Big Presentation Coming Up? Make it Your Best One Yet

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

There isn’t a presenter alive that doesn’t want their audience absolutely riveted; sitting on the edge of their seats with rapt attention. Yet, the reality in most presentations is that the audience is sitting back, kind of relaxed and spacing in and out.

Here Leadership IQ CEO and best-selling author, Mark Murphy, shares some ways anyone can deliver a killer presentation.

Q: You say storytelling is a critical element in delivering killer presentations that really catch and keep an audience’s attention. How does that work?

MM: It’s all about dopaminergic response. Basically, when something really interesting, like a good story, happens, the brain starts to light up. And if the story is really exciting, the amygdala gets involved (that’s what you want) and says, “Wow! This is fascinating stuff! I’ve got to start activating some of the other chemicals in the brain—we’ve got to pay close attention to this!” So it goes and starts activating dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter for highly pleasurable things, highly attentive things.

And whoa! Once dopamine gets involved people really start to pay attention. Plus dopamine helps sear whatever it is folks are experiencing (in this case, your killer presentation) into their memory so they don’t forget it. So a great story is a way of getting the brain to say, “I am really engaged with this. I don’t want to miss a word that’s being said here. I am going to remember every word I hear.”

Next time you’re listening to someone else’s presentation, pay attention and see if you experience any moments that leap out at you and just get seared into your brain. Where you walk out of there quoting something you just heard to everyone you run into that day. If you don’t have that kind of experience then it is likely that the person speaking didn’t get anywhere near activating anything beyond your prefrontal cortex. They didn’t get into your limbic system, and they certainly didn’t excite your amygdala.

Q: So what’s the secret to telling a great story that excites the amygdala?

MM: There are a number of different ways to tell stories that really get people’s attention. Here’s one that uses an unexpected twist. Imagine you began a presentation by saying, “Six months ago, we upgraded our servers. Our website visitor capacity doubled. Our website loading speed tripled. And our profits dropped by 80%.” You can do something like that. Take your audience in one direction and then all of a sudden take them in a totally different direction. That’s one of those things that will make people’s heads spin a bit and get them to think, “Wait a minute, did I just hear what I thought I heard? I better start listening more closely.” You can also tell stories that build an emotional connection or introduce a startling fact.

Q: What’s one big thing to avoid when giving a presentation?

MM: Narcissism. When you talk about others more than you talk about yourself, that’s good. But when you talk about yourself more than you talk about others, that’s bad. But that can be challenging in some presentation situations. Leadership IQ teaches presenters to apply the Narcissism Ratio which is a little check that signals when it’s time to tell a story or to talk about somebody or something other than yourself. That way you don’t spend 20 minutes talking about all of the awards your company has won – something about which your audience probably doesn’t care. And it directs you to talk about something about which they do care, something that’s really going to activate them and get them on the edge of their seats.

To apply the Narcissism Ratio to your next presentation, keep track of how many times you say “I” or “me” versus the number of times you say “customers” or “employees” or “you” or “they” or anybody other than you. It takes some practice, but it’s really quite an effective way to keep your finger on the pulse of where your presentation is going as it happens. That way you are always on track and making sure your  audience stays fully engaged.

For more tips on delivering memorable presentations, join us for our upcoming webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Delivering Presentations: The Rules of Dating Apply Here Too!

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Imagine you’re out on a date and your goal is to really impress. You want to be the only person in the room your date can see or hear. Given that goal, what would you say is the best way to start the date:

Start the date by sharing your life history including all your great accomplishments and the things that matter most to you.Start the date by talking to your date about the kinds of things he/she finds valuable.

Now, in the dating world, pretty much everybody gets it right, you talk about “them.” But here’s the shocker: once we move into the world of business presentations; another place where winning quick audience favor is critical, pretty much everybody gets it wrong. Because instead of using what we know works, most folks begin their business presentations by talking about “themselves.” In fact; over 90% of the presentations we’ve studied began with a slide that looks like this…

And unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this is just a terrible slide and horrible start to your presentation. You don’t even have to read every bullet point to feel the automatic turn off. This slide is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. If you used a personalized version of this slide in a dating situation, I guarantee you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived.

