abhijit's blog

Last night, the flight back from Budapest was an interesting experience. British Airways is not known for in-flight services. On a three-hour flight in the evening, they will only serve you cold sandwich for dinner. If you ask for a second round of drinks, as usually happens on BA flights, you will be waiting indefinitely, and it will generally not come, unless you ask again.

Something similar happened last night. Quite a few fellow passengers asked for beer and wine after first round of drinks and sandwiches were served. My neighbour, an elderly gentleman, very politely asked for his second drink with “I would love another beer please”. Half an hour later, the drink did not arrive. He was not alone – there were several others around us who were also waiting, and no sign of the drinks! The cabin crew could be seen walking up and down the aisle, and I guess my fellow passengers were too polite to ask a second time.

I was a curious onlooker watching my frustrated neighbour. I hadn’t until then asked for a second glass of wine. Then as a flight attendant was walking past me, I looked at her and asked in a slow voice, “Excuse me…..(pause), can I get a glass of red wine?”. “Sure”, and she disappeared. After about five minutes, she appeared with my glass of wine. Although this did not surprise me, my co-passenger was definitely surprised. Of course it did give him a chance to ask for his beer again which he eventually got, although he was mystified by how I got mine in five minutes.

I did something which I have now learnt to do when I seriously want someone to respond positively to me. Here is what I did on the BA flight:

Excuse me (in a slow voice)…….: This got me her full attention.

A slight pause: She was now trying hard to listen to what I had to say.

Can I get a glass of wine?: Now when I began my sentence with a question (can I), this obviously needed an answer from her. Note that I did not purposely include the word ‘please’ in my request – a bit impolite, I admit, but it works…..! When you add ‘please’ the message when conveyed to the listener gets transformed to ‘could you please’, rather than ‘can I’. Now, there is a plot behind this syntax: when you say ‘can I’ to someone, suddenly the other person gets the message that he/she has power over what you want. But when you polish your request with a more courteous ‘please’, the meaning of the request changes to a very polite command. Now what difference does this make? Simple – my ‘can I’ (I am at her ‘mercy’) obliges her to at least give me an answer: most normally wired people will find it hard to say ‘NO’ when you make a ‘reasonable’ request (if I had made the same request just when the aircraft was landing, I would not expect her to give an affirmative answer as this would be a very unreasonable request). But when I make a seemingly courteous request with the so-called magic word ‘please’, her mind does not hear it that ‘polite’ – it comes across more as a command (‘will you?’). Worse still, when it is a command, the recipient may choose to remain silent (no ‘yes or no’) – it does not automatically require an answer. Only in time you will figure out whether or not your ‘command‘ has elicited an action. In my case, when I heard her say ‘sure’, I knew I would get my wine as she has made a commitment!

Try this next time when you want someone to comply with your reasonable request. Although I must add the caveat that human minds don’t work exactly as machines – so don’t be surprised if you do not succeed in every case.

And do write about your experience if you use this trick! Leave your comments on my blog at: http://resultsachievers.com

As a consultant and coach, I often work with groups of first-time leaders who have risen from middle or senior level managerial positions. One of the questions I get asked quite frequently is about how to develop a single vision within the organisation, and what the leader needs to do to make sure that everyone in the organisation shares the vision of the leader.

My answer to the question is a ten second video clip of the Windows 7 advert which they have all seen. Everyone from the new-learner, amateur user to the expert, all take credit for developing this piece of software. Whether or not this actually happened is another matter; but the advert has a powerful message for those leaders who think that it is their vision that everyone else will need to share. A vision needs to emerge organically, with the leader playing the role of the chief architect, facilitator, as Bill Gates likes to call himself.

In the good old days, the industrial-age leaders developed vision for their companies and handed it down to their managers and workers to bring the vision to reality. In modern organisations, the leaders are managing an inverse pyramid where the customers are at the base (top of the inverted pyramid), managers/middle management facilitating learning and the CEOs absorbing, assimilating and developing knowledge. In the old style, the leaders, CEOs sat at the apex of the pyramid and were supposed to ‘know’ everything, and the lower down the line was the delivery apparatus, and further down the line at the base of the pyramid sat the customers – you consumed whatever you were served. This has radically changed now – leaders are no longer the repository of vital knowledge about the business. Today’s CEOs operate with much less knowledge of their customers than what the frontline staff or managers have. They need to listen more, learn more (from people below them), and make sure that they create an environment where learning ‘developed’ at the bottom reaches the top.

A vision is something the leaders help develop, working with their frontline staff, customers and managers; it is not something they hand down anymore for other to follow. Leaders of today know that knowledge about the business sits across the organisation, and the leaders also know that although the strands of knowledge exist across the organisation, it is their job to pull these together into a coherent whole. It is their job to bring the strategic thinking that creates the synergy when all the different strands are brought together. Leaders are paid to THINK things your subordinates have not thought through.

