04 Dec 2011
by resultsmatter
in Aid, Doing Good
Tags: Africa, Drought and Famine, Humanitarian aid
We all know, unlike Tsunamis and earthquakes, drought is a slow-onset disaster, and famine slower still. You never know when the first two are coming, but in the case of drought and famine you can see it unfold for months and even years before they finally take their toll.
This is precisely what happened in the Horn of Africa earlier this year. Since about September-October 2010, humanitarian agencies working in Somalia and neighbouring countries were warning of a severe drought and food security crisis which would lead to malnutrition, starvation and misery for millions in the region. But until the dramatic footage of dying children started coming out of Somalia and Kenya, courtesy of CNN in early July, international community paid little attention to the repeated warnings sounded by the humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations.
Only after 20th July when the United Nations declared famine in Somalia, by when tens of thousands had been dead already and an equal number faced starvation, did the international community wake up. And when it did wake up, money started to pour in generously.
Why is it that help does not arrive until you see the picture of people who can not be helped anymore – when they are already dying or are dead?
Only six years ago, it took thousands of children to die in Niger (July 2005) before the international community delved into its 
pockets. I remember at the time the then Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations responsible for humanitarian issues, Jan Egeland, telling the press that over a period of ten days more money had been received than over the previous ten months when his teams on the ground and various NGOs were sounding out red alerts about starvation deaths. It took graphic images of dying children for help to finally arrive.
It was the same during the 2011 famine and drought in the Horn. Since the summer of 2010, countries in the Horn of Africa have been under the effects of a La Niña weather pattern, causing severe drought along the equatorial belt due to consecutive failures of the October-November 2010 and March-April 2011 rainy seasons. Once again, humanitarian agencies of all hues raised alarm bells since about October last year. Funding was desperately needed to prevent a famine that would cause deaths to hundreds of thousands. Yet funding to the appeals attracted much less attention even compared to previous years until the pictures emerged, almost like a reality TV show, of children dying in scores. And once the reality show began, funding poured in generously. In four months after the pictures emerged, almost 75% (nearly $1.8 billion) of the appeals have been funded, something of a record in slow-onset disasters.
Except that if this had come in over the past one year instead of over the last four months, thousands of lives could have been saved.
We know that droughts cannot be prevented but famines can. As Amartya Sen pointed out through his seminal work over three decades ago, famines are rarely caused by nature, but more by failure of institutions and policies of those who have a duty to care.
‘So who failed in their duty to care’ is an obvious question.
First, of course the governments in respective countries. Most parts of Somalia have had no functioning government for nearly twenty years now – and that’s where famine was at its worst. In other countries, while governments are functioning, as is usually the case, their policies do not adequately reflect the needs of the poor and vulnerable.
Second, the policies of some of the western governments, notably the US and the UK in particular, are to partly blame for the thousands that have died this year. In the past two years, the United States and Britain have brought about stringent laws which not only outlaw al Shabaab – a terrorist group which control most parts of Somalia severely affected by drought – but also state that aid groups could be prosecuted if their aid unintentionally falls into militants’ hands. Even in a normal year at least a million and a half Somalis survived on the hand-outs received from aid agencies. But in the past two years since the US legislated that any aid reaching the al-Shabaab, even if unintended, would amount to supporting terrorism, humanitarian aid to some of the most vulnerable communities have been cut by more than half.
Finally, the humanitarian agencies themselves failed partly in their mandate. Humanitarian imperative requires that humanitarian agencies do their utmost to ensure that they get access to the communities who need their care. Except for a few individual agencies (like the International Committee of the Red Cross) who negotiated access to the communities, there was very little of collective negotiation or advocacy to engage with either the al Shabaab or the US/UK governments who virtually commanded the humanitarian agencies not to work in al Shabaab areas.
That the western governments (including the US) later – after the pictures of dying children started grabbing headlines – relaxed their stringent regulations to allow humanitarian agencies in al Shabaab areas is another story.
