Why You Might Eventually Do Something You Don’t Want to Do…

… And What You Can Do About It Have you ever told yourself that you wouldn’t do something? Maybe you said you wouldn’t eat too much at a party. Maybe you told yourself that you wouldn’t speak too soon at a meeting. Or maybe you just told yourself that you wouldn’t break the speed limit on the way home from work. Whatever it was, you told yourself that you wouldn’t do something that you either normally do, wanted to do, or habitually do, and you eventually “gave-in”... [Read more]

One Way To Guarantee That Your Suggestion Is Ignored

I have noticed one behavior many of us use that almost guarantees that our suggestions, solutions, and opinions will be ignored when we offer them: We tell people what to do before we have heard their whole story. When we offer people suggestions, solutions, and opinions before we have heard them out, they often do not care what we have to say. So, they rarely listen to and fully comprehend what we are suggesting. The suggestion might be useful. It might be right on target. It might be exactly... [Read more]

Effective Communication Skills: You Don’t Know Until You Ask

A few weeks ago, I was standing in an airport waiting for my return flight to Indianapolis when I overheard a woman (“Mary”)* complaining about a flight attendant’s (“Sue’s”) behavior on a previous flight. At the time, I was trying not to overhear Mary, but her emotional investment and volume were too high to ignore. As Mary spoke about Sue’s behavior, she said something like this: “Sue did it on purpose just to irritate me.” I remember thinking:... [Read more]

Decision Making 101 – Check Your Emotions Before You Decide

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, writes about the impact of our short-term emotions on our long-term decision making. In summary, his research found that we tend to make poor decisions when we have recently experienced a negative emotion. That makes some intuitive sense related to the short-term impact on our decision making. Surprisingly, he also found that we tend to repeat those bad decisions when we are faced with them again... [Read more]

The Positive Runs Out

This afternoon, I recorded a webinar on employee motivation techniques. During the webinar, I discussed a model of human behavior that helps to explain why people do what they do. The main learning point from this model is that people generally do what they do because of what they expect to happen after they do it. After the webinar, I was speaking with my friend and colleague Kevin Eikenberry. We discussed the webinar, and, as we spoke, I remembered an event from a training class I lead on this... [Read more]

Conflict Resolution Lessons From A Lifeguard: A Drowning Man Doesn’t Care About You

Communication, conflict resolution, leadership, and parenting can, at times, resemble working as a lifeguard. In all of these situations, you can, like a lifeguard, be in the position of a person approaching someone else when they are under distress because their needs are not being met. Picture a drowning man. He is flailing in the water. He is grasping at everything and everyone within reach. He has little or no visible concern for others. He may, at other times, be a kind, loving, considerate... [Read more]

Using Detours To Get Where You Want to Go

There are times in both personal and professional situations where apparent road blocks get in the way of achieving your desired goals. Earlier in my life, these road blocks discouraged me. Now, I just see them as detours, and I have learned to learn from the detours. I learned to use them to get where I want to go. In the picture above, the desired goal is somewhere on 9th Street. At the moment, the normal or shortest path down 9th Street is closed. That does not mean that we should change our... [Read more]

Getting What You Want With Gentle Persistence

My brother and I have pretty well mastered the art of getting what we want from the humans we adopted. They’re pretty nice people, but they don’t always understand us immediately. So, we have learned to sit patiently at the back door and look at them until they realize that we want to come in the house. We Got What We Wanted We have found that this approach works much better that making lots of noise and insisting that they let us inside. In fact, when we make too much noise, they generally... [Read more]