Tag: fear

Presenting

Fabrizio1 Comment

If you are preparing to deliver a presentation that matters (to you), consider the following.

Start with the audience and the change you’d like to see (even when you are just presenting results, you are still demanding a change). List them down somewhere and have them visible throughout the process.

Have the deck ready early, at least a week before the presentation.

Little text on a slide is always better than more. Always.

A list is a list even without a bullet.

Allow enough time to collect and implement the needed feedback. If you get feedback too close to the time you are supposed to deliver the presentation (<24hrs), be brave and disregard it.

Write a script for the key points and the transition between slides.

Rehearse the presentation multiple times, keeping the script at hand, but without reading it.

Few hours before the actual delivery, free your mind and take a break from the presentation. Do something else. The deck is ready by now, and so you are.

Good luck.

Clinging is not the answer

FabrizioLeave a comment

Beliefs are constructs, and so two things can happen.

They can fail you. When you least expect it, when you start thinking at beliefs as reality, when you put a lot of pressure on them, the world will shift and they might not be relevant anymore.

They can change. It takes probably more time than you’d like, a lot of learning, some pain, and yet there is no reason why your beliefs should be the same for all your lifetime. When was the last time you thought Santa would deliver gifts on Christmas Eve?

As this happens, you can either cling to your failing and changing beliefs pretending they are fact (they are not), or you can challenge yourself over and over again to find uncomfortable situations, meet that person you’d never want to meet, learn something out of your field, invite somebody you don’t know very well over for dinner. Make it so this choice is deliberate.

Offer problems

FabrizioLeave a comment

When leading people, it’s better to be careful about pushing urgencies down the line.

An urgency is always something personal. Something that is urgent for you is rarely urgent for another person, and when you leverage your position of power to get that done, two things happen.

First, the machine gets stuck. The member of your team who is working on your urgency is not being employed for what they were (hopefully) hired for. Instead, they are acting on orders. Value is not added and the organisation has just seen a bottleneck blooming.

Second, energies are drained. The effort put into doing a task one does not understand is more than the one put into a task one owns. Additional mental energy is needed to make sense of the situation, reverse-engineer the decision and figure out if this is the right time to search for a new job.

Rather than urgencies to act upon, offer people problems to solve, and let them come up with their list of actions, people to meet and documents to draft. Give them the tools and let them come up with their story. After all, nobody wants to be a secondary character in a story someone else has drafted.

Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away.

From The Trillion Dollar Coach

Strategy and tactics

FabrizioLeave a comment

While I was writing Secret Recipes the other day, I noticed I wrote another post a while back on a similar topic and yet with an apparently contrasting message. I now want to try to make better sense of my thoughts around doing.

Secret Recipes is about approaching information in a critical way. I say that 99.9% of the people seeking information online (how-to and step-by-step guides, mainly) will not do anything about it, and that the remaining 0.1%, those who plan to actually implement the recommendations, should factor in the role of context and luck. That is to say, they should not take what they read as immediately applicable to their case.

We know what to do is about the inability to act on what we know. Our hubris often makes us not follow common knowledge because we think we are different, our situation demands it, our idea is better than the millions that have come before it. And this makes us fail even when there’s a pretty consistent agreement out there about how we should have acted.

Secret Recipes suggests to be critical with information, We know what to do seems to suggest the opposite, that is to say to follow the knowledge we gather.

Both are true, and it very much depends if we are talking about strategy or tactics.

We know what to do is about strategy. It’s about the knowledge that multiple generations have gathered around how certain things are done. It’s about rules, frameworks that people have been following before and that have worked. And so other people also followed them, and again they worked.

Of course, sometimes the rules need to be broken. Yet, rather than believing this is the time, with us, here and now, we usually end up much better off if we stick to them. For example, if we start doing marketing by investigating the market and the customer, no matter if our product is so unique everybody will go nuts about it. Or if we are pitching to Guy Kawasaki with a presentation that follows his 10/20/30 rule, no matter how important it is everything we were planning to say.

Secret Recipes, on the other hand, is about tactics. That’s what most of the content nowadays is about, because tactics are usually more nuanced and dependent on the situation. For this reason I believe that being critical is necessary, and the more we act on such tactics anchoring them to the general framework (the strategy), the better.

Dispersing energy

FabrizioLeave a comment

How much energy do we spend trying to come out on top?

Being the best in our class, in our team, in our company; walking faster than others to try to get a best spot in the queue; paying for something we don’t need with money we don’t have; winning that argument that is draining the energy of our peers; speeding up as the traffic light gets yellow to pass just in time; refreshing the page to buy the tickets first, or to comment on the video first. Is there satisfaction in this? And if so, how long does it last?

How much energy to we spend giving external factors the keys to us being on top?

Wishing our partner would be more loving, our boss more caring, our colleagues more helpful. If only that thing would work out this way. If we could only win one more customer. If only the weather could be good tomorrow. I wish I had 10,000€ more to afford that car. Or some more time to spend with my family. My team won, and I am happy!

I choose to be responsible for my experience. In other words, the weather does not upset me. I upset myself because I am attached to beliefs about the weather. I believe it should be sunny and not cloudy. I am the source of my beliefs, and I am attached to being right about my beliefs, and when the world does not cooperate, I upset myself.

Jim Dethmer, Leading Above the Line

Coming out on top and letting external factors determine what the top looks like are incredibly tiring activities. Most of us live in a constant fight, one in which we have no power (we don’t get to change the weather) and the prize for which is not really something we are looking forward to.

There’s value in coming out second, third, fourth or ninehundredninetyninth. It’s for us to decide.