So, I was posed the question: are over achievers dissatisfied with life, put themselves through misery and “trying” to prove themselves even more? My answer was pretty straightforward.

Some people are born into the world like bicycles. They believe they are bicycles and can go up to a maximum of, say 50 km/h. Along comes someone who is born into the world like a Ferrari. But this Ferrari is traveling at 100km /h. All the bicycles are astounded by the speed and ask the Ferrari to slow down. However, deep down inside, the Ferrari knows it can go much faster.

Some of you were born Ferraris. Unfortunately, because of the world of self-help and how people have been victimized by scams along the way, or any other unfortunate circumstance, people have lost the belief in their own birthright.

For example, I believe that everyone can be a great leader. I believe everyone can be a great public speaker. Or a great business owner. Somehow, they stopped believing in themselves and have not yet been awakened. It is this that drives me to keep on getting people involved in their own personal development so that they can become achievers and get past their own mental blocks in life.

I do meet people who idolize such great people. But having an idol and having a role model are two very different things. Having a role model means you’re going to do something about learning from your model. Conversely idolizing means you simply just sit there.

In achieving success, I strongly believe that individuals who have the potential to succeed should push themselves through the fire. Doubt, uncertainty, being victimized by others… all these need to be pushed aside without much care. You, the incoming achiever, needs to know that every step of the way is a step of faith that you can be better. Without this, people would not have broken records, swung the odds in their favor, or made a complete turnaround of a disastrous result. Time and time again, history has proven this to be true: a person who desires to achieve will achieve, and a person who creates resources enables that achievement. Conversely, human beings make rules that prevent them from being far more successful than they should be.

“I’m not good enough” or “I hate myself” or “I’m not worth anything” are common beliefs that cap the potential beyond anything else – self-sabotage. These unconscious beliefs hover like a veil of foul air. Sure, this is my belief. But without going beyond and holding this belief to be absolutely true, I would not have achieved what I have achieved today. And personally, I believe that many of these achievements are simple to do once you know how to do it.

So, are some people really just born as bicycles or as backburner Ferraris? I strongly believe in the latter rather than the former. Sure, a small handful are not endowed with what we might call “normal” skills. Yet, in spite of these appearances, they too go out and achieve the seemingly impossible. Haven’t you seen people born without arms and legs go out and achieve amazing results? Haven’t you seen sprinters with prosthetic legs participate in the Olympics? These stories have been shared to death in the social media online. But we still look at them as “the impossible dream”.

Well, maybe you just have to dream bigger. There’s more out there to live, love and learn. To me, I can’t simply see a great car go to waste. Neither can I see a great person go to waste.

Unleash your potential.

Find a coach. Attend a training. Read a book. Whatever it takes to awaken that sleeping giant, and stir that hurricane-force motivation which is in you to get what you were born to get.

This is simply because the road to profits can be achieved in a million and one ways. How does leadership really factor in? Personally, I see leadership as the single factor that turns the tide in your favor.  Archimedes once mentioned “Give me a lever long enough and singlehandedly I will move the world”, which basically describes the concept of leverage.

Leadership is the organizational catalyst for anything you want to do. Properly done, it serves as the single most important thing that your organization can do to improve performance and profits. Poorly done, and it works in the opposite direction. People get disgruntled, feel that things are unfair, and cease any affiliation for the organization.

I basically characterize the leadership competencies in five broad categories.: (1) Crafting, (2) Systemizing, (3) Performing, (4) Maximizing, (5) Rewarding.

So, how does this factor as a process? Basically, a leader needs the ability to Craft the business, just like an artist would. The visioning, culturing, missioning. Next the leader has to go to the science of systems. You need more than just an idea to run the business: you know you need the system so the ‘craft’ can function. Next, you go into the action or performing mode. This is where you discover what works and what doesn’t. You must definitely have a decent agenda to track your performance as well. It’s the feedback element in the business process that enables you to reflect upon what you achieved. Is it tangible and valuable? Then, you take the next step of maximizing, which is to optimize the system, weed out weaknesses in your performance and clarify the goals more effectively. Finally, once the tasks have been accomplished, you move into the rewarding part of leadership.

Although this looks like it only works as a process, there are other parts of these that will allow individual leaders to function well, and this process can be reconfigured as long as they are competencies that leaders take seriously.

