IN SHORT:  Having all the time in the world makes us lazy. What would your priorities be if you suddenly found you had only a few months, or just weeks left on your clock? So why aren’t they your priorities now..?

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time,
for that is the stuff life is made of.”
[Benjamin Franklin, 18th-century US Founding Father & polymath]

No-one’s final words have ever been
“I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
[Unknown]

(~1120 words, approx. 5-8 mins to read)

It really is a strange thing, time.

It’s the fourth dimension of our existence but, unlike the other three, we get no choice which direction we travel in. We are compelled by our nature to proceed at a speed of precisely 60 minutes per hour, no u-turns, stops, diversions or changes. The clock on the wall ticks, denoting each passing second with the unspoken promise of one to follow. Each of those seconds-yet-to-come contains an inexpressibly large variety of possibilities, but as each ticks by we chose only one single future and via that singular ever-in-motion moment we call ‘now’ we solidify it into a fact and carve it into the stone tablet of our history, a history that can now no longer be changed.

In March 2010 I wrote of a friend of ours who had been told she had cancer. Terminal: one word and yet a sentence. She had already lived for longer than her prognosis indicated, but four months later she lost her battle, gracious and strong to the end, and passed away. A few days ago her husband, a quiet and very private man, shared something he’d not mentioned before, about her prognosis, and it really did make me stop and think.

But we’ll get to that in a moment – I need to talk about a film first.

Some of you might have seen the movie “In Time”. If you haven’t then here’s a summary of the general premise of the film, without spoilers. The movie is set in one of the myriad of possible dystopian futures that sci-fi writers love, in this case one where the saying “Time is Money” is now literally true – instead of cash, the currency is time. The whole population are genetically engineered to stop ageing when they reach 25 years old BUT at that same moment, your biological clock starts ticking, counting your life down second by second. When your clock hits zero, your time has run out – you die, there and then on the spot. Time can be earned – wages are paid in hours and minutes, or weeks and months if you’re a high earner. Time can be spent – a cup of coffee will cost you four minutes of your life, and not just because of the time it takes to drink it. Time can be invested, earn interest, be shared, given to others in a transaction or as a gift, and can be stolen too. But you are constantly aware of time and its passing, and of how much you have left.

That awareness of time does things to different sections of society in the movie. The ‘time poor’ live from one day to the next on a daily wage, with usually no more than 24 hours on their ‘clock’. So they don’t waste that time on frivolous activities, never sauntering or wasting words or just sitting around – instead they use every moment they have either productively or in enjoyment, realising that life is short so it needs to be lived. Not so the richest, who have all the time in the world – and that’s not a figure of speech! Whilst they have the all luxuries and never need to rush, they walk around with bodyguards, in fear of having their time stolen, and never ever engage in anything that might possibly cause injury or death for fear of losing all the time they’re carrying. Whilst they have all that time, the paradox is that they never really experience living. What’s interesting is what happens when a time poor chap finds himself with over a century of time on his hands, and when a rich girl suddenly finds she has only minutes to go.

But let’s get back to what my friend shared a few days ago. He said that when he and his wife were told she had between six months and a year to live, it made life a lot simpler. I’ll repeat that; having knowledge of exactly how much time she had left simplified life, and here’s why:

He said that being told her time was limited made them focus on what was important, who they needed to spend time with, what activities they would make sure they did together, what really needed to be said and done and, just as usefully, what was less meaningful, trivial, unproductive, people and things that they’d accumulated but weren’t contributing to their life any more, things that could be let go of and left behind.

Not having ‘all the time in the world’ provided extra clarity and perspective on pretty much every aspect of their daily life. He described it as a gift – a costly gift, yes, but a gift nonetheless in their point of view. Every day became precious, especially when she lived beyond the year.

I couldn’t help wondering what my reaction to that would be. If, for example you had only a year left, what would you do? What about only 6 months, or just a month? And if you had but 24 hours to go on your clock?

If your train of thought is anything like mine, after acknowledging you’d spent at least a few minutes in shock, I realised that the less time I had left, the more the things that really matter rose to the top of the list. Those will be different for each one of us, whether it’s time with family and friends, travelling to places we always meant to go, experiencing something we’ve perhaps been too fearful of up until now, getting rid of or out of a current situation, prioritising key projects at work or home because they provide you with a sense of purpose, or something else – the key is that it would force us to focus on what really makes us happy and feel fulfilled.

Which begs the question:

Are we making enough time for those things currently?

Rather than wait until we’re required by circumstance to focus, what’s stopping us prioritising them here and now?

I’m becoming convinced that too much time on our hands makes us lazy. I have to conclude that the best way to live would be such that, if I found out my hourglass had only minutes left to run, I’d be able to say truthfully that I had no wrongs to put right, no situations unresolved, that I had accomplished all I could in the time I’d had already, I’d invested it wisely and was satisfied with my life. I’m honestly not sure I could say that yet, so perhaps it’s time to stop writing and get on with sorting and prioritising, putting some of the really important things back in their rightful place in my life and letting go of the clutter that doesn’t really matter any more…

Want to join me?

