Why the Rhetorical Journey?

A friend of mine, Roger, asked me “Why do you call the blog The Rhetorical Journey?”.

I am a fan of U2. I have been since I was 10 years old. On the album “Rattle and Hum” there is a recording of an interview between a journalist and Bono and The Edge of U2. The journalist asks them “what are you doing?” and The Edge replies, with laughter, “We are on a Rhetorical Journey”.

A Rhetorical Journey

I didn’t know what Rhetorical meant, but it sounded like a cool thing. To me a Rhetorical Journey is a journey searching for meaning and purpose; a desire to travel, to experience to see and feel and experience all that life has to offer. I have always thought that U2 is one of the few musical groups who completely reinvent themselves every 5-6 years. They travel, they seek new inspiration, they seek new answers. No album is ever a simple repeat of what worked in the previous album.

I was in hospital the last two days for an operation. I don’t like needles. I spent the time waiting for the operation working to keep my brain full of other thoughts and not allow room for thoughts about needles, knives or operations to enter my head. I spent about 40 minutes in a clean ward with 6 others getting wired up before we were wheeled off to our respective operating rooms. At a certain moment I looked up at the ceiling and thought “hospital ceilings are horrible. Green paint and florescent lights. How many people have this as their last view of life.”

This blog is a journey away from anonymity for me. These are ideas that I think about and have often written about in my own private notebooks. It is sometimes painful to press “publish” and put my half-formed ideas out for all the world to see and comment on. I am generally surprised by the positive feedback that I receive and has been a big motivator to keep the habit of blogging (It might be a bit sad, but I do pay attention to which posts get comments, RTs on Twitter, Shares on facebook…).

I had felt for a long time that I had no base to talk about life – I can’t point to massive success or some other external “validator” that my ideas might be useful. I was greatly helped by an insight from a friend, Tony Anagor, who has decided to take a step back from his successful business and build a role as a “life coach” (check out his website Keep The Bounce) – helping others understand and take steps to achieve their dreams (in work, family, personal lives).Tony told me that he had gone to one of the first Anthony Robbins conferences in Europe. This was about 18 years ago in London. Anthony Robbins was only at the beginning of his journey towards the famous motivational guru that he has become today. Tony went to another Anthony Robbins conference a couple of years ago where Anthony was now successful, confidante to Presidents, a millionaire author with his own resort in Fiji (here is his TED talk).

My friend told me that the first conference was the most powerful of the two. Robbins was on his own journey of discovery and the conference was about Robbins sharing his pains, fears, steps of his personal journey. The second conference was powerful, but less authentic for being so professional. Robbins had lost any of his own doubts about his own path and is clear on his purpose today. It was harder to connect to the guru Robbins than to the “on a journey” Robbins.

I saw then that I do not need to point to my successes (few), but only remain humble (I fail often), open to ideas, stories, people and provide my mundane, simple commentary on these experiences that appear in my life.

This then is my Rhetorical Journey.

5 Techniques to Win Over the Masses

A short note inspired by a post from Verne Harnish of Gazelles. He wrote about a keynote speech by Dr. William Horton, author of Mind Control. After showing various debate clips featuring Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama, Horton outlined five techniques for winning over (manipulating) the masses:

Encourage their dreams
Justify their failures
Allay their fears
Confirm their suspicions
Create a common enemy

So this is how it’s done — cold and calculating.

Entrepreneur? Business manager? Verne Harnish will be running his European Growth Summit on 15th June in Barcelona – a powerful event for anyone growing a business – two themes this year – Going Global, Getting Lean. He has two free downloads on the site that are worth a read whether you can attend or not.

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How do you lead people to excel?

I just watched Michael Feiner, a professor at Columbia Business school, on Authors@Google. He talked about leadership.

Jack Stack, author of the great game of business says that there are two disciplines needed in a company: optimization and innovation. I think that these overlap with the skills of management and leadership. Management is about predictability and order, about planning and using resources to meet the plans These are skills of optimization. Innovation would require leadership.

Leadership is three main things. It is about:

Establishing direction
Building Alliances and Coalitions
Motivating and Inspiring

How to do that? Michael says that leadership is managing relationships. Managing relationships is one to one activity, 90% is bellow the surface – activity that is not visible.

