What is risk, really? If you choose not to take advantage of an opportunity, you risk not accomplishing great things. If you go for it, you risk losing things that are important to you. You can’t escape risk. The only question, then, is, what are you willing to risk?

This is certainly not an original thought. Smarter, prettier people than I have explained this point much better and in much more detail. Right now, though, I need this reminder. I’m working on an amazing opportunity—putting together an event for World Usability Day.

It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, and the task is daunting. But I see it as an opportunity to build a stronger local community of user experience practitioners. Should the event flop, though, I risk looking like a fool and losing credibility within the local community. What’s more: we’re late to the game. The event is little morethan 3 weeks away and we’re still in the planning stages, so the pressure is definitely on. And, as with all risk, (at least, all risk that I’ve encountered), the self-doubt is as great as the opportunity. But it’s just self-doubt, a side effect of risk. I can either have the courage to push forward with the event or give in to the self-doubt and throw in the towel. What am I doing? With the help of several friends, I’m going to organize an amazing event. And when my self-doubt hits me again, and it will, I’ll push through it. I’ll win.

More interesting words from Steve. His latest post answers the question: why become an extrovert? A lot of folks were asking this question, and he provides a moving answer—one that I am definitely going to keep in the forefront of my mind the next time I’m caught in an uncomfortable social situation.

But the reason he gives (creating powerful relationships with people) is not the reason I decided to work on improving my social interaction skills. Rather, I wanted to have a fighting chance to accomplish several of my life’s goals and I knew I could not do it alone. And I knew because I read Keith Ferrazzi’s book: Never Eat Alone. It’s an amazing book about why building relationships matter, about how to connect with people, and about creating meaningful relationships with every person you meet.

Anyway, read Steve’s post and pick up Keith’s book. You’ll be the better for it—even if you disagree with every word they wrote—though I doubt you will.

I just finished reading Steve Pavlina’s How to go from an introvert to an extrovert. It’s a great read, and like so many of Steve’s articles, I completely agree with everything he says.

In the last comment of Steve’s post, as of this writing, someone asked how to develop social skills. As someone who has been working to to improve his social skills over the past few months, I’ve found that successful social interaction starts with a few basic techniques:

• Smile. This is probably one of the greatest things you can do to meet new people. I’ve just started a new job and have had a lot of luck meeting new people just by smiling. Appear friendly and open and people are much more likely to talk to you than if you’re stoic.
• Be prepared. People are, at some point, going to ask about you—your thoughts, your opinions, your life. Think about your answers, but don’t have “pat” answers. It’s more like having interesting bullet points to talk about. Some common questions to be prepared to answer include:
  • What do you do?
  • Are you married?
  • How did you meet your spouse?
  • Do you have any kids?

• Be interested. Take responsibility for being interested in what the other person is saying. If you’re not interested in them, it’s your fault. Ask yourself: what can I do to make this conversation more interesting? And do it. How do you communicate interest? See the next bullet.
• Engage. This is probably the most important social interaction skill you will develop. When you’re talking to someone, fully engage them. At the core of engagement is listening, but engagement also includes asking questions and appropriate body language.
• Adapt. Social situations change at the drop of a hat. Add a fourth person to a 3-way conversation and you’ve exponentially increased the complexity of the relationships. This is something that I’m having particular trouble with.
• Get out of the way. Often, I find myself in conversations asking myself: “What do I say next?” Relax and go with the the flow of the conversation.

And, really, the best advice I can give for improving your social interaction skills: get out there. You can:

• observe people who have strong social interaction skills.
• have one-on-one conversations with people who you think are interesting.
• Read. If you want to be a good programmer, you read books about programming. If you want to have good social interaction skills, read about improving social interaction skills.Some good reads:
  • How to Go From Introvert to Extrovert
  • The Multiple Self - blog post on how to actually make changes in your self.
  • Are you listening to me? Learning to Listen? Learn what to listen FOR
  • Quickly connect with people
  • How to listen: Following skills
  • How to listen: Attending Skills
  • How to Listen: Reflecting Skills
  • People Skills: How to assert yourself, listen to others, and resolve conflict by Robert Bolton
  • Never Eat Alone by by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz

I’ve been thinking a little bit about motivation these past few days, which has also led me to do some noodling on values. This horrible train wreck of a thought process started because I’ve been re-reading Covey’s 7 Habits, and I’ve noticed one big difference between his and Allen’s approach: Covey wants us to start our self improvement with “the end in mind” whereas Allen just wants us to start.