30 Nov 2011
by resultsmatter
in Doing Good
Tags: Palestinians, Peace
A friend forwarded me this moving speech by an Israeli mother who addressed the European Parliament earlier this year. In my frequent visits to Israel and West Bank/Gaza in the past several years, I have always wondered if any of the moderate and progressive breeds still exist in Israel. This heart-touching account of the struggles of Palestinians by an Israeli woman has a message for all.
The text is slightly long, but assure you if you read it patiently, you’ll realise there is still hope in this divided world, thanks to courageous women like Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan. I have left the text as it is…….
Abhijit
“Israeli Mother Addresses European Parliament
Dear Friends,
Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world. For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of Haifa, avitaloz@research.haifa.ac.il
—-
“WOMEN by Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).
However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R’aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family’s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.
I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe. In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of “la liberte égalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.
Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour. I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.
But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children.
Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses, though they may have various illustrious names — such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland — are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: ‘I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.’
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.
And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.
I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals..
Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.
I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers’ cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova–another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children–asked: Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
21 Aug 2011
by resultsmatter
in Goal Setting, Motivation, Strategic planning
In coaching, one of the first things we learn is to focus on the goal – how clear and compelling it is. It is not very often that you get clients coming to you with a clear vision of their goals. About a year ago, I was working with a client who knew exactly what he wanted – he wanted to quit his well-paid job with an international organisation and move on to do consultancy work. In the first couple of sessions, we realised that he had developed his vision for this new venture in quite some detail and so we soon moved on to the ‘how’ part of the work.
A couple of months later, in one of the coaching calls, I sensed that he hasn’t made much progress on some of the follow up actions we had previously agreed upon. His vision for consultancy was still equally strong, and the reasons why he wanted to make the change were also convincing – unhappy at work, likes the independence that comes with consulting, excellent analytical and consulting skills, and so on.
But in our third session, the discussion went somewhat like this:
1. In your current work, why are you unhappy? Because I don’t think I am being creative, I am perhaps doing the same thing year on year.
2. Why are you not being creative or you think you are doing the same things year after year? Because the pressure of work is such I am always led by events happening around me and I hardly get time to think creatively or do things which I think will bring about real change.
3. Why do you allow yourself to be led by events around you or other peoples’ priorities? As a manager I have to support my staff and I am there to solve problems.
4. Why supporting staff and problem-solving makes you feel that other people control your agenda? Because my peer groups also operate in this way – there is not a culture of strategic thinking and change in the organization.
5. If a culture of strategic thinking and change is so important for you, why couldn’t you attempt to change your own department or peer groups’ ways of working? Well, I probably accepted things as they were.
6. If your own style and that of your peers who you know very well can not be changed, why do you think as a consultant you can create that change in people and organisations you know less well?
I stopped at the sixth why. Because suddenly, we both realised that, instead of focusing on how to set up his consulting business, we were moving towards deeper issues in his current job. We were both glad we had this conversation – almost a year now, and we do not speak about consultancy anymore, and he is happily working where he was. He is excited by some of the changes he has been able to bring about in his department as well as in the senior management team, working with his boss. He is almost an inspiration for his peer group.
It is easy to forget anything that is simple. Since that lesson a year ago, I religiously remember to ask ‘why’ at least five-six times either when talking to a new coaching client or I am undertaking a consulting work for a client.
20 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Goal Setting, Motivation
Tags: Goal Setting, Motivating strategies
The possibility of a future that is exciting, compelling, filled with enjoyment and accomplishment is what drives us as human beings forward in life. Unfortunately too many of us do not experience the daily motivation and joy of creating a more-fulfilling life because the future we desire is poorly defined, and lacks clarity in our minds. Most often we even do not know – although we believe we do – what really motivates us.
In terms of what motivate us to act, there are broadly two types of people in life: (1) some need very clear marker for the future – owning a million pound home, writing a book that becomes a best-seller, etc; (2) then there are others who would be always motivated by the need to avoid pain – ‘I do not want to be poor again’, ‘I don’t want to fail’. I have a daughter now doing her A-levels; it has been a pattern with her that while she is happy to stay away from her studies for eleven months of the year, and come the exam time, she is at her desk studying almost eighteen hours a day. Every time discussions about future or grades come up, her belief is that she is doing all she can so that her grades do not fall below x, y, z. She doesn’t want to fail. She is what we call, motivated by ‘away from’ (failure) pattern.
