Alchemy Consulting

Ok so you’ve freed up your intellect’s RAM from anything and everything that has your attention.  Next is a Process and Organize phase. Processing allows us to decide on the next possible action for an activity which will bring it nearer to completion.  For this we define next action steps.

The purpose of this is simply “can I act on this item as soon as I read it?”  E.g. an entry on my brain dump was “Call Richard for CD’s”.  Here I assign a next action, like “Ring @ 7pm when Rich is home (554 1234)”.  More than one next action step can be assigned if need be, take an actionable item like “arrange garage sale” it could have multiple next actions: “Sort out the stuff in the garage”, “Decide on date-time-place”, “Place advertisement in paper”, “Deposit monies received in bank” etc, etc. Keep your steps as simple as possible though to avoid procrastination, the enemy of getting things done!

Secondly is the organize phase – having a random list of brain dump entries, each with one or more next action steps is not helpful when you are at the supermarket, office, or school parent-teacher meeting.  Organizing your list into ‘contexts’ ensures sorting entries by relevance.  Group your activities into related contexts – for example activities like “reply to sales manager’s RFI email”, “order printing toner”, “draft internal sales job description” could all be flagged as “OFFICE” which is one context.  Other contexts could be “HOME”, “SCHOOL”, etc.

Well done, you’ve sorted your brain-dump into a meaningful list of associated items all with next action steps assigned to ensure follow-through.  Next week we will look at the final ingredient… doing.

Derek coaching Brain dump, Organise, Process, sort it out

Albert Einstein said “never commit to your memory what you can find in a book…”

For me it’s “…what you can find on your week-schedule!”  You see each thought that you have, appears as a loose end in your subconscious mind and occupies some space in your mental RAM. If that thought points to an incompletion that you ought to handle then it will nag you at subconscious level. It will vie for your attention.  Stress-free productivity and getting things done (GTD) are inextricably linked.  You will not be able to focus on your current activity until you address that incompletion. Identifying these thoughts and getting them all together at one place is the starting point for GTD. This action is called a Brain Dump or a Mind Sweep.  For me I start Sunday evenings by putting on paper every activity that I feel has to be done by me in the week ahead. It can be as arbitrary as “Call Richard for CDs” or a long term goal as “Learn French”.   Just dump everything that is in your brain. Immediately I’ve just uncluttered my mental RAM.

Perhaps consider a trigger list to begin the download, e.g. what commitments or promises have you made and not kept? Do you need to follow through or renegotiate? What do you need to clarify or resolve?  Are there people waiting for you to get back to them? Are there people you are waiting to hear back from?  What do you need to look into? Are there professionals or support staff waiting to hear back from you about anything?

Well, you have completed level one of getting things done, collection. Don’t worry about organizing these tasks into sections now, the processing part follows, next we will look at this…

Derek coaching Brain dump, Getting things done, GTD, Mind sweep, RAM, Simplify

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) was coined by Linda Stone in 1998 after observing how people at Microsoft® (where she worked) skim information in fear of missing something.  People have so much information concurrently hurled at them that they have succumbed to carving up their attention across numerous activities – paying fractional attention to everything around them.  The greatest challenge however is the impact that CPA has on innovation. Innovation draws deep from the wells of focused attention, in strong contrast to the emerging “skimming” trend.  For example a company may schedule a planning session with key stakeholders, yet attendees are attending with technology such as laptops or smart-phones which see them fielding emails, scanning RSS feeds, and taking notes – this is counter-productive to innovation.  Wikipedia concisely says: humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time.

The paradox of our time is obvious by growing attention deficit traits and other related disorders, all highlighting an attention overload.  Attention has become a scarce commodity and very valuable in the innovation economy.  How often do you just let you mind wander, freeing attentional resources?  Why not try exercising mid-day, I have found that I almost always have my best ideas joining me during a workout!  It is a time to reflect, and re-consider your direction.  These benefits include greater concentration, greater stress reduction, and greater motivation for tackling the insurmountable goals we have set for ourselves!   As we become involved in multiple tasks, our brain loses some of its reasoning and concentrating abilities. Daydreaming is a great way to mentally recharge for new ideas, but you have to get into the habit of allowing it.  As Steven Wright so humorously puts it “I try to daydream but my mind keeps wandering!”  Allow yourself to be distracted by one thing at a time, even if it means a diary entry everyday to “smell the roses”…

Derek coaching CPA, Daydreaming, Innovation, Linda Stone, Microsoft, RSS, Steven Wright

As coaching has grown into an industry, supply has raced to meet the demand for optimization in performance hungry individuals and teams.  This has ushered in a plethora of coaches who in well-meant scenarios have denigrated the profession to “lighting a candle and reading a poem” as a client so humorously put it recently!

