The Choice is Yours

When life throws you a challenge, are you equipped to choose the best option to deal with it?

ACTOR Robert de Niro once said: “The talent is in the choices.” In other words, you must make the best choice available to you at a given point of time. The more choices you have, the better the chances of achieving your desired outcome.

Two is better than one

In the philosophy of Neuro-linguistics Programming (NLP), if you have only one choice, it is not considered a choice at all.

If you have two or more choices, you have an opportunity to make the best decision to influence the outcome. You can draw on the vast resources of your brain to create choices for yourself. You can also reframe your problems and see them in a different perspective.

For example, you have a choice to remain as poor as a church mouse or to become more financially stable. You have a choice to be untidy or be organised. You have a choice to do it now or later. You have a choice to be complacent or to be alert to opportunity.

The Post-It lesson

The glue used in 3M Post-It pads was originally meant for fixed surfaces like bulletin boards. A 3M chemist, Arthur Fry, tried to find other uses for the glue but could not think of any.

One evening, while he was singing in church with his choir, a light breeze blew his hymn sheets away. At first, he was irritated. Then he had a creative, brilliant insight. The 3M glue could be used to stick paper onto paper! And the Post-It pad was born.

Fry received a yearly royalty for his invention, thanks to his committed desire to find a use for one of his company products.

No failure, only feedback

Sometimes you make the wrong choice and the result is failure. Take heart, making the wrong choice is better than not making any choices at all. At least, you take the initiative to act.

Failure is not the opposite of success, but its by-product. Inaction, apathy and tolerance of mediocrity are the opposites of success.

We learn valuable lessons from failure, such as taking the hard knocks in life. The lessons are not taught in formal universities but out in the street.

In NLP, there is no such thing as “failure”. Instead, failure is actually feedback that can be used to improve your performance. Failure is a necessary part of success. It is actually a step before success.

Many quit when confronted with failure, not knowing that the next step is success.

Domino theory

Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, was only four years old when his father died. Poverty drove his mother to place him in an orphanage. Young Tom harboured two childhood dreams — to be a priest and to play in the Detroit Tigers, an American baseball team.

However, after a year of studying to be a priest in a seminary, he left. In 1960, he started Domino’s Pizza. Initially, it was very successful, but in the 1970s, he started losing control of the company because of rapid expansion. Domino’s was on the brink of bankruptcy.

By 1993, Tom Monaghan had rebuilt Domino’s Pizza into one of the largest pizza chains in America with a sales turnover that exceeded US$2.2 billion (RM7.3 billion).

So compelling was his dream to play in the Detroit Tigers that he purchased the entire team. He also remained Domino’s president. Had he given up during his bankruptcy, he would not have enjoyed Domino’s later success — and he would not have fulfilled his second childhood dream.

He chose to see his bout of failure as an opportunity to do even better. As Henry Ford once remarked: “Failure is the only opportunity to begin more intelligently.”

— Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article contributed by Michael Lum, an American Board of NLP trainer.

Don’t Tell Your Staff What To Do

Encourage them to think for themselves and come up with great ideas

If you want results, stop telling employees what to do and, instead, ask them thought-provoking questions.

It gets people thinking for themselves about possibilities and, when they come up with their own answers, they are energised and excited about implementing them.
A tremendous amount of brainpower is wasted every day because managers still think their job is to tell people what to do. But, in reality, workers know much more about the work they are doing than the boss does. Being told what to do can actually sap their motivation for the job.

The problem is that even if you do have a winning idea, your staff may still be resistant to it because the suggestion came from you. People often question and react negatively to ideas they didn’t think of themselves.

On the other hand, when your team members come up with an idea themselves, it creates positive feelings that make them want to take action.

How to make that happen? People should be encouraged to focus their thinking by answering questions from their own experience. That will invariably make them come to a solution on their own.

Planning and organising the questions has a series of steps:

• Get permission. People may be too preoccupied to listen. Schedule a time when they are willing to pay attention.


• Describe the process. Tell people that you are going to ask them questions about what they are doing and make it clear they are expected to do the thinking and come up with their own conclusion.


• Start with the present. For instance: What are you stuck on? How long have you been thinking about this? That will identify the issue and get people focused on how much energy is being wasted spinning their wheels on the problem.


• Clarify their understanding. For instance: What have you done so far? What alternatives have you identified? Which do you think is the best alternative?
  Listen carefully. Restate what they have said in simple terms to clarify the insight. For instance: “I hear you saying that you would like to . . . Is that correct?”


