February 2011

  • Curiosity and Results: What’s the Connection?

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 14th February 2011

    “It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference.”
    Michael Dell

    Curiosity has been given a bad rap. Perhaps we grew up hearing that asking questions was rude or conveyed ignorance, or that we’d get into trouble if we were like Curious George. We might even have been warned that “Curiosity killed the cat!”

    The truth is that curiosity is one of the most vital and life-affirming qualities you can bring to your life and your business.

    Curiosity in Business

    It is so easy to blame others when things go wrong. Consider being curious about your experience rather than critical. For example, instead of beating yourself up for not reaching sales goals—again—try asking yourself what was going on for you that you kept performing below your expectations? With an attitude of “how fascinating that I’ve created this” you are much more likely to help yourself find new solutions to attaining your goals.

    Curiosity in Life

    Helen Keller said, “Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all!” When you cultivate an attitude of curiosity, doors open and adventures begin; questions lead to new possibilities. For example, asking yourself, “What do I want to learn now and where might that lead me?” can set you on a journey of exciting exploration that moves you forward. If, instead, you come from the place of “I already know what I need to know,” you shut off the possibility of discovering something new that could rock your world.

    Curiosity in Relationships

    How often we assume we know what someone else is thinking or experiencing. What if we came from a place of not knowing and offered others an invitation to speak? According to Sharon Ellison, creator of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, “A non-defensive question is innocently curious, reflecting the purity of the child who asks how a flower grows or what makes an airplane fly.” We invite others to share their true experience when we ask questions without hidden agendas and to clarify understanding.

    Practice Cultivating Curiosity

    Here are some ways to cultivate a more curious life.

    Questions. Practice asking questions with openness and neutrality. Practice with strangers in stores and with people close to you. Stop thinking you know all the answers…be open to being surprised!

    Inquiries. An inquiry is an open-ended question designed to broaden your perspective. For example: “What would make life a daring adventure for me?” “Where in my life do I assume I already know?”

    Assumptions. These impact how we treat strangers as well as loved ones, employees, clients and vendors. Challenge your assumptions by asking, “What if that’s not true?” What other choices might you make then?

    If you truly want to expand your excitement, joy and fulfillment sprinkle liberal doses of curiosity and watch your life and your business become the fabulous adventure it can be!

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January 2011

  • Humor – It’s Good for You and Your Business

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 17th January 2011

    “Life is too important to be taken seriously”
    Oscar Wilde

    Humor – It’s Good for You and Your Business

    The physical benefits of laughter are well documented. Laughter decreases stress hormones, boosts the immune system and raises the heart rate, bringing more blood and oxygen to the brain. It also increases the level of alertness and memory as well as the ability to learn and create.
    So if we’re interested in living a healthier, saner and more balanced life we simply can’t afford to be chronically serious in our work life.

    Injecting humor into your business is not about entertaining others. It’s not pranks, practical jokes or juvenile antics. Instead, it’s more of an attitude, a way of viewing and processing things.
    You just can’t be too serious if you want to motivate yourself or your employees, improve morale, spark creativity, facilitate open communication, be more productive, build trust between you and your employees or provide great customer service.

    Here are some compelling reasons to invest in humor in your business

    Manage stress
    Humor reduces tension in a stressful situation. It provides a realistic perspective when you most need it, gives you control over your emotions and helps you rise above a crisis. Humor is a thinking response in an emotional situation, helping you connect your mind with your heart.

    Enhanced Creativity
    Humor unleashes creativity and divergent problem-solving.Humor and creativity are about looking at the same thing as everyone else and seeing something completely different. Both involve taking risks, playing with ideas and making new and often unlikely associations.

    Build Stronger Teams
    Humor enhances collaboration and team-building, creating a climate in whichpeople feel motivated, energized and ready to contribute. You could say that the group that plays together stays together.

    Happier Employees
    Laughter reduces workplace stres,, and breaks up boredome and fatigue. Happier, more relaxed amployees ae able to better focus on tasks, make fewer errors and are more productive. They also stick around longer, are absent less and don’t burn out.

    More effective communication
    Humor is a powerful way to break down barriers and connect at a heart level. It creates an environment conducive to open, honest communication. People with a sense of humor often have the ability to deal effectively with people and work issues, and they keep the severity of problems in perspective.

    Productive meetings
    Humor in meetings encourages participation, minimizes conflicts, helps people retain information, opens up dialogue and sparks creativity.

    Improved customers service
    Including a sense of lightness in communicating with customers and clients is an effective way to connect with them, retain their loyalty and provide outstanding, memorable service.

    Manage with a lighter touch
    Use your sense of humor as a way to build rapport with employees, vendors or your outsourced service providers. Be transparent and remember to laugh at yourself. It encourages trust and good will. Embracing a lighter approach is a way to communicate more effectively, shows your human side more openly and fosters a supportive environment.