On the surface of it, Covey’s approach feels right, but in reality, Allen’s approach is much more practical: how can you really know what your end you want unless you clear away all of the clutter in your life and better manage the many demands on your time? You can’t.

But why would you start any kind of self improvement program if you didn’t have a goal you wanted to achieve? My answer: motivation. It’s not as solid as a goal or as daunting as defining a goal. It’s squishy. Nebulous. Abstract. Motivations are the desires that spur us to better or worsen our situation. Some examples:

• I want to be happier
• I need to get better organized
• I need to spend more time with my family
• I want to be a better person

A motivation alone is a great deal of sound and fury that amounts to nothing, but it’s enough to get us started. People who start a diet or exercise program are motivated: They want to lose weight or be healthy. But what happens when that motivation is gone and they haven’t built any self-discipline on top of that motivation? They fall of their diet, stop going to the gym, and gain back the three pounds that they just lost.

Unless you build on your motivation, you will fail because motivation means nothing: You want to be healthy? Great, but it takes more than desire.

This is where I began 6 months ago: I wanted to better manage my time. I didn’t have any real goals in mind. I just wanted to be more productive at work so that I would have more time to spend with my family and do other things that I was passionate about.

But then, of course, I had to ask myself: what drove me to be motivated? (Tell me you saw that question coming.) That’s when I started thinking about values. (Told you it was a bit of a train wreck ;))

Values are the qualities or traits and beliefs that we prize in ourselves. They determine how we perceive reality. Some values we hold at the core of our being and changing them would be like making the sun rise in the west. Other values change on a daily basis. Some even on an hourly basis.

Our values determine our motivation. If we see ourselves as a victim, our values limit our motivation. Nothing we do will matter, so why bother. But, if we view the world as a “ours for the taking”, we will be motivated to improve our current situation. Our values may severly limit us, but they also set us free.

As you can see, Values and Motivations are closely tied together. If I believe that I can become rich, then I may be motivated to become rich—if becoming rich is something I would want based on my other values. However, if I think that I am not someone who could ever be rich, I will never be motivated to act on becoming rich.

I’m not sure how this fits in with my doodle from a couple weeks ago, but I am certainly noodling on it.

After reading Steve’s great series of posts on building self discipline, I got to thinking more about the Covey+GTD+NEA combinations that I’ve been exploring.

I’ve come to realize the self discipline is the key to being successful in any of these systems—it’s the basis for all of the core life skills. Without it, you don’t stand a chance at being successful. If, as Covey says, we should put first things first, then building self discipline is where we start. Not with personal productivity—though, you might very well use a personal productivity system to help you exercise your self discipline; the initial goal, though, is not to improve your productivity, rather it is to improve your self discipline—productivity gains will be a nice side effect. At least in the beginning.

The more I thought about self discipline as a basis for all other life skills, the more I realized that I needed to doodle. This is what I came up with:

Now, it’s only a draft and it’s certainly not pretty, but it covers what I currently consider the core life skills.

Self discipline is the base. We all have some modicum of self discipline, but how much or how little we possess determines how successful we are at the other life skills.

At the second tier, we have a little ecosystem:

• Energy Management includes that misnomer time management. We really only manage our energy and how productive we are with what little time and energy we have over the course of our life. This also includes diet—after all, how we generate our energy is as important as how we spend our energy.

• Interpersonal Skills determine how well we relate to different people in different situations. They include verbal, written, and listening communication skills. It also includes general etiquette as well as the ability to carry on small talk or a meaningful conversation as well as the ability to determine which type of conversation is most appropriate.

• Analysis is the ability to assimilate new information, so it includes learning and logic skills.

• Creativity is the application of our analysis.

All told, the four skills at this level feed on each other. An example: If you eat a healthy breakfast, you increase your energy and ability to focus throughout the morning. This increased focus allows you to better analyze the code your writing; through this analysis, you determine that you can re-use some code and it will save you a bit of time. This allows you to meet your deadline, earning you trust from your boss. You increase you energy, you become more creative, which in turn allows you to build better relationships with those around you.

At the top of the pyramid, you have ambition and this is what begets greatness. This is where you set goals and reach for them. The greater the ambition the farther you reach.