• Stimulate action. An example question might be: “What is the most logical next step?” If more than one option is identified, ask further questions to help your staff decide which one to pursue.

The goal is for your team members to conclude: “I just decided what I need to do.” At that point, because it is their idea, they will be committed to take action on it.

In asking, the focus should always be on finding a solution rather than identifying a problem. If you want to work with people who have no hope, you have to look like the solution and not the problem. Once thinking patterns are established, they are difficult to break, so little can be changed by asking: “Why isn’t this working?”

Suggest a question like: “What do you need to do to make this work?” Or, “What do you want to do next?”

Because the brain is always making new connections, this will encourage the development of new habits and goals.

Once people get used to the approach, conversations will take only a few minutes before they have the insight they are looking for.

However, it is important to make employees comfortable with a question-based technique. Being questioned can scare people because they fear they are being evaluated on their answers. So it is vital that managers explain the goals to their team members and stress that they are not being judged.

How can you help employees gain problem-solving insights? Here are the kinds of questions to ask.

How clear is your thinking on this?
This might lead team members to analyse if enough time has been spent thinking about an issue.

What would your most desired outcome look like?
This helps to create a mental picture of the goal.

How will you know when you have been successful?
This helps people to visualise what completion would look like, and how satisfying it would be to do well.

How are you going to be accountable for this?
People often make promises they don’t really intend to keep. Making a commitment to be accountable strengthens resolve.

What would need to happen for this to be an outrageous success?
This question gets people thinking in new ways, opening up possibilities for grander outcomes.

As a manager, your role should be to help your people think better. Don’t tell them what to do.

– Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article by David Wee, founder and CEO of DW Associates/ Asia Speakers Bureau.

Think Inside the Box

Fresh ideas can come from the wealth of experience we carry within us

I HAVE a problem with thinking outside the box, especially with people who use the phrase lightly.

We hear it all the time these days, but so often the people who say it don’t stick around to explain what this box represents, so nothing changes.

“Think outside the box” sounds like a positive statement, and people feel as though they are motivating their colleagues by encouraging such behaviour.

But in fact what people often hear is: “You are incredibly conservative and unproductive, and I’m frustrated with you.”

What the “box” represents

Using the phrase “think outside the box” may not be the best way to change matters.

Why? Because the box that has been built around our thoughts is our education, our upbringing and, to a certain extent, the wiring of our nervous systems.

So when I’m told to think outside the box, it feels like I’m being told to question my past, disrespect my parents and give up on the me I know and am comfortable with.

I have occasionally done some of these things, and have benefited from all of it. But I probably wouldn’t have if I had a boss telling me to do it all the time. I would have changed jobs, or at least developed my passive aggression.

I ran an improvisation workshop for a large music company once. The boss said to me at the beginning of the day: “I ask for a bit of creativity, and then I see what they give me, and I tell them, ‘This isn’t creative! Give me something creative!’”

He expected me to sympathise with him, so he was in for a surprise when I chose instead to question his approach and explain why his staff resented him.

One of the reasons improvisation exercises are so helpful in the pursuit of creative thinking is that no one ever, ever talks about “the box”.

Developing any type of communication on the spot requires a person to dig deeper into himself for relevant material rather than looking for answers outside.

Get a “sack” instead

Instead of the box, I prefer the image of a great big “sack”, like the one Santa Claus carries. I tell people to imagine that this sack is always with them, filled with everything they’ve ever seen, felt, heard, read, tasted, loved, hated, hoped for, investigated, recoiled from or flung themselves at. It contains everything they have to offer.

If the perception is that there isn’t enough in their sack, then, the answer is not to encourage them to think outside it, but first to learn to trust its value and also to put more into it: more movies, more art, more travel, more books, more animals, more people, more conversations that dare to venture into the most obscure corners of the heart.

For the manager, it seems to me that the opportunities for developing staff creativity exist above all in two areas.

The first is in attitude. If there is anything you can do to make your staff feel safe offering you their ideas, do it. Try smiling when they walk into your office, for a start.

Tell them you are interested in their sack of toys. If they don’t pick the right toy for you right off the bat, encourage further digging. If you tell them you know it’s in there, they are much more likely to find it.

Secondly, look around at the office. Is there anything of interest to look at? Some people who study creativity believe that it is actually impossible to change the way people think from the inside, and that environment is the number one key to creative thinking.

Give your staff something to look at, something to stimulate their brains, something to put in the sack. The box concept will slowly break down and go the way of all cardboard. Good riddance.

– Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article by Alison Lester, who conducts regular workshops on creativity and presentation skills.