    Improve the bottom line
    If humor and a sense of lightness help us achieve all the things listed above, then it only makes sense that this would improve our overall effectiveness and productivity which will ultimately result in an increase in profitability.

    Our work has a tremendous impact on our lives but don’t wait too long to realize the truth of the old cliché “life’s simply too short”. Yes, we need to take our work seriously and at the same time remember to lighten up and have some fun because ultimately the real bottom line in life has nothing to do with dollars or profits.

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  • Shhhh. Quiet Leadership: The High-Performance Secret

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 10th January 2011

    The conventional image of a business leader is one we see all around us—the commanding, visionary person who takes charge in a time of crisis or transition and leads his or her company to victory over daunting odds. The tales of these “celebrity CEOs” and their successes make great reading—as does their failures.

    Yet, for several years, a slowly growing body of knowledge and experience has begun to suggest that another approach—under the heading “quiet leadership”—may be ultimately more effective at achieving sustained high performance in organizations of all kinds.

    While that may be good news for those of us who are not natural media stars, don’t be misled: Quiet leadership is a challenging management approach that requires a keen understanding of your business and the people in it to achieve its promise.

    For starters, quiet leadership isn’t clearly defined. Certainly a bedrock of quiet leadership is leading by example, of eliciting the behavior you want by demonstrating it, rather than just telling others to do it. But a deeper understanding of what it means to be “quiet leader” is emerging as management researchers and business coaches delve into just why it is that certain types of leaders tend to produce better results, in more varied conditions, over longer periods of time. And quiet leadership isn’t just for the person at the top, but applies across the spectrum, from the leader to all levels of middle-management, from solo entrepreneurs and their team of subcontractors to small business owners with a small staff.

    Author Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, first documented that transforming a mediocre company into a stellar performer seemed to require a leader who was the polar opposite of the “celebrity CEO” archetype. This type of leader combines tremendous personal determination to do what it takes to achieve success for the organization with a willingness to accept responsibility for failure and to pass along the credit for success to his or her team.

    In his bestselling book Leading Quietly, Harvard professor Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. identified key behaviors that successful quiet leaders seem to follow to get results. He distilled these into seven recommendations, among them:

    •Don’t kid yourself. Be realistic about what you know—and don’t know—of the situation you face. Accept that you may have to act with uncertain knowledge.

    •Trust mixed motives. Recognize that people, including yourself, bring a blend of motivations to their jobs—public-spirited and self-interested. Work with this instead of fighting it.

    Daniel Goleman’s recent book, Primal Leadership, suggests that a coaching style of leadership may best describe the rarest—and most essential—qualities of the quiet leader.

    “The coaching style is the least-used tool in the leader’s toolkit,” says Goleman, “probably because it doesn’t look like leadership.”

    Like a coach, a quiet leader can achieve breakthroughs by asking guided questions rather than giving orders or advice, and by getting to know each member of a team well enough to be able to craft work assignments to best suit where they are and where they’re going.

    Yet it’s clear that quiet leadership is not so much about any particular management style as it is an attitude toward work and people—and life. Keeping your ego in check certainly seems to be a prerequisite, as is giving up your ambitions for being on the cover of Fortune.

    As Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management studies at McGill University, commented in a recent article on quiet leadership, “Maybe really good management is boring.”

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  • Improve Business Results Through Collaboration

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 3rd January 2011

    When it comes to work, are you a lone ranger? See if you identify with any of these statements:

    “I can do it better myself.”

    “The more people involved, the less control I’ll have.”

    “I like MY ideas and MY way of doing things.”

    The truth is, going it alone can lead to overwork and burnout for you, and can create unnecessary stress and tension in your workplace. It can breed competition, fear, dishonesty, tunnel vision and inefficiency.

    So before you limit your chance for success, why not open the door to other people’s skills and experience. Collaboration is a win-win solution with many benefits, including the following:

    Do what you love. Everyone has a unique set of passion triggers, the things you love doing because they fire up your interest and you do them well. There are also, of course, the things you struggle with doing. By collaborating, you can divide up the tasks so that all involved get to do what they love.

    More ideas. Brainstorming with a partner, coach or team will inevitably lead to more ideas than one person can think up on his or her own. There’s also an incredible opportunity for innovation as people build on the ideas of others.

    Belonging. It’s human nature to value the feeling of belonging, being part of something bigger and better than you are alone.

    Relationships. Success in business, success at work, success in life, they’re all contingent on success in relationships. Collaboration is a place to learn, stretch and grow into more effective and healthy ways of interacting with others. Collaboration can be challenging—and it’s worth it!

    How to Be a Good Collaborator

    Trust. Assume the best about people, and trust them with your head full of ideas. Have faith and remember that your collaborators want to do their best and feel good about their work at the end of the day. And trust the collaborative process, even when people do things differently than you would, and you can’t quite see how it will all come together. It will.

    Be trustworthy. Mahatma Gandhi said that we need to BE the change we want to see in the world. So if you want to trust people, be someone they can trust. Act with integrity, do what you say you’re going to do, and be open and honest in your communication.

