In a recent training on Creating Customer Intimacy, I tabled the idea that all the communication tactics in the world would never enhance your ability to have customer intimacy. Most of us live in a world where we think we have no customers. But as long as you have to work with at least one human being in the world, that person is considered a ‘customer’. It could be a team member, your family, a boss, a friend. At the end of it all, we have to be very clear that in order for customers to want us, we need to make a special change to the way we do things.

In my personal view, there are three kinds of relationships you can build within any organization. The first is the relationship with the world. This is what a lot of people want to do. They go on Facebook and add friends. They create an advertisement to communicate with their intended customers. They build products to sell. These are external customers, whom we are obliged to deliver maximum service and value to.

The second is the relationship within the organization. They are your team members, bosses, peers and partner vendors or suppliers. The relationship here still needs to be clear: we have to build a partnership with each of them in order for the external customer to be satisfied, and to maximize their value. However, it is often not recognized that we are expected to maximize service to our internal customers.

The final core of this entire model is simply the concept of the self. You have to have  a relationship with yourself in order for you to know yourself better. There are many aspects of this that I have written about already, but the truth is most of us don’t know ourselves intimately because it is easier to hide from our emotions, beliefs, negative thoughts and patterns of behavior.

But if you were to see how the world is behaving, you’ll realize this: everyone wants the dollar, the bottomline and they focus on the external world. What if this doesn’t work? You aren’t getting your dollar, you aren’t building your followers, you aren’t creating the success you aimed for in your goals? It’s simple, really. It basically means the core of the executor – You – is not well grounded. You have not gone to the core and begun the process of deciding what you stand for.

From a personal development standpoint, this is crucial – we cannot ignore the impact of personal development on team leadership and business strategy. I know so many people out there who crave to start a business, want to make a difference, but they stumble upon so many different problems in their life that the fruits of their laborious labor are not worth consuming.

Recently, I posted on Facebook that a few of my graduates of my public programs had taken ideas, logos and frameworks that belonged to us, and had used it for their own profit. A number of very sympathetic people commented that we should take steps against them to protect our intellectual property. Of course, this is not the only time this has happened. But what makes me reluctant to threaten or sue is simply that I am using the same energy to take them down that they used to steal our ideas. It’s somewhat counter productive. It’s like this: the husband blames the wife for spending too much money. The wife blames the husband for not loving her. The husband gets angry and says the wife is irresponsible. The wife shouts at the husband saying he is unreasonable. Okay – you know very well that his kind of match is “who has the fittest lungs wins”. It’s silly, we know, immature… and yet millions of people do this every day!  I have to relook my own approach in training to promote the idea of partnerships because in many cases, past participants who want to do the same thing as us have forgotten that stealing is wrong. Stealing destroys trust and it prevents partnerships from ever happening. It’s like this: you date this person, and you don’t show up. You not only don’t apologize, you say that your date should be more reasonable to know that you are busy sometimes. You’ve just asked the person to trust you to do the right thing, then you stole that trust away. The next time you ask that person on a date, you can be quite certain that the relationship has changed.

If you always have the problem of quarrels and arguments in your business, it may be a sign that you are already doing things ineffectively. But to throw the blame to someone else, justifying that you are hurt, unhappy and disappointed is going to be just jaw-droppingly stupid (in my humble opinion). Partnership is the key and trust is the driver. In order for trust to take place, a sincere and clear communication must be made. Seriously, if you built all the trust you wanted but your level of competence is low, don’t expect the customer to say “yes I want your service”. If you created lots of competence but you break your customer’s trust, you may be great the first day, but not the subsequent days.

Balance this by looking inside, because unless you are congruent with the external world, it’s going to be hard to strive to achieve goals. Sure, we all have this “superhero complex” sometimes. Get over it! The world does NOT revolve around us and our dreams all  the time.