It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting to one person or a room of a thousand, the only way to grab your audience’s attention is to spend the first 10 minutes addressing issues that matter to them. Neurologically, those first 10 minutes are when your audience forms their opinions about you. It’s when their brains absorb all the incoming data (that would be you) and then decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to that big noise coming at them (again, that’s you). And because you know this little tidbit of knowledge that comes to us from the world of brain science, you can use it to your advantage.

Dating Research that Proves Affect of Opening with Messages About “Them”

Let’s jump back to dating for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid that was created by a couple of guys who met while at Harvard. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I don’t go there trolling for dates. But back when the founders were still actively blogging, I used to check out OKTrends and I was pretty impressed with the statistical research they shared. Like the study where they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women, to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. As you can imagine, some of the opening messages were incredibly cheesy. For example, some of the words the study revealed that DON’T work (i.e. women did not reply to the man’s message) were: “sexy”, “beautiful” and “hot.”

I’m happy to report that there’s a redeeming flip side to this. Because there were some words and phrases the guys used in their emails to women that generated huge numbers of responses.  For example:  “You mention…”, “noticed that…” and “curious what…” all got fantastic responses (statistically, messages with those phrases get double the normal response rates). So basically, if a guy appears to have read a woman’s profile, and he shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good “guy message” would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you travelled to Italy. I’m curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine?” That’s a guy I might let my daughter go out with—when she gets to dating age, and luckily, that’s far in the future.

The lesson in all this is: whether you’re dating or making million-dollar presentations, start by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction and that you care about the same things that they care about.

In my upcoming webinar, The Secrets of Killer Presentations, you’ll learn how to assess the four personality types you’ll find in your audience so you can begin every presentation knowing exactly what your audience wants to hear from you. And if you’re addressing multiple personality types, you’ll learn how to time a presentation to safeguard those different attention spans so you know when to deliver the bottom line, when to be to linear, when to stick to the facts and when to get warm and fuzzy to build an emotional connection.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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Consider these 4 Communications Styles When Delivering your Next Presentation

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You may be presenting to a group from within the same industry or even department, but that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience has the same preferred communications style. Different people have very different ways they prefer to give and receive information. Which means that the kind of delivery that engages some people may send others in your audience scrambling for the exits.  One of the big challenges when presenting to a mixed group is correctly adapting your communication style so your whole audience stays focused on what you’re saying.

To make it easier, we distilled it down into four basic default communication styles people can fall into. These are not personality types; this deals specifically with how you like to give and get information. Here’s a brief description of each default communication style:

The Intuitive type refers to those people who are not terribly emotional, but who are quite free form. Intuitive types don’t necessarily like things to flow from A to B to C and so on. They like to cut to the chase, so it’s best to skip directly to the end: what’s the real value you are bringing this person today? If you can get the Intuitive types in your audience to buy in on the end result right away upfront, you’ve got a much better shot at getting them to listen to all the other stuff you’ve got to say.The Analytical type refers to those people who prefer things unemotional but linear. These are your “just the facts” kinds of people. They don’t want to hear a lot of warm-and-fuzzy feeling words, so don’t waste the Analytical-type communicator’s time by telling them you understand their pain; instead just give them the numbers and data they need and want.The Functional type refers to people who generally like their communication to be emotional and linear. These folks like to have control of the process so it’s always best to move in a linear fashion: from A, to B, to C and then follow through right to the end. If you try to skip around in your presentation or jump to the enticement of your “wow” finish, you risk losing the attention of the Functional-type communicator.The Personal relater is both free form and emotional. These are the folks who want the warm-and-fuzzy emotional approach.   So feel free to dive right into all the details such as: Who else is going to be involved/ how getting involved will make them “feel”/ who else they will touch by getting involved, etc.  You can’t just come in and dump a bunch of facts on personal-type communicators, even if they are startling facts. These folks are still going to need a more interpersonal connection.