It is not that you need to be only one of the two types. Some people have blended both these motivating strategies into powerful success formula. A friend of mine I have known for nearly three decades moved from one top job to another in several multinational companies and became Chief Executive before he retired, making millions in the process. During all these years, he rarely took holidays. While he always wanted the top job, he was also driven by the thought that he would never like to see himself jobless, ever in his working life. In his childhood, he saw his father become jobless and spend the rest of his days in extreme poverty and social ridicule.
First, Identify your motivational pattern:
If you want to identify your motivational pattern, you may find the following exercise beneficial. Repeat this process 4 or 5 times over a week, each session lasting about fifteen minutes.
Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed by anyone or anything. Sit upright on a chair – or if you are used to doing yoga, sit on the floor – and relax. Take a deep breath in, making sure that as you breathe in, your diaphragm expands outside. To find out where your diaphragm is, place your right hand above your stomach just below the point where your chest bones end; then place your left hand just below your right hand; your diaphragm region is where your left hand is resting now, just above your naval. As you inhale, hold the breath for five seconds (with your diaphragm protruded outside) and then gently exhale – during this process the diaphragm will go back to its normal position. Repeat this process five times, and as you do this you will feel your body relaxing, your muscle tensions slowly reducing with each breathing cycle.
In this relaxed state, think of all the great things you have achieved in your life, all the successes you have had. Now of all the successes, choose three or four which you think were really big moments in your catalogue of achievements. It does not matter whether others will consider these ‘big’ or ‘great’, as long as these stand out in your mind, they are big. Try to ask yourself: what motivated me to achieve this? What was driving me at that point in my life? Stop this process after about 15-20 minutes in one sitting. If you have several ‘great’ moments to work through, it is best to do no more than 2-3 in one go. Repeat this for 4-5 sessions.
You now have a good awareness of what drives you – it could be something you aimed towards with a clarity of purpose, or something you wanted to avoid at all costs with a strong determination, or a combination of both. It is important that you are aware of how your mind’s operating system functions when it comes to sending out gush of energy and motivation for taking sustained action.
This is the first rule of self-motivation: be self-aware of what drives you – ‘towards’ a goal, or ‘away from’ something, or both?
Second, Know What You Really, Really Want:
Too often people set goals in negative terms: ‘I don’t want to be poor’; my daughter’s motto ‘I don’t want to fail’. Our brain does not understand a negative command; when it hears words like ‘no’, ‘don’t’, etc., it ignores the negative and works with the rest. So those who drive their life with the aim of ‘don’t want to be poor’ will end up being poor. There is also another problem: when I ask my daughter, ‘what grade do you want to attain’, her statement ‘I don’t want to fail’ only tells me the non-targets she wants to miss, rather than targets she wants to hit. After all you can’t hit what you can’t see; so this does not give the mind anything to work with. But stating a goal in positive terms gives your mind a more clearly defined target. It gives you access to a vast source of motivation towards that goal. My successful millionaire friend I talked about earlier had clear sights on jobs he wanted and worked towards that, and he used his ‘negative’ command (never to be jobless) to drive himself to work harder and harder (you and I may debate whether or not working without any holidays is a healthy strategy for anyone to pursue, but that’s a matter of value).
Define precisely what you really, really want; in other words, set measurable goals – if it is money/wealth, then state a definite amount. Just saying I want to be rich is a wish, not a desire which the mind recognizes. Stating a definite/ quantifiable amount gives the mind something to work on. It makes those goals more easily attainable. It helps you attract the goal. The power of the law of attraction is a reality we all experience from time to time. Visualizing a goal with positive expectancy sets in motion universal processes geared towards drawing that goal to you like a magnet. The more you think about your major goal(s), and how to achieve it, the more you activate the Law of Attraction in your life. You begin to attract to you people, opportunities, ideas and resources that help you to move more rapidly toward your goal, and move your goal more rapidly toward you. We all remember times when we seriously thought of doing something, buying a particular car, or going on a holiday to a particular country, and suddenly we ‘chance upon’ programmes on TV or rave reviews on radio or by friends on exactly the same experience that we were after, although we may not have heard anything about these before we took a decision to have these in our lives. We call these coincidences – but are they?
