Tag: speaking

A walk

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More and more, I find that taking a walk in the middle of the day is helping me to recharge, refocus, and gives me space to explore new ideas. Often those ideas are the ones I stick to later in the day, the ones that get me unstuck.

Give it a try.

Walking occupies us just enough to help us stop thinking about whatever it is we were working on, but not too much as to prevent mind-wandering. It’s the perfect gateway into the subconscious mind and for stimulating creative insight that can help us overcome mental gridlock.

Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness – Peak Performance

The two options

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Are you building thought leadership or are you looking for leads?

It might seem like it’s just a marketing question, but it is actually much more than that.

Are you establishing deep connections or are you greeting everybody and move on?

Are you here to make a change or to share your numbers?

Are you interested in telling a story or in surfacing shortcuts?

Are you creating or copy-pasting?

And the one that I personally prefer.

Are you for quality or quantity?

Certainly, the two can be simultaneously present. And yet, you can’t go all in on both. Eventually one will prevail, projecting your work in very different directions.

Also, the more you stick with one the more difficult it will be to move onto the other. But this is more true when the movement is from leads to thought leadership. So, the idea that “we are going to do quality work when X and Y will happen” is a mirage.

I bet you already knew that.

Give yourself a reason

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What is the reason you give yourself to continue doing what you’re doing?

If it’s to make things better, to support, to spread an important message, to grow and make others grow, to change toxic habits, to repair something that is worth it. That is fantastic, and you are lucky.

If it’s to feed a habit, to continue a routine, to leverage information that no one else has, to make yourself indispensable, to add layers of complexity and titles to your business card, to keep your mind busy so that you do not have to face bigger, more painful questions, to share your opinion on things you don’t know even when not asked.

Then it is time to find new reasons.

What you need

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You don’t need another article that tells you how to get what you want to get, no other “how-to” or “five steps” guides to determine what you are going to do today.

All you need is a starting point and a destination.

In between is the journey.

Let it be your own story.

Tension breaks down

FabrizioLeave a comment

You are never the best judge of your own work. You cannot be.

Sometimes it is because of sunk costs, other times because of laziness, more often than not simply because your perspective is narrow, as it takes an incredible effort to see the world as others might. And so, we are often in tension between judging our work too harshly or too softly. Either way, it is never an appropriate measure for how we are doing.

This is valid also for groups. Going beyond the boundaries of what is known, liked, achieved is extremely difficult. Sometimes, we can mitigate this with diversity, and we should certainly try. But in the long term, a group will always appreciate their work with some degree of distortion.

Of course, this should not stop us from doing the work. Actually, it is an additional reason to put our work out there as soon as we deem it good enough. To see if there’s a fit, if it resonates, if it works, if it can spread. And if the answer is no, go back and repeat.

What we should never do, on the other hand, is protect the work from others, from feedback, from criticism, from admiration. We should not become executors that see a delivery (or a missed one) as the final stage. What we should never do is give that tension too much power, because eventually tension breaks down. You might be too far, too lost, too blind by that time to get back on track.