The desiderata (Latin for desired results) of a ”coachee” should be no less than:

1. Long-term, improved performance:

In the paradox of our age technology has fuelled an instant-gratification culture, at the expense of the long term.  A focus on short-term results only sees the great being traded for the good.  Superior performance is at the epicenter of a great coach’s plan.

2. Self-Correction:

This is evidenced by coachees being able to self-observe when they are performing well and when they are not. In other words you have been coached in such a manner that you are then able to make the necessary adjustments, independently of the coach, in order to constantly move towards higher performance levels. The coachee is consequently not dependent on the coach in the long-term.

3. Self-Generation:

Coachees aware that they can always improve and continually find ways to do so.  The coaching process could be likened to training-wheels on a bicycle – not steering, not pedaling, not breaking nor negotiating corners, but simply supporting until the rider has a practical sense of his/her performance.

So before you trade your lace ups and dress-suits for straw sandals and a robe, select a coach who will be working themselves out of a job – if there is no skills transfer you are simply renting with no return on your investment!

Derek coaching coaching, longevity, Training wheels

Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks notes 5 key traits in his book Lessons from the Top: The search for America’s best business leaders. As an entrepreneur with employees, one of your greatest challenges is most likely to attract and keep motivated workers. I believe the following summary will help you be a leader people LOVE working for:

Key Trait #1: You must have a vision. We’ve all heard the saying “You must stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”  As a leader, you have to learn to communicate your vision to the people you want to follow you. But how can you do that?

Key Trait #2: You must have passion. Your employees want passion; in fact, they’ll go to the ends of earth because of it, live and die for it. People want to explore uncharted territory; their leaders’ passion must inspire them to take on new and stretching challenges.  You’ve got to light the “fire in their bellies,” to get them to feel passion about the organisation and connect to your vision. Passion is such a key part of being a great leader that if you don’t have it, you simply can’t be a great leader. Think of all the great leaders throughout the ages and try to name one that did not have passion. It’s infectious!

Key Trait #3: You must learn to be a great decision maker. How are major decisions made in your company? What is your process for making them? Some leaders have a set method, others fly by the seat of their pants. But you don’t want to be one of those leaders who consults no one before making a decision, announces the change the next day and then gets frustrated when no one follows it.  If this is you, implement a course of action for decision making – here’s a system you can use to become a better decision maker. It’s called the Q-CAT:

Q = Quick. Be quick but not hasty.

C = Committed. Be committed to your decision but not rigid.

A = Analytical. Be analytical, but don’t over-analyze (Too much analysis can cause paralysis.)

T = Thoughtful. Be thoughtful about all concerned, but don’t be obsessive.

Key Trait #4: You must be a team builder. To become a great leader, you must develop a great team. But how do you do that? Teach your team to use the Q-CAT decision-making system and give them the freedom to work through their own decisions. Don’t breathe down their necks and don’t micromanage, but make yourself available if questions or challenges come up. Use humor to keep your team’s spirits up during a crisis, they will look to you to be a tower of strength and endurance.

Key Trait #5: You must have character. Without character, all the other “keys” are for naught. That’s because your innate character strengths and limitations play a critical role in your leadership style. The real question is, are you aware of just what role they play? All great leaders have taken steps to learn about their individual personality and what part it plays in their leadership style.  So what’s your leadership style?

Derek Leadership Character, Decision Making, Howard Schultz, Leadership, Lessons from the Top: The search for America’s best business leaders, Passion, Q-CAT, Starbucks, Team, vision

Someone once said a New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one Year and out the other!  A revelation however begs a response…

Where were your major successes in 2009?  You have just unveiled your strengths! We often come to the end of the year and, driven as we are to achieve the highest levels of performance, and we see only our deficiencies, failures or areas for improvement.

How many times in your life have you experienced the “Princess and the Pauper” scenario, where someone else saw your overarching talents and you chose to remain in disbelief.  Have we all been so busy watching other people’s performance that we have forgotten to turn our attention to our own personal growth? I realized recently how distracted I have become doing this very thing!

