…adding five substantive conversations to your weekly social calendar could boost your spirits dramatically.
–Skip the Small Talk:
Meaningful Conversations
Linked to Happier People
See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here:
The Conversation Contract.
I use Twitter to share brief messages, not more than two per day. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
You can’t control the wind so learn to control your sails.
When a thing is new people say, “It is not true.” When a thing seems to be true people say, “It is not new.” William James
I’ve done things on Monday and Tuesday, made progress on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I have completed tasks on Saturday and Sunday, but I’ve never accomplished anything on “someday.” See Goal Setting on this blog.
Failure lies not in needing help but in failing to accept help when needed. Tony Mayo
Impossible to modify your immutable past. Just mute it and move on. Tony Mayo
Prior tweets are here, at Twitter Logs.
I have been posting fewer and fewer tweets because they have been producing fewer and fewer responses. Has Twitter jumped the shark?
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©2010 Tony Mayo
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my commentary on the 2008 Conference Board survey of worldwide top executive coaching rates and budgets. The Conference Board has recently released its 2010 update and revision to that report. Unfortunately, the report no longer contains information on the amount organizations are paying for executive coaching per hour or by engagement.
The most interesting tidbit is that most organizations are compensating executive coaches for travel time.
You can visit the Conference Board site and purchase the report by clicking here.
Trust is increasingly recognized as an essential element of successful personal relationships, effective teamwork, and large-scale commercial relationships. The amount citizens of one country trust the residents of another has even been shown to correlate with the amount of trade between the countries.
Evaluating the level of trust in a relationship is an often evaded and sometimes sensitive task. My work coaching top executives and facilitating work groups has taught me that the “trust topic” is much easier to discuss once we realize that trust has at least five constitutive components. Examining each aspect of trust, one by one, leads us to better judgments and more fruitful conversations.
- Sincerity
- Capacity
- Competence
- Consistency
- Care
When we say that we trust or mistrust a person it means that we have evaluated their:
1. Sincerity — Does what the person says match their internal conversation? Are they telling us what they honestly believe and truly intend? Once a person establishes a reputation for (more…)
New York Times columnist David Brooks, alumnus of my college and our off-campus newspaper, explains beautifully some of the reasons I advise my executive coaching clients to put away popular business books and get into great novels.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. … Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. … If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
Also see my short post, Why I review novels on a blog for CEOs and executive coaches
I felt more productive.
I was seeing results.
I realized how important it was to connect with your spirit in doing the things you do. Life is not just all details and logistics. You have to know why you’re doing things and understand that there are other people involved. You can’t get it from just going through the motions everyday. There’s the whole spiritual thing that some of the V.S.O.P. exercises made me realize, along with some of the things that Tony says. He doesn’t talk about it a lot, but that was one of the many things I took away.
It’s really amazing that such a short period of time could do so much and be so positive.
–Ann Lohmann
High Tech Executive on
Tony Mayo’s executive coaching program
Genuine Success: V.S.O.P. in 1997
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.
–George Bernard Shaw in
Man And Superman A Comedy And A Philosophy
Epistle Dedicatory To Arthur Bingham Walkley
See also, Success = Fully Engaged
The final idea for civic life is that every man and every woman should set before themselves this goal–that by the labor of their lifetime they shall pay the debt of their rearing and education, and also contribute sufficient for an handsome maintenance during their old age.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
–George Bernard Shaw quoted in
George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works
A Critical Biography (authorized)
By Archibald Henderson
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Much too often, business owners and salespeople eagerly run off to complete assignments given to us by employees, prospects, or clients. We are asked for something, we feel like we should know how to provide it, and we eagerly set to work trying to produce something that might please them.
My experience is that it pays big dividends to slow things down by asking many clarifying questions. Exactly what information will satisfy a prospect who is looking for a reference? Or comparable experience? Or assurance of financial stability? How much ownership or participation in an eventual sale will satisfy a key employee? What commission, recognition, or work/life adjustment will motivate our best salesperson?
My CEO executive coaching group members have learned that (more…)
I noticed something interesting about executive effectiveness while reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? The researchers identified specific traits of the most effective teachers, traits that I immediately recognized as characteristic of exceptional business leaders. Try reading the following excerpt from the article while substituting “manager” for “teacher” and “employees” for “students.”
First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly (more…)
The research suggests that the brain has more control over its own perception of passing time than people may know. For example, many people have the defeated sense that it was just yesterday that they made last year’s resolutions; the year snapped shut, and they didn’t start writing that novel or attend even one Pilates class. But it is precisely because they didn’t act on their plan that the time seemed to have flown away.
By contrast, the new research suggests, focusing instead on goals or challenges that were in fact engaged during the year — whether or not they were labeled as “resolutions” — gives the brain the opportunity to fill out the past year with memories, and perceived time.
Finally, the mind is perfectly capable of interpreting a fast-forward year, or decade, as something other than a frittering away of opportunities for self-improvement. In another series of experiments published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks.
The mind is a wonderful sense-making device: it takes ambiguous or confusing information and simplifies it according to rules of thumb.
–Aaron M. Sackett
Psychologist
University of St. Thomas
How the Brain Perceives Time
New York Times
Learn how to set goals: click here.
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