As Zig Ziglar once said, you can get anything in life you want, if you help enough other people get what they want. True partnership requires sacrifice, giving, not expectations and taking. It is this Beast inside of us that needs to bend, to change. Maybe we’ve been constantly thinking we were always right, aggressive and caring more about ourselves. But change is necessary. That’s when the Beauty takes notice and changes along. And then, the spell of Evil can be broken, and the Beast be transformed back to the handsome prince he once was. The classic story ends but our new journey begins with a question: can we make our partners fall in love with us and keep loving us?

Recently, I added some content in my seminars regarding the difference between people who capitalize on their strengths versus those who merely work on their weaknesses. According to the Gallup Organization, in a book written by Markus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, “Now Discover Your Strengths”, it’s become apparent that working on weaknesses doesn’t necessarily reap returns. That made perfect sense. In other words, you really need to know your strengths in order to capitalize on them.

One thing began to bother me though.

Recently, in another piece of psychology research, I’ve also found that those who become masterful at something don’t necessarily need to spend huge amounts of time. They merely research all the mistakes that people make. I found that quite fascinating. It meant that the things I’ve always been successful at learning and providing results to back those up versus those where I’ve only learnt textbook knowledge from stems from this very idea.

Another additional point I’ve realized is that in order for us to make effective decisions, we cannot just rely on a logical strategy. In Master Your Mind Design Your Destiny, we outlined a formula for you to understand your emotional drivers. We all know, however, that emotions are not the only way to make decisions, but simply ignoring them isn’t going to work. I’ll give you an example. When you are totally rational about something, you end up being really good at suppressing your emotion. Trust me, I’ve been in Vegas the last few days and I can see clearly how people could keep playing until they lose their shirts. You are shown that you are winning credits but you never win more than you bet. However that ‘win’ registers as a pleasant feeling regardless. That’s odd, isn’t it?

When you learn from a mistake, you have the opportunity to foretell the future. You become the guru. It’s almost insane, however, that people are so obviously making the same mistake. They set out with good feelings to run a business or make money, but forget the skills and strategies they need to success. Worse, they forget to learn the mistakes that will kick them in the other direction so that they don’t fall prey to blindly putting their money in a place that ‘feels good’.

A lot of people who are in the helping profession are exactly like this. They can’t get past the problem of charging less than they are actually worth because the service itself generates positive feelings of success and well-being. That’s not what success is about. Success is about the collective learning effort – whether the end outcome is what you want or not. This is very difficult for many people to understand. Let me put it in a context that you could probably understand.

When I first started out learning neuro linguistic programming, I think Richard Bandler had already stumbled upon this principle – we learn far faster by doing and making a mistake than really just getting things right the first time around. The trouble is this: we don’t have a compatible state to be able to balance two very important forces.

The first is “ecology“. A bad move, no matter how much you learn from, is going to have a negative impact tin the minds of other people who are working with you, or in your family, especially if they don’t understand the rationale of your actions. What’s worse is that some people might actually never have thought of the reasons for their actions. You fail to explain your situation, your intention and at the first sight of disapproval, you give up explaining. Sure, there’s not always enough time to explain sometimes, but it sure says a lot about you and your ability to convince someone.

The second is the “driver state“. In my trainings with Bandler, we’ve been told to emphasize the state of audacity and do things from a state of wanton curiosity. Now, that’s an emotional state that I’ve often forgotten about simply because of the feeling of fear or uncertainty. It’s definitely an important thing to consider because wanton curiosity enables us to learn powerfully from experiences. We discover challenges and we can go “hm! that was interesting” or “wow, I never knew that” and that enables the brain to absorb information far more readily and easily.

In other words, forward thinking skills and state management skills are critical for survival. This is especially so if we are proceeding further into the 21st century. We need to master the ability to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others in order to maximize our professional capacity.