Until next time,

IN SHORT: Changing our words really can change our world!

 ”The difference between ‘can’t’ and ‘can’ is that ‘can’t’ requires a lot of certainty while ‘can’ just asks for a little possibility.”

[unknown] 

(~841 words, approx 5-8 mins to read.)

Last time we discovered that the general assumption that words are just tools for describing our experience isn’t true and that in fact the words we use also define our experience too. I promised that this time we’d dig into that a little more and discover how we can use that to our advantage.

Let’s look at a simple statement:

“I could never do that!”

Remember the times you may have heard someone say it, or found yourself saying it.

Your list of occurrences might include some of the times I’ve actually heard it said:

• having to give a presentation or speech
• expressing an opinion in a meeting
• dealing with conflict
• cleaning out smelly drains
• running a marathon
• cleaning and dressing a serious wound

By saying “I could never…” the speaker has put the activity in question in a large box labelled “Impossible Things.” You might want to argue that much of the list I’ve given you above fits instead into the box of “Things I’m Very Afraid Of.” However, I’d posit that while you may be on to something, that latter category is actually a subset of the first one in the mind of the speaker because of the little bit of reasoning they’re doing, possibly unconsciously, which goes something like this:

“I feel very afraid of that and because I can’t imagine admitting to the fear, getting over it, or facing and dealing with it, it’s easier for me to believe that the thing itself is impossible.”

And I find that very interesting, because essentially they’ve popped whatever ‘that’ is into the same box as spontaneously sprouting wings and taking to the air or growing a second head which are, in the normal universe, truly impossible. Because if we didn’t put ‘that’ in the category of “Impossible Things” it would automatically have to be in the opposite category of “Possible Things” instead and that would mean we’d have to change that little sentence from “I could never do that” to the following:

“I won’t do that.”

I know from experience when I’ve explained this in face-to-face conversations that some people find that a provocative thing for me to say and that’s because it highlights the fact that the impossibility of ‘that’ is something we created ourselves simply as a result of the way we chose to describe ‘that’.

And that has implications: if you’ve decided that you could ‘never’ do something, it means that just as the people we spoke about last time can’t tell the difference between blue and green, you won’t see the latent capabilities inherent in yourself or the possibilities offered by a genuine opportunity to grow or try something new – you’ve robbed yourself of the ability to distinguish things that might take time and effort and some change, all of which are actually possible, from truly “Impossible Things.”

Take running a marathon for example. Before late 2007 I had never run more than 5 miles or walked more than about 10 miles in one go in my entire life, and it’d been a while since I’d done even that. Yet about 18 months later, at 40 years old, I ran and completed my first marathon.

Whilst it’s true I had no experience of marathons to look back on and therefore no real proof that I could actually do it, that didn’t mean it had to go into the “Impossible Things” box. On the contrary it had to go into the “Possible Things” box precisely because I hadn’t yet proved it to be impossible.

And the way I, and countless others have done, made sure it didn’t go anywhere near the “Impossible” slot was to start by changing the way I thought about it to myself and spoke about it to others. Instead of something “I could never do”, it was something “I haven’t tried yet”. Before long it became something “I haven’t done yet, ” and finally became something “I have done.”

Let’s take a look at those phrases in a little more detail.

• “I haven’t tried yet” creates the possibility of having a go, and the ‘yet’ subtly implants the idea that at some point in the future I will have at least attempted it.
• “I haven’t done yet” moves me on to something I’ve actually begun to find out what I’d need to learn or change in order to do it, or in this case have started training, and the ‘yet’ reinforces the idea that at some point I will have done it
• “I have done” is what you get to say when you’ve actually done it and, having kept it out of “Impossible”, moved it from “Possible” into “Accomplished!”

Because I talked about the task differently, I thought about it differently and therefore I felt about it differently too.

No matter whether it’s a presentation, conflict situation, marathon, flying or something from your own “I can’t…” list, start by putting it on your “I’ve not done that yet” list instead and notice the beginnings of a shift towards the “Accomplished!” category.

Changing our words really can change our world!

Until next time,

ps. If you’ve been on one of our “Taxi..!” workshops you’ll have experienced a number of other ways of changing words to change worlds too. And if you’ve not, look out for the next workshop!

—-

* Possimpible is, according to Barney Stinson (How I Met Your Mother #4.12), “the place where the possible and impossible meet,” because, “nothing, and everything, is possimpible.”

IN SHORT: We don’t just talk about the world we experience, we experience the world we talk about. So if the world we experience isn’t how we’d like it to be, our first stop should be to change how we  talk about it! 

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

[Ludwig Wittgenstein, 19-20th century philosopher]

(~1081 words, approx 5-8 mins to read.)

First, a question to ponder for a moment or two: What colour is the sky?

Last year I discovered something very interesting. When I say ‘discovered’ I guess I mean I learned something I’d never come across before, something new to me that made me think and I thought perhaps it was time I shared my new learning with you.

