Connect with us

TIp Sheet

Get in the Ring Before You Feel Ready … and More Tips for Wide-Format Print Pros

You don’t gain confidence before taking the leap, you gain confidence by taking the leap.

mm

Published

on

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

Motivation Get in the Ring

Waiting for just the right opportunity? Or until you’re ready? You may be waiting forever. That was among the key takeaways from Wharton professor Adam Grant’s latest book, Hidden Potential: The Science Of Achieving Greater Things. “Put yourself in the ring before you feel ready. You don’t need to build confidence before you take the leap — your confidence grows through taking the leap,” he writes.

PRODUCTIVITY Leverage the Dread

One of the ironies of procrastination is that it often stems from the mildly discomforting things in life, such as doing taxes. In contrast, you don’t indefinitely put off a root canal. You want to get it over with. According to a trio of new studies out of the University of British Columbia, you can use this psychological quirk to your advantage when you find yourself avoiding a task: Tell yourself that it will be horrible, the absolute worst. “The key to getting tasks off your to-do list is to harness the psychological discomfort of dread, which is negative and unpleasant — and therefore a feeling that most people seek to relieve,” noted an article about the finding in FAST COMPANY.

COMMUNICATION Make Long Emails Digestible

Writing a long email? Break it into two parts, says leadership expert Erica Dhawan. “Start with a quick summary at the top and then go into the details.” It helps people greatly digest the message, she writes in Digital Body Language: How To Build Trust And Connection, No Matter The Distance.

MANAGEMENT Feed It Forward

Providing feedback has long been considered to be an essential skill for leaders. But according to executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, there are two problems with it – it addresses something that happened in the past and it makes the recipient defensive. In its place he recommends “feedforward”, which is suggesting a couple of things you think could help one of your workers improve their performance. It takes little time and is usually well received, he writes on his blog. “These suggestions can be very specific and still delivered in a positive way. In this way the manager can ‘cover the same points’ without feeling embarrassed and without making the subordinate feel even more humiliated,” he says.

Advertisement

SALES Unlock Superstar Potential

When you have someone on staff who is a natural salesperson, put away the rule book and stash the scripts, say marketers Rich Baker and Gary Levitt in a column at MarketingProfs. “Encourage creativity, boldness, and authenticity. Tell them you have made a choice to embrace the soft science of human interaction over the hard science of metrics — come hell or high water,” they write. “With this lofty mindset in place, every customer interaction will be a slam-dunk and crackle with the intangibles you need to transform customers into loyal friends.”
 

MANAGEMENT Seek Advice, Not Feedback

Feedback is a gift, be it negative or positive, or so we’ve been told. How do you improve after all, if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong? But what if that thinking is wrong? Recent research from Harvard Business School study found that a better approach was to seek advice. The reason is threefold. First, people love giving advice — it makes them feel valued. Two, they don’t love giving negative feedback — it makes them uncomfortable. Three, feedback tends to look back and is often not “actionable,” whereas advice can be. It’s important when seeking advice to ask for specifics (“Where exactly can we improve our online channel?”) and to ask someone who can actually help.

Advertisement

MANAGEMENT Ask How They Do It

You may have wondered why your staff hasn’t figured out the way you like to work: how you like to receive and give information, your best hours, your strengths, what small things are important to you, and so on. The reason is likely because you never told them. They, too, likely have their own way of getting things done. If you haven’t yet, ask them at their next review or during onboarding. Peter Drucker, the OG of management studies, called taking responsibility for relationships in this manner an absolute necessity to achieving an effective workplace.

MOTIVATION Make It Easy to Show Up

There’s something in the phrase “showing up” that seems to demand grit and buckling down. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says James Clear, author of the bestseller Atomic Habits. “One of the things I recommend in the book is called the two-minute rule,” he says. “Just take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So ‘read 30 books a year’ becomes ‘read one page,’ or ‘meditate five days a week for 30 minutes’ becomes ‘meditate for 60 seconds.’ You’re just trying to master the art of showing up. So, make it easy to do.”

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MAN OF STEEL Defeat the Strawman by Bolstering His Arguments

With the next presidential election only weeks away, social media is inevitably filling up with straw-man arguments that divide and enrage us — to the point that it’s sometimes hard to get work done after a dose of Twitter or Facebook in the morning. What to do? Flip the script. Steelmanning, according to a recent article in the Financial Times, describes the approach of using the strongest arguments possible to argue for your point of view and then using the same methodology to fight for your opponent’s view (even points they might not have considered). While you might still not agree with their position, at least you will understand them better, which can help stave off our wired tendency to fall into tribal thinking — and allow us to get more work done.

Advertisement

Advertisement

SPONSORED VIDEO

Printvinyl Scored Print Media

New Printvinyl Scored wide-format print media features an easy-to-remove scored liner for creating decals, product stickers, packaging labels, and more. The precision-scored liner, with a 1.25” spacing on a 60” roll, guarantees a seamless and hassle-free removal process.

Promoted Headlines

Most Popular