This is interesting. Not meant to be a prescriptive guide, just a list for you to consult when you need, which are life-giving ideas:

1. relax alone with your favorite drink (wine, coffee, etc)
2. go window shopping
3. Listen to music you love
4. Pray
5. Do something nice for someone else
6. Deliberately shift your attention to something else
7. Take a walk in nature
8. Exercise
9. Talk to a coach
10. Increase self awareness
11. Journal
12. Appreciate yourself
13. Read out a list the things that you are already grateful for
14. Sing
15. Set up a mini challenge for yourself
16. Look at the problem as an opportunity
17. Consider past similar experiences and ask yourself what you can learn positively from it
18. Believe that this day has come for a reason and it will pass
19. Surf the web for funny videos and share them
20. Read a few inspirational quotes

I found this quite interesting and thought it might be a good idea to share it with you. This wheel of emotions shows the position you are at, and is a useful tool for emotional literacy.

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!

I’m certain you’ve heard of the concept of a ‘generation gap’. In fact, this gap happens in many other places too. Racial gap, religious gap, cultural gap… the list can go on.

What exactly is this “gap”?

I was listening to the radio today and they were discussing the case of the 14 year old teenager in school who had beaten up her teacher. The main topic was, whose responsibility it was. It was quite funny because the first caller dialed in to blame the Minister for Education. The most of the rest contributed points that were borderline illogical (“I blame the teachers because they have no dress code themselves”).

photo credit: davitydave

This is an instance of a gap. One generation tells the other generation what to do without considering the other’s perspective. But this is due to General Apathy. Basically, these are people who have no idea what the other side is experiencing, nor will they until they stop putting their own mental models aside in order to understand someone else. This fixation, however, is also an opportunity to recognize that while it can be problematic, it is also an opportunity to learn from others’ glaring mistakes.

Joint responsibility (between teachers and parents in this case) of raising children is difficult, yes. And that is because firstly, as a human being, you’re not allowed to give up on another human being. I think that’s the first measure of respect. Sometimes, you just have to believe in them more than they believe in themselves to be able to get them to step up.

In other words, you’ll need a lot of involvement. It’s simple to say “spare the rod and spoil the child”. Then look at all the spoiled parents (some dysfunctional, yes) out there who were given the rod in the past. It’s the same mentality that “since it’s been done that way, it should always be done that way”. That’s not even logical. You can discipline a child, but the ability to do it because you love a child is poles apart from disciplining a child for the sake of following some time-tested process!

So suffice to say, I think it works out for almost any kind of human relationship. An investment in a relationship takes time. It’s not easy. Especially since it means that you have to do away with your own ways of thinking and maintain some form of neutrality first. By doing so, you get the opportunity to experience the person, his circumstance and thinking processes.

You can’t close a gap by a physical change. A behavior can be changed, but it won’t necessarily last if it’s a change from the outside. If it’s a rationalized change, the person will be able to forge a better change from the inside, especially a teenager. During this time, you get a chance to model the qualities of patience, being firm (you don’t just want to be ‘nice’ all the time) and respectful.

And who says only children and teenagers model? Adults do to. And if you have a young adult subordinate, you may need to do the same as well in order to close the experience gap we all face in our world today.

It never fails to strike me as how one-sided many people are in relating to one another.

photo credit: xflickrx

I often like to tell the story of how one day I was in a cab driving down the Central Expressway (CTE). The driver was so engrossed in talking to me about the bad traffic situation in Singapore that he made this claim: “All women are bad drivers. They cause all accidents.” No sooner had he mentioned this, there was an accident up ahead that involved a woman.

Conversely, there was a situation where a friend of mine (female) drove to my place to pick me up and I was pleasantly surprised to note that she was really good at handling the car. As we drove down the same expressway, it turned out that there was a big jam due to an accident. She made this claim: “Taxi drivers in Singapore are the biggest cause of traffic accidents, and they are getting worse.”

Hmm.

Difference of opinion, or the failure to look at the other person’s perspective?

Very simply put, there are many sides to an opinion. If you think you are always right, think again. I strongly believe that a lot of the arguments we have are unnecessary simply because we fail to understand the other person’s point of view.

A senior manager came up to me once and told me that the “youngsters nowadays” are difficult to train and not willing to take on hardships.

A young engineer recently came up to me and told me that “the more elderly they are the less cooperative they are”.