    Choose wisely. For each task that challenges you, there is someone who loves it and does it well. Build a team of experts.

    Keep in mind that when collaborating with your team, coach or anyone for that matter, being polite or holding back what you really think for the sake of avoiding hurting someone’s feelings, destroys the opportunity for honest communication in a collaborative environment.

    Successful collaboration is a balancing act of personality types, work habits, communication styles and skills. To the lone ranger, that might seem like too much trouble. But if you’re looking to improve your performance and seal your success, collaboration is an opportunity you don’t want to pass up.

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December 2010

  • Intentions: The Key To Reaching Your Goals

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 21st December 2010

    Setting intentions is quite different from goal setting. When we’re setting a goal, we think realistically. We analyze our current situation and plan out steps on how to reach our goal. Goals help provide direction and are oriented toward a future outcome. We think we are in control of the plan and of all the steps how to get there. But as you know, sometimes life comes between us and our goals. It’s hard to stay on track because there are so many distractions. If things don’t go as planned we sometimes experience stress, anxiety and even depression. That’s because the rational mind is a master at the wanting to control and creating the “shoulds” and stories that surround the “shoulds”.  Not a recipe for the ease and freedom we’re seeking.

    Intentions are different. They are focused on how we are “being” in the present moment. Creating intentions does not mean we abandon our goals. Goals are the concrete results of our intentions. An intention is not concrete, but energetic – what will move us to take the actions needed to reach our goals. We set our intentions based on our understanding of what matters most to us and make a commitment to align our worldly actions within that larger context of meaning. Staying conscious of what’s most important offers the possibility of being at peace beyond the fluctuations caused by life’s unpredictabilities, distractions and things we think we have control over but don’t.

    Keep the following in mind when setting intentions:

    • Know what gives you meaning in your life, your values from which you live and from which you make and align your decisions*
    • Letting go of control is about trusting and creating space in your life where new and exciting things can happen.
    • Intention comes from the heart. It does not come from your reasonable head but from your aliveness.
    • When you are in touch with and acting from your intentions, you become more effective in reaching your goals than when you act from wants and insecurities.
    • When your goal is not aligned with your values and life purpose you may find that your intentions are actually undermining your goals because your inner critic and negative voice are getting in the way.

    Intention is the key to success in reaching our goals and what we want to create in our life. When we remember to consciously set intentions coupled to our goals we’ll notice ease and freedom as well as an increase in productivity and enjoyment in working towards what we want in our life and our business.

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  • Time to get ready for 2011

    Posted By Ellen van den Berg / 7th December 2010

    2010 is wrapping up! If you have not started thinking about 2011, you absolutely should be. Now is the perfect time to start setting your goals for the coming year.

    Before creating your goals for 2011 take the time to reflect on the following:

    • What are you celebrating this year? What made it possible? How can you capitalize on these successes in 2011?
    • What did not work this year and why not?
    • Review your long term vision. Are you still in alignment with it? Make any changes if needed so you continue to have a clear picture of where you are going.
    • Identify your opportunities for continued success? How can you capitalize on these opportunities


    Consider using the SMART method, meaning Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely goals. Setting SMART goals are crucial to your success. The more specific you can get with these goals, the better. For example, wanting to bring in new business becomes wanting to bring in 2 clients a month from the local eco-friendly business industry by attending 2 networking events and following up within 2 days with the people you have connected with.

    Not only do you need to create SMART goals, consider setting Stretch goals as well. Stretch goals can make the impossible happen. When President Kennedy said we’d have a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, many people laughed. But it happened, and that shows us exactly what a stretch goal can accomplish.

    For many doubling production isn’t easy. For others it may be a stretch to slow down long enough to work an hour a week on their business let alone take a day off.  But is it harder than landing a man on the moon and bringing him back alive? When you start off telling yourself to be realistic in setting goals, you will never know how great you and your people can be. So, go for it and make some of your goals a stretch. Creating stretch goals is motivating. It gets you and your people to give that extra effort.
    What if you fall short on a stretch goal? The better question is: How close did you come? If you have set a stretch goal that’s way out there and you fall a bit short, it still is something to celebrate, even if you did not go the full distance.

    Of course your goals need to align with your vision and strategies (if you don’t have those in place you need to start there). And, it needs to be in writing. The purpose is to have a document that you can share and is clear to everyone. You do not need to write a short novel – if you can do it in a couple of paragraphs or pages that is all that is needed.

    Last but not least you need to take action towards your goals. Writing your goals down is a great start, but there is more to be done. If you come up with great goals and even have them broken down into action steps nothing happens if you do not act on them. To be successful at taking action you need to create intention. More about intention next time.

    Remember: success isn’t achieved by accident. Planning ahead is what successful people have always done to get what they want out of life and their business

    Have fun creating exciting goals for 2011!

    You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
    Yogi Berra

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