Of course, ambition is nothing without energy management, creativity, analysis, and interpersonal skills and those, in turn, are nothing without self discipline.

Interesting thoughts jostling around in the nutshell I call a brain. Will have to think more about this in the coming weeks, and will definitely keep you posted. (Sorry, but pun intended.)

A couple of days ago, I blogged this quote from Never Eat Alone:

Who you know determines how effectively you can apply what you know.

I would also add that who you know determines how effectively you can get things done.

Before reading Never Eat Alone, I read Getting Things Done, and over the last six months I’ve seen my productivity increase. I also saw my patience for small talk decrease. I disappaeared from the daily team lunch. I closed my office door more often. I was heads down in my work for I was getting things done.

But I was getting things done at the expense of maintaining my relationships. Co-workers complained that they never really saw me anymore. I wrote this off as a necessary side effect of being more productive—I just wasn’t going to have more time for all that relationship “stuff”.

Relationships, though, are the key to accomplishing ventures of any significance. They are the key to growth, to happiness. They make work seem less like work and more like fun—if your coworkers are your friends, the time you spend at work seems more like hanging out with friends than, well, work.

Now, I make sure I take at least five minutes every day to connect with coworkers. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The daily five is a perfect way to maintain relationships with your coworkers.) I’m also making it a point to have lunch with at least two people every week—I’m not quite ready to commit to never eating alone, but I’m getting there.

The relationships I’m building may not always help me accomplish my next action, but at some point they will, and building and cultivating those relationships ensures that when I need them, they will be there. As Keith says, “Build it before you need it.” What’s more, relationship building now is a GTD project, ensuring that my commitments for the day are balanced between accomplishing tasks and building relationships.

In the end, the combination of these two life skills—time management (or energy management) and relationship building—is invaluable: Who you know determines how effectively you can apply what you know to get things done.

Rosa’s onto something here: creating a combo Covey and Allen productivity tool. She’s still thinking through all the details and has invited others to help. I’ve actually been thinking of something similar—combining GTD and Farrazzi’s Never Eat Alone. In fact, I think there are several of these systems that we can combine to create an overall system of life skills.

Anyway, more thoughts on this next week.

Now we’re down to the most difficult group of listening skills: Reflecting skills. Reflecting skills are the key skills required to be a master listener. With Following Skills and Attending Skills alone, you’ll be good, but you may still misunderstand or misinterpret the speaker. Bolton offers these thoughts on reflective listening:

In a reflective response, the listener restates the feelings and/or content of what the speaker has communicated and does so in a way that demonstrates understanding and acceptance.

There are four reflecting skills:

• A paraphrase is “a concise response to the speaker which states the essence of the other’s content in the listener’s own words.” When I talk to folks about the virtues of reflective listening, this is often what they think about, but it doesn’t stop here.

• Reflecting feelings “involves mirroring back to the speaker, in a succinct statement, the emotions which she is communicating.” You can deduce the speaker’s feelings by

  • observing body language
  • listening to their tone
  • listening to the type of feeling words they use
  • putting yourself in their shoes

  By non-judgmentally reflecting the speaker’s feelings, you encourage them to talk more freely and openly, which helps create an instant intimacy with the person. Further, in order to fully understand the content, we must understand the emotions surrounding the content.

• Reflecting meaning is simply reflecting both the speakers content and emotion.

  When we respond to the speaker’s meanings—the feelings that paralyze or motivate and the content to which the feelings are associated—our listening is often most effective.

  When first learning how to reflect meaning, try using the formula: “You feel…because…” For example: “You feel angry because that jerk cut you off in traffic.” You might think that saying something like: “You feel…because…” would come across as silly or condescending, but it doesn’t. People focus on the fact that you actually understood them rather than the actual words you used to communicate that understanding.

• Summative reflections are restatements of the over-all themes and feelings of a conversation.

  Summaries are useful in any number of situations, and are most effective “when the listener (1) gathers together points that the speaker brought up, and (2) selects relevant data—that which will help the speaker more clearly understand key elements of her situation.” A good summary, then, empowers the speaker to “speak in more depth” about the topic.

  Bolton gives a great example of how helpful summative reflections can be:

  Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung’s astonishment, proceeded to group the content of Jung’s monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give and take.

So, there you have it. A summary of the three sets of skills needed to become an effective listener. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and would strongly recommend that you pickup Bolton’s excellent book People Skills to learn more about effective listening.