Even from these brief descriptions of the four communications styles, the conundrum is obvious: they all want something different. The good news is that, by knowing what the 4 types are, you can plan your next presentation knowing you need to hit all 4 types in your delivery. And we’ll teach you how to do that in our upcoming live webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.  But here’s a quick little take away secret you can start using now:

When great speakers present to a new or unknown audience, they assume all four communications styles are present. And there’s a certain order they present their information, in order to communication to each style. They begin by addressing the Intuitive types, then they speak to the Analytical types, then to the Functional types and they close by speaking to the Personal types. We see this often in presidential speeches or wherever there’s a mixed audience of preferred communication styles. Working in this order, from the Intuitive to the Analytical to the Functional to the Personal addresses attention span: Intuitives have the shortest attention span, then the Analyticals, then the Functionals and the Personals have the longest attention spans.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

How Can Leaders and Managers Make Performance Reviews More Meaningful?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Leadership IQ’s research into the effectiveness of performance reviews produced some pretty discouraging results. What are the exact numbers?

MM: We did a study of a little over 48,000 people and only 13% of managers and employees thought their year-end reviews were effective. And by effective I don’t mean that they liked the experience, but rather only 13% said their review had a positive impact on their future performance. And just as disturbing, only 6% of CEOs thought the performance reviews their organization used were effective. That’s a lot of resources being funneled into something that is producing more or less zero benefit, and probably even creating new problems. Poorly conducted performance reviews are a big demotivator for most employees.

Q: What can leaders do?

MM: There’s actually a lot that can be done. Starting with the process side, there are factors like: What kind of content you should have in this conversation? What order the conversation should take place? What is the correct basic structure of this conversation? Leadership IQ has specific scripts we teach for talking to high and middle performers, which are really different than the low performer conversations you should be having. And then there’s the development side of a performance review, knowing the right way to plan with the employee for what comes next.

Q: What’s one of the biggest things most performance reviews miss?

MM: Attitude. I see this all the time where a manager gives somebody a 5 out 5 on a performance review and then three months later he’s calling HR saying, “Oh, hey, listen, I need to fire this person.” And HR comes back and says, “What do you mean you need to fire them?  You just gave them a 4 or 5 on their performance review, they just got glowing marks, how could you possibly need to fire them?” And the manager says, “Well, you know, it’s for attitude, it’s for reason that our system doesn’t really evaluate. So I had to give them good marks because they have great skills, but their bad attitude is just killing me and the whole department is suffering.”

Q: Why do so many reviews skip evaluating attitude?

MM: There’s a big misunderstanding about what objective means and it keeps a lot of managers from realizing that attitude absolutely is measurable. Objective means verifiable and observable, it does not mean quantifiable. So just because you can’t assign a number to something, like a bad attitude, like gossip or stirring up conflict, it does not mean it is not a valid issue. Attitude leaks out in behavior, and attitude can be measured to the extent that it emerges in the form of those behaviors. And, of course, behaviors can be verified and observed. Managers may not be able to mind read, we can’t climb into people’s heads and divine what our folks are thinking, but we can observe their behaviors and determine what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Great organizations like Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton and Disney; they all regularly assess attitudinal issues. And it’s those attitudes that make those companies so famous and so successful. So this is one of the things you have to be crystal clear about. You don’t want your managers who are conducting reviews avoiding tackling issues related to attitude because they think attitude can’t be measured. That’s just sending low performers with bad attitudes back out there with strong validation that they are welcome to keep on exhibiting those bad attitudes. It’s just a fact that too many managers mistakenly avoid tackling attitudinal issues because their definition of objective is distorted.

Q: Employees tend to hate performance reviews as much as the managers who have to give them. What can managers do to make it easier on employees?

MM: A lot. You can start by making sure that you call in your high performers first. Let them take that walk into the review with full knowledge that they are in the first group and that defines them as a high performer. Not only is this going to make them feel great, it’s going to send a clear message to your low performers. Especially when you next call in your middle performers.

