ATTENTION DECODED

Bad feedback is not the same as feedback that addresses your areas of opportunity.   Knowing the difference could have a major impact on your career and your self-esteem. If you cringe when you receive bad feedback from a client I hope this post makes you far less hard on yourself. First, lets talk about what bad feedback looks like… Bad feedback is when someone provides you with a review of something you supposedly did but their delivery is overly emotional, attacking and non-constructive.   Feedback should have useful undertones as you absorb it. Stay focused when you get feedback and look for what is actually useful about what was said. Now, this doesn’t mean look for something positive the client said about how you did. What I really mean is look for a suggestion that they made, look for a trend or pattern when you read feedback from clients. If people start suggesting similar things that begins to be...

"It is always something" Is that not the first thing we think of when we have just gotten through one “road block” situation only to immediately find another “road closed” situation? We want there to be this grace period where things just coast for long enough to catch our breath. We want to celebrate that we overcame our last obstacle before knowing we must concur another…  Yet how seldom we get the chance to revel in the tranquility of nothing going on . No, there is rarely nothing going on. Because “it is always something”. Maybe we should look at things differently. What if life was the opposite? What if the more common saying was: “it is never anything" If life was a series of nothing ever happening to us would that be better? Would you trade endless days of “never anything” happening for the people and responsibilities in your life that cause the “its always somethings”? Here is what I mean... If your Husband or Wife is always asking you to help them with yet ...

Masquerade: to assume the appearance one is not. Sometimes we confuse what people appear to be with what they actually are. Like many other things, what people are is subject to perspective. For example... Most people would consider a person in the market to buy a small boat to be a potential client to any boat salesmen. I am not convinced. And you shouldn’t be either. Not everyone in the market to buy a boat will be considered a potential client for every boat salesmen. At first glance, this may sound ridiculous. Why would a person in the market to buy a small boat not be considered a potential client to every boat salesmen? Who would pass up a chance to make a sale? The professional sales person with specific price points in mind, that is who. Because some people will masquerade as your clients when you have no business making them your client. A salesperson who is not wanting to be a one of many salespeople for consumers to pick out of a hat must be able to know how to quic...

At a certain point it is hard to convince yourself that listening to other experts in your field will make you better at your job. Maybe in the beginning of our careers it makes sense to hear about the different tactics other professionals use, but after a while you have heard all of the in the field strategies. Eventually getting better at your job means that you have to go outside of the very thing you do in order to build up your other supporting skill sets. You have to diversify your talents beyond what is listed in your job description. For example, if you are in the business of selling running shoes then at some point it makes sense that learning about something other than what you sell will be the skill set that allows you to sell shoes better than other shoe experts. For this reason, learning about human behavior and communication is the single most important thing you can do to stand out from the other experts in your field.  In a room full of people who all kno...

The best way I know to help another person who is feeling discouraged is to show them this picture. When we think of our worries and ourselves and we look at this picture at the same time… We are in that moment experiencing what it is to feel refreshingly humbled. The magnitude of what perspective can do for us hits home in this photograph. During even the most trying situations, comfort can be felt by seeing this tiny blue dot. “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every t...