What I discovered is that many ancient languages don’t have a word for the colour blue.*

Now, you might suppose that not having a word equivalent to ‘blue’ would simply mean they had a slightly different way of categorising colours, perhaps grouping colours according to what made most sense in their environment. And you’d be at least partially right. I discovered that some languages and cultures do have ways of differentiating, like Vietnamese which uses the same word to describe the colour of leaves and sky- ‘xanh’ – but labels it as ‘leaf-xanh’ and ‘sky-xanh’.  Others do not separate their concept of green and blue at all so linguists have coined the terms ‘grue’ or ‘bleen’ for a word describing both colours.

But there’s actually something more interesting going on; a series of experiments  began about a decade ago, one of which has become quite famous, to see if the fact that a language lacked a word for something meant it actually affected people’s perception and experience of that something. In this case, would not having a word for ‘blue’ change the way people actually perceived the colour blue?

The researchers found a tribe in Africa, the Himba, who have no separate words for blue and green, just one general descriptor for that whole section of the visible spectrum. As part of their experiments they showed them various sets of 16 block-coloured squares and asked them to point out any squares that were different from the majority. Logically, you’d expect that even without the words to describe blue and green, they’d still to be able to perceive and then point out the odd ones, wouldn’t they?

What they found was unexpected. The tribe did very well picking the odd squares in the set most of the time, but when the set was a mix of green and blue they took a lot longer to decide on the odd ones out or they couldn’t find them at all.

While you’re reading this you may have wondered, “Well perhaps the entire tribe is blue-green colour-blind?” That was actually screened for in the experiment using a variety of other techniques, so what is left for us to conclude then? It can only be this:

The way we describe the world determines the way we perceive the world!

That’s actually very powerful stuff. It used to be thought that language developed as a way to describe experience, i.e. it’s a one-way process, that the way we describe the world reveals how we perceive it, and to some extent that’s true. But the whole truth is that description and perception actually form a loop – i.e. that the way we talk about our world feeds back and reinforces our perceptions of our world in the light of how we talk about it. In the case of ‘blue’, not having a word for ‘blue’ makes distinguishing between blue and green trickier or impossible.

It seems strange, doesn’t it, not to be able to see ‘blue’ when it’s staring you in the face, simply because your language or experience up to that point doesn’t include separating ‘blue’ from ‘green’.

So the next question that sprang to my mind was, “Does that mean our perceptions are set by our language – that they can’t change?”

Fortunately, research has also shown that when we change how we describe our world, our perception of it changes too!

Young children who’ve developed some language skills but not learned their colour names yet perform the same as the Himba when trying to discriminate between coloured squares – they find it difficult too. However, when they learn the colour names their ability to discriminate between colours jumps. The same happens with adults, even if the terms used to discriminate are just made-up words. It’s as if creating a finer set of distinctions or a wiser way of categorising the world really does opens up a whole new set of experiences.

So, I wondered, how often do we miss out on something that’s actually right there in front of us, staring us in the face, shouting at us, jumping up and down for our attention, simply because we don’t have the capacity to notice it for what it actually is, to perceive it as separate from the other stuff that’s going on?

If you lived in a culture that didn’t have stools for example, how would you differentiate a stool from a small table? Or you’d never had the difference between a crow and a raven explained to you, they’re all just big black birds aren’t they?

These might sound like trivial examples, so what about this: imagine you’d grown up in a home where no matter how well you succeeded, it was only the mistakes you made that were pointed out – where a 95% mark on an exam was labelled as “5% less than what you could have got!” – how would you know what ‘success’ was if even your most brilliant efforts were labelled as failure?

How about these examples too:

• You can’t grasp the opportunity that a job promotion represents because you’ve already put in the category of ‘too much responsibility’?
• You can’t understand the sense in saving because that’s just ‘stopping me enjoying my money now’?
• You can’t see when someone is genuinely interested in you romantically because you’ve labelled all flirting as ‘they’re just after sex’?
• You can’t see the benefits of a healthier lifestyle because you’ve already categorised it as ‘too much like hard work’ or ‘it’s just about denying me the things I want’?

Although it might not seem like it, these are the results of exactly the same kind of ‘lumping things together’ as the colour problem.

But there’s hope in every case here because when we start talking about these situations differently and develop ways to describe the things we can’t grasp or understand yet, gradually we change the way we perceive things.

And we’ll talk about how we do that next time!

Oh, I almost forgot - what colour is the sky? Take a proper look, don’t just say “It’s blue”…

Until then,

—

* There have been various theories to explain this, ranging from erroneous “The entire race was colour blind” to a plausible “Blue isn’t a colour that occurs often in nature, so why have a name for it?”

“Let go, forget the burdens of the past. The past cannot be changed so use it to make the future yours.”

[Unknown] 

(~1035 words, approx 5-9 mins to read, plus 10 mins to listen to the story…)

As often happens this ‘slice’ was inspired by a string of events over the last few months including, amongst other things, a visit to Edinburgh, bumping into a business contact of mine I’ve not seen in a while, Richard Hammond’s racing helmet and a Russian musician with the almost DC-comic name of Modest Mussorgsky.