I had spoken a bit about this after I had lost a total of 8kgs from December 2009 till March 2010. I joked it was because the economy was bad. (LOL) In reality, ti was a time when I initiated a fitness plan. I know I’m far from optimum health, but there are many areas to study.

Much of this was triggered by the need to get back my breath (after all I am a trainer – need to keep talking!) and from seeing how bad health can adversely affect my life (my dad had been hit by diabetes a year ago, but through proper health routines, has been successfully beating it back and has pretty much been back to normal since a couple of months ago).

I think it’s important to at least have a fitness plan, and I know you procrastinators out there are having a field day with your exercise routines.

Get yourself out there and start something, anything! Running, swimming, soccer…  just keep at it for a while, and you’ll find some interesting returns. This is far better ROI than putting money in the back because the returns are literally guaranteed. Of course, a fitness plan means you need someone who can guide you there.

At the moment, I suggest:-

• Find a decently trained fitness coach.
• Do a proper body check to ensure you are fit to go.
• Stick to your routine and work toward intensifying your routine to up your fitness further as time goes by.

I’ll leave you with a note.

A friend once decided to get fit because he was running in a half-marathon and was consistently taken over by the girls who were much fitter than he was.

Another person I know decided to get fit because he just couldn’t fit into his clothes anymore.

Another guy I know decided to get fit simply because he knew that he looked much better with a buff look (which kinda helped his love life, if you know what I mean).

Whatever it is, make sure you find your reason to do all this research and carry out the action to turn yourself into a person who really enjoys staying healthy!

A number of people have considered changing their jobs because they think they are going somewhere. In reality, that new environment might or might not allow them to grow at all.

The biggest issue in people who are planning their career path comes from the lack of understanding who they are. If they don’t have coaches or a clear direction as to where they want to be, they will stumble upon opportunities which may not necessarily lead to better places, only more appropriate places. If they get upset or stressed, it’s really a place to ‘train’ them with life.

It’s always important to get back to knowing what your personal values drives you.

Step 1: What do you want?

Step 2: Why do you want it? What value is associated with this?

Step 3: What are the specific tasks you will need to do in order to reach to the goal you intend to achieve?

Step 4: What do you need (skills and knowledge) to be able to achieve those tasks?

It’s easy to look at these questions, but it’s more important to process them. That’s the reason why coaches are so valued. They can get you to be more aware of your goals and your capabilities in order to help you to get to where you need to go.

Simple questions, simple processes for complex thinking.

Remember – don’t get entangled by your own complex thinking. Get some coaching.

As much as we advise auditing how much money we spend, it’s probably good to keep track of life in general. So I went around surfing for useful tools that could keep us more productive.

http://www.rescuetime.com/

This is a productivity tool that enables tracking of your time in reference to certain kinds of goals you set for yourself. I gave it a test run and I can see where it’s going. Not bad at all! Not sure how long it will take to monitor my time tho (LOL)… I’ll give it a shot and let you know how it fares.

Why should an organization know this?

• you clearly define your goals in developing a training program
• you save more time in selecting a potential training provider
• you are certain of the deliverables and can identify them
• you can justify the reason why you chose your provider
• you can chart your training progress more easily

If you happen to be in charge of training needs, you should actually pay attention to the following broad areas:

1. What problems do you have in the organization? or if you think you haven’t got any problems…
2. What goals would you like to achieve for your organization?
3. How much time do you have to conduct the training?
4. What measurement system would you like?

What problems do you have in the organization?

I’ve had some people who have really been up front about their organizational issues. Of course, the best person to talk about this would not just be one person. To get a fair picture about the issues at hand, it would be best to talk to a range of people. However, if you already have done an employee survey, it would be clear what their main complaints are. These problems are often segmented into two parts. The first part is a skill issue, which must be tagged to the appropriate trainer. After all, if your employee is unfamiliar with legal procedures, or company operations, then training is a must. The second part is an attitude and culture issue. In reality, too few training companies or consultants really know how to transform attitude and culture. If you are up for a discussion regarding this, please speak with my corporate training division.

If you have some difficulty, it is possible for use to initiate a study of your organization and offer some ideas as to how to get a better picture of your company’s training needs.

