Better Relationship Tips For Task Oriented People: Redefine Your Task

This week, I was on the road conducting Bud To Boss training. As I called home on Sunday evening, I found myself unable to listen to my wife telling me about her day. Try as I might, I could not get my mind to focus on what she was saying. I could only think about what I still had to do to prepare for the next day before going to bed. Sadly, this is not the first time I have struggled to have a fruitful conversation with my wife while I am traveling for business. After we ended our phone call and... [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]

How To Get People To Do What You Want

This week, I have lead two-days of Bud To Boss training and participated on two expert panel discussions at a major trade show. All week, I have been sharing my thoughts and insights on communication skills, motivation theory, leadership, team-building, and persuasion. The thought behind much (not all) of what I was asked in my role as seminar leader and expert panelist basically reduced to this: How do I get people to do what I want them to do. My short answer: you don’t. People do what they... [Read more]

Get Over Yourself To Develop Effective Communication Skills

Recently, I have been frustrated in a number of conversations when the person I was speaking with asked me a question and then interrupted or hijacked the conversation before I finished my answer. Every time I reached a comma in my thought, they heard a period. As a result, they misinterpreted my message, started speaking, and took off in a conversational direction that left me wondering if we were in the same conversation. I didn’t say anything at the time. Other people were around, and it... [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]

Communicating About Change – Connect With Emotions

Today, we had our monthly Group Coaching call for Silver Remarkable Leadership Learning System members. Using the handout from this month’s Remarkable Leadership teleseminar as a discussion guide, we talked about some really powerful concepts related to communicating change. This is one of the many ideas we discussed: Change can be driven by facts, but people are driven by emotions. As we discussed this observation, we spoke about the importance of connecting with the emotional response that... [Read more]

Conflict Resolution Tips: Task Oriented People with People Oriented Individuals

I often use the DISC Model of Human Behavior as a tool in my training sessions. One of the key ideas to draw from the model is that about 35% of people are more task oriented and about 65% of people are more people oriented. Task oriented people tend to focus on the task at hand even in the presence of other people. They often view everything as a task. Sometimes, they even view relationships as a task or a project. People oriented individuals tend to focus on relationships and people ahead of... [Read more]