Mussorgsky is the composer of the “Pictures at an Exhibition” suite. It’s a musical illustration of a series of pictures drawn and painted by artist Viktor Hartmann over many years. Each movement in the suite is based on one picture or moving around the imagined gallery. Many of you might actually be familiar with at least one of the themes in the suite – “Promenade” - have a listen here and see if you recognise the opening phrase.

It’s that idea of an exhibition I’d like to chat about here…

Whilst few of us have large exhibitions of art around the place, I do know several people who work in art galleries of one sort or another, one of which was the business contact I mentioned earlier. However, many of us have photographs on the walls of our home, or desks at work, even in our wallets and on our phones. We may perhaps keep boxes of photos and pictures too or, if you’re like my Dad, meticulously numbered, dated and labelled shelves of albums – something I know I will be grateful for if not now, in years to come

For example, as I sit in my living room, there are photos of our children as babies and a glass-fronted box containing their first pairs of shoes, a photo of the extended family, a multi-photo frame of my wife and I and our kids at various ages in different places, a beautiful bookcase hand-made by my wife’s grandfather, a watercolour from my mother-in-law, and two cabinets where, amongst the items, there are things made by our children as they grew on display.

However, in contrast to what we as humans like to do with our external environment, we often do something very different in our own internal world. The pictures we keep in our own private exhibition often contain the very things we’d never, ever put on display for all to see but we keep them there and dwell on them nonetheless.

But surely, you might argue, we should remember those kind of things as a reminder not to let it happen again. And while there’s a grain of truth in that sentiment, the problem is not that we have those pictures in our exhibition, it’s what we do with them that makes the difference.

The worst thing we can do is to dwell on the events themselves as I’m sure you’ll realise – focusing on the event makes us relive the negative emotions from that time – guilt, fear, sadness, anger, bitterness, shame – all those things that should be behind us. What usually follows then is a string of self-critical thoughts and feelings that bring us even further down.

However, this leads us neatly to Richard Hammond’s racing helmet. I’m referring specifically to the helmet he was wearing during his horrific crash in 2006 whilst driving a jet-propelled car. During a recent episode of “Miracles of Nature”, he pointed it out as it sat on a shelf in his garage. It would be easy for him to focus on the events of the crash itself, that he should’ve noticed the front tyre beginning to shred, that he could’ve died, and his long and tough recovery over the many months that followed. But it was obvious from what he said about it that he keeps the helmet around not for that negative purpose, but to remind him of something much more positive – that he’s alive and to be grateful for that fact and make use of the extra time he now has.

Just think about that for a moment and cogitate on the big difference that comes from rewriting the simplest phrase there: “I could’ve died” becomes “I’m alive.” This is fantastic proof that it’s not what you remember that counts, it’s what you *do now* with what you remember that matters most.

After all, the purpose of any trip to the museum or gallery is to leave you feeling that it was worthwhile, that you’ve had a good time, perhaps been challenged or learned something new. So make sure when you tour the gallery of your life, that’s what you come away with.

And if you like stories that illustrate lessons like this, click here and have a listen to this one I wrote some years ago for a client… 

Until next time,

I was at a networking morning recently and spoke to quite a few people. As is often the case, I was offered some marketing materials from a couple of the people there.

One was a nicely produced folder with some written information interspersed between artful photos.

The other was a stick of dynamite. Well, not an actual stick as you can see from the photo.

Guess which one I actually took, and then had a great conversation with Robert, the guy who gave it to me? And I’ve read it too, though I’ve not popped the party popper that was concealed inside. Yet..!

The not-a-stick-of-explosive is a fantastic piece of marketing communication, but also embodies four of the most important principles of powerful communication:

1. Make it PULL, not push.
2. Keep it simple.
3. Engage as many senses as you can.
4. Leave them wanting more. 

The company is ADM Creative. I have no other reason to mention them other than their true creativity here, and the fact that I know I’ll remember the conversation and his name and company for a lot longer than most other networking conversations!

If you want to know more about how these principles work and how to tweak your communication, no matter what form it takes, get in touch now.

IN SHORT: Successful time management doesn’t come from just knowing what to do – it comes from actually doing it!

“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.”

[Samuel Smiles, 19th-century Scottish author and reformer]

(~1140 words, approx 6-9 mins to read)

Last time we talked about the ‘magic number’ of projects or other activities you can devote your time and energy to without things beginning to fray at the edges, which turned out to be two and a half.

But many of you probably know people that seem to manage a lot more than that, those seemingly inexhaustible people who juggle time like Doctor Who and seem to squeeze several extra hours out of a normal day. And I promised that this time I’d reveal how they do it, or at least how they create the impression that they are.

