Working On Me

Often we read books or attend courses and decide to apply some of the learning. Too often, though, we don't sustain the application and our good intentions melt away as day-to-day demands take over.

I determined that I would no longer put up with this state of affairs, and would put key development priorities somewhere I would be constantly exposed to them. The one place I referred to every day was my desk diary, and I had the idea of making a 'today' bookmark and putting my development commitments on that. I have never looked back.

The example shown is one I used for a while after reading a well-known personal development book. Each time I opened my diary, I would glance at the bookmark and reflect on what I was doing and how I was applying the learning. At the end of each week, I would rate out of ten my current level of applying each of the principles. This allowed me to particularly challenge myself the following week where I needed to work the most.

The bookmark is double-sided of course. On the back of mine I usually list my goals so that I'm regularly exposed to these too, but you can use this to track other development ideas too.

Over the years, I have gone through several of these bookmarks and each has helped me incorporate different development ideas into the way I work. I truly believe they have made the difference and made me move beyong just learning and into actually doing.

Bullet points are now endemic to our communication. The bullet-point is almost the atom of ideas in that it cannot be further reduced without losing meaning. Retaining that meaning in the process is, of course, vital, and it is here where grammar has a real contribution to make.

The good news about the bullet-point is that it removes the need for virtually all punctuation. The idea is that if your bullet-point is long enough to need a comma, it is probably too long. Even a list of items which would traditionally have been separated by commas (items such as lists, recitations, inventories and roll-calls) is rendered not with commas, but with sub-bullets, thus:

• Items such as:
• lists
• recitations
• inventories
• roll-calls

Note an important grammatical point here. Where sub-bullets complete a grammatical structure begun in the parent like this, they shouldn’t start with a capital letter, since in grammatical terms they simply continue an existing sentence rather than beginning a new one. This can be a challenge, since Word and PowerPoint will usually seek to make capitalisation automatic for you, assuming that a bullet-point will always constitute a sentence. Fortunately, this option can be turned off globally through Tools/AutoCorrect.

My wife was trying to teach my 8-year-old son when he should be using 'less' and when he should be saying 'fewer'. She started by using an example. "You would say, 'less soup' or 'less milk'," she said.

My son reflected on this for a moment, before exclaiming, "I know! It's foods you don't need to chew."

And the real rule isn't much harder to remember. When referring to a plural noun, one should use 'fewer' ('fewer calories', 'fewer loans'), but when referring to a singular noun you need 'less' ('less fat', 'less debt'.) Simple, but evidently not simple enough for the supermarkets that ask us to queue at tills dedicated to those with 'ten items or less'. 

You might be trying to determine the difference between 2 dates to determine who old a person is. The easiest way to do this is with the DATEDIF function, which although entirely undocumented is present as a built-in function in all recent versions of Excel.

Assuming A1 contains the date of birth and B1 contains =TODAY(), then input in C1:

=DATEDIF(A1,B1,"y")

Other entries in place of the "y" will help you be more precise:

- use "ym" to tell you how many spare months

- use "md" to tell you how many spare days

This formula will tell you an age in Years, months and days:

=DATEDIF(A1,B1,"y") & " years, " & DATEDIF(A1,B1,"ym") & " months," & DATEDIF(A1,B1,"md") & " days"

Those of us who drive a car can sometimes be a little neglectful of it. We'll top up on fuel, change the oil now and again or check the tyre pressure when things feel a bit bumpy (but probably not before.) Eventually, we'll send the car in for a full service, and it will come back sometimes feeling appreciably different. It is then that we realise that the service had been due for quite some time and we had had no idea how much it had been needed.

When we get deeply involved in the day-to-day business of work and life, we tend to make do with just refueling and the odd oil change. When do we actually stop and take time out to look at what we're doing and think about what we need to do differently? My gut feel is that we need to give ourselves a full service far more often than we actually do.

As a consultant and coach, I often have to meet people to help them address a performance issue. Often, what the issue is might look fairly clear. Nevertheless, I cannot afford to assume, and it is then that I remember to ask children’s questions rather than policemen’s questions.

The policeman interrogating a suspect begins with a theory and then sets out to prove that it is right. His questions seek to confirm the theory and uncover evidence that supports it. Loaded questions will predominate. If I take this approach when coaching someone, I risk the hidden truths eluding me. I could end up trying to help address an issue which doesn’t exist.

What distinguishes children’s questions is that they are asked without any idea what the answer will be. They are the most reliable way to cut through preconceptions and get a clear picture of what is really going on.

When you turn your policemen’s questions into children’s questions, you increase your chances significantly of finding the truth.

I was running a management training session today and talking about the importance of values when trying to develop your people. One of my participants asked a pretty crucial question: “Whose values are we talking about?”

In talking about the question, an analogy came to me that I think works really well. It is to do with the difference between a missionary and an anthropologist and the way they approach a different culture. When a missionary visits a new culture, he has no interest in that culture’s values, but instead seeks to supplant his own values in their stead. An anthropologist, though, tries to be invisible, and to simply observe and determine what the values of the culture are.

So when helping their people develop new skills in line with values, managers need to decide whether they are missionaries or anthropologists; whose values are going to determine the direction of the development?

Last week I wrote about putting yourself at the front of the money line. Before even a year of applying this technique has passed, you will have accumulated a whole extra month’s earnings. Keep it up, and compound interest will mean before long you will have a year’s earnings on deposit, then ten years’ earnings. And if you can manage after a while to put away 12% or 15% through better financial discipline, then you will get there even faster.

Another boost comes when you get a pay rise and decide that half of it will go straight to your savings. After a few rises, you might find that 25% of your earnings go straight into your special account. A few simple sums will show you what a huge impact this can have on your future financial security.