Also, if you meet with low performers first, they are going to go back out there and interact with their peers and have all kinds of negative things to say: lots of denial, blame and excuses. They’re going to be angry and they’ll want to take others down with them. You take that power away from low performers when you meet with them last, because by then you’ve already got all these high and middle performers out there who are feeling pretty good about things. They’re not going to be interested in listening to low performers gripe and bash. And that’s going to make low performers feel the sting of a poor review even more.

Q: What’s one of the biggest mistakes that happens in low performer reviews?

MM: One of the worst things you can do, and lots of managers do it, is use a compliment sandwich. And that’s a compliment followed by some corrective feedback followed by another compliment. It sounds something like this: “You know, listen, Bob, you’re just so talented.  You’re the smartest person on the team. You get nasty and caustic when we’re in these team meetings and it’s really hurting our morale. You’re just so smart. I want everybody else to see how smart you are.” So basically, if I’m Bob, what I just heard is “I’m great, I’m smart. I hear a compliment. Then I hear Charlie Brown’s teacher (“wawawa”), but, wow, then I hear another compliment, the boss just said he wants everyone to know how smart I am. Oh boy. I’m great. I am golden.” The compliment sandwich is a giant fail. No one hears the corrective feedback shoved in the middle of two compliments.  The only effective way to deliver corrective feedback is to state the facts.

Attend our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews and learn more specific scripts for talking to high, middle and low performers. Learn about the other mistakes managers make when reviewing employees and some simple fixes you can make to conduct more effective reviews.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

View the original article here

Why do so many goals end up in failure?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Why do so many goals end up in failure?

MM: Many corporations have formal goal-setting systems, like SMART Goals, to help employees develop and track their goals. But a big part of the problem as to why those goals are not being realized is that people and organizations get so hung up on making sure their goal-setting forms are filled out correctly, checking and double checking that their goals are realistic and achievable, that they neglect to answer the single most important question: Is this goal even worth it? And then, if it is ‘worth it,’ if it is a goal worthy of the challenges and opportunities we face, we next need to ask: How do we sear this goal into our minds, make it so critical to our very existence that no matter what obstacles we encounter, we will not falter in our pursuit of this goal? That’s why Leadership IQ teaches HARD Goals.

Q: Why do HARD Goals work?

MM: Leadership IQ research found a distinguishing characteristic in the people who set and achieve extraordinary goals. And it isn’t daily habits, or raw intellect, or how many numbers you can write on a worksheet that defines that success. It’s actually the engagement of your brain. When your brain is humming with a goal, as happens with HARD Goals, everything you need to take your goal and run with it falls into place. But when your brain is ho-hum about your goals, all the daily rituals and discipline in the world won’t help you succeed.

The way to achieve any goal (health, financial, career, business, etc.) is to seek HARD goals—so whether you set a goal to save money, lose weight, hit a sales target or invent better products, every goal you set has to meet the following criteria:

Heartfelt—you’ve got to have an emotional attachment to your goal; it has to scratch an existential itch.Animated—goals need to be motivated by a vision, picture or movie that plays over and over in your mind.Required—it needs to feel so urgently necessary that you have no other choice but to start acting on them right here, right now.Difficult—goals need to drag you out of your comfort zone, activating your senses and attention.

Q: That’s quite different from SMART Goals, generally defined as: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Limited. What do you say to someone who says, “But everyone else is using SMART Goals, why shouldn’t I?”

MM: Look, from Einstein to Bill Gates to the late, great Steve Jobs, the greatest thinkers and leaders in history saw opportunities that others didn’t see. The people who achieve the extraordinary don’t just use the same warmed-over ideas as everyone else and they don’t just do what everyone else is doing. They are bold and they do what is right for them, and part of that is in how they set and go after their goals.

Steve Jobs made a career out of doing extraordinary things that quite frequently others said couldn’t be done, and trust me, no goal he ever set would pass the Achievable and Realistic test for a SMART Goal. He had the courage to change his mind, to say “this isn’t working for me” and to try something new.