To know what you really, really want, do the following exercise:
Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed by anyone or anything. Relax and do the same breathing exercise we talked about earlier for about 2-3 minutes. Pick one of the goals you intend to accomplish over any time frame. With your eyes closed, develop a picture in your head of you having achieved this goal. It will help if you look with your eyes to the right. Once you have a picture, turn it into a movie that depicts you in the act of having achieved the goal. See the movie in first person, as though from your own eyes when you are experiencing it. What can you see? What is happening? What are you wearing? What is the weather like? Work on making the image as detailed as possible. Is there anyone with you? What are they wearing? Try to get a really intricate movie rolling.
Next make the pictures of the movie very big and very close to you in your mind’s eye. Make the colours extremely bright and vibrant. Increase the picture’s borders out to include more detail. You should notice that the more detailed your picture gets, the more intensely you start to feel the feelings you associate with having achieved this goal.
Now focus on what can you hear as you are achieving this goal. How loud are the sounds? If your goal was to buy a nice car, hear the sound of the engine, or what your spouse says about how great it was that you finally had this awesome car. Make the sounds as detailed as possible too. Can you hear any noises in the background like birds chirping or a car driving past? Make the sounds louder and more clear, like you would hear them if you were actually there. We are trying to create the experience of what it will be like when (not if, WHEN) you are actually there.
Now feel what you will actually feel as you are experiencing achieving your goal. Is there a breeze blowing that you can feel on your face? Are you touching anything or anyone? Can you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin? Whatever it is, feel the feelings you would feel. Make them feel as real as possible in your mind.
Finally try to think what you would be thinking and feeling mentally as you achieve your goal? Maybe an excitement that it’s finally happened? Maybe a sense of accomplishment? Perhaps anticipation? Maybe you feel a sense of freedom or happiness or fulfilment? Whatever it is, let the ‘you’ in the movie think and feel those same feelings.
Do the above exercise every morning or at night before going to bed.
You should now be thinking, hearing, seeing, and touching everything as you would if you were actually there having it happen. This is as close as you can possibly be when you actually achieve your goal, and you should be starting to feel those same feelings while you sit and picture! You can have the feeling without even having the goal. This movie that you have created can be extremely motivating. Take some time each day to relive this experience and re-enact your goal. You will find it becomes clearer with each repeated visualization. Eventually it should feel so real to you that when you think about it while not visualizing, it will start to feel like it actually has happened. In other words, the visualized experience will start to seem like an ACTUAL experience. Remember everything in the world started as a figment of someone’s imagination, a visualization. The Wright brothers imagined man can fly and gave us aeroplane. Marconi imagined that sound can be transmitted long distance through ether without any wire, and gave the world wireless.
Third Step to Self-motivation: you choose whether you want success or failure
Try recreating the movie whenever you feel a lack of motivation toward that goal, or even first thing in the morning if you find that empowering.
Successful people visualize the kind of success they want to enjoy, in advance. Prior to every new experience, the successful person visualizes previous success experiences that are similar to an upcoming event. It is said that no Olympic medalist ever won a medal without visualizing the finish line. Sports psychologists say that the material difference in skills between the finalists is non-existent – in other words they all have the same speed or skill – however, what differentiates the gold winner from the rest is how he/she experiences the winning moment in his/her mind’s eye before the race begins. A successful salesperson will visualize and remember previous successful sales presentations. A successful speaker will visualize and remember the standing ovation he /she received for the last presentation made to a large gathering.
Remember, unsuccessful people also use visualization, but to their detriment. Unsuccessful people, prior to a new event, recall, imagine, and visualize their previous failures, real and imagined.
