Our choices reflect and determine who we are.
Plant the seed of hope
c/o Adobe stock photos
On this journey called life.
Take the good with the bad, the happy with the sad,
Appreciate what you have and let go of what you had,
Always forgive and never look back,
Things change,
Things go wrong but your path goes on.
Hope is not a strategy
I encourage my family, friends and colleagues to be good persons and not waste too much energy trying to prove it.
I encourage my family, friends and colleagues to go where they are appreciated and not where they are just tolerated.
I think our life purpose would be greatly enhanced when we know why we are getting up in the morning.
I encourage you to ask yourself these three questions everyday:
- Why are you working hard?
- Why do you want to succeed?
- Why do you want to win?
Purpose before profits
I recently bought my son a winter jacket and even after looking at Arc’teryx (my second favourite brand) and North Face, our unanimous choice was Patagonia. Patagonia is an heritage brand, famous for their outdoor climbing equipment.
Patagonia have a clear brand identity and knows exactly what they stand for - global sustainability - and they lead from the front. Action speaks louder than words and I always remembered that Yvon Chouinard (founder) said, “Every time we do the right thing, our profits go up.”
Discovery Process
I use the discovery phase to start the relationship and to understand what the customer needs and how I might (or might not) be able to help them. Here's how to run an EFFECTIVE discovery process in just 4 steps:
1) Learn their role and fit,
2) Learn their business milestones,
3) Learn their priorities to achieve those milestones,
4) Learn what they are doing today to get there
That’s the formula and every step starts with learning! Send me an e-mail and let’s arrange a physical or virtual meeting.
We are wired to look for coincidences
Illustration: Joanna Andreasson
I think that we human beings are storytelling machines, we notice things and we have to tell stories about them. For example, perhaps you thought of over 200 people yesterday and maybe one of them called you. I’m sure that in this case you would have paid attention to the coincidence and would not say to yourself that 199 people didn’t call me today. We are wired to look for coincidence, and as storytelling humans we are always looking for that correlation.
I can help
I continuously wonder when will we move away from the socialised metrics of success and embrace internal measures of success. As we create more and more wealth we will have to decide whether it is OK that this wealth is going into the hands of fewer and fewer people. The big question in the not too distant future will be, “Where will our status role models and social hierarchies come from? I do not think they will be the people who have made the most money. Send me an e-mail and let me know what you think.
One of the greatest physicists of the last century
“Never confuse education with intelligence. Intelligence isn’t the ability to remember and repeat, like they teach you in school.
Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience, solve problems and use our knowledge to adapt to new situations. - Professor Richard Feynman”
How do you do that?
I have always been a curious human being! Today, I thought about what it would be like if I were in your body right now.
How would I get frustrated?
What would I picture?
What would I say to myself?
How would I say it?
What tonality would I use?
Is art a cure for curiosity?
Is the purpose of our culture to enable capitalism or is the purpose of capitalism to enable culture? I would like to believe that it’s the latter, send me an e-mail and let me know what you think?
Simple ways to say you care
It is not everyone who wants to lead a deep and passionate life.
It is not everyone who wants to leave the world better for having passed this way.
If you do, here are some simple ways to say you care:
Is there anything I can do for you?
How can I support you?
Do you need my help?
I always have time for you...
You are really good at what you do...
Examining your weaknesses and making them your strength
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with.
It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices.
It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true.
But our preferences do not determine what is true. - Carl Sagan
”
Success vs. Happiness
Image c/o Haiku Deck
I have always believed that success will not make you happy if you were not happy before becoming successful. I have never tied my self worth together with my accomplishments. There are many people who believe that happiness is over the next mountain and as long as they conquer that next thing or achieve that next milestone - then, that’s going to bring them happiness. In reality, if you are not happy before success, you will not be happy after achieving success.
I think happiness comes not from those big moments that you anticipate, but in the little joys of life, for example, the pleasure of walking in the park and observing the colours of the leaves; the joy of creating a morning smoothie, etc. Happiness comes from the the small moments, not from the big accomplishments, regardless of what it looks like from the outside.
