and puts valuable time back in your day, especially when you attend or hold multiple meetings each day. The result? Spend less time talking about what you will do and more time actually doing it.

Please share your successes in employing this technique. Also, if you have a favorite way to reduce meeting times…or meetings altogether, we’d love to hear about them.

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.

Diagnosing Misdiagnosis in Business

In the medical field, a doctor’s misdiagnosis can prove fatal. Have you ever considered the consequences of misdiagnosing a sales, marketing or business issue? In the metaphorical sense, a wrong diagnosis can prove fatal to your career or business as well.

According to the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF), misdiagnosis occurs in the medical profession up to 42% of the time.

When you consider that doctors, being highly educated and well-trained in their field, still misdiagnose symptoms for 2 out of every 5 patients, how much more susceptible might the everyday sales or business professional be in proffering a wrong diagnosis? Yet for many business professionals, they cavalierly forge ahead with untested hypotheses of their business issue, and a firm course set for remediation.

“For most diagnoses all that is needed is an ounce of knowledge, an ounce of
intelligence, and a pound of thoroughness”

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?
Try to recall a recent business result that fell short of expectations, and subsequently required diagnosing the problem. What was the process you used to identify the problem, and identify a remediation plan?

For many people, they follow an inherently flawed two-step plan:

They compare their result to their expectation, then
They work backwards from the result, looking for a plausible explanation for why they fell short

While this is a common approach, the problem is that beginning with the comparison as your starting point for diagnosis is far too late. All you can do at this point is learn for next time…if fortunate enough to have a next time. The second problem is that working backwards from the result only serves to explain symptoms, but not address the root cause. If we want to avoid bad results or avoid repeating bad results, we need to get at the root.

HOW DO YOU GET AT THE ROOT?
I used to live in a neighborhood where there were a lot of very large, mature trees with roots that would buckle the sidewalks. Imagine a city planner tasked with inspecting the damage and evaluating a remedy for the current problem, to serve as a model for future neighborhoods.

Imagine how preposterous it would be if the City Planner recommended a ‘root-redirection’ program when sidewalks started to buckle? In other words, if the proposal was to address the point of the visible problem by digging up the damaged sidewalk, and working to redirect the roots downward, we would laugh at the foolishness of such a plan.

Common sense suggests either planting trees farther away from sidewalks or changing the type of tree altogether. Stated differently, we would need to change what we do on the front end to get better results, not work from the point of the buckled sidewalks backwards.

Yet, this serves as a picture of how missed expectations are often addressed. A person does a comparison, sees the variance and looks for an explanation to the problem. When taking this approach [from the end rather than the beginning], the tendency is to stop searching once you believe you have reached a conclusion.

“A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.”

Those were the words of the German-American physician, Dr. Martin Fischer (1879-1962).

PRESCRIPTION FOR PREVENTION
Dr. Denis Burkitt said, “Diseases can rarely be eliminated through early diagnosis or good treatment, but prevention can eliminate disease.” Most would agree, prevention is much better than prescription.

In order to prevent a career full of missed results, followed by faulty diagnostics leading to more missed results, we need to look at a new process that will enable one to succeed intentionally, predictably and repeatedly. Doing so will prevent a career full of regret.

The best way to do so is to have a repeatable structure or process for achieving results, so that you can quickly identify and detect problems early.

Following are a list of steps to get you well on your way:

Long-term goals should be front and center as your starting point
Connect all shorter term goals into your long-term goals
Identify specific activities/tactics necessary to achieve your goals on weekly basis
Plan specific times each day/week to achieve the tactics leading to your goals
Evaluate each day/week how you performed according to what you planned to do
Adapt your approach as necessary based on your evaluation and insights

Do not let the process scare you as this not only is guaranteed to improve your results, but literally only takes 20 minutes/day and increases the success rate significantly. I do steps 1-4 in The First 15 Minutes of each day, and steps 5-6 in the last 5 minutes of each day before I leave. I jot quick notes of my observations for what did and didn’t go as planned and as a result, have a written record of how to repeat success.

What steps do you take to create intentional, repeatable and predictable success?

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.

Time Management: 15 Minutes Can Make or Break Your Day

Do you ever find that you spend a good amount of time coming up with fantastic goals, that meet all the criteria of a S.M.A.R.T. goal and if achieved, would make a significant difference, but somehow you fail to give it the attention necessary each week and month to actually achieve it? If the answer is yes, it is a more common response than you might think.

I too, struggle now and then with this, and whenever I catch myself feeling “too busy to devote time to my goals,” I know where the problem is and what to do next. You may have systems that you use with success when this occurs and if so, great! However, if you are finding less success in your process, consider the following system. This is a system and practice I came up with based on some long-standing and timeless principles to address issues I was experiencing.

The process is what I call The First 15. The concept references the ‘first 15’ minutes of everyday that I dedicate to planning the most important things I can accomplish within a week’s time frame. While there are simply three primary steps to the plan, it is the last action I take that makes all the difference in my process. The process is as follows:

Step 1: Weekly Goals –I identify the top 2-3 goals that I should be focused on that are tied directly into and support my longer-term goals. I write these front and center at the top of the page.

Step 2: Daily Actions – This is important in making sure that the actions I will take Monday through Friday are not merely things-to-do, but are the most important things that will accomplish my weekly, monthly and longer-term goals.

Step 3: Schedule Actions – After having identified my weekly goals and the daily actions to achieve my weekly goal, I use my planning time each day to make sure I know specifically what time slot I will be working on these daily actions. I use a 1-page template that includes the following components:

Longer-term goals (1-3 years) – These are written at the top of the page so that I am always orienting to those
Goals for the week – I identify specific actions to take this week to move closer to my longer term goals
Daily Tasks – Next is a 5 column table (M-F) that lists the specific actions I need to take to meet my daily tasks; I write the specific day I will do the task and the time I will do it using my Outlook calendar
Weekly Calendar – The last element on my 1-page goal planner is a screenshot of my Outlook calendar. I do this after planning when I have time for each daily task, then I schedule time for the task in Outlook with a reminder

By planning in advance specifically what is most important, what actions I need to take to accomplish the goals and when I will actually get this done, I find that my odds go from wishful thinking to success. At the core though, is my commitment and discipline in following the process.

Important to remember is, whether using this process, or any other, the process itself is less often the issue. More common is not having a process and self-discipline to follow your own process. Typically at the heart of these matters is a personal discipline to slow down and evaluate what has been done and how effective, or often times, how ineffective the actions taken were in producing results.

More common is the pursuit of activity to feel that we are actively pursuing the results we seek, which takes the form of sporadic bursts of activities for short periods. These activities result in feeling increased pressure for the goals you are not achieving and the rest of your responsibilities that seemingly take the back seat while you are busy “trying to accomplish your goals.” The result is ending up overwhelmed and exhausted.

Sound familiar? If so, consider evaluating your process and level of discipline in consistently following your process. You are likely to find the answers in this area.

One note of caution is that as you start any new process that is foreign to your daily/weekly routine, it is inevitably going to feel a bit onerous out of the gate. It will require focus and discipline to stick with the process and reorienting yourself to why you committed to taking more control of your success. The answer for why you are doing this, of course, is to establish a long-term structure for how to accomplish goals consistently. After all, a lot is at stake when you consider the consequence of repeatedly missing goals. What approach will you choose?

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.