16 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Leadership, Organisational Change, Strategic planning, Success Criteria
Tags: NGO consulting, Skills of a Leader, Strategic planning in nonprofits
I once heard a great Indian economist, speaking of India’s national development plans, say that the plans had two parts. The first part was the poetry part which had all the great sounding words which rhymed with everybody and which the leaders loved for their powerful sound bytes. The second part gets down to details – having got the poetry part out of the way, planners then embark on the serious business of sabotaging everything the poetry said, and making sure that the poetry remained on paper.
Pretty much the same things can be said of strategic planning in organizations. Once the planning process is over and a nicely bound copy of plan delivered to the board, everyone forgets about it. Companies usually do this once every year, and in the non-profit sector, I have seen this done usually every 3-5 years, though some still do every ten years. Ask any senior director or manager as what were the key elements of the strategic plan, well, you will get no more than a pie-in-the-sky narration of the dream, or a waffle for as long as you have patience to hear. Either way, as a consultant, you are still left wondering what all these mean.
Walking into an organization, whether you are reading their strategic plan, or listening to the bosses explain their take on it, you wonder where have you seen all this before. I read so many of these plans that now a days they all look very similar. You would hardly recognize if you are in organization X, or Y. What passes for strategic is often a matter of operational plan or simply a rehash of the left-overs from the previous plans. Some months ago, I was doing a review for an European organization. I read their strategic plan which had, as any good strategic plan ought to have, an account of their mission, vision and values. When I met the senior management and CEO, they all had a consistent understanding of what were already stated in the plan. However, about half an hour into our discussion, something interesting happened as I asked a silly question. The CEO had articulated his vision and how the mission and values were being brought to bear on their day-to-day work in the organization, and I asked, ‘‘what will all these do for your organization?’’
The CEO again repeated the vision in more or less the way he had articulated earlier, with some minor changes to his language.
I asked again, “okay, if you achieved this, what will this do for your organization?” The answer was again slightly different, but the language was becoming more ‘practical’ – what I would call ‘real and measurable’. We continued this for another ten minutes while I kept slightly changing the last part of the question – instead of, ‘what will it do for your organization’, I asked, ‘what will it do for your customers’? – as the CEO was definitely enjoying this ‘repeat’ question, and his directors were now intently listening to what he was saying.
At the end of fifteen minutes when I summarized what I had heard the strategic aims were, there was not just strong nods from the group, but also an acknowledgement that this will help them articulate the strategic aims for staff lower down the line.
Before I left them I was asked if I would go back and help them with revising their strategic plan.
09 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Personal Effectiveness, Self Improvement
Tags: Influence, Results
Last night, the flight back from Budapest was an interesting experience. British Airways is not known for in-flight services. On a three-hour flight in the evening, they will only serve you cold sandwich for dinner. If you ask for a second round of drinks, as usually happens on BA flights, you will be waiting indefinitely, and it will generally not come, unless you ask again.
Something similar happened last night. Quite a few fellow passengers asked for beer and wine after first round of drinks and sandwiches were served. My neighbour, an elderly gentleman, very politely asked for his second drink with “I would love another beer please”. Half an hour later, the drink did not arrive. He was not alone – there were several others around us who were also waiting, and no sign of the drinks! The cabin crew could be seen walking up and down the aisle, and I guess my fellow passengers were too polite to ask a second time.
I was a curious onlooker watching my frustrated neighbour. I hadn’t until then asked for a second glass of wine. Then as a flight attendant was walking past me, I looked at her and asked in a slow voice, “Excuse me…..(pause), can I get a glass of red wine?”. “Sure”, and she disappeared. After about five minutes, she appeared with my glass of wine. Although this did not surprise me, my co-passenger was definitely surprised. Of course it did give him a chance to ask for his beer again which he eventually got, although he was mystified by how I got mine in five minutes.
I did something which I have now learnt to do when I seriously want someone to respond positively to me. Here is what I did on the BA flight:
Excuse me (in a slow voice)…….: This got me her full attention.
A slight pause: She was now trying hard to listen to what I had to say.