So here goes: seven principles from those Masters of Time, culled from my reading, observations and experience:

1. “If you want it done, write it down.”
   You’ve probably heard this so often, but that doesn’t make it any less true; productive people plan ahead. Not necessarily in fine detail or obsessively, but they think ahead and write down what they have to do. The most common forms I’ve seen are well know to us all, even if we don’t use them: a diary and a to-do list. The most productive people I know write their to-do lists at the end of the working day ready for tomorrow – that way they can just get into action first thing without having to remember where they got up to the day before.
2. “Do what you *need* to do first.”
   How often have you had a report to write and you look for the perfect font before you’ve got the content sorted? Or it could be changing the layout of the table six times before you’ve started cooking for your dinner party? Many tasks have a mix of more and less enjoyable elements and it’s easy to let ourselves get sidetracked into doing the fun parts first, rather than the necessary bits. The masters of time don’t. They start with the necessary elements and get those out of the way, or at least a sizeable chunk of it done. What this often does is leaves enough time for the tweaks anyway, rather than the time-sloppy way of doing the fun stuff first then finding you’re tight on time for the really important bits! Time-savvy people also don’t add unnecessary spit and polish and focus on ‘fit for purpose’ unless perfection is absolutely what’s needed. Which brings me on to the next principle…
3. “Little and often.”
   If I mow my lawn once a week during the summer I can do it in half an hour or so because the grass hasn’t grown too much and I don’t have to empty the mower more than a few times. However, if I leave it a couple of weeks instead, it takes much, much longer as the mower has to work harder to cut through the longer grass, and I have to empty the mower much more frequently as the grass box fills up quicker. When it comes to repetitive necessary tasks, especially those we find tedious or boring, the time-savvy crowd simply do them more often and keep on top of them so they don’t pile up and consume hours or days instead of just minutes at a time. Little and often also makes sure that a tedious task is kept short and doesn’t become so long you want to quit before finishing. It’s also easier to slot in a slice of it here and there rather than have to do find time to do it all in one huge effort. However…
4. “Better to do some than none at all.”
   If you have a limited slot of time, say between other activities, and there’s something that you could be doing but you’re not sure  you can finish it in the time you’ve got, many of us would wonder whether it’s actually worth doing any of it. Not the time-savvy! Their mind set is “Well, at least I can make a start.” They might not get it all done, but they know they’ll have less to do next time they come back to it. And a handy trick related to principle #1 is to make a written note of where you’re up to – that way you don’t have to waste time figuring out how far you’ve got when you come back to it. This principle overlaps a little with the next one…
5. “Run things in parallel.”
   Most of us do this here and there – if you’ve ever prepared a full meal you know that you sort the elements of the meal in descending order of cooking time. This means that, for example, once you’ve put something in the oven, you don’t just stand around waiting for it to cook, you get on with preparing the rest of the meal so that it all happens in parallel and everything comes together at the same time. Productive people do the same with as many of their activities as they can, so that whilst they appear to have many things on the go and have many things come together at their proper times, at any single given moment they’re still obeying the magic number. However, that does require some thinking ahead, which also spins us back to principle #1!
6. “Guard your time.”
   I can’t emphasise the importance of this principle enough. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the “Can I just have five minutes?” interruption and we all know it’s never just five minutes. I once had a colleague leave the office on the basis of a five-minute interruption and he came back over 2 hours later! The most productive and time-savvy people I’ve worked with are actually quite selfish with their time, especially when working on more tedious tasks, and are comfortable using phrases like, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy at the moment. I have 15 minutes spare at 2:30 – can you come back then?”* Some of them even schedule their ‘interruptible time’.
7. “Be realistic.”
   Too often we are overly optimistic with how fast or productively we think we can work or what we can get accomplished in a set amount of time, often because we don’t account for hiccups or problems that might crop up. I’ve found this especially true of people’s estimates of meetings! Great time managers are a lot more aware of their true pace of work and much more realistic which their estimates of how long something will take, even under pressure. They take stock of their past performance and plan according to experience rather than naive hope.

There you have it – seven key principles for becoming more masterful of your time. Remember though, successful time management doesn’t come from just knowing what to do – it comes from actually doing it!

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve got other principles you’ve found useful too.

Until next time,

—

* One knock-on effect of this ‘can you come back later’ approach is that often they don’t return, having gone away and figured it out for themselves – from some anecdotal estimates it can be as high as 2 out of 3!

“Busy-ness and productivity
are not the same thing.”

[Unknown]

(~1044 words, approx. 5-8 mins to read)

Back in 1990 jazz hip-hop trio De La Soul proposed that “Three is the magic number.” But today, based on research and experience, I can exclusively reveal that they were wrong, but only slightly.

Before we get to what the magic number actually is, I realise that a little extra information might help everyone understand exactly what I’m talking about here, so let’s back-track a bit.

I spent the better part of a decade working in various roles for a global FMCG company (that’s Fast-Moving Consumer Goods for acronym non-geeks). One of the problems we decided needed addressing was how we could maximise the overall performance of each team member by making sure their time wasn’t spread too thinly across too many projects.

So, obviously, that meant we needed to know what actually counted as ‘too many’. I now work with a number of business, public-sector and individual clients who also ask that question. And it’s a very important question too, since the answer has an impact not only on project planning in business, but also on our individual and collective time management, our stress management and whole-of-life balance – in fact our personal productivity in total.