How do you lead people to excel? Here are Michael’s laws of leaders who lead people to excel:

Law of Expectation – Pygmalion effect. People live up to what you believe them capable of.
Law of Intimacy – know people, what excites them, what frustrates them, passions
Law of Building a Cathedral – connect the work to meaning (Laying Bricks or Building Cathedrals)
Law of Personal Commitment – be available, respond
Law of Accountability – targets matter, disciplined action is required
Law of Pull vs Push – allow others to influence you (“help me understand why you feel that way?”)
Law of The Mirror – a problem needs 2 people – (“what am I doing to contribute to this problem?”)
Law of Winning Championships – none of us is better than all of us
Law of Healthy Conflicts – dialogue, debate and disagreement necessary for growth
Law of Leading bosses – Intellectual courage
Law of Values based leadership – WYHA 2 WYHB (Move from “What You Have Achieved” to “What You Have Become”).

The video is here (on the blog).

Have a great week.

The best teacher I had in school

Mr Matz. He taught biology. I was 14. I was living in Chicago having moved from Dublin and going to New Trier Township High school up in the northern suburbs.

Mr Matz started the first class by holding up the biology textbook and asking how much it was worth? $30. He told us that if we learnt everything in it and could answer all the questions correctly, we each would be worth exactly $30 more. However, if we gained a curiousity for life, a process for analysing systems, a desire to share our ideas, a self belief in our own ability – we would be worth infinitely more. He then set about to make that the real basis of the course.

About three weeks into the course, I received back a homework assignment that had been graded 11 out of 10.

I had never before got 11 out of 10. In my schoolified mind I didn’t believe it was correct. How could Mr Matz make the mistake of giving 11 when there were only 10 points to give. I remember receiving the work and sitting there in surprise. I thought “there must be some mistake”.

I went up and spoke to Mr Matz and asked him about it after class. He told me that I had clearly gone beyond his expectations for the assignment and therefore deserved more than the 10. I remember going through a week trying to understand how he could give 11 when there were only 10 on the test.

Every class ended with 5 minutes of writing in our journals. He didn’t mind what we wrote, all he asked was that our pen remained in contact with the paper for the full 5 minutes and we just wrote about what we felt like writing about.

I kept the habits of intellectual curiousity, of not taking 10 out of 10 for granted as the objective, of writing for a few minutes every day for the rest of my life… I have forgotten osmosis, cellular membranes, species classifications… what he was “supposed” to be teaching. A fair deal. Thanks Mr. Matz.

*UPDATE*

Wonderful news. I wrote this post back in April 2010. About 3 months after publishing it on my blog, Mr Matz’s wife sent me an email. She let me know that Mr Matz is retired from New Trier. I got their address and sent Mr Matz a card and a short letter. Amazing what possibilities a simple blog post can open up!

Are your values a danger to your health and happiness?

On Friday I heard a story about values and the importance of not just accepting other’s value systems without ensuring they are right for me.

I remember reading a book on psychotherapy and the “pathological critic” (Self-Esteem by McKay and Fanning) that described four criteria to evaluate my personal values that allow me to check whether my own values are “healthy”.

Flexible – healthy values allow for exceptions and accept room for some mistakes in the process of learning new things. Unhealthy values often include the ideas never, always, all, totally, perfectly – which are likely to end up creating feelings of worthlessness. “I should never make mistakes” might sound like a worthy ambition, but is likely to generate stress in all but the most safe situations.
Owned – healthy values are owned: critically examined and right for me. Unhealthy values are inherited without critically determining if they are right for my personality, needs and circumstances. They are often our parent’s values that we have accepted as valid without a process of checking whether they are right for my life.
Realistic – healthy values are oriented to outcomes. Unhealthy values are absolute and global, prescribing behaviour because it is morally “good” or “right”. “A good parent keeps their children safe from danger” is unhealthy – there will be situations where the parent has little control over the situation eg bullying at school, underperfomance in sports.
Life enhancing – healthy values do not diminish or narrow me as a person – they allow pursuit of areas that are positive, nourishing, supportive to my needs. Unhealthy values are life restricting – “I must always be happy and positive” is not life enhancing – it denies that there will be moments that I am sad, frustrated or angry – and it is restrictive to deny my full range of emotions.

