by Sylvain | Sep 19, 2010 | Passionate Being, Shift
In my article The 30-day Passionate Being challenge, I started a challenge to help you create a Passionate Life, for free. Now there are only about 48 hours left to join the challenge. After that, it’ll be to late, as I probably won’t make that same offer again.
One free session with me (I estimate the value at $100-200) just by filling in the following form with your email and your time availabilities. Good deal, isn’t it?
Get more information or fill in the form below to join the challenge. Remember, after September 21st, it’ll be too late.
[onw_simple_contact_form]
by Sylvain | Sep 15, 2010 | Productivity, Shift
If you’ve ever seen a few MacGyver episodes (and who hasn’t?), you almost certainly witnessed some bomb almost explode. Disarming a bomb with only 1 second left is one of MacGyver’s specialty (along with creating all sorts of devices with chewing gum and duct tape). Though defusing a difficult situation only moments before it’s too late is a great ploy to create tension and emotion in the viewer, it also happens quite often in daily life.
Deadlines
photo credit: psdYou have deadlines, taxes to pay, DVDs to return, meeting presentations to prepare, etc. What all these situations have in common is that they cause significant pain (financial, emotional, etc) if you don’t take care of them in time. You may push them back for a while, but the closer you are to the deadline, the more your brain is obsessed with it. At some point, you will drop everything else and take care of the hot potato. In order to deal with it, you might do it yourself, ask your friends for help or even hire a freelancer.
Whatever it takes.
What happens is that the mind doesn’t want to be bothered with it, so it tries to avoid it as much as possible, until it gets real, and realizes there’s no way to escape it.
What happens when you have to do it? You bring up the big guns. And you make it.
Being a hero
Being a hero is about having the courage to do what’s right, what has to be done, when most people wouldn’t.
But when you do what is necessary to make that deadline, you are a hero, you save the day.
I might means you called in all your favors, you dropped or put on hold what wasn’t really important, but you fought, and you won.
But who decided you had to wait until the last moment to do what heroes do?
Everyday hero
You know that when the pressure is right, when you’re close to the end, you find a way to do it.
So how come you always wait until the last moment to invoke these resources?
You don’t need the gloom of the eleventh hour to call your friends and ask for help, or to set aside time and energy to deal with your obligations. Use the resources you have.
Imagine it is the eleventh hour, give yourself an earlier deadline, and be a hero. Not only it will remove some stress from your life, it will also train you to use the best resources for the job, while keeping your mind on your passions.
Let’s say that you spend a week every month dreading some project you have to get done. If you can gather the resources and get it done before the stress comes up, you instantly gain 12 weeks a year that your mind can spend on a subject that you love instead of one that you dread.
I’m not saying it’ll clear your all schedule, but it might clear up a lot of the background processing of your brain, allowing it to be free to enjoy and be passionate instead of being tense and unhappy.
It’s simple to be better than MacGyver, gather all your knowledge and resources and deal with the bomb as soon as you have the tools to defuse it at your disposal, instead of waiting until your mind can’t simply hide it anymore.
Tell us in the comments how you are better than MacGyver.
by Sylvain | Sep 13, 2010 | Passion, Shift, Work
I’m not a violent guy. Well, most of the times I’m not.
Sometimes, though, I seem to forget all my manners and I imagine I’m grabbing some deeply unhelpful rep called Randal, and shaking him until he gets rid of the crap he keeps in his ears.
But I don’t do it. Partly because I don’t feel like going to jail, and partly because somebody has yet to invent a way to do that by phone or email.
What puts me in this state of darkness? Glad you asked!
The beginning of the story: do you care about the experience?
More specifically, do you care about the experience of your clients, customers, and whoever you’re doing something for?
You want to provide a service, that is useful and appreciated, so you care.
You probably remember a situation when a clerk, let’s call him Randal, was complaining, and you even felt like you were bothering him. You thought “Why are you doing this job if you hate it so much?”.
And you really, really, don’t want your customers to feel the way you did.
So yes, you care. And you try to make sure each experience is the best possible. You want to improve your service so your customers are happy.
But you can’t always know what goes on in your customer’s mind.
Where you ask for feedback
So you ask for feedback. I mean, you know your customer knows best what she wants in her encounter with you and your services.
And you’re not the only one asking for feedback, the big ones do it too.
Let’s say Randal Corp. is a big Internet service provider. They record the support calls so that the “customer support experience” can be improved. They even send an email after a call to the support asking for a small 30 seconds feedback. So small that the only thing they ask you to do is click on a simple radio button to express whether the customer rep was competent and helpful. They don’t give you the opportunity to ask why the h*** they don’t provide support via email!
And why? Because they don’t want to know. Because they don’t actually want to improve the experience, they just want to rank it, to normalize it, so that it’s appropriate, not so that it’s good, or better. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they give the opportunity to send forms via email? Or – God forbid – put them on the web so their customers don’t have to spend 15 minutes waiting on a call then wait a week for the forms to arrive?
Where you get feedback
I want to make things better. This is who am I at the core. And I’m pretty good at pointing out things that could be improved. But more importantly, I’m a (potential) customer willing to help.
This is a message for the Randal Corps of the world: Most of the time you ask for feedback. Often, I give it. Sometimes you answer. Most of the times you make me understand that my suggestions won’t go further than the Trash mailbox. If by chance, you not only listen, but hear me, and I ask you to keep me posted on the elements that prevent me from buying from Randal Corp., why do I never hear from you ever again?
You say you care about your “customers”, but don’t understand it is always one at a time!
Where I want to matter
I want to be cared for. When you tell me you care, because you want feedback, I trust you, and I give. Then you do whatever you want with my gifts and forget about me. Why don’t you go until the end?
What I learn from your actions is that you want to use me and dispose of me.
Then I just want to punch you in the face, because, seriously, it’d be so easy to do it right.
Where you do it right
If you are passionate about the experience, and if you listen, I mean really listen to me, make me feel that I care, I’ll be devoted to you, I’ll help you grow and serve your clients better than ever, I’ll bring you new customers, and a wealth of ideas and services I want to buy from you.
But that brings up a question: do you want a relationship with me, or do you just want me to buy stuff from you?
Be passionate about your customers experience, and you’ll get loyal fans. Be a Randal, pretend to care and don’t follow through, and not only your customers will not care about you, they’ll jump ship as soon as something looks better on the other side.
If you’re not passionate about your customers, are you serving anyone but yourself?
No Randals were harmed in the making of this post (though I certainly thought about it).