In my opinion, happiness and success are two different things. Success is based on what I’ve achieved and happiness is based on what I feel about myself and about how I feel about what I am doing. Whenever I attempt to interconnect them, I remind myself that happiness and success give a separate sense of meaning and fulfilment.
My daily affirmation
I am happy,
I am healthy, and
I am strong.
Facts on Friday
The way we change the culture is not by getting a trending headline on social media, I think we change the culture by establishing that people like us do things like this. Culture is driven by media and media is driven by a business model. We all believe that we see the world as it is, in reality we live in a culture and that culture changes what we see.
Even though the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been before, even now during the Covid-19 pandemic, no one believes that is true. What has happened over the past 20 years is that the media business model has dramatically changed, and therefore, the reason that people don’t think that the world is safer and healthier is because the media does not want us to think that this is the truth. The higher powers have decided that society makes the most profit when we are on edge, insecure and feeling insignificant. #justsaying
Teams: Diego Maradona (RIP)
Panoramic/Press Association Images
Football (soccer to my American friends) is the sport that has played the biggest role in my life. Yesterday we lost the most iconic footballer of all time, Diego Maradona (RIP). You can read the obituaries online, but I think every great team should have the following:
Storyteller
Designer
Builder
Magician
Stabiliser
Fighter
Explorer
Dreamer
Mentor
MARADONA
Recruiter
Question: Why me?
What can I bring of experience and competence that can potentially beat a candidate with industry experience?
The love of winning! Sometimes an “outsider” can see a smarter way of doing it as I would have to learn the procedures and performance routines. And when you are learning a performance, you model yourself after the smartest way, which more often than not is also the best way.
Too many of us think the best people are the people who are metaphorically speaking, screaming “look at me” the loudest, and talking down to the rest of us. They are not the best!
The best people are out in the field - doing it - showing you the distinctions, articulating to you about what has worked for them, so you can benefit from their experiences. I think it’s genius to learn from other peoples mistakes, not in a miraculous way.
Too many of us have to learn from our mistakes several times before we really learn from them. Contact me via e-mail for sparring, mentoring or guidance.
The future will be confusing
Purpose drives profits
Over the last few years I have really studied sales people to find out precisely what the best sales people have in common. What I discovered was those sales people who truly want to make a difference in the lives of their customers outsell sales people who are solely focused on sales quotas and targets. And organisations where their purpose included “improving their customers lives,” also outperformed organisations who had a solely profit based purpose.
According to a Gallup study from 2017 on the American workplace, of the country’s approximately 100 million full-time employees, 51% felt no real connection to their jobs. Employees can do a lot of things to increase their engagement and they could begin by attaching a sense of meaning to their work. I think there are three questions one could ask oneself:
1. How do you make a difference in the lives of your customers?
2. How do you do it differently that your competitors and peers?
3. On your best days, what do you love about your job?
Remember your job matters and that it has a meaning. Contact me via e-mail when you are ready to take a look at your individual or corporate sense of purpose.
Say Thank You!
The path to transformation is by embracing life everyday with openness. You can start on the path wherever you are, everyone is in the position to say that this situation is difficult but I am grateful for having a higher self that can find a solution. Acknowledging this path can transform any experience from darkness to light. It’s like having a torch in a dark forest where the only thing that matters is the next step that you see ahead of you.
How should you live life when you are on this path? It’s easy to feel grateful when life is going well, yet not everyday is like that! Most days are a mixture of negative and positive situations, emotions and feedback at home and work. I think that we only need two tools on the path: knowledge and experience. Knowledge gives you the vision of the bigger picture that you can trust, and experience validates that the experience is true. When we achieve even more knowledge and experience - complaints are transformed into light and wonder and gloom changes to joy. This acknowledgement that you are being guided by the light inside of you is the beginning of the journey.
Dark vs. light; good vs. bad; us vs. them, whoever them happens to be!
Getting beyond these opposites is important, not that you should give up and let the darkness creep in but so you stop being stuck in conflict. To be in the light, you must open yourself to it, which is different from constantly struggling against the darkness. Contact me via e-mail when you are ready to take a deeper dive into this arena.