Selfishness

Understood that this is my 1^st post of the year, and I should choose a more positive title to encourage everyone. However, I promise this won't be as bad as you thought and wasn’t any bit demotivated.  I still understand my role as a soft skill trainer, so keep reading on.

Through my career and life, I have always heard accusation of selfishness. Employee accuses their boss being selfish for not increasing the salary or extending work hours. Parents accuse their children being selfish for not listening to their opinions. Brothers accuse one another being selfish for no particular reason. After spending so much time listening to all these blame, I have obtained a simple conclusion; “Poor Communication” or “Misunderstanding”.

All the above accusation of selfishness was due to poor communication or misunderstanding. Employee accuses their boss being selfish, because there is no proper communication between the front line workers and top management, which results misunderstanding. Parents desire to have children to take their advice, but fail to receive their children’s thought. Parents often believe their opinion is better due to experience, but they fail to identify their children as an individual with own ideas. For such, misunderstanding appears.

In fact, I can’t really explain what’s the actual problem between brothers or sisters, because they often accuse each other for no particular reason. Some may say one is not taking the responsibility to take care of the family. Some may disagree with one’s decision or plan. However, I would say it is all about misunderstanding and poor communication. Family with the above problem often do not have a direct communication channel, but through members. Therefore, all the information received has been interpreted already with additional flavor.

Anyway, I just hope this article can awake those yet to understand that there is no such thing call “selfish” in this world. We just didn’t communicate well. Whenever you want to accuse someone for being selfish, think again. Because that someone may have help you or support you in another area, where in this case he or she has just happen to stand in a different point of view against yours. In such way, you will realize that all this accusation is totally meaningless, unless you desire to surrender all support from such person permanently.

At last, share a wonderful quote I obtained from my friend, and may your God bring you peace and happiness for this 2012.

Get Your Company A Speaker

Events and media have been the most well know marketing tools so far. Marketing representative utilize different media to present their product to consumers. Events are held for introducing new projects. However, they all focus on introducing the unique selling point of products; those obvious ponts. Mobile devices, computers and other electronic emphasis on tech specs when advertise. Service provider such as hotels and resorts focus on restaurants type, room size and design. However none have get someone who can embrace the product with a story that can inspire people to pursuit a belief; to believe that the product is something they need and always wanted.

The success of Apple was built by thousands of Apple employees, but known through one person, Steve Jobs. Sadly, none has learned from him, and understand the key for Apple’s well known success.

Whenever he was on product launching, he was always selling a dream, not the product. He explained his dream again and again as a story. He linked this dream of changing the way technology was with Apple's new product. “We have reinvented the phone”, he said while introducing iPhone. We can easily felt his belief through those words, and were influenced. Their advertisements concentrated on the meaning behind the design instead of explaining the tech specs. He has built a belief in us, and made us willingly to spend more for Apple’s product.

It is always much effective while inspiring people to do something instead of rewarding them to act. Announcing all those figures behind the product is consider as rewarding the consumer for their action to purchase. Tell them a story and involve them into such story can motivate them to go after the product. To sell a story, one needs a great speaker; a speaker who can influence people through words. Start searching for those talents within your establishment and utilize them wisely. 

Don't tell me words don't matter.

Learn from our younger generation

Through TED, I have got to learn about Adora Svitak, a great young author from America. When I called her young, I mean it. She is only 14. I watched her speech in TED, and was totally blown away. I would strongly encourage everyone to experience her powerful words from http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html. The topic she has shared is “What can adults learn from kids?” and I found this topic extremely important to us, especially to our leaders.

Often we forgotten to listen and lend an ear to our younger one. We tend to share more of our experience to them instead of understand what’s in their mind. We lead them by our pass experience and expect their success. I would say at most of time, we have just simply ignored their voice. We forget the fact that the world has changed, and we did not catch up these changes better than our youths.

We communicate more rapidly through technology nowadays, which in fact we weren’t as good as our youngsters. We can learn more through Internet now, but we spend less time in comparison to our youngsters. We need to admit the fact that we can actually learn from our younger one in many aspects.

By empowering them to share their thought with us, we then get opportunities to learn. We can learn how to improve our management skill through Internet, and yet such learning can be costless. We can learn how to better communicate with others through technology, and again many of these tools are free. Through exchange ideas, we can identify much efficient ways to achieve result, and yet with lower price.

Lend an ear to our next generation, and allow them to share their opinions with us. Allow them to achieve their need of supreme through this little action, and you may avoid them to obtain responsiveness through miss behaviors. We will be surprise with how much we can learn from our youth, and yet how much they would appreciate such interaction from us.

Listening Skill

Listening skill is one skill that majority of people will ignore, or I should re-phrase myself, as majority of people do not find themselves with problem to perform such skill. But in fact, most of people have poor listening skill.

People often believe that they have fine listening skill as they have been practicing it since they were born. The 1st skill that one obtained right after birth is “Listening Skill”. Then through age, one then learns to speak, read and write. Therefore, one would attend writing class as it was found most difficult, and in school one was graded mostly base on the writing skill.
However one can find many books or training program provide tips and knowledge to improve one’s writing, reading or even speaking skill effectively, but never a book focusing only on listening skill. It was due to the nature of the brain. Listening skill is not something can be taught, because it require personal discipline.

80% of time when someone is talking, listener’s brain will work simultaneously on the reply. The brain will formulate the reply base on experience and knowledge instead of the message from the speaker. In such respect, one is not actually listening to the message.

Although I mentioned earlier that “Listening Skill” cannot be taught, and require self-discipline. But there are still some tips that I would like to share to improve one’s listening skill.

1. Do not interrupt the speaker: Allowing speaker to finish the message is the key to effective listening. Many of time, one’s mind will obtain few key words base on the 1st or 2nd line of the message, and automatically generate the entire message with a reply. This will often cause interruption to the speaker, because one would consider that the message from the speaker is exactly as the message generated in mind, and can be replied even before speaker ends. This is a common cause of communication error.

2. Repeat in own words: After listen to the speaker, one can repeat the message in his/her own word to confirm understanding. It is difficult to stop the brain on formulating the message and reply base on the key words obtained, but at least one should check with the speaker if the message acknowledged is correct. Due to the tone and pace of the speaker, same message can be acquired with different meaning. Therefore, by repeating the message in one’s own word, one could then eliminate the chase of misunderstanding.

3. Be an active listener: It was mentioned ahead that effective listening involves self-discipline. In order to conduct good listening skill, one must 1st want to listen. Choice of location and timing become very important in this case. One should only perform communication at the right time at the right place, and this will happen only when there is a “WANT” from the listener.

Above 3 tips are some I have learned from some training and reading. It still requires daily practice to improve on such skill. I hope these tips can help some of you to enhance your “Listening Skill” and reduce the chance of communication problem.