Well, with some research from a variety of sources, backed up by subsequent experience, we found the answer:

Two and a half.

Now I can guess that some of you will be wondering what on earth ‘a half’ means, and we’ll get to that in a moment.

What the research turned up was that if you are being asked to make a continual and significant contribution to a project, you are at your most productive when you have two and a half to work on.

This might seem to go against what seems like common sense which would suggest that focusing on a single project would mean you’re at your most productive, but in the real world of working and home life, no project is without its delays and breaks. And while it’s probably arguable that focusing on a single project might improve your productivity *for that project*, your total productivity *as a person* is harmed.

This is because having a second project to divide your time between means that when when one or the other needs input or help from someone or somewhere else, or there’s a hiccup outside your control, you’re not sat twiddling your thumbs because you have something else to work on. Since we tend to get bored doing the same thing all the time, and even the best intentioned of us do, having a second project means there’s something else you can do, rather than nothing.

The ‘half’ a project comes in as something that you’re not required either to make as continuous or significant a contribution to, but can step in to when required and step out again without anything too detrimental happening in your absence.

You could think of it instead as the magic combination being two major projects and one minor one. The half or minor project often appears in the workplace as something you might contribute to as an adviser or expert, or share a role equally with several other people, but you aren’t involved in its day to day execution. Or it could be something you’re using as a learning or development opportunity.

What this means is that if you are being asked to be a serious part of three or more projects, you are starting to be over-stretched, and that means one or more of the projects will begin to suffer as you seek to prioritise whatever you consciously or unconsciously perceive to be the two ‘major’ projects.

And in case you’re one of those who think they can multi-task effectively, research over the last couple of decades shows that true multi-tasking is in fact a myth and attempting to do it actually makes you less and less productive on each project and has the same effect on your performance as being mildly drunk, or reducing your IQ by around 15 points!

What’s really interesting is that this rule of two-and-a-half works recursively, that is, it applies equally to every layer of life.

For example, let’s start with your whole life. If you’re employed, you have a work-life ‘project’ and a home-life ‘project’. You may also have a community-life ‘project’, e.g. running a sports club, youth group, local choir, etc. Since no-one else can run your work life or home life, those make the two major projects, and the third takes you to, and possible beyond, the limit unless it’s a minor project.

Let’s go a layer deeper: In your work life, we’ve already discussed how two major and one minor work projects is the limit of good solid productivity and contribution.

However, the same applies in your home life; you may be in a serious and committed relationship with someone, so that’s one ‘project’. You may be a parent, so that’s two. If you have a serious hobby or other interest, that’s three projects on the go, again taking you to and possibly over the limit of good, solid continuous contributions, unless one can be classed as a ‘minor’ project.

I’ve lost count of the number of stressed employees and managers I’ve worked with, relationships I’ve seen damaged, stress-related problems and breakdowns, or careers sidelined because people either tried to make every project in their life a major one and found they didn’t have the time, ability or energy to keep it up for long. Either that or they relegated what should have been a major project, e.g. their family life, to minor status, often without realising it, and the knock-on effects came back to bite them.

Many of you may already be wondering how those people who seem to have a finger in every pie and juggle many different projects, way beyond the ‘two and a half’ actually do it.

So next time we’ll talk about how!

For now though, remember, the ‘magic number’ you need to hold on to, the one that governs our productivity and focus, our ability to achieve and our stress levels too, is 2 ½ - two major and one minor project. Any more and you start to lose the magic…

Until next time,

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
[William James, 19th/20th-century American Psychologist, Philosopher & Author]

 [1145 words, estimated reading time 6-10 mins]

I was prompted to revisit some of my older articles after a couple of experiences, including catching part of a TV programme showing mothers who push their children from an early age into so-called ‘beauty pageants’ and other activities, and a conversation about people who are famous only for being famous. I found this one from 5 years ago…

For those who’ve not come across Bonsai trees before, or if you just need a gentle reminder, they are, in essence, carefully cultivated miniature versions of their much larger outdoor cousins, and they’re grown from the same seeds or nuts too, so it’s nothing to do with where you start from that makes the difference between a ‘proper’ tree and a Bonsai.

What makes a tree a Bonsai is what’s done to it as it grows.

Bonsais are planted in shallow basins, with their main root, the taproot, that normally anchors a tree into the ground, cut off so that it will fit into the basin.

As they grow, other roots and branches are cut off or pruned too, and leaves and buds pinched as they develop. Sometimes branches are trained using splints or wires to make them grow in particularly aesthetic ways – the whole point of growing a Bonsai is that it should be visually pleasing.

And they are – if you get a chance to take a good look at one, they’re quite beautiful.

However, I’d like to pose a fairly deep question here:

What is the purpose of a tree?

I know, there are a multitude of answers you could give here, some to do with the survival of the tree itself and its species, some related to its role in local and even global ecology, some to the way its wood can be used to build and create, and perhaps some a little more ethereal, about digging deep, reaching wide and growing tall.