While it may be necessary to work on a few weaknesses, your best will come when you can make your strengths even more compelling and inspiring. You will go beyond your best achievements yet by reinforcing what already works than trying to fix all your apparent inadequacies and limitations.

Play to your strengths!  Conventional wisdom says we should work on improving our weaknesses. What a terrible waste of time, talent and opportunity.  Focus on your strengths rather – experience the immense satisfaction that comes with being great at something.  Everyone has a natural aptitude in something.  We all have a special ‘gift’. You may be especially good at working with numbers, drawing pictures, teaching children, growing plants or caring for those less fortunate than you.  Your special talent may involve music, athletic ability, empathy, writing, or working with your hands.

Hire someone who is good where you are weak; why not start treating your time as more valuable than your money?  Delegate tasks that you don’t enjoy to others who do enjoy those things.  Automate repetitious tasks.  Contract out the chores that you are not great at doing to specialists who thrive on these aptitudes.

Derek coaching new year's, revelation, revolution, strenghts, weaknesses

One of the key skills of a coach is their gifting to pose good questions that make you think extraordinarily.  Case in point: a coach may challenge you as to why you still do things the way you always have? A great coach will ask the questions that compel you to consider if there is an improved approach. So a coach does not provide answers, but rather raises the questions that help you realize what is achievable.

Being coached is demanding. You consent to someone challenging you and asking questions that may make you feel uncomfortable. Many people are opposed to being challenged, then again so are many people content with the way things are.  The trouble with comfortable, is that the whole world is constantly shifting and business is having to incessantly transform. In contrast, coaching requires a level of confidence and security, alongside a readiness to change. Great athletes boasting a coach will tell you that being accountable has been decisive in their achievements.

Do you even merit a coach? If you are not receptive to challenges and growth, then you don’t warrant a coach. It will only prove to be a dereliction of your time and funds. All you will do is fight back and defend against the challenges. If truth be told, it will only ingrain you deeper in your ideas, playing out as misdirected disappointment and blaming of your coach. If you are up to the challenge, are you ready to take the stride, intentionally finding a great person to coach you? Selection of a coach is paramount and it takes deliberation to unearth the right person,  and then work with the coach to ensure they can be allowed to enlarge you. If you merit being coached, you will take care to find the right person for this time of your career or life.

A butterfly must put in great effort to transform from cocoon to flight.  It must decide to force its body through that little cocoon opening for several hours.  If this process is easy or free of any challenge, it emerges with a large body and small shriveled wings.  However if it endures forcing itself through the cocoon’s tiny opening, fluid is pushed from the swollen body into the wings, giving enough strength to carry the butterfly in flight.  Transformation isn’t easy, but essential to you and your organisation’s longevity.  Alchemy is in the business of transformation, not preservation.  Are you up for the challenge?

Derek coaching butterfly, challenge, Coach, coaching, longevity, transformation

What is your vision for the next decade?  Or does it peak in “the not too distant”2010?

As excited as we are at the beginning of something new; whether it be a year, project, or new start, we eventually come to the point where we lose sight of the thing we are hopeful for.  We lose sight of the vision.  Life happens, obstacles stand in our way, naysayers are constantly whispering in our ear, and we start to doubt our vision will ever come to pass. We have to be able to stand back and know what our vision is – so it can push us forward.

Challenges will come against you and your vision. You must be persistent if you are going to achieve, it means being true to what you have decided to accomplish and letting nothing stop you, to stand fast in the face of resistance.  Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the presence of vision.  Courage is the ability to stand up in the face of fear, even though there will be times of stress, disappointment, and pressure. Here’s the thing – every resistance to your vision comes to make you wiser, not weaker – every opposition comes to strengthen you, not to stop you.
Destiny demands diligence, but many people lose because they quit when life says “no” the first time, but persistent people prevail. They never take no for an answer when it comes to their vision.  Perseverance means bearing up under the pressure, because the incalculable worth of “character” is formed by pressure. Great people grasp that pressure is good for them because pressure is one of the keys to perseverance!  It is not those who are hasty, but rather those who continue to the end who achieve.

Vision always demands a cost; which is why a good vision (laced with contentment) is the enemy of a better vision (primed with a responsible discontentment).

Vision is a preferred future – as tomorrow’s leader, how does yours look?

Derek Uncategorized courage, vision

A great mentor once told me “learn the lesson, forget the details…”  This nugget of wisdom has become a mainstay in my quest for gold.