Can I get a glass of wine?: Now when I began my sentence with a question (can I), this obviously needed an answer from her. Note that I did not purposely include the word ‘please’ in my request – a bit impolite, I admit, but it works…..! When you add ‘please’ the message when conveyed to the listener gets transformed to ‘could you please’, rather than ‘can I’. Now, there is a plot behind this syntax: when you say ‘can I’ to someone, suddenly the other person gets the message that he/she has power over what you want. But when you polish your request with a more courteous ‘please’, the meaning of the request changes to a very polite command. Now what difference does this make? Simple – my ‘can I’ (I am at her ‘mercy’) obliges her to at least give me an answer: most normally wired people will find it hard to say ‘NO’ when you make a ‘reasonable’ request (if I had made the same request just when the aircraft was landing, I would not expect her to give an affirmative answer as this would be a very unreasonable request). But when I make a seemingly courteous request with the so-called magic word ‘please’, her mind does not hear it that ‘polite’ – it comes across more as a command (‘will you?’). Worse still, when it is a command, the recipient may choose to remain silent (no ‘yes or no’) – it does not automatically require an answer. Only in time you will figure out whether or not your ‘command‘ has elicited an action. In my case, when I heard her say ‘sure’, I knew I would get my wine as she has made a commitment!
Try this next time when you want someone to comply with your reasonable request. Although I must add the caveat that human minds don’t work exactly as machines – so don’t be surprised if you do not succeed in every case.
And do write about your experience if you use this trick!
04 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Goal Setting, Self Improvement
Tags: Achieve Success, eBooks, Motivation
Yes it’s true.
I speak every day to dozens of people from all age groups, working on their own or with companies or organisations. People with a real commitment to high achievement. People who have invested their time and their money to learn new skills, develop their abilities, and set new goals as part of continuous learning and development process. And we hear the same
thing back from them over and over again:
· “I set goals – sometimes ambitious – and made some attempts to take action, and gave up as soon as I found something else interesting enough to do.”
· “I set goals, seriously went after these, and achieved these – in some areas of my life these took days, in some cases months, and in some others years or even a decade to achieve what I had set out to do.”
· “I set goals, took persistent actions, but achieved no results, and gave up.”
If you’ve ever said any of those things to yourself, then you know what I mean.
Many of these people have also attended expensive seminars and workshops on setting goals and know exactly how goals need to be stated.
So how come even when you set clear goals, you fail to accomplish what
you set out to achieve? Or halfway through the journey, you stop taking
action as the goal no longer motivates you?
If success was all about setting positive and precise goals, developing appropriate strategies and taking actions, could not we all attain what we want?
“Having Goals is only part of the story!”
To understand why some goals were achieved and other were not, I got drawn to study the science of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). This also took me to studying the experiences of other people, some great achievers, and some friends and clients who I coached. One thing I learned from all these is that it is not about what goals you set, but how you set goals determines what you achieve and how quickly you achieve these.
“If you set Goals, you Must also make these MUST for you!”
What do I mean by that?
It involves making a switch in your mind from having a goal of setting up/ achieving something to making it a MUST – convincing yourself that you have no other option except to achieve your goal.
Whatever you achieve in my life is the result of the level of acceptance you set for yourself. You will only ever get what you are prepared to accept, not what you expect. If you set a goal for an annual income of £200,000, and are prepared to take a job for £50,000, well…..that’s what you will get. But if you are so serious about your goal that you will not accept anything below £200,000, well that’s what you will get.
After all…
“What Do We Call Someone Who Settles for Less Than the Target?”
We call them lazy. Daydreamers.
With Little Practice and Discipline, It is Easy to Become a High Achiever
Fortunately, making the shift from being daydreamers to High Achievers is in our hands. We all know that simply setting good goals is not enough to ensure that we achieve these. The primary difference between high achievers and low achievers is “action-orientation.” Men and women who accomplish great things in life are intensely action-oriented. If they have an
idea, they take action on it immediately. The factor that distinguishes those that move to take action consistently from the others who ‘wish to achieve something’ is simple: they make their goal(s) a must, while the rest belong to the category of general population who like, wish, want, hope to succeed. The latter group will work within their comfort zones, and when challenged, will find excuses why something cannot be done. They want to lose weight, but it is not a must. They would love to make more money and wish to take charge of their lives, but they could live without these. They have SOFT goals – Some Other Future Time.
