It’s with a hat tip to Jonny Rose who coined this phrase that I wanted to thank YOU all for embodying this very idea.
YOU – the friends who participate here on this, our blog – are a breed of people who have turned ego aside to find value in each other and bring that the front for the benefit of all.
In the face of digital narcism and online celebrity which has lured people into promoting the gospel of self, it’s my joy to have this last year enjoyed some incredible conversations with you all, many of which have blossomed into friendships and collaboration.
Last year I was afforded some incredible opportunities and from my travels across the world, my digital engagement around the web, and in particular through the Like Minds community who travelled to join us in Exeter, London and Helsinki, I’ve become more convinced of the truth and value of the following saying:
Seek to be interested, not interesting
It’s all about people, and the greatest joy in this world is to get to discover an individual. Within every person you’ll find experience, understanding, wisdom, pain, hope, inspiration and more. And with every person, the mix is different and the story unique.
I want to encourage you that this year, your growth, your answers, your solutions – they aren’t in helping yourself – they are in helping others.
So as we truly get into 2011 and might forget to look back from here on, I just wanted to pause and say that I thank you, I appreciate you, and I love you.
I’ve been thinking about how people can better their blogs in 2011, beyond the general “write better content” or “do 5 steps to…” type of advice.
Of all the different types of people who read this blog and the different types of content I post here, one large demographic is people who are in the media / social media space and write blogs to that effect. I read many your blogs – those of you who have commented here at one point or another – and so I feel I have a good idea of what you’re doing and not doing, and thus what would be beneficial to start doing this year.
What follows are 5 things you need to do at least once a month in 2011 to grow your blog, grow your community, and grow your communication skills:
1. Video
You can’t beat video for getting off of the type of a page and into the personality and charisma of an author. Considering that some of you write long blog posts everyday and yet have never done video, your readers are missing out on vital communication that you need to give them.
This video doesn’t have to highly professional – it needs to be a webcam or mobile phone video of you just saying what you’ve already said before – the advantage being that people get to meet with you and your mannerisms that can’t be communicated through written word.
And if you have an issue with how you look on video – get over it – because if you get those speaking gigs that you’re pushing for, then people want to see video!
2. Practical How To Post
At least once a month you need to be turning out a very practical “how to” post that people can use right away. I’m thinking of one person in particular right now who only ever writes theoretical stuff and so I don’t imagine their readership is going to last long, because lets face it, there’s tons of theory out there.
A practical post on a element of what your blog covers is a great way to distinguish yourself and give your readers instant value from your efforts.
3. Repeat The Past
If you scroll through all the past posts you’ve written, you’ve got some real gold that is now buried and gone and you need to bring it back to the fore for both your new readers, and also to refresh the minds of your regulars.
Once a month, find an old post that was a big hit and re-communicate the truth with a new example. Remember that it’s only when you feel you’re making your point too much that people start to get it. You have to get re-iterating your ideas if people are to consider you to be the go-to person for that topic.
4. Ask Others
I’m big on asking questions in blog posts and my stats prove that when I use question marks in titles, I get far more engagement on a post. Make sure that once a month you ask a question that really gives the floor to your readers to participate and flex their muscles.
I also find that too few blogs focus on other people – particular UK writers. There is so much value in interviewing someone else, having someone guest post, shooting a video with a friend who has a great insight, etc. Do this and you’ll grow your readership and create a decent win-win situation.
This also demonstrates that you aren’t that person who needs to hog the blog with your own ideas every week.
5. Paint The Future
I find that too few blogs give me direction for what’s coming – not necessarily next week – but what technology or ideas will help me over the next quarter. If you can be the person who paints this picture for me, then you become the expert in my books.
This expert content also separates you from the scores of bloggers who keep saying the same thing. When you form original insights and ideas you move out of the role of just plain digital commentary.
Who Does This Well
The person that I know who does this best is Ron Edmondson. Subscribe to his RSS and have a look at the mix of his last 20 posts, and you’ll see it’s all there (well, with the exception of video unfortunately, Ron!)
With that type of mix, Ron doesn’t tie himself into one particular style but keeps it varied and interesting. He also occasionally goes into a series (another great idea) or will do something totally different.
And Yours?
If you could add one more thing that you need to do every month on your blog, what would it be?
I’ll admit it if you will – many times I’ve been the person you don’t want to meet at the cocktail party.
You know, that person, the one who talks at you the whole time about their job, dropping names like they are going out of fashion with an exciting story that always trumps anything anyone else says, and finally topping it off by getting your name wrong, if they are able to remember any of it that is!