Broadly, here are a few training needs that we hear frequently:

• inter-department conflicts due to ineffective communication;
• inexperienced new but intelligent leaders;
• dipping of morale;
• productivity needs to be raised but don’t know how;
• the need to help employees develop life skills in general;
• enabling employees to create value;
• awareness of potential safety hazards in the workplace
• … and the list goes on

How much time do you have to conduct the training?

This is where training managers in companies balk a bit. They know very well that in order to have a good training, the amount of time factors in. But, they don’t always want to give the impression that there is a lot of time to spare because some training providers just give a week worth of games instead of real content.

Personally, my rule of thumb is simple. Given a set of clear competencies, you will need at least half a day to cover ONE competency. Most of the time, the number of competencies a company wants to cover is way too broad. Example, the issue of resolving inter-departmental conflicts often requires the following:

• Ability to empathize and put oneself into another’s position
• Ability to ask questions in a manner that enables the other person to feel understood, not undermined
• Ability to clarify one’s point with another person
• Ability to diffuse tense situations by building effective rapport
• Ability to read another person’s intent
• Ability to consider a person’s personality style in communication, particularly in stressful situations
• and more…

So, we have 6 competencies to cover. They have to be tagged to specific deliverables (e.g. a skill set that helps to improve the ability to put oneself in another’s position) that are agreed upon. Which are most important to you, if you only have 2 days, because this will take at least 3 days to teach, demonstrate and measure.

If it is a non-tangible set of capabilities like a team building training, it should be at least 2 days with rigorous activities to demonstrate team communication and allow collaboration.

What measurement system would you like?

Ah… my favorite topic. There’s the post training survey, which is great for immediate feedback about the training, but says nothing about effectiveness and transfer of learning. Back in the office, a segment of seminar attendees still need coaching (1) to refresh their memory as to what can be applied to the workplace; (2) for better support with new skills. Training seminars are NOT a substitute for coaching!

The trouble begins when we know there is no transfer likely. I mean, honestly, how am I supposed to know if your leaders are going to do what I taught? You need to give me more power to measure this. For example, add a requirement for them to complete a particular task that will be assessed in their regular annual employee appraisal. Or, peg the achievement of certain competencies to the way in which you get a raise or get promoted. To ensure these are done, you will need a much more comprehensive suite of measurement tools and systems. Some of them will require a longer time to implement but essentially, the more effective the transfer, the higher the cost of such a measurement.

Once again, if you have questions regarding training in your organization, drop by at my corporate training division.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in leadership competency development.

1. Good leaders know what they need to do. They may not be given the bible of standards to follow, but they think through it and understand it thoroughly in order understand their task at hand. This guides them in their ability to solve problems and make decisions (it’s always in relation to what goal needs to be achieved).
2. Good leaders know what skills are required to achieve what they need to do. They begin to consider the team and human elements as well as the technical requirements to get their task achieved.
3. Good leaders know how to win over what they require. This means that their level of persuasiveness is high on the scale. They enroll people into their vision of the future and excite them through their language. In order to win people over, the leader also needs to listen and understand constraints. He needs to identify if the gaps are reasonable and whether changes need to take place.
4. Good leaders find innovative alternatives to gaps. It’s not always possible to find a direct solution all the time. Often, it requires a constraint to help a good leader move in an alternative but plausible direction.
5. Good leaders look at the global scale systemically. They not only have an eye for vision, but also have an idea about other things that have an impact of the achievement of their goals. They are wary about the things that influence their goals negatively and take measures to correct them. They do their best to identify things that support their goals.
6. Good leaders make things happen. It’s easy to be a leader on the ground but you wait for things to happen. If a goal is there to achieve, leaders are the ones to guide the way. This basically includes everyone in an organization because leadership is not a “position” – it’s a sense of responsibility and good leaders across the hierarchy recognize this.
7. Good leaders make their intentions known and valid. They know how to argue the right way, support things well and ensure that people get the idea. They seldom use force to impose their ideas. They want to be predictably clear and this allows the people around them to be open to them. Their intention allows people to have clear direction and be empowered toward whatever needs to be done.
8. Good leaders learn fast. They learn from others, and learn from mistakes. Both are good, because the leader implements new ideas based on learnings and enjoys sharing them for others to learn from as well. A good leader learns fast so that he enables others to learn as well. If they need to pick up skills, they do it.
9. Good leaders build better leaders. Through their experience, they help to hone the leadership capabilities of other people within their team.
10. Good leaders do less but achieve more. They don’t have to be present in a project or event for it to be successful. They have already empowered their team to achieve this willingly and reap their rewards accordingly. If the reward is not available within the organization, they look outside of the organization to offer rewards to deserving people.
11. Good leaders take on big goals and move toward them. In fact, they let people know they are doing it and shamelessly let people know how they are doing.