Why do some people find games more fulfilling than real life?

This is another blog post inspired by a TED video. This one on the world of online games by Jane McGonigle.

Humans spend 3 billion hours a week spent playing online games. This is a lot. Many American teenagers will have accumulated more hours playing online games than school hours by the age of 18.

Two questions: 1) why? and 2) what are they learning?

The answer to number one is quite simple. I can approach this as a economist might approach it. Each individual case will have their specific reasons, but on a massive scale people play because there is something better about being in the virtual game world than they get in their real world. Jane McGonigle in her TED talk identifies 4 specific disciplines that are part of a gamer’s experience of the virtual game world.

Urgent Optimism – extreme self motivation, the desire to act immediately to tackle a problem and to start now with a belief in a good chance of success. There is a constant belief in the existance of the epic win – a winning outcome that you sense will be bigger and better than anything you could imagine.
Social Fabric – instinct to trust. The attitude of gamers in virtual online worlds is to trust and share resources and challenges with unknown strangers.
Blissful productivity – we know that we are happy when we are working hard. The average gamer of World of Warcraft plays 22 hours a week. These are not 22 hours of watching the clock, waiting for the coffee break or the school bell to ring. These are 22 hours of intense problem solving, collaboration, trying and trying and experimenting until the gamer achieves an outcome. Gamers know that they are most fulfilled when they are totally absorbed in their tasks.
Epic Meaning – gamers love to be attached to awe inspiring missions. They might be tapping buttons and shifting pixels, but they believe that this is connected to a really worthwhile purpose – saving the galaxy, taking Argentina to the world cup final, defeating evil.

An the answer to question 2 – what are they learning? Jess says they are learning to be “super empowered hopeful individuals”. The pity is that they are not taking these super powers – persistance against all odds, trust and openness to strangers, desire to work hard and faith in something bigger – over to the real world.

What can we do to make real world more like these games? What can be done to allow kids to feel that it is worth working hard to build something important?

The three types of work

There are only three types of work:

Bad work
Good work
Great work

I think you probably know what sits in each of these categories.

Bad work is pointless. It is a waste of time. It is the basis of Dilbert cartoons. Sadly, most organisations are superb at creating bad work: bureaucracy, meetings to plan other meetings, outdated processes that bear no relation to what customers require.

Good work is the bread and butter, the stuff you do well, you are trained to do. It is comfortable and you probably do it well. Good work is necessary and there will always be some in your life.

Great work is the work that matters. It is meaningful to you, has an impact and makes a difference. It can be enjoyable, but it can also be quite uncomfortable. It is new and challenging so there exists a possibility of failure.

The answer is not to stop everything and focus only on great work. I was reading the Changethis.com manifesto “Stop the Busywork: 7 counter-intuitive ways to find more time, space and courage to do more Great work” by Michael Bungay Stenier. His years of experience coaching people suggest that most people lie in the range of:

10-40% Bad work
40-80% Good work
0-25% Great work

Michael suggests an exercise: You draw a large circle on a page and create your own work pie chart – how much of what you do is bad, good and great? What sorts of things fit into good and great? What is in the great category that is also of immediate and strategic value to your company?

Overcoming Adversity? Aimee Mullins at TED.com

How can I get through the obstacles to something better on the other side?

Aimee Mullins was born without her fibular bones, the smaller of the bones connecting knee to ankle. The doctor had to tell her parents that she was disabled, had to amputate what was left of her legs and tell her parents that the prognosis was not good for a full life. She would not be normal. She tells that at the age of 15 she would have traded anything to get rid of her prosthetic limbs and have “normal” legs. She would have given anything to get rid of her “problem”.

Now she is not so sure.

Life is not what is beyond the obstacles. The adversity, the obstacles, the difficulty is life. There is no “other side”.