Lots of leaders and organizations say they want to take the world by storm, to create the next iPod or whatever great thing it is, but then they go right back to running things like they’ve always done. And if you do things the same way they’ve always been done, you’re going to keep getting the same results.

Too often SMART Goals act as impediments to, not enablers of, bold action, and actually encourage mediocre and poor performance. “Hold on a minute,” SMART goals seem to say. “Don’t push beyond your resources, don’t bite off more than you can chew, play it safe and stay within your limitations.” Even a factor like Specific, which sounds okay, can suck the life out of goals. For most people Specific means turn your goal into a number and jot it down (e.g. I want to lose a specific weight, like 27 pounds, or meet a specific sales target, or whatever).

But that definition of “specific” pales in comparison to the intensely-pictured Animated goals of achievers like Jobs and others. Sure they’ve got a number, but they also know what their body looks like 27 pounds from now, what clothes they’ll be wearing, even how they’ll feel when they no longer carry the weight. For them, 27 pounds isn’t an abstract concept or a number on a form; it’s a vision into the future that feels so real, it’s as if it’s already happened. And SMART Goals just don’t do that. However, there are steps you can take to make SMART Goals more powerful.

Q: As leaders and organizations head into 2013 what goal-setting advice can you offer them?

MM: It’s a truly unsettling world right now. But we all know that denial, blame, excuses and anxiety are not going to make it any better. We need to harness the energy of this moment, scary though it may be, and turn it into greatness. Whether we’re going to grow our company, lose weight, run a marathon or change the whole darn world, we’re going to have to saddle up a HARD Goal and ride that sucker at a full gallop.

Too many leaders say “I have had this training,” whether it’s SMART Goals or something else, and that’s where they stay, indefinitely, even if it falls short of inspiring themselves and their employees to be more effective and to constantly reach for better and better results. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Is what I’m doing getting the best results?” And if it’s not, if you’re not getting the results you want, or you just keep getting the same results over and over again, then dare to debunk the standard practices that aren’t working for you and try something different.

Get started on your HARD Goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals. Learn how to push yourself and your people to achieve the extraordinary, even in the toughest of times.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Overcoming Fear of Failure to Achieve Difficult Goals

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Advancing your career, starting a business, doubling sales revenue, losing weight, running a marathon, quitting smoking, going back to school, and saving more money are all challenging goals that can be pretty intimidating. It’s so intimidating that just thinking about it is enough to make most people hesitate or even back off entirely from even starting the goal. But it is possible to overcome the fear and become part of the select group of people who actually do achieve their difficult goals.

A big issue here is the common misbelief that the more difficult your goal becomes, the higher the possibility that you could fail. When the truth is, the more difficult your goal, the better your performance is likely to be. That’s because difficult goals give you a jolt; they stimulate your brain, push you out of your comfort zone and excite you emotionally all culminating in you delivering your best performance. But all that notwithstanding, a sizeable group of folks are still fundamentally afraid that if they attempt a difficult goal they might fail.

“What happens to me if I fail at this goal?”

Getting past the trepidation requires rewiring the way we think, and it starts with the simple question: “What happens to me if I fail at this goal?” A simple question, but not an easy one, and truthfully answering it requires a deep look into some of your inner mental processes. When I ask this question to the individuals and organizations Leadership IQ works with, I generally hear responses like:

“People will think I’m weak and couldn’t hack it.”

“I’ll be exposed as someone who talks a good game but can’t deliver.”

“People will be disappointed in me.”

“No one will ever believe in me again, and I sure won’t believe in myself again.”

 “I’ll die from embarrassment.”

“If I can’t do this, it means I’ll never be able to do anything.”

“It’ll mean that I’m not as smart/talented/skilled as I like to think I am.”

The obvious problem here is that all these responses use serious and highly-charged words like “never”, “always”, “only” and “die”. And, when we assess the actual facts, we find these words tend to be overstatements that fall into the categories of interpretations, assumptions, emotionally-charged extrapolations, castastrophizing, irrational beliefs, or whatever else you want to call them. The thing they typically are not, are proven facts.