Whilst most people who are reading this are now recalling the last experience they had with that person themselves, it might well be the case that – shock, horror – you are that person to those around you at cocktails, and the digital drink that we Twitter.
Are You That Klingon?
As I sit here, I’m watching an episode of Star Trek in which a Klingon is asked to be the first officer on the Enterprise for an intergalactic exchange programme. (It is related – stick with me!) The tension and the moral of the story is that the Klingon assumes that is disciplinarian leadership style is just what the humans on the Enterprise need, and thus struggles to adapt himself in a way that will get the crew behind him. In short, he’s expecting his environment to adapt to him, without any thought to adapting himself to his environment.
So let me make my not so subtle point: when you don’t adapt to your relational environment, you’re that person. Some call it having a low EQ, some low emotional intelligence, others self-consumed, and others just call it anti-social or plain due.
Whether online or offline, when someone disproportionately talks or tweets about themselves it leaves them appearing as self-centered. Yesterday we discussed the “horns and halos principle” in which the tiny sample that someone sees of you in 140 characters or with a handshake is used to ‘fill in the blanks’ and give your horns or halos based on the sample.
Our Self-Centric World
If I try to work out the reasons why I’ve been that person, especially online, it’s because we’re so crowded that we feel we have to beat our chests in order to get heard. And in our content-driven online world, it is the easiest thing to get sucked into the gospel of me, me, me, me.
But when we feel we have to ‘big ourselves up’, what is it we are really trying to achieve? It’s actually an incredible simple human motivation that we all share and is right for us to feel:
How To Really Be Remebered
If we really want to leave an impression – whether it’s a re-visit to our website, another tweet to engage us, or a phone call after you left someone your number – the trick is in engaging the feelings of the beholder.
Making someone feel special is the most powerful way to have someone remember you, and when it comes to making someone feel special, it’s not even necessary to speak a word. I’ll tell you how I’ve learned how to do it:
To make people feel valued, talk to them about themselves.
Use Twitter to ask people questions and find out more about them. Ask people what their interests and passions are rather than just what their jobs are.
Use Facebook to ask questions that people can comment on, allowing people to engage with each other and add to each other’s ideas.
At dinner and cocktail parties, seek to be interested rather than interesting. Hint: people remember you better if they find out what you do by asking you, rather than you volunteering the information yourself.
It’s hard to resist having a good moan on Twitter, especially when something or someone isn’t doing their job and we hope that our moaning, combined with our perceived influence, will get us special attention.
The trouble is that your complaining, whilst seemingly resolving your current short term frustration, might be causing you long term brand damage.
The reason why lies in understanding how people form impressions of you – both at a first glance, and also over time.
Horns and Halos
In First Impressions (aff link), Ann Demararis and Valerie White discuss the “horns and halos effect”, which is a phenomena related to when people first meet you. A first impression is a retained remembrance of a small sample, a tiny percentage of what a person is really like. However it’s the only sample that someone has and they use to to fill in the blanks and the rest of my life to created this remembrance.
Whilst I have 27 years of life, when I meet someone I might only be able to impart 2 minutes and 27 seconds of who I am – say 5% of who I am – and the psychological fact is that this short representation will be used by the person I am meeting to inform their opinion of the other 95% of my life.
If this 5% contains negative traits – such as being angry, distracted, moody, or a complainer – the person will add “horns” to you and consider those traits to be a small sample of a greater amount that is is present in your life and might take you for someone who is far moody than you are, simply because you, for example, had just heard some bad news. Likewise, if someone encounters positive traits such as appreciation, smiling, encouragement, then they will add “halos” to you and imagine you to be an all round nice person – possible even nicer than you actually are!
Complainers and their Horns
The problem with complainers online is that in just 140 characters they create an impression that they are a complaining person. Even the fact that I am calling them “complainers” now shows that they have put themselves in a category of people who predictably moan about a lot, even though they might have only complained once on Twitter or Facebook.
This is particularly important if you represent a brand. I have tried to hold the conviction myself that I will not be a complainer online because if I do, I am representing Like Minds and therefore make it to be a complaining organisation. I am also quick to ask people not to use the #likeminds hashtag to complain on (of course, if they want to, they will), but through my relationship with everyone I encourage them not to in order to keep our hashtag and thus our brand complainer-free.
Complaining also says “I’m not in control”, a brand value that none of us would want to have associated with us. I’ll be honest, when I see people complain, I normally make a decision to step back from them because complainers are not normally the type of people who solve problems, they are the ones who wallow in them.