The one I want to focus on though is related to how it all begins. Take an acorn for example. Within it lies all the genetic information and starting ingredients for a future as a great oak tree. In a nutshell (pun intended) the acorn IS an oak tree, just not yet.

Given good soil, rain, light and air, the acorn cannot help but become what it always potentially was – an oak tree. In nature, this happens all the time and there are some famous trees, the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest for example, that are anything up to 1000 years old. Others have grown and later become church doors, dining tables and chairs, house frames, boat hulls and many other useful things.

The Bonsai tree, however, serves no purpose other than to look good.

It has, through careful and regular attention, been prevented from becoming what it should have been, purely for the pleasure of its ‘owner’.

Now I’d like you to take a mental survey of the people you know – family, friends, colleagues – then out into wider circles, to those you’re aware of – celebrities and other famous people.

And then take an honest, rosy-tint-less view of yourself and your own life.

Some of the lives you’ve touched on will be authentic, lived in the process of becoming what they were always supposed to be. Others, however, will be ‘bonsai’ lives, lives which look great and fit well with the current expectations of society, culture and fashion but serve no deeper purpose than looking good or fitting in. Or, perhaps more insidiously, they’re lives that have been force-fitted by well-meaning or even abusive parents, partners, governments or religious or even educational institutions.

There will be some that are in-between, perhaps your own life the easiest to spot, with areas that are truly authentic and other areas that have been ‘bonsai’-ed, either by other people up until now, or by yourself with the splints and wires of your own limiting beliefs and conflicting values, ruthlessly pruning those roots that delved too deep and branches that reached too far towards things that you were unsure of your worth to attain, or to places you feared to go.

The paradox is that a life lived in a good environment with support and resources that allow nature to take its course cannot fail to become what it was supposed to be in an almost effortless manner; to ‘bonsai’ a life takes takes much more effort – repeated attention and restriction, usually beginning with those who looked after us or had authority over us as children (whether intentional or not, the effect is the same), and then by ourselves as we carry on their work long after those parts of their influence should have faded and been left behind.

And the sharpest tool in the bonsai kit is fear…

So to our challenge:

A life lived just to fit in or look good or a life lived in fear has no long-term purpose at all and is ultimately small.

Me, I want to live a life that has meaning and purpose that last longer than my few years on this earth. What about you?

Delve deeper, spread wider, reach higher.

Be authentic.

“We live our every one of our beliefs, whether we like them or not.”

[Anon.]

(~1290 words, approx 7-10 mins to read)

I realise the title of this month’s ‘slice’ sounds like a line from Star Trek and probably need explaining, so let me tell you a little real-life story…

A few months ago the ‘mood lighting’ under the book shelves in my office died a spectacular death complete with exploding light bulbs and that acrid burning smell that accompanies melting plastic. I decided, after a little looking around, to replace them with LED lights as they’re very low cost to run, using less power in a week than my old lights would’ve used in a day!

So I ordered a new set of lights which is made up of three components – the lights themselves, a power supply, and a little connecting strip that goes between the transformer and lights.

It all arrived a few days later and I connected it up to check it worked together.

It didn’t.

So I sent it all back and requested a replacement, which arrived a few days after that. But when I connected it all up I got the same result – nothing!

Some of you reading this would, I’m guessing, have just asked for a refund and changed what you wanted, or asked for yet another replacement in the hope that this time it would work.

I didn’t. I’m slightly annoying like that…

Instead, I got out my old multimeter* and decided to check each of the components to make sure it was doing what it was supposed to.

First, I checked the power supply to make sure it was indeed sending out the right voltage, which it was.

I checked the connecting strip to make sure everything was internally wired correctly, which it was.

Finally I checked that the positive and negative connections were connected to the positive and negative terminals on the LED units. Which they were.

So, everything was connected the way all the labels said, and the power was on but despite all this, there was no light forthcoming.

Then it hit me. Figuratively speaking, fortunately…

What if the terminals on the lights weren’t labelled correctly? What if … (are you ready for the line?!) … the polarity was reversed (Captain)?

After a simple re-wire that took just a few minutes, I connected it all back up again and switched the power on.

It worked..!

“So what?” you might ask.

Well, let’s take this as a metaphor if you will.

I often get clients who want to make a change. They have all the right reasons for wanting the change, i.e. the ‘power supply’ is working, and they know exactly what they need to do to make the change happen, i.e. all the ‘wiring’ is in place, but when they go for it, they can’t make it work.

In many of these cases, it’s because they have the ‘polarity’ reversed somewhere in the chain of connections from motivation to action.

What I mean by that is they have some belief or value or a part of their sense of self which is directly contrary to the change.

If it’s not clear yet, it will be when I give you an example:

Ben (not his real name) wanted to stop smoking. He’d tried many times over the past 6 years or so with varying degrees of success but something “always pulled me back.”**

As Ben and I spoke we discovered that all the men he’d looked up to in his formative years – close family members such as dad, uncles and older brothers – all smoked heavily.