Fear can be healthy, you just have to disprove the negative statements that got you there

Now, all of this is not to say all fear is unhealthy. Certainly, from an evolutionary perspective, a fear of sabre-tooth tigers kept us alive. But there are times in this modern world where our fear reactions get pointed to something quite abstract, and perhaps even imagined. If you fail in your goal to escape a sabre-tooth tiger, you will almost certainly be dead minutes later. But if you fail in your goal to increase your savings this month, you’ve got at least a decent chance of still being alive 30 minutes later. The fact is, most of the repercussions we face if we fail in achieving our goals are not going to kill us. And, not only will we not actually die of embarrassment, we might not even have cause for any embarrassment.

However, we are human beings, not computers, so we can’t just flip a switch and say, “Feeling like I’ll die of embarrassment is irrational, so I’ll just stop feeling that way.”  Instead, we’ve got to debunk these thoughts in our head, just like if we were an attorney cross-examining a witness. So we’re going to take each of these fear statements, or whatever your personal fears are, and, one by one, ask ourselves if we can find any examples that might provide evidence to the contrary of what we said.

Let’s take the example: “If I fail to achieve my goal, I’ll die from embarrassment.”  Can you find any examples in your life (or even someone else’s life) where you failed to achieve a goal but didn’t die? And to take it a step further, can you find any examples where any embarrassment you felt was far less than what you were expecting? Now, by virtue of your being alive and reading this right now, I’m guessing you found at least one example that refutes the belief that “I’ll die of embarrassment”. And the same can be done with each of the responses listed above.

Once you’ve finished that exercise, it’s time to rewrite those fear statements. You’ve debunked them so now turn them around into something a lot more encouraging. For example:

“If I fail at this goal, people won’t think I’m weak. In fact, they may even rally to my defense.”

“If I fail at this goal, people will still believe in me.”

“If I can’t do this specific goal, it has no bearing on my ability to tackle other difficult goals.”

You’ve disproven the negative statements you started with, so it’s just a question of closing the loop and cementing this logically-sound bit of encouragement in your consciousness. It’s simple, but it really does work.

Overwhelmingly, we have little or nothing to fear from attempting (and even failing) at a difficult goal. Because it’s only by attempting difficult goals that we hone our ability to successfully achieve them. And remember, we’ll have absolutely no control over our lives and destinies if we allow ourselves to remain paralyzed by the fear of the mostly imagined consequences of failing at a difficult goal.

Get more tips on overcoming the fear of achieving difficult goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

One Thing Leaders Can Do to Be Better Listeners

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One thing we as leaders can do to be better listeners is to acknowledge that there are certain emotions that, when we feel them, we shut down and stop listening.

We need to be aware of these patterns in our own behavior so that when we experience the triggers that set us off, we can anticipate that we’re probably going to have some bad reactions and circumvent that from happening. At the core of all this, of course, is that when we have those bad emotions, we need to figure out what caused us to feel that way so we can avoid having it happen again in the future. 

This is the essence of listening

If you know that when you hear somebody talk about something in a particular way that causes you to feel something negative, and as a result of that negative feeling, you react badly and it shuts down your ability to listen, you’ve just established an emotional chain that you need to break. Because once you know there are certain things that when you hear them, they set you off and cause bad reactions, you are prepared to recognize it coming and say “Oh wow, this is going to spark an emotion I want to avoid.” This allows you to handle that emotion differently so you stay plugged in and listening to what’s being said instead of wandering off into a negative emotional reaction.

It is fascinating and amazingly reinforcing that when you start to become more aware of an emotion, you become more aware of yourself. And the more self-aware you are, and the more aware you are of others, the more control you have. So, try to anticipate the situations that are going to set you off so you can put yourself in the right frame of mind to be able to compartmentalize your own emotions, bracket them, and key into what other people are saying. This way, you do hear that critical nugget of information that you absolutely need to hear.

For more tips on great listening, including how to stop yourself from making snap judgments and learning to dissect every conversation in order to ensure you hear the message that’s truly being delivered, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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