Gold panning is the simplest practice in searching for gold.  The method is a manual sorting of gold. Pans containing sand and gravel are submerged in water and shaken, gold (i.e. the lesson) is sorted from gravel and other materials (i.e. the details).

Gold Panning

As we reflect on a year gone by, mixed feelings flood our emotions, a year of events rather forgotten, yet an illumination of our capacity to endure challenging times.  A year of uncertainty as financial longevity plagued organisations and individuals, yet unrivalled opportunities for new beginnings – how do we ‘pan’ for the gold in this mystery?

The past is not an isolated and wasted point in time, but a stream that is intimately connected with the future!  It can greatly benefit our strategic reasoning, but it’s up to us to agitate the recollections, separating the gold from the gravel, and move forward – a small price to pay for the value received.  As in gold panning, where lighter density material such as sand, mud and gravel are washed over the side of the pan, so our reflection of a year gone by must be.  Allow the less-valuable times and events of 2009 to sluice out of our memories and into this stream called life, leaving the gold behind.  Avoid the Christmas rush this holiday season, and charter the life-changing memory rush – use hindsight to shape foresight.  What will convert your company from a good to a great company next year? A technology investment, a new product, a big customer?  May I put forward that the ability to go beyond our setbacks, will supersede any of these short-lived attempts to build enduring greatness! We can’t change the past, but we can enlarge our futures!

Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

(The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost)

Our choices, not chances, will determine our tomorrows.  The year’s not over yet, finish strong – be intentional about today and tomorrow.  The task of business leaders must be to overcome the paralysis of fear amidst uncertainty and confusion that dooms organisations and individuals, and begin shaping the future. The starting point is to take stock of, but not live in, the past.  In this we practice emotional alchemy – the skill of transforming our moments of confusion into insightful clarity.

Derek Uncategorized Christmas, financial longvity, foresight, future, gold, holiday season, panning, Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, uncertainty

Someone once said “Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

Thierry Henry caused uproar when his recent ‘Hand of God’ intervention set up the goal that put France through to the Soccer World Cup in South Africa next year at the expense of the Republic of Ireland.  It took 8 years at Arsenal to create the legacy of Thierry Henry, and a heart-beat to destroy it.  Henry had a [character] choice to make – celebrate a fowl-goal, or admit to handball and have the goal disallowed – he has expressed his regrets in not opting for “the right thing to do”.  Henry was one of the greats, a footballer of distinction – but the branding of ‘cheat’ by the world has sadly undermined his stellar status.

In contrast, there was Bobby Jones; a Tiger Woods long before Tiger was born. Golf fanatics know that Bobby Jones is considered one of the game’s greatest golfers. He won thirteen majors before he retired at the age of twenty-eight, and he is the only player to win the four major golf tournaments in one year (something that even Tiger Woods has not done!) Notably, more than his impressive record on the golf course, Bobby Jones is known for a two-stroke penalty he received at the 1925 U.S. Open.  The précis: During the match, his ball ended up in the rough just off the fairway, and as he was setting up to play the next shot, his golf club accidentally caused a small movement of the ball (a golfing no-no). He immediately turned to the tournament officials, and called a penalty on himself. The marshals discussed the situation among them and even questioned some people who were close by to see if anyone had seen Jones’ ball move. No one did. No one else saw his club touch the ball and no one saw the ball move. Their decision was that since no one witnessed the incident, the choice was left to Jones. Bobby Jones did not hesitate and called a two-stroke penalty on himself. Bobby Jones could have justified not taking the penalty. Apparently no one saw it. It seemingly didn’t impact anything. The tournament official said, “Well, Bobby, it is up to you. Do you believe you touched the ball?” To which Bobby responded, “I know that I did.”  Bobby Jones lost the 1925 U.S. Open by one stroke!

A fashionable mantra: “It isn’t cheating unless you are caught.” Not so for Bobby Jones. Bobby Jones refused to compromise his integrity. One tournament was not worth damaging his character.

Alchemists have proven it is far easier to turn gold into lead than the reverse reaction, simply because the immediate cost is counted!  Have a vision that transcends the price-tag of ‘now’, and sees the cost of character as a long-term investment. Envision beyond the “win-no-matter-what” lead, and aspire for long-term gold – that’s Alchemy.

Derek Uncategorized Alchemy, Bobby Jones, reputation, thierry henry, Tiger Woods