From growing up around these role models he’d constructed an robust belief that masculinity and smoking went hand in hand. It won’t take you more than a moment to realise that with a belief like this, every time he tried to stop smoking, he began unconsciously to trigger the niggling feeling that he wasn’t a real man himself. And because his masculinity was more important to him he was always ‘pulled back’ to smoking.

His belief was wired to oppose his desired change – the polarity was reversed.

So we began to rewire that belief, to put the polarity back the way it needed to be to enable his motivations for stopping smoking to flow properly and enable the result of actually stopping smoking.

I asked him to define how he’d expect a ‘real man’ to behave, other than smoke. Some of the things he told me were:

• a real man doesn’t take any **** from anyone
• a real man sticks up for what he believes in
• a real man takes care of his family – he provides for them and protects them
• a real man is good at football

Just remember that it doesn’t matter whether you agree with any of these or think they’re valid – that’s irrelevant. The important thing is that they were all true for him.

I then got him to think about each one of his other characteristics of a real man and apply it to the other ‘reversed’ belief that ‘a real man smokes’ using questions like this:

“If a real man doesn’t take any **** from anyone, would comments about him quitting smoking count as ****..?”

“So, would a real man stick up for the fact that he’s determined to stop smoking, or would he roll over and give in?”

I’ll leave you to ponder the chain of questions and answers that applied to the other beliefs I’ve listed here, especially the one about taking care of his family…

Before too long we’d accumulated a mass of evidence that the belief that ‘a real man smokes’ seemed almost daft in comparison – we’d reversed the polarity on that limiting belief and, with a little more work using some NLP and hypnosis, he went on his way a non-smoker.

Are you ready to find out what you can do with this now?

1. Think of an area of your life that you’ve tried changing in the past but somehow you’ve never managed to get it where you want it.
   It might be to do with relationships, exercise, weight, career, money, diet, ambition, learning, or something else.
2. Check that your ‘power supply’ is working, i.e. you have some definite positive ‘TOWARDS’ motivations for making the change. If you’re not sure what I mean by TOWARDS motivations, read this: http://www.iceandlemon.com/v7/away-from-towards/
3. Check that you really know what outcome you desire, i.e. your lights are the ones you want, and that you have described it in both functional AND sensory terms. This means that when you think about your goal in rich detail, you actually have a tangible emotional response to it.
4. If steps 2 and 3 result in a ‘yes’, that means there’s a limiting belief in there somewhere and you need to find it by exploring all the things that come to mind when you think about that change.
   Some examples I’ve come across have been:
   “Exercise is really hard work.”
   “Money is the root of evil.”
   “I get really jealous of skinny people.”
   “Falling in love means you could get hurt.”
5. This is the step that might take a little longer. You now need to explore all the trains of thought that could begin to ‘rewire’ that connection.
   I’ll leave you to ponder those for now, but if you do get stuck, you can always get in touch!

You see, if the polarity remains reversed, your main result will be frustration. If you’re not careful and you keep ramping up the power you risk burning something out, or blowing something up! However, once that connection is wired correctly, the power flows easily.

Now everything is all wired correctly I know that when I throw the switch, darkness becomes light without any hassle at all. Lovely…

Until next time.

—–

* A multimeter is an impressively complicated-looking gadget for testing voltages, currents and connections for electrical and electronic circuitry. Most have a large dial in the centre surrounded by various letters and symbols to indicate interesting combinations of settings. However, most people who own one only know what a handful of the settings actually do, though they’d never actually admit it…

** Many of you will know that the physical addiction to nicotine is actually not too difficult to get over – your body is on the way to dealing with the cravings after 48-72 hours and is pretty much done with the purely biological side by 10-14 days. The toughest cravings to handle are psychological, usually emotional, in origin, though they may well feel physical and these may hang around even when the physical addiction is long gone.

We deliver a range of training courses, workshops and seminars to a variety of clients on a range of subjects. Many of these are one or two day events, and occasionally can be condensed into a half-day, though obviously with some loss of content and an increase in pace.

All our training is designed to make sure everyone feels able to learn effectively, ask their own questions and explore the subject freely. To make sure this happens, we use a carefully balanced mix of information, group activities, reflection, application and pragmatic examples.

Our overall goal when we’re facilitating and training is that the participants know that when they leave, they can actually implement what they’ve learned straight away, and see improvements from the start.

Our workshops and courses include:

Personal Development

• Time & Priority Management
• Beating Stress, Creating Calm
• Personal Power - Assertiveness & Self-Confidence
• Career & Development Planning

Communication

• “Taxi…!” – Communicating Success
• “Yes..!” – Persuading & Influencing Skills
• “Brilliant..!” – Presenting Success

Management & Leadership

• Transitioning into Management
• From Process to People – True Leadership
• Coaching Skills
• Managing & Resolving Conflict

We’re often asked to mix elements of these courses to produce development programmes, especially around developing managers and leaders, and some are delivered though partnerships with other consultancy and training companies.

When  you want to know more, use our contact page to get in touch, email info@iceandlemon.com or call 0845 111 0360 now.