photo credit: Simon Blackley

In executive coaching sessions, you should go through several sessions focusing on goals and targets. Each of these goals and targets may require one or two sessions itself to define. The strategy you implement will require proper thinking through, and your coach will guide you through the process of gaining awareness of your thinking and provide insight as to what you want to achieve. Business results are pretty simple to assess, and they usually relate to return on investment. However, not all business results are cheap to assess. For example, if you want to conduct a proper assessment on return on investment for training, it may take some doing. The more accurate the measure, the more likely it is going to be more expensive and time consuming.

However, sometimes, this coaching has nothing to do with the business itself. It may be that the individual wants some new direction, sense of self, communication problems resolved and the like. In these cases, the goal being set is not necessarily “I want to achieve an extra $1m revenue” but “I want to feel confident speaking to my new group of managers” for instance. The less well defined the goal, the less likely you can measure it.

Evidence Procedures

In my coaching, I introduce the concept of ‘evidence procedures’. It’s basically a way of defining your end result through some kind of assessment of evidence. Just like in a financial result analysis, we can see a lot of evidence for certain kinds of goals being achieved, and easy to see, evidence procedures give us a subjective measure of how well you are reaching a particular goal. Here’s an example:-

“I want to believe in my people again”

This is tough because it is a morale issue. I’ve taken a scale and gotten this executive to measure on a scale of 7 how much he currently believes in his people, so let’s suppose he gives a 1. The intervention is to get the client to move from 1 to 7 where he now believes in his staff and employees. There are several ways to do this that are based on procedures I’ve defined when working with clients.

Here’s yet another example:-

“I can’t decide whether or not to push on for this project. Both seem to have their inherent dangers and risks, and I’m just not sure”

Basically, this executive needs to be able to make a decision. But more importantly, looking forward, there must be some understanding about what the consequences are for making such a decision. In assessing the decision making process, I first model after his other effective decision strategies using a modeling process in NLP, then test that strategy, with the measure being whatever he defines for me after he is aware of his decision making strategy.

What I want to emphasize therefore is that the ability to reap rewards does not just lie in previously known measures of return on investment alone. Sometimes subjective measures need to be implemented for less tangible goals that still affect a human being and his sense of self. Do spend time with your coach in defining your targets and deliverables so that effective collaboration can take place.

If you’re not sure what that word means, perhaps you can check it up and find out what it means because you’ll have some days when you run out of words to express your emotions!

photo credit: peruisay

In my work as a trainer, I’ve met many brilliant teachers. We’d already run our Transformational Teaching program since 2005, covering aspects of learning and teaching strategies, life skills and how to re-ignite the passion in some of these very dedicated teachers.

Some of them are very good at what they do. Yet, no matter how good they are, there’s so much more they can do to bring out the best in their students if only their methods change just slightly.

1. Student rapport. I’ve seen many teacher stumble on the issue of student rapport. A lot of times, teachers are unable to manage a classroom full of what they call ‘attention deficit’ students. It’s not an easy task, but you can achieve great success if you learn strategies for rapport building.
2. Deeper communication. Yes, it is important to learn communication, no matter how much of it you already know. More importantly, it’s not about talking. It’s about really going into the mind of the other person to understand what they are thinking and how they might react. Putting yourself into their shoes will also enable you to read them better, understand their mental processes and also create for yourself a set of strategies to better teach your students once you know how they think.
3. Leveraged support. Many students today learn through the net. If, as a teacher, you’re not yet connected to the internet with your own blog or podcast, you might want to look at these tools for education, so that you won’t have to keep repeating certain things and also keep your teachings consistent.