Integrate!

There are lots of experts who will tell you what to do once you know what you want. They will give you motivational tips (which means they are not based on emotion, not evidence) and they will give you evidence-based tips (often the result of social science research). What they don't do is tell you what to do when you don't know what you want. After all, if you don't know what you want, what's the point? People think that you must know what you want. And that's probably accurate on some level, but your conscious awareness might be out of the loop. I spent a large part of this week asking people to grow their influence by knowing what they want other people to do. I kept asking people what they wanted. The answer that no one wanted to give out loud was something like "I would like people to be impressed by me just as I am, and I'd like them to figure how to use the information I give them. I don't want to have to think it through, because I'm not...

A pony named Callie and a small horse named Tonto follow each other around small, endless circles. Have you ever had a job like that? I don't know how the animals feel about it. But I know what they were accomplishing. I put a 5 year old girl on Callie and I knew she was being brave. She really wanted to ride the pony, but ponies are quite large animals when you are 5 years old. Riding the pony wasn't just a treat: it was an accomplishment. There are days my work can feel like walking in small, endless circles. I keep doing it in the hope that some people will be able to practice being brave and feeling connect to something just big enough and different enough to scare them a little. In NLP, we say that the meaning of a communication is the feedback it generates. Remember to look for the results before you decide that going in circles means you're not making progress.

I was inspired by Chris Brogan's post at Owner this morning . Chris got me thinking about how what we notice drives our behaviours which drives our results. What are you measuring when you try something new at work? We tend to move between two poles. At one extreme, we measure results. We know what we want and that's all we measure. At the other pole, we measure reassurance. Are we getting gold stars? Does someone who counts approve of our efforts? As employees, we tend to work for some form of gold stars although we are more engaged and more successful when we are able to see the results of our work and measure those instead. As entrepreneurs, we want to measure results but until we get them, we would like some gold stars. It's hard to work on your own and hope you're doing something worthwhile. It's nice to get a gold star. It's nice, but ultimately, your ability to continue to do what you want to do depends on your results. More than anything, as an ent...