Personal Success Archives

Solve Strategic Problems by Using All your Personal Resources

Jul 19, 2016 Comments

We are often faced with problems that have an important impact on our work and lives. They always involve making an important decision and are more complex than solving simple everyday problems.

Sometimes these problems can cause us to freeze and do nothing and even become confused or defocused.

Define Problem or Goal

However, we are all built to succeed and possess the resources required to achieve our goals. So the first step is to become clear on what the goal or clarify the problem.

For example, if one of my leading products or services is becoming commoditized in the marketplace then the goal might be to develop a new product or service. Or the problem definition could be to find a solution to the commoditising of the product or service.

Use Your Three Brains

Next is to use your three brains or intelligences to come up with solutions for your problem or goal. These are your intellectual centre, your emotional centre and your instinctive or physical centre of intelligence. The key is not to overuse any of them but to balance all three in working out the best solution to your problem.

In his book CrazYZoo! Know Thyself Made Easy, Fritz Clouse explains the three intelligences and goes much deeper by guiding the reader in choosing their classic and combined types. This gives a deep understanding of yourself and how to leverage your strengths and control your weakness.

Use your intellectual intelligence to logically analyse the problem in order to find the cause or evaluate the pros and cons of the possible solutions.

Use your emotional intelligence to see how you feel about implementing possible solutions. Imagine the solution happening and see how it feels.

Use your instinctive or physical intelligence to allow ideas to come to you that your mind may not have thought of when trying to figure it out.

When faced with these types of strategic problems I like to first get clear on the impact of the problem and why I need to solve it. I then stop dwelling on it and instead start focusing on what it would be like if the problem was solved.

I find that when I engage in some physical activity like running or cycling new ideas start flowing to me to address the problem. Our instinctive intelligence is very powerful and will deliver ideas and solutions that our logical mind will never think of as it is more limited by our self-imposed concepts and ideas.

Visualize a Solution

One powerful technique is to use visualization that can also be combined with positive affirmation to train both are conscious and subconscious minds to provide actionable solutions. This technique makes good use of the three intelligences. As you think of the problem or goal visualize it in your mind while tapping into your emotions. You can do this by recalling a past experience where you felt success in your life.

Give Yourself Time

In order for visualization and affirmation techniques to be effective it must be done every day for 30 days. I will cover this in more detail future articles and videos so subscribe now if you haven’t already.

Because I am referring to key strategic problems that will have a major impact on you or your business it is important to allow adequate time to work on these problems. If you rush you will not allow yourself to use your three intelligences adequately.

I hope this gives you some greater insight into using all your resources to address a strategic problem or goal. The main take away is to learn to use all your centres of intelligence to guide you to solving important problems and achieving key goals.

You Inc., how to use your full potential

Apr 06, 2015 Comments

The key to happiness and success lies within you. Why work harder to get what you want when you can work smarter and achieve the same or more in less time? Imagine if you and your employees were all working smarter and thus producing more in a day. How would that affect your business and make your work more enjoyable?

Rather than looking at yourself as a boss or manager and your employees as staff, think of yourself as a company, You Inc. Just replace You with your first name, so for me it would be Stephen Inc. In this sense, you are a supplier to your company. What do you supply?

Assets

Every company has assets. We use our assets to produce results and those results create benefits. Results are sales, profits, customer satisfaction, innovation etc. and the benefits are how you enjoy the generated results. Benefits could be the home you live in, the vacations you take, the hobbies you enjoy etc.

Talents and Abilities

Our assets are made up of talents and abilities that we use every day to produce the results and gain the benefits we enjoy. Here is an inventory of our talents and abilities that we all use in our work to produce results.

Know-how and skills
Time
Concentration
Decisions-making
Energy

Go through the above list and evaluate your level of satisfaction for each of the talents and abilities on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest level. How satisfied are you with your knowledge requirement for the job and the skills you have to perform the job? How well do you manage the time available to get things done? How is your ability to concentrate on the task at hand and control distractions? How well do you make decisions considering both timeliness and striking a balance between intuitiveness and being rational? Finally how much energy drive and passion do you bring to your work?

After you have scored yourself for each of the talents and abilities, pick one that would have the most impact if you improved in this area.

Now imagine if I had a magic wand that I could wave and instantly give you your full capacity in that talent and ability. Close your eyes, relax and think about how things would be different. What do you see, how do you feel? Write your answers down. How would this translate into results? How would it improve your benefits?

Full Potential

Science tells us that the average person uses only 5 to 9% of their total potential. Let’s say your above-average and you use 15 to 20% of your total potential. This still leaves 80 to 85% of untapped potential.

Set a Goal

What goal can you set for yourself to develop the talent and ability that you identified in this exercise? How could you start tapping into your untapped potential? Start by taking a first step. Focus on one talent and ability at a time.

Continuous Growth

The key message here is to keep growing and develop the mindset for continuous improvement. If you learn to apply this on yourself it will extend to everything you do. If you can teach this to your employees not only will they be grateful to you but they will perform better and stay loyal.

Stephen Goldberg

The 4 Stages of Learning to Develop a New Skill or Behaviour

May 14, 2014 Comments

Learning a new skill or making a change in behavior as a result of a training workshop or learning program does not happen just from your participation in the activity.

Real learning happens when the desired outcome of the training actually manifests itself in the performance of your activities or of the way you behave.

Unconscious Incompetence

To achieve real change requires that we go through four stages of learning. The first stage is making us aware of what we don’t already know. This is called the unconscious incompetence stage. We must first become aware of the things we need to learn and what we don’t already know in order to be open to the new material and to make the effort to put it into practice.

Conscious Incompetence

This leads us to the next level of learning, which is called conscious incompetence. Now we know what we didn’t know and are more open to learning, but we still cannot perform the new skill or behavior.

Conscious Competence

Once we start putting the skill or behavior into practice through guided instruction, we now go through the next stage of learning, which is conscious competence. This means that we can perform the skill or behavior, but we need to be thinking of what we’re doing and still be guided and corrected.

Unconscious Competence

The more we practiced the new skill or behavior. We gradually become better at it until it is fully learned and we reach the next stage, which is called unconscious competence. This is the goal of every training program were ultimately the new skill or behavior becomes a habit and second nature. We no longer need to think about how to perform each step we just do it naturally.

A good analogy is learning how to drive a car. The first step was to learn the theory behind driving in a classroom before we even went out on the road. The next step was to get behind the wheel with an instructor and to learn the different controls and operations.

Once we were comfortable with that, we started to practice driving perhaps in a parking lot and slowly went out on the road with the instructor who gave us feedback and made corrections.

As we practiced more and more we became confident based on the results and the feedback from the instructor until the point that we were doing things automatically.

When you drive to work next time, look at the faces of people driving the other cars. Most of the time people are thinking about something other than driving the car itself, but we all somehow show up to work safely. This is a good example of unconscious competence.

This process is more difficult for a behavioral change as compared to learning a mechanical skill, such as learning to operate a computer program or machine. A behavioral change is linked to beliefs and attitudes and thus requires greater awareness of your thoughts and reactions to people and situations in order to consciously put into practice the new behaviors.

Stephen Goldberg