Working On Me

Here is a mistake I see alll the time in written English, and I've often made it myself, too. Practice with a 'C' is a noun. It means either a doctor's or another professional's business or can refer to the abstract concept of repeated rehearsal. It is used correctly here:

The lawyer's practice was growing

Practice is the only way to improve in sport

But when you use the word as a verb, that 'C' becomes an 'S' and we write about the act of practising. Here is the verb form used properly:

When you practise law you have a duty of care to your clients

The more time you spend practising a skill, the better you'll get

A similar distinction applies for licence/license. You apply for a driving licence, for instance, but you can be licensed to undertake certain activities.

Impulse spending can ruin the most careful budget; impulse eating means more diets fail than succeed. A self talk technique can help curb these impulses. Impulses are hard to resist because acting on them provides immediate gratification, although it is often short-lived. You can resist an impulse by asking yourself how you will feel an hour from now (or a day) were you to give in and yield to the impulse. In all likelihood, you'll feel no better than you do now. Reinforce this by immediately focusing on what you hope to achieve by controlling your eating or spending and ask yourself how you'll feel when you achieve your goals through not yielding to impulses.

Yesterday I was doing some research on speed writing and found this site. There is some useful guidance there, but what really spoke to me was the last comment on the page:

You get better at that which you practise.  If you practise not doing these things, you will get better at that, also.

Beautiful!

Last week I wrote about using your journal for problem solving. I thought it would be useful to provide some more examples of implementation of this idea. Here are some openers I've used myself:

1. There are fifteen jobs around the house I need to get to the next time I have a day off.
2. There are ten coutries I want to visit on holiday in the next few years.
3. I shall list twenty way of saving money from the family budget.
4. Here are five ways I can make more time to exercise every day.

Remember to state a number which is slightly more than you think you'll be able to come up with.

There are ten ways you can use your journal to solve problems.

Actually, there aren't; or if there are, I don't know what they are. But if I wrote that sentence in my journal - "There are ten ways you can use your journal to solve problems" - I'm sure I could come up with ten.

This is a technique I have used in my own journal to explore thoughts and issues and resolve problems. Here's an actual example I used recently:

I am going to list twelve things I can do with the family at the weekend to make up for working late every day this week.

And having written that in my journal, I then set about listing my ideas.

Why twelve? Because it was a few more than I thought I'd be able to manage. I did manage twelve, although the last three needed a few minutes of headscratching. If I handn't had the target number to fulfil, I would have stopped at nine. That would have been a shame, because number eleven was a real gem of an idea.

I have used the technique quite widely already, and giving yourself a stretching target really does pay dividends.

A few months ago, I joined Toastmasters International, probably the best known speaking club in the world. At any given time, many thousands of people all over the world are working through Toastmasters programmes and discovering public speaking skills.

I joined not because I cannot speak in public (as a freelance trainer, this is a skill I developed a long time ago) but because I felt I had stopped improving. Since joining the organisation, I've made several speeches and presentations, and received direct, constructive feedback which has helped me polish my skills. I've seen many other speakers, some speaking for the first time, some old hands, and heard the feedback thay have received, too.

All in all, I've developed my speaking skills more in the last 6 months than in the preceding ten years. I'd recommend Toastmasters to anyone, whatever their level of speaking experience.

Here's a very handy Excel tip. You might want to limit with data validation the entry a user makes in a range of cells so that only a name appearing in a lookup list can be entered. But you also want to prevent any of the names in that list being entered more than once.

Here's how to do it.

Assuming A1:A10 contains the list of allowable names and the names are keyed in by the user in Column D, then select D1:D10 and from the Data menu, choose Validation to display this dialogue below. Make sure you change the 'Allow' pulldown to 'Custom':

In the 'Formula' field, enter the following:

=AND(COUNTIF($A$1:$A$10,D1)=1,COUNTIF($D$1:$D$10,D1)=1)

Done.