Hmm… so much for standing in each other’s shoes and getting an understanding for each other. I believe that we fail to recognize the merits of each individual we meet with to the point where it is easy to make assumptions about the other person. I was once taught by Dr. Richard Bandler, the founder of NLP, to consider if I ever thought I was wrong about something. It dawned on me that this teaches me to look at a different perspective. Often, not always, I have a judgement and opinion, and do my best to look at the question and its conventional answer from a different angle, so that I can generate something even more useful. But I always do my best to acknowledge that the perfect answer may not exist, and I have of course, had some of my ideas proven wrong many times. This is why I prefer not to take sides in an argument because both sides often are valid. But as human beings we frequently do not know how to hold more than one possible answer in our heads. It’s as though life were like math, that 1 + 1 must always equal to 2.

But we know life is far more complex than that, and requires a bit more patience and attention. After all, we seldom spend enough time learning about our life, when there are many interesting and beautiful wisdoms to consider. Perhaps it’s time for use to acknowledge that the generation gap is more than just a age difference, but is universal: it is the gap we generated due to our own experiences and memories and biases. Let’s learn how to bridge them by being curious about another person’s perspective, and discover something interesting that we may never have thought of.

I just had a flash of insight a couple of hours ago because I was in the middle of doing an unprecedented in-house training for a group of my trainers. While we all had a fun time with “mind blowing” details (I was teaching them the dynamics of marketing online), it somehow struck me that there are things that people are “interested” in doing, but won’t do. There are also things that people are “obsessed” with doing, that no matter what happens, they MUST do.

I got a little surprised myself because I thought about what makes me want to do something versus what I don’t like to do, and what struck me was that I really enjoyed working with people and seeing them learn, but seriously dislike it when people aren’t able to learn. And I don’t mean this intellectually – I mean it viscerally in my gut. It’s a reaction to their reaction of the inability to grasp information.

So as I thought about the implications of this, it could mean two things. First, it could mean that it might force me to be a better trainer. Second, it could mean that it might make me ignore certain things in an audience simply because I might want to have the illusion that I’m doing a great training. Ultimately, I don’t just want to do good training or pretend that it was, I want to make sure that the people around me “get it” regardless of how I feel, the participant must be more competent to take action.

This is the kind of awareness I tell people to partake in regularly because I find that it is so illuminating. Without this kind of insight, we can never learn to improve. It is self-awareness of things that propel you and the forces that repel you that make you discover more about who you are and what you do.

For example, do you know what you believe? And, do you know that your beliefs could damage you? One idea behind the Law of Attraction (that many people have mistakenly thought originates from the documentary ‘The Secret) is that whatever your beliefs are shape you and attract like things.

photo credit: myuibe

Now, I don’t want to me mystical and tell you that it’s about universal reverberations. Let’s just focus on your thoughts. What happens when you have a negative or disempowering belief? If you have always feared going up on stage, the prospect of doing it actually creates a physiological chain reaction. Not only does it prevent you from being your confident best, it also prevents you from opening yourself to a different interpretation to on-stage success. The stress leads to a release of a neuro-chemical known as cortisol, which, if in your system for the long term, causes bodily aches and pains. What now happens is that the thing you fear, is literally causing you more pain, and becomes cyclical. The more pain you feel, the more you associate it with other negative beliefs about your life, your age, etc. The result: a nervous breakdown.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that this is bad for your future, and it has really nothing to do with universal vibrations. All it is, is your reduction of strength from a very real, physical limitation placed on yourself through your beliefs.

photo credit: Lazurite

Until someone points out to you “hey – in the past you were just nervous but nowadays you seem to have gotten really frustrated and angry when told you have to do a presentation” do you realize that something has to change.

I believe that self-awareness comes with practice. Not everyone is able to gain self-awareness because we keep getting caught up in the day-to-day, getting distracted, and missing time for ourselves. Maybe it’s time to re-prioritize. Maybe it’s time to make time to listen to our inner thoughts, reflecting on why we do the things we do, and re-calibrating ourselves toward our success.