The Two Times When Complaining is Human
It’s important to not overlook the fact that there is a side to complaining which is human. There are times when a complaint can benefit your brand. In fact, there are two approaches:
The first is when we are frustrated with a situation that it can endear us to our community because it revelas our wounds and shows we aren’t perfect.
What is essential here is that you must acknowledge the complaint in such a way that you safe proof yourself from being labelled as a complainer. So rather than saying, “OMG Vodafone Network down again. When will they learn #FAIL”, one should rather say “I hate to moan, but Vodafone’s network being done is really delaying me today.”
Someone who does this well is Chris Brogan. If you follow Chris on Facebook (not Twitter) you’ll sometimes see him vent off on a particular struggle, but done in a way that endears his community to him and presents him as a non-complainer who is frustrated at this moment in time and needs help.
The second time when complaining is beneficial for your brand is if you polarize people based on your position. Take my friend Olivier Blanchard who regularly calls people out. When he tweets or writes a blog post that complains about a situation, he does so in a polarising nature that means you love him or hate him, and this means those who follow him do so more vehemently.
The safety catch here is that you must offer solutions to what you are complaining about. Olivier is an incredibly intelligent person and his passion overflows in calling people out – but his intelligence always wins because he paints the picture of how things should be instead. This means he is being objective and offering solutions, this demonstrating his expertise. Be warned however this polarising people is tricky business and not always the best long term strategy.
Your Leading Thoughts
Are you a complainer? Have you ever considered that the digital impression you are leaving is giving your horns rather than halos?
Do you have a brand strategy on complaining and using it to your advantage?
Has your brand lost power in an over-saturated market? With thanks to Trey Pennington, this short little video from Steve Jobs back in 1997 provides exceptional insight into using values in marketing to multiple the power of your brand.
I found it’s been valuable for me to watch this because in some instances when we talk so much about content online we forget about the power that design has. I’m always telling people that design matters but feel I’ve lost a bit of way, so I needed this:
If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch directly on YouTube.
This video has reminded me to focus on the gut emotion that people feel when they see the logo of Like Minds or The River Church, or the feeling that they will feel when they hear those words mentioned.
Associating Value
The issue is that it’s noisy, and perhaps we are thinking, “If only I were Apple, I could have time to influence people”, but even Steve doesn’t take this for granted. Steve’s opening paragraph in particular which sets out the dilemma:
“This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is.”
So surely the process begins with asking, “What are the values that the market associates with our brand name and logo?” I wonder, how many of us know the three values that our brand must communicate? Do we have that kind of crystal clarity and diamond focus about WHY we are and WHO we are?
Likewise, do we know what we are not? When we ran the Like Minds Summit with Visit Finland last year (the tourist board of Finland), in creating their social media strategy we were given their brand book that said what Finland WAS and what Finland WASN’T. It was a great help, and certainly clarified the direction that we must not go in with reagards to a social media strategy. However it lacked the final piece:
Knowing your benefits. I mean, do we really know what value we add? What is the product that people immediately associate with us? (Apple = iPhone, Microsoft = Windows) And do we know how that offering benefits them at the lowest level. I’m not talking about some crazy concoction of “it empowers people to do this and this and realise this”, I mean the once, two word benefit that cuts through the crap. The trouble that we had with Visit Finland was finding what their primary offering is, considering New York = Empire State Building, Paris = Eiffel Tower and so on. Without knowing this, you’re stuffed.
Your Leading Thoughts
So I would say to associate value we need to know 1] what values we are, 2] what values we are not, and 3] what benefits we offer.
Can you answer all three for your brand? Or where are you stuck so that we can help?
Alternatively, can unwrap more of how you have learnt to associate value?
Do we really know how powerful our words are? I’m not just talking about thinking and speaking positively – which has benefit and we need to do for sure – but on an even more powerful yet everyday level that can impact the world around us.
I’m talking about encouragement.
We seem as a society a discomfort with expressing encouragement and also receiving it. How often does someone praise us or communicate their thanks to us and we sidestep it and say “Well, it was nothing” or immediately returning the praise with a compliment of our own, rather than squarely receiving the thanks?
Or how often do we fail to communicate to others our own thanks, love and appreciation, not through a text or email, but by sitting someone down and telling them directly face-to-face how we value them? (And, hopefully without them squirming to sidestep the praise as above!)