I will show you through my eBook that in our lives, all of us can achieve many things, and whenever we have had great successes, we would have set our goals in such a way that our mind got automatically aligned in the pursuit of our goals. This is the theme of the ebook on Transformational Goals . It will show you:
1. The vast power you have in your mind and how to tap into the all-powerful subconscious mind.
2. A simple technique to keep your motivation going, even when nothing seems to be going according to plan.
3. Six steps in setting goals and making them compelling – making the goals ‘MUST’.
4. How to develop a strategy that takes you towards the outcomes you want.
5. How to enjoy taking action.
6. How to continuously review goals-strategy-action cycle and deal with feedback.
7. How to deal with blockages – limiting values and beliefs – break through the barriers and limitations that have been holding you back from manifesting real wealth and success in your life.
The order your copy, visit our ebook page on this site. The eBook is normally priced £ 12.99. For subscribers of this blog, you can obtain it free now.
02 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Leadership, Personal Effectiveness
Tags: Leadership, Visioning
As a consultant and coach, I often work with groups of first-time leaders who have risen from middle or senior level managerial positions. One of the questions I get asked quite frequently is about how to develop a single vision within the organisation, and what the leader needs to do to make sure that everyone in the organisation shares the vision of the leader.
My answer to the question is a ten second video clip of the Windows 7 advert which they have all seen. Everyone from the new-learner, amateur user to the expert, all take credit for developing this piece of software. Whether or not this actually happened is another matter; but the advert has a powerful message for those leaders who think that it is their vision that everyone else will need to share. A vision needs to emerge organically, with the leader playing the role of the chief architect, facilitator, as Bill Gates likes to call himself.
In the good old days, the industrial-age leaders developed vision for their companies and handed it down to their managers and workers to bring the vision to reality. In modern organisations, the leaders are managing an inverse pyramid where the customers are at the base (top of the inverted pyramid), managers/middle management facilitating learning and the CEOs absorbing, assimilating and developing knowledge. In the old style, the leaders, CEOs sat at the apex of the pyramid and were supposed to ‘know’ everything, and the lower down the line was the delivery apparatus, and further down the line at the base of the pyramid sat the customers – you consumed whatever you were served. This has radically changed now – leaders are no longer the repository of vital knowledge about the business. Today’s CEOs operate with much less knowledge of their customers than what the frontline staff or managers have. They need to listen more, learn more (from people below them), and make sure that they create an environment where learning ‘developed’ at the bottom reaches the top.
A vision is something the leaders help develop, working with their frontline staff, customers and managers; it is not something they hand down anymore for other to follow. Leaders of today know that knowledge about the business sits across the organisation, and the leaders also know that although the strands of knowledge exist across the organisation, it is their job to pull these together into a coherent whole. It is their job to bring the strategic thinking that creates the synergy when all the different strands are brought together. Leaders are paid to THINK things your subordinates have not thought through.
I sum up discussion on my 10-seconds video clip with five key messages for first-time leaders:
- Think of all your staff as ‘neurons’ in the organisation’s brain. You need capture all that exist in their brains. You must not ignore a single neuron.
- Think! Think! Think! Remember, as a leader, you are paid to THINK! They need to see in you a strategic thinker whose thoughts are simple and powerful.
- Present your thoughts in a way that they think your thoughts are theirs – you helped them articulate it! And these thoughts will form the vision.
- If you think your people do not understand your thoughts and vision, you are not communicating effectively. The fault is in you.
- Things will go wrong, and when they do, ask you people for feedback.
01 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Positive Thinking, Self Development
Those of you who have raised children through teenage years will know how difficult it gets when a child suddenly starts thinking that she’s no good and the entire world is arraigned against her. My 13-year old decided to go this way earlier this year. No amount of parental counselling, encouragement, coaxing and cajoling changed that. ‘I can’t do maths, I’ am dumb, I hate PE……’ The list was endless.