I sum up discussion on my 10-seconds video clip with five key messages for first-time leaders:

1. Think of all your staff as ‘neurons’ in the organisation’s brain. You need capture all that exist in their brains. You must not ignore a single neuron.
2. Think! Think! Think! Remember, as a leader, you are paid to THINK! They need to see in you a strategic thinker whose thoughts are simple and powerful.
3. Present your thoughts in a way that they think your thoughts are theirs – you helped them articulate it! And these thoughts will form the vision.
4. If you think your people do not understand your thoughts and vision, you are not communicating effectively. The fault is in you.
5. Things will go wrong, and when they do, ask you people for feedback.

For more similar tips and ideas, go to our website at http://www.results-matter.co.uk, or visit our blog: http://resultsmatter.wordpress.com

Yes it’s true.

I speak every day to dozens of people from all age groups, working on their own or with companies or organisations. People with a real commitment to high achievement. People who have invested their time and their money to learn new skills, develop their abilities, and set new goals as part of continuous learning and development process. And we hear the same
thing back from them over and over again:

· “I set goals – sometimes ambitious – and made some attempts to take action, and gave up as soon as I found something else interesting enough to do.”
· “I set goals, seriously went after these, and achieved these – in some areas of my life these took days, in some cases months, and in some others years or even a decade to achieve what I had set out to do.”
· “I set goals, took persistent actions, but achieved no results, and gave up.”
If you’ve ever said any of those things to yourself, then you know what I mean.

Many of these people have also attended expensive seminars and workshops on setting goals and know exactly how goals need to be stated.

So how come even when you set clear goals, you fail to accomplish what
you set out to achieve? Or halfway through the journey, you stop taking
action as the goal no longer motivates you?

If success was all about setting positive and precise goals, developing appropriate strategies and taking actions, could not we all attain what we want?

“Having Goals is only part of the story!”

To understand why some goals were achieved and other were not, I got drawn to study the science of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). This also took me to studying the experiences of other people, some great achievers, and some friends and clients who I coached. One thing I learned from all these is that it is not about what goals you set, but how you set goals determines what you achieve and how quickly you achieve these.

“If you set Goals, you Must also make these MUST for you!”

What do I mean by that?

It involves making a switch in your mind from having a goal of setting up/ achieving something to making it a MUST – convincing yourself that you have no other option except to achieve your goal.

Whatever you achieve in my life is the result of the level of acceptance you set for yourself. You will only ever get what you are prepared to accept, not what you expect. If you set a goal for an annual income of £200,000, and are prepared to take a job for £50,000, well…..that’s what you will get. But if you are so serious about your goal that you will not accept anything below £200,000, well that’s what you will get.

After all…

“What Do We Call Someone Who Settles for Less Than the Target?”

We call them lazy. Daydreamers.

With Little Practice and Discipline, It is Easy to Become a High Achiever
Fortunately, making the shift from being daydreamers to High Achievers is in our hands. We all know that simply setting good goals is not enough to ensure that we achieve these. The primary difference between high achievers and low achievers is “action-orientation.” Men and women who accomplish great things in life are intensely action-oriented. If they have an
idea, they take action on it immediately. The factor that distinguishes those that move to take action consistently from the others who ‘wish to achieve something’ is simple: they make their goal(s) a must, while the rest belong to the category of general population who like, wish, want, hope to succeed. The latter group will work within their comfort zones, and when challenged, will find excuses why something cannot be done. They want to lose weight, but it is not a must. They would love to make more money and wish to take charge of their lives, but they could live without these. They have SOFT goals – Some Other Future Time.

I will show you through my eBook that in our lives, all of us can achieve many things, and whenever we have had great successes, we would have set our goals in such a way that our mind got automatically aligned in the pursuit of our goals. This is the theme of the ebook on Transformational Goals . It will show you:

1. The vast power you have in your mind and how to tap into the all-powerful subconscious mind.
2. A simple technique to keep your motivation going, even when nothing seems to be going according to plan.
3. Six steps in setting goals and making them compelling – making the goals ‘MUST’.
4. How to develop a strategy that takes you towards the outcomes you want.
5. How to enjoy taking action.
6. How to continuously review goals-strategy-action cycle and deal with feedback.
7. How to deal with blockages – limiting values and beliefs – break through the barriers and limitations that have been holding you back from manifesting real wealth and success in your life.

The order your copy, visit our ebook page on this site. The eBook is normally priced £ 12.99. For subscribers of my bog (http://resultsmatter.wordpress.com), you can obtain it free now.