The Power Of A Word
I mention this because I was recently contacted by someone from my Feedback days 5 years ago who I hadn’t seem in as many years. This young man had once been part of the Feedback youth organisation and regularly attended our church. He had, as most did, a troubled family life and struggled with insecurity, rebellion, ego, fear and the usual teenage emotional cocktail.
One night all those years ago, I was praying for him and I looked at him and told him “You’re a warrior.” Saying things like this to people isn’t something unusual for me, and really it wasn’t anything that I thought was life changing – it was just something encouraging I said to him – but what happened next is something amazing.
This young man had moved away years ago and, as I heard from someone else I happened to bump into from the Feedback days, had just moved back to Exeter. He sought me out just the other week – the first time we had seen each other for years – and we went out for lunch that week.
There, sat at the table, he told me that for all these years one of the things that he had held onto in the good times and the bad was that single word I’d said to him – warrior.
Opening Our Mouths, Closing Our Discomfort
I don’t know why we get some uncomfortable about expressing ourselves like this. But what I have found is that as we become more secure of ourselves, we become more secure about others. I can directly correlate the support and encouragement of my wife with my ability to support and encourage others.
What I have learnt through all the people that I mentor, and the interns that I praise on the last day of work, is we have to open our mouths and shut up our discomfort. The way that I learned to encourage people at first was to literally write down what I wanted to say and then find a movement to sit someone down quietly and encourage them. At first it was very uncomfortable, but having it written down meant that the discomfort didn’t stop me from saying what I needed to say.
The worst thing is when we have the encouraging words right there in our mouths, but our discomfort keeps them closed.
We Need Your Encouragement
The main point of what I want to say is that in the instance of this young man, he needed encouragement. And today, we need your encouragement. You need mine and I need yours. So let’s not let our pride or discomfort hold it back.
Equally, we need each other to speak plainly into our lives when it comes to correction, and if we haven’t developed the maturity to encourage without discomfort, we certainly can’t correct without discomfort.
So here’s to an encouraging 2011. Now, open your mouths.
The end of December is always an enjoyable time for me as I focus on the coming year and my priorities. Whilst it’s true that if you want to do something, you should do it, the New Year is helpful in providing a distinct time for reevaluation and refocus.
The trouble with New Years’ Resolutions is that they have a lot of bad PR – namely that they aren’t worth the hot air they’re spoken by – and whilst we have ever intention of starting on January 1st with a whole new outtake on life and a brand new daily routine, we all know in the back of our minds that it won’t last.
What I want to share with you today is a simply mindset change that will help you achieve the change you want to make in a year, without experiencing resolution cut-out or just plain burnout from the 52-part routine your day now consists of.
1. Your Vision For The Year
Every year I have a vision for the year – an overall statement that will guide what I do. Last year my vision for myself was “a leader of teams, not a doer of things”, as I was the bottle neck for way to many projects because I was the one doing all the work. Instead, I had to make 2010 about being a leader of teams and not a doer of things if I wanted the projects to become significant.
I find a vision is more helpful for an overall year that a list of 50 monthly goals, because the vision helps you make quick decisions (does this fit in with my vision for the year?), and also is more a guiding vision than a list of objectives that, if they aren’t fulfilled, can discourage your greatly.
2. Change Your Mindset: The Vision Is For The End, Not The Beginning
Once you have your vision statement – mine for 2011 is “Fatherhood” – then here comes the most important shift that will change the way your approach this year.
Rather than making the vision about what you must be from January 1st, your vision is actually what you want to have integrated into your life by December 31st. In other words, it’s not about making 10 immediate changes to your work habits and setting wildly outrageous goals for exercise, family time, professional achievements and spiritual development on a week by week basis. Instead, it’s taking the pressure off and relieving this intensity by setting a picture that you want to move towards, rather than a marker that you must already be at. The vision is for the end, not the beginning.
If you think about this, this is just common sense. I can take a year to fully integrate a new routine in my life, but I am unlikely to get it into my life tomorrow. This is what the Apostle Paul was talking about in Philippians when he said “not that I have attained on been made perfect, but I press on towards the goal.”
3. Work Backwards In Quarters
Once you’ve got your vision as where you want to be by the end of the year, work backwards and set an objective for each quarter.
Too often we set a vision but then never layout a path to get there, and the mistake I’ve made is by setting the vision and then having a few key objectives that I didn’t make time sensitive, and as we all know when it comes to getting things done, you need a due date.
Now I’m not saying that these objectives become to-dos on our to-do list. But what I am saying is they are timed and measurable markers to help us move towards our vision. So my first of 4 objectives is to “have a daily routine for my life, for life”, by which I mean a daily routine that I can be happy with for the rest of my days and works at my optimal level, with room for adaptation. This is my first objective, so of course, it’s tied to the first quarter (due: end of March!)