We decided to give up trying hard. No point in reminding her that only in the last term she was doing excellent in school and had so many friends!
When ‘being unhappy’ becomes a habit, reason doesn’t work. I asked her to spend ten minutes with me one evening, on the assurance that I won’t talk about her school or studies or her life. She did it – she found it funny as it appeared that two grown ups (she considers herself one) were doing silly things. This is what I asked her to do with me (this is a technique I picked up years ago during my NLP training!):
Start by rolling your eyes in a wide circle while keeping your head straight. First clockwise for two minutes, then counter-clockwise for another two minutes. Then follow up with moving your eyes in a horizontal figure eight pattern. As you do that make sure your eyes move up through the centre of the figure and down the sides. Go in one direction for two minutes, then in the other direction for two minutes. Make sure you keep your head straight and move only your eyes. We made her do it 2-3 times in a day whenever we spotted her about to go into her favourite state.
She must have found something amusing about this exercise because although she started doing it with some reluctance, after 2-3 days we could spot her sitting in her room and rolling her eyes all around. Before the end of the week, she began talking about her achievements in school, and her plans to excel in all the areas which she was ‘hopeless’ six days ago!
Explanation: For those of you who are curious as to how this seemingly ‘silly’ thing works, here is the simple theory behind this exercise. We all know that your state of mind (happy, sad, depressed, excited, etc) affects your posture (physiology – outward bodily manifestation that people see). When you are sad, you are looking down, or your shoulders drooping etc. Try looking up and stay that way when you are depressed! You get the point – it is also our physiology that influences the state of mind. If we can change one, we can change the other. Simple? Try it, and you’ll see the difference!
01 Jun 2010
by resultsmatter
in Goal Setting, Personal Effectiveness
Tags: Goal Setting, Self Improvement
How many times do you think that people try to achieve their new goals before they give up?
The average is less than once. Most people give up even before making the first attempt.
Research has shown that people who had clear, written goals and plans do better in life than those who have no written goals.
What makes written goals so powerful?
The answer lies in the fact that the process of putting goals down on paper forces you to ask questions which help clarify in your own mind as to what the goals is, how important it is for you, and what obstacles you might face. In fact writing down goals also helps in breaking down big long-term goals into small chunks which provide clarity of steps when it came to taking action.
But more importantly, I have found that the process of writing down goals also has an important effect on how our mind grapples with future plans we make for ourselves. The planning process itself is a left-brain (our rational brain, conscious mind) activity, but the process of putting the plans down on paper makes an impact on our sustained commitment to act which requires our sub-conscious (right brain) to be fully engaged. Only when the sub-conscious is fully awake to the rational plans (need to lose weight, make a career change, etc) we make for ourselves, can we get the drive and momentum to keep going.
In the seventies and eighties, a huge amount of research was carried out by several psychologists on how the most successful people set their goals and went on to achieve these. They identified four key factors that made goals powerful and must – only when goals are stated in these terms, our right brain remains fully engaged and drives us to achieve the goals:
· Prove-able – Goals must be specific and measurable: want to be ‘rich’, ‘successful’ etc., are not measurable; some people will consider themselves rich with a thousand dollars in their pockets, for some a few credit cards in their wallet is enough to give them a feeling of being rich.
· Positive – goals must be stated in positive terms. Our brain does not understand negative commands: instead of saying ‘I want to lose weight’, write down ‘I (want to) weigh xxx stones’.
· Present tense – goals must be stated in present tense, as though you had already achieved these goals. For example, you would write, “I weigh xxx stones.” Or, “I run my own business with a turnover of xxxx.”
· Personal – must be personal to you; i.e., it is in your control. Instead of saying ‘I would like my employer to give me a promotion’, state as ‘I have demonstrated my ability to handle complex jobs requiring senior level managerial competencies and therefore I want to stake my claim for a promotion during the next annual review’.
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