Three Questions To Ask Yourself - Frequently

One of my colleagues was late arriving for a meeting. She was flustered and apologetic. Almost immediately she was asked to account for actions allocated in the last meeting. She struggled, despite having done the work. It looked like she was making it up on the spot - others had done less but made a better job of giving and account of the little they had done.

When I spoke to her later, Tracy told me she'd had problems with her childminder and had to drop her son at school herself. Her mind was 'all over the place'. Here is the question I suggested she might have asked herself before getting out of the car:

Am I OK?

I don't like complicated approaches to personal development or problem solving. By asking ourselves a simple three word question we are allow ourselves the opportunity to take charge of our own destiny.

So what would Tracy have answered? She would have said 'No, I'm not OK, I'm late and I feel unprepared'.

Here's the next question:

What's My Plan?

Tracy may have said, 'I need to be ready for the meeting - so I need to be in control, calm and anticipate what's going to happen' So her plan may have been to sit and gather her thoughts running through her apology for lateness, the topics she might have to cover in the meeting (and the answers she might give to questions), and once she'd rehearsed how she was going to get through the door without seeming out of control, she might sit still for just one minute until she could confidently answer the third question:

Who is in charge of me?

What!? I hear some of you ask me. But how often do you feel at the mercy of events? How often do you feel truly in charge of what is happening?

Even when bad things happen we can all choose how to respond. So when Tracy found circumstances messing up her day, she could have decided to take action there and then by phoning a colleague who she knew was in the meeting and who could pave the way for her apology. She could have added a few extra minutes on to her estimated time of arrival to give herself breathing space and time to relax instead of hurtling along the motorway in blind panic.

White Space

Finally many of you will remember when US President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. Malcolm Gladwell talks, in his book Blink, about how Reagan's bodyguards could not have been any better trained nor better equipped to look after him. But he still got shot.

After watching hours of video tape again and again the agents learnt there was simply nothing they could have done. There was simply not time enough available to react to the threat before he'd pulled his gun and fired. This simple fact radically altered the way secret service agents protected their VIPs. They introduced the concept of 'white space', simply meaning time to react, time to allow all the training to kick in.

When my colleague Tracy burst into the meeting in a rush, she had left no white space for herself, she was as close to events as it was possible to be - and it showed.

By asking those three simple questions throughout each day as you move from task to task, or meeting to meeting, you give yourself White Space and make sure you have the chance to be best you can be at that moment:

Am I OK?

What's my plan?

Who's in charge of me?

How to Nurture Your Powerful Personal Network

In my last blog I wrote about how to build a powerful personal network. I'm guessing you now know who your most powerful contacts are, so how do you go about keeping them, and benefiting from their special personal traits?

You probably don't need reminding that relationships only exist when something happens between people. So if your key contacts are not necessarily people you see every day, how do you maintain a useful contact without artificially creating conversations.

It is really easy.

First of all, don't forget these people are the sort you will probably enjoy contact with or certainly benefit from, so time invested will reap a return almost immediately. So how do you make best use of your own valuable time on your network?

Get Your Five A Day

There are probably about twenty or thirty key people in your powerful network. Aim to have some sort of contact with five of them each day. That way you will probably be able to keep in touch with all of them each week.

Sounds a lot? It shouldn't because contact can be anything from a phone call to a two line email.

The point is that by the simplest of contacts they know you were thinking of them in some useful context.

I Saw This And Thought Of You

Remember the Post Office advertisement with the strap line 'I saw this and thought of you'? In the ad someone was surprised and delighted by a card or letter in the post from a friend (or contact) who had thought of them - a really effective campaign based on the simple pleasure of knowing someone was thinking about you.

Next time you come across an interesting on-line article, news story or piece of research, pause for a moment and ask yourself 'who else would be interested in this?' if the answer is someone in your powerful network, send it them!

Simple.

Share the Social Media Love

Social media can be a curse or a blessing. If you can resist the time-thief temptations of Facebook games (Note: there are also many other equally good ways of wasting your time on-line) social media can make the job of showing your contacts you are interested in them and like their work a simple one.

Your contacts probably have similar interests as you - do they have blogs? Or do they use Twitter or Digg? You can invest time effectively by keeping up to date with their work, but also making sure they know you value their opinions by commenting on blogs, re-tweeting their work or using 'like' functions on Digg or Facebook.

Told you it was easy.

Finally you might be at the start of a project where you need the help of your power network contacts to get your idea out there. My advice is to start early by arousing their interest - ask their opinion, let them engage with your ideas, they won't be able to help themselves once they get interested, it's in their nature (remember why you identified them as powerful people in your network?). To use an old-fashioned phrase, court them, they will repay you.

One final thing - the idea of networking is not manipulation and exploitation, people soon see through that. You are good at what you do so be prepared to share and be a part of someone else's powerful network. Don't make networking all for your benefit - people who court you might have less to give in return but the nature of networks is that ideas, power and influence circulates for good.

Be a generous networker.