By having this overall quarterly aim, I am still avoiding the intensity and weight of a totally changed life from day 1. In fact, it’s not even an intensity per month, but per quarter. I also think that if your vision needs more than 4 quarters to get to, it’s too big for the year.
Once you have your objective, you can then break it down into some smaller goals to help you get there. But don’t make too many – we want to keep this simple as you already have enough complexity in your life.
4. Develop A Daily And Weekly Routine
I recently taught a group of leaders that I mentor about daily and weekly routines and was surprised to find how none of they really had one. So whilst I am indeed talking to early adopters and suspect many of you do, I will still go over how I suggest it’s done.
First thing is that simplicity is the key. I have no interest in creating more work to manage my work. I need a routine that is basic, adaptable and easy to complete so that I don’t get discouraged.
My daily routine goes a little bit like this, which Chris Brogan posted this week – so have a watch:
The key points to add in addition to Chris are 1] I have a set bed time and wake up time as my body loves this, 2] I know what food makes me feel better in the morning, so I eat that! 3] I have a rule when I can use a computer from – in order to force me to disconnect, and 4] my daily routine is more basic than this, but the idea of sectioning time is what I want to get at here.
My weekly routine is even more basic. On a Sunday, I mind map the projects that I am doing on my iPad (I’ll discuss this another time), and based on that mind map, I allocate slots of time to work on those projects in my diary, like appointments with myself. This leaves no whitespace in my calendar and thus that time can’t be taken up with other things like meetings and so on. It also means I have made that commitment with myself, and then can make commitments with others based on what I can get done in those time slots. This means I have accountability with my teams.
5. Get Things Done
If you haven’t read Getting Things Done, then rather than buying the book, you can read this summary by Olivier Roland. This is the very summary that changed my life two years ago. There’s also a fuller summary here. It’s important that you have a daily system for the work you do, and whilst I would assume you as an early adopter do, there are so many people that don’t that I don’t want to assume.
Over To You: Your Leading Thoughts
I always ask for your thoughts to build to this post, as there’s more wisdom in the comments than in my brain! I’m keen to know:
How do you plan for your year? How have you learnt to make every year count?
What is your vision for this year?
What tools can you suggest others here use that you have found indespensible?
Also, I’m so passionate about productivity and being efficient and effective that I’m really keen to help with any questions that you have – so please, ask away.
So I’m the type of person who likes a framework, in case you didn’t know, and recently I’ve been trying to clarify to a group of leaders I am mentoring what the top qualities are that I desire in people on my various teams.
I’d suggest you read the article yourself, as Jocelyn not only lists and describes the 5 qualities, but she shows you how to test for them too.
The Qualitites That I Want
After struggling, as I said in starting, to get down my most sought after qualities in people, I think this list is pretty much bang on. Initiative, or pro-activeness, is certainly my top quality and I see it as the bedrock of the others. If someone has initiative I can deal with their issues and build up their strengths as opposed to someone who just isn’t moving in their life despite having a great set of strengths already. One of the primary roles of a team player for my teams is to lighten the leader’s load – to lighten my load – and people without initiative do the exact opposite and increase my load because now I have to continually ‘work them’ to get them to work.
Communication and problem solving are two different skills but both joint second for me. Communication is a no-brainer – someone with poor communication slows the team down. Problem solving is perhaps similar to initiative, but I would see it as a distinct creative quality that shows lateral thinking. I know people who can take the initiative, but they can’t problem solve.
Curiosity and risk-taking are at the lower end of my list and I’m not sure if I would keep the list at 5 qualities to keep them in – I might just make mine 3 and remove them. Or I might replace them with something like loyalty, faithfulness, trust worthiness, etc.
Your Leading Thoughts: What Are Your Top Qualities?
What is your list of 3, and then your list of 5?
If there had to be ONE top quality above all others, which could you make it?
Every week contestants will tell the boss how good they are at selling, how they’ve taken on ‘feedback, how they can ‘control people’, but you’ll never hear about leadership.
If I had 16 people contending to work for me at £100,o00 a year I wouldn’t be looking for skills that I could hire in for less. I’d be looking for leadership – the ability to lead people, lead markets, lead change and lead organisations.
I would say the reason why is because we can easily and lazily point to the tangibles of how much we sold. But it takes detail and observation to show how you’ve lead. It’s harder work, but far more valuable, and the rarest asset around.