Other posts on How to listen:

• How to listen: Following skills
• How to listen: Attending Skills
• How to listen

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I’m certainly no expert on listening. Most of the ideas and all of the quotes come from an amazing book by Robert Bolton: People Skills. IMO, it is the greatest book on how to apply listening skills in your everyday life.

Was thinking more about Pressfield’s Virtues of War. Specifically: why did Alexander die at 32? And what does the book’s title mean? In ferreting out the answers, I found a key life lessons.

First, let me review two important passages that will help answer both questions. The first passage details an encounter with a group of gymnosophists.

One of my pages, a bright lad named Agathon, was striding ahead to clear the lane, when he came upon a troupe of gymnosophists taking the sun in the public way. These declined to vacate for my passage. An altercation broke out between the boy and several vendors, who took up the cudgels on the renunciants’ behalf. A crowd fathered. By the time I arrived, a full-blown incident was in prgress. The nut of the quarrel was this: Who was the more worthy to possess the right-of-way—Alexander or the gymnosophists? As I reined-in, Agathon stood in spirited exhange with the eldest of the wise men. Indicating me, the lad declared,”This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” The philosopher replied without an instant’s hesitation, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

And the second passage is from Hephaestion, a close friend of Alexander’s, ranting at Alexander to give up conquest and return home—this comes after several years of war that has led the army thousands of miles away from home—farther than any Greek army had traveled.

“Till Persepolis I stood with you, Alexander. Wrongs done to Greece must be avenged. But we have slain Persia’s king. We have burned her capital; we have made ourselves masters over all her lands. Now what?” He gestures east, across the river. “Shall we conquer these honest yeomen next? Why? How have they harmed us? By what right do we bring war against them? Pursuit of glory? This army stopped being glorious a long time ago. Or shall we cite Achilles and say we emulate the ‘virtues of war’? Rubbish! Any virtue carried to its extreme becomes a vice. Conquest? No man can rule another. The most devoted subject will trade in an instant his wealth, earned beneath your rule, for poverty he can call his own. We had a cause. We have none now.”

I don’t think Alexander wanted to conquer the world. Rather, he had a burning need to prove himself to be the greatest warrior and general on earth, which could only be proven by defeating all other armies and their commanders. And in the end, he was never able to conquer this need to prove himself. He pushed his generals and his army too hard—to the point that they became afraid of their own success and eventually refused to continue.

Shortly after his return to Babylon, he died—died because he could not stop. His obsession with the virtues of war became his vice, and eventually destroyed him. At least, that’s my supposition.

If taken in this light, the book’s title, then, describes war (or any other undertaking of genius) as a double-edged sword: it’s virtues, if not controlled, are it’s most dangerous vices. That is, if you let the virtue of your genius define who you are, it will destroy you.

Rosa’s at it again. And, as usual, she’s hitting the nail on the head.

She’s posting more about the Daily Five Minutes. This time it’s a two part series. Today’s part focuses on the D5M from the employee’s perspective; the second part will focus on the boss’s perspective.

Now I’ve been remiss in actually telling you why I think the Daily Five is such a good idea. There are two reasons:

The first has to do with the core purpose of the Daily Five:

When your boss Takes 5 with you, the basic coaching they get from me is that the agenda for the D5M is yours, not theirs (hence Lucy’s question). They are supposed to come to you with nothing but an eagerness to talk to you, ready for some practice on being a better listener when you talk to them — about whatever you want to talk to them about.

That the employee has the opportunity to be heard and, more importantly, be understood is the key part of the Daily Five Minutes. Being understood is key, because it’s what we, as humans, really want. If your boss shows up for a Daily Five and doesn’t actively listen to you, she’s doing more damage than if she had just ignored you all day long.

Keith Ferrazzi writes a little about this in his column in inc magazine. Master Networkers, he says, can quickly create an intimacy with other folks by “allowing people to go deep into themselves”—that is, we can intimately connect with others by engaging them in an open conversation about the things that they are passionate. What’s more, this openness and intimacy are rewarded.

In this same way, a boss that takes the time to talk to her employees in a non-judgemental fashion about things the employee is passionate will be rewarded with hard-work and loyalty.

The second is a bit more practical in nature: it allows the employee and boss to connect without taking a lot of time, which gives the employee (and boss, for that matter) more time to get work done.

Anyway, quit reading my words and go read some of Rosa’s. Great stuff.