“Comfort is the worst kind of slavery because you’re always afraid that something or someone will take it away” Seneca

Comfort is the absence of growth, the absence of learning. Panic and fear would be the other extreme. Between comfort and panic lies learning and growth. I often begin my classes with a diagram of three circles on the blackboard. The smallest circle is the “Comfort Zone”. These are things you know you can do. People sitting passively in the classroom with their arms crossed, not raising their hand, are in their comfort zone. They are not growing as people. The Largest circle is the “Panic Zone”. This represents the things that are far beyond my competence and instead of allowing growth, they induce fear and impede any process of growth or learning – the animal part of my brain just wants to get out of there and kicks in the fight or flight responses (making my human brain disengage and dumbing down my potential responses). The zone in the middle between the Comfort Zone and the Panic Zone is the Learning Zone.

As I spend time in my learning zone, my comfort zone expands as there are now more and more areas in which I become competent and proficient.

“A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” John A. Shedd

Here is the video of Aimee Mullins at TED (on the blog).

I finish with a quote that I liked a lot. “I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.” Grant Show

Happy Easter to all. I spent about 3 hours procrastinating instead of writing and it resulted in a redesign of my blog layout using the new template designer that blogger.com launched yesterday. I hope you like the new look.

What makes you a Well-Paid Expert?

This is relevant for anyone who communicates regularly from a position of authority – doctors, scientists, professors…

3 Types of Experts

I have had several people who have expertise say to me “but I haven’t been successful myself”. Toni Nadal isn’t better at tennis than Rafa, but he knows how to get results. Michael Porter hasn’t run a business, but he has spent a lifetime interviewing people that have. There are 3 types of experts:

The Result Expert – Proven ability to get specific results for others
The Research Expert – Has interviewed performers and has a deep knowledge of tools, strategies and tactics in an area
The Role Model – Has been successful

Tim Ferriss has an interesting perspective: “you can learn more from the person who shouldn’t be good, but is than from the person who is naturally excellent.” Roger Federer has every natural gift to be a top tennis player. Rafa Nadal had to really fight to become number 1. Most of us can learn more from Rafa’s approach than we could learn by understanding Federer.

Four Actions of Experts

There are four things that the best experts do:

Choose mastery. Choose continuous learning. Choose to read, to review, to focus intensely on a continuous process of learning and growing in the specific field in which they are experts. Go deep rather than go broad.
Regularly interview other experts looking for patterns and best practice.
Create arguments based on four parts:
1. What we should be paying attention to
2. What things mean
3. How things work
4. What might happen
Simplify complex ideas with frameworks

Four Actions of Wealthy Experts

There are four further things that can differentiate the wealthy expert from the plain expert:

Package their knowledge: Write, speak, record – put knowledge into a form that people are willing to purchase
Campaign vs Promote their knowledge – each interaction leads to a further interaction
Charge expert fees – charge more than you are comfortable with
Focus on:
1. Distinction – Keep studying the competition and keep innovating
2. Excellence – Be better
3. Service – Be helpful and responsive

These 8 actions come from this video from Brandon Burchard. Brandon helps others become well-paid experts.

I like his explanation of what differentiates a true expert from non-experts.

I will finish with a thought from Charles Handy, the Irish business philosopher who was one of the founders of London Business School.

“The aim of education is to give someone the self belief that enables them to take charge of their own life.” Charles Handy

This is the true aim of any expert.

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It took me years to be happy with how I look, sound and speak on the webcam. Years of not liking how I looked, how I gestured, how I rubbed my chin or my nose, how I was searching for the words and not transmitting confidence in what I was saying… years…

But, the improvement doesn’t take years. People will notice your improvement in days or in weeks. Your clarity will improve in days.

Well done. This is an important step.

We now begin our journey together. I can show you a path, but I need you to take the steps. Will you complete each exercise that I send to you? If you do complete the exercises, you will see a difference in how people respond to you. You will have greater confidence. You will get the commitment of others when you seek it.

– Conor

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If you find the exercises in the course useful, please feel free to share.

Practice, Practice, Practice – how to gain confidence as a speaker – 10 Exercises – Speaking As A Leader http://t.co/23XsO6i3mS #Move2Action

— Conor Neill (@conorneill) October 9, 2013