Sometimes, the obvious needs to be stated: If you’re not passionate about what you do, how can your audience be? If the audience can’t see your enthusiasm, how would they fire up?
Are you passionate about the thing you do? Do you share your enthusiasm with your audience?
But only when it’s about you.
In fact, it’s often super easy to do for others. When we listen to someone explain their struggles, we tend to know quickly what they should focus on.
But for ourselves? That’s super hard. It means letting go of opportunities and it invites failure: What if it’s the wrong priority? What about the external driving forces? There are bills to pay. Customers to satisfy. Employees to care for. Also, there’s this new trend that would open up great new opportunities and potentially skyrocket parts of our business.
But the bitter truth is this: If we don’t prioritize then someone else will do it for us. And if it’s not someone, it’s time. The one thing we can be certain of is that there are always going to be more things to do than we’ve got time to do them.
Basically, if we don’t prioritize we’re delegating the decision. If that’s not what you want, then you’ll have to make the decision yourself.
What makes it harder than it should be is when we think that our decision would be final. That it would need to be the right decision.
It doesn’t.
There’s always the possibility to change course. Revise our decision. Use new data to make a new decision.
Here are 10 thoughts that might help you with finding your focus for now: https://michaelgerharz.com/focus.
Some companies define their strategy as a focus on an outcome, such as “double our revenue in the next 5 years”.
This can be utterly frustrating. Because usually you cannot control it. It’s not something anyone inside the company can do.
When the CEO promotes a vision like this as the company’s focus for the next five years, what does it mean for the team? How do they put it into action? It will often leave large parts of the workforce frustrated.
Ultimately, it’s what I like to call a “lazy strategy” which leaves the hard decisions fuzzy and vague. It’s unclear how to act on it and what to do to make it happen. (Plus: it carries no meaning for most employees.)
A more helpful focus is one that informs actions and empowers decision making within the team. It requires courage and commitment. But that’s what leads to action.
Reminder: Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not your call, it’s theirs.
No matter how “authentic” you think you are, it’s their perception of your actions and words that counts: Do they perceive what you say and do as being consistent with how you say and do it?
Their perception is not in your full control – which is why I think that focusing on “authenticity” can lead you astray.
What’s in your control, though, is being true to your values and beliefs – which starts with getting clarity about those and being able to articulate them. Whether someone perceives that as “authentic” is a different question.
Contrary to popular belief simplicity is not the opposite of complexity but the prerequisite.
It’s through simplicity that we open our audience’s minds for the complexity underneath.
It’s through simplicity that we make sense of the underlying complexity.
Simplicity is the interface that helps us access complexity. And it’s your job to craft that interface for your audience.
When was the last time you sat down with someone and just listened?
I mean simply sitting there and giving them the space to express their feelings, sort their thoughts, say what needs to be said, …
The opposite approach is the default. How often do we feel the need to jump into the conversation with advice and recommendations. To cut the conversation short as soon as we think that we got the gist of it … jumping to conclusions before they even finished their thought … filling in any blanks as soon as a slight pause occurs.
If we resist that urge it paves the way for the others to open up. If we allow them to make a pause when they look for the right words they are much more likely to actually find the words that express their thoughts and feelings accurately. When, after that pause, we’re still there to listen, I mean truly listen, that’s what makes them feel heard.
No judgement. No advice. Just your presence and the willingness to listen.
We’re living in a world that’s more connected than ever before. We have hundreds of connections and we send thousands of messages each day.
And yet, feeling heard is still as rare and precious as ever.
I’m lucky to have people in my life who have that gift of listening. Who make people feel heard. You know who you are.
A great way to improve your communication is to listen to your customer-facing teams, such as sales, tech support, or social media managers. If you have a system in place to collect all the objections that customers tell your teams, you can address each of them in your communication.
The obvious way to do this is to find (or come up with) ways to convince your audience that these objections are kind of untrue or don’t matter that much (or that it wasn’t your fault).
A much more unusual way is to use the collection of objections as a filter and embrace some of the objections to separate who your service is for and who it’s not for.
That way you can strengthen your communication for those who it is for.
In a way, rather than arguing why your are right and those who complain are wrong you acknowledge that both might be right and then you use it to reinforce the message for those who agree with you.
In elementary sales school you learn that a prospect’s “no” is short for “not enough information”.
And so, whole armies of salesforces bombard their prospects with ever more info when the prospect has already tuned out and started to feel annoyed.
A better way is to consider the possibility that your customers are actually, you know, smart and that they might actually know what they want and need.
Sure, sometimes a “no” means that you haven’t explained it well enough or that a crucial detail was missing. But other times, a “no” really does mean “no”.
If it’s the latter, rather than adding more detail you might want to consider fixing the product or finding a better match. Only if if’s the former will tweaking your communication have an impact.
(It helps, of course, to become good at distinguishing the two.)
The TV show Ted Lasso is full of interesting, rich characters. One of them is Nate, the kit man who became assistant coach and later known as “The Wonder Kid”.
When he felt underappreciated by Ted Lasso and the Richmond team, he left to become the head coach at rival team West Ham United where he was unbelievably successful, heading from win to win, truly acting as a wonder kid.
And yet, he chose to quit mid-season.
It was a toxic environment.
Nate is an unusual example in today’s world. He finds joy from perfecting the things he does rather than from doing the perfect thing.
He prefers to work in a healthy environment that values the little contributions that anyone makes over being the shining light in a toxic environment.
He prooves that passion is not always something that strikes you at birth, but something that can be found in the things you do.
If you haven’t watched the show, I highly recommend you do. Nate is just one of many fascinating characters.
There’s this certain breed of super charismatic founders. You could listen to them for hours and after the meeting you’ll leave with a feeling of excitement. Their enthusiasm was so mesmerizing and that thing they were telling you about really sounded cool.
So, you feel you just have to tell your friends about it. Which you do. Well, actually it’s more that you try to tell them. Because soon you discover that it’s actually pretty hard to explain. Somehow, you can’t quite put your finger on what the point really is. What sounded so cool when she said it, sounds rather confusing when you say it.
And so, your friends don’t quite get your excitement.
Which is not your fault. Because the one thing that the founder missed was to make it easy for others to pass the message along.
They won’t be in the room when the message gets passed along. And so the message itself must be crafted such that it captivates even when others share it.
How do you make it easy for others to pass your message along?
