Sharpening Your Skills

How to Stop a Worry Spiral

July 29, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you tend to worry a lot—about your weight or money, what others think of you, going to a job you dislike, your life path,—you can use a simple trick proposed by the self-help author Shannon Kaiser.

In Joy Seeker (2019,) Kaiser suggests turning “what if” statements into “I wonder” statements. This reframing exercise helps quiet down your anxiety-filled thoughts and refocuses your mind on the best possible scenario rather than the worst:

Worry: What if I fail and it doesn’t work out?
Wonder: What if things go better than planned, and I am happier than I ever thought I could be?

Worry: What if people don’t understand or approve of what I do?
Wonder: What if people love it and my idea is well received?

Worry: What if I am rejected?
Wonder: What if I am accepted? My life will change for the better.

When you are too consumed with fear, your vision narrows, and your mind homes in on the threats you’re facing at the moment. You can’t focus on what you want. You can’t see the truth of the situation. Choosing wonder over worry helps you tap into the possibilities instead of getting sucked in by the limitations.

Idea for Impact: Approaching uncertainty with curiosity can help you fight hopelessness. Rather than admitting a terrible outcome as a foregone conclusion, you become open to possibility. You avoid sliding down into a pit of dread and despair. You’re far more likely to come up with effective ways for coping with the situation in question.

Niksen: The Dutch Art of Embracing Stillness, Doing Nothing

July 26, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Niksen - Dutch Technique of Doing Nothing, Just Being The Dutch have a practice they call Niksen, derived from “niks doen,” which literally means “nothing-ing.” It involves purposefully engaging in doing absolutely nothing, embracing a state of aimlessness.

Think of it as a sanctioned daydreaming session.

Niksen entails gazing out the window and allowing your mind to wander wherever it pleases. Unlike mindfulness meditation, where you observe your thoughts or focus on your breath, Niksen is about simply existing. Just being there. There’s no effort to return to the present moment or to analyze your thoughts.

In Niksen, you’re just being. You take a pause, practice stillness, and let your gaze drift to the horizon. It’s about being wherever you are, whether sitting or standing, without any deliberate action. When thoughts arise, you let them pass without scrutiny, allowing them to come and go naturally.

As a stress-relief technique, Niksen is gaining popularity. Embracing idleness means disconnecting from the constant buzz of connectivity and the pressure of stress, anxiety, and depression. Studies show that allowing your mind to wander activates different parts of the brain, maybe even tapping into some hidden wisdom.

Give Niksen a shot, even if it’s just for a minute or two every now and then. It can provide a much-needed break during moments of tension and worry. These brief escapes can add richness and intrigue to your life, expanding your horizons beyond the everyday.

Half-Size Your Goals

July 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the start of the year, if you’re like most people, you selected a bunch of lofty, impossible goals. Now, halfway through the year, you feel disappointed and let down with yourself. In fact, the longer your goals list, the more overwhelmed and off-track you’ve got.

As part of your mid-year review, reflect on the first six months of the year and adjust your goals for the rest of the year. Revisit your goals, assess your progress, evaluate your approach, and change your timeline. Break big ambitious goals down into more manageable decisions and improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire.

Try half-sized goals. If you’re struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal.

If you’re not getting good results, then you go back and tweak what you’re doing. Don’t feel the need to change everything in your life at once.

More Data Isn’t Always Better

July 23, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The hype around so-called ‘big data’ seems to have convinced many that unless the data and analytics are ‘big,’ they won’t have a big impact.

In reality, though, your organization can generate tons of value from the prudent use of smallish data.

Furthermore, you just don’t need big data tools such as Hadoop to solve every data analytics challenge you’ll face. In many cases, humble Microsoft Excel is all you’ll want.

More Data Isn't Always Better - Big Data. Often the missing gap isn’t in big data technologies but in data science skills. The rapid rise in your ability to collect data needs to be seconded by your ability to support, manage, filter, and interpret the data.

Idea for Impact: With data, more isn’t necessarily better. Small data can still have a significant impact. Rather than collecting data for the sake of it, identify why you need data and then go get the most meaningful data that can answer the questions you have.

Focus not on whether the data is small or big but on the problem you’re trying to solve.

Change Must Come from Within

July 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you want to become the type of person who wants to change, you must become the type of person who embodies that change repeatedly. You must deliberately weave the change into your sense of identity. Seth Godin notes in The Practice (2020,)

If you want to get in shape, it’s not difficult. Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done.

That’s not the difficult part.

The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.

When you use your actions to drive your identity, you’ll naturally become confident in your ability to make fundamental decisions that sustain—and enhance—who you are.

Idea for Impact: Habits stick when they respond to your sense of identity. Change your identity, change how you want to be seen, and you’ll change your life.

Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For

July 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Corn flakes were born (1894) when the Kellogg brothers inadvertently left a pot of boiled wheat overnight on a stove. They passed the flaky dough through bread rollers and baked the flakes to create a crunchy snack.

The Penicillin mold was discovered (1928) by Sir Alexander Fleming, who, upon returning from a vacation, saw a Petri dish that he had left behind without disinfecting. That Petri dish had a zone around an invading fungus where his Staphylococcus bacterium culture had not grown. A mold spore from another lab in the building had accidentally fallen on this culture. The spore had grown while Fleming was away. Rather than throw the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as belonging to the Penicillium genus, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.

The microwave oven was invented (1945) unintentionally during an experiment by Percy Spencer of Raytheon Corporation. Electromagnetic waves from a new vacuum tube melted a chocolate bar in his pocket while standing next to a magnetron.

Viagra had been developed (1989) as the chemical compound sildenafil citrate to treat hypertension and angina pectoris. Researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials that the compound was good for something else. It was approved for medical use in 1998.

Serendipity is a rich idea that is very central to the creative process. Lots of ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Physiologist Julius H. Comroe Jr. once said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”

Idea for Impact: Creativity is a disorderly journey. Much of the time, you may never get where you’re going. You may never find what you hope to find. Yet still, you must stay open to the new and the unexpected.

Explore how to transform serendipitous ‘mistakes’ into breakthroughs.

Entitlement and Anger Go Together

July 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Exaggerated entitlement could possibly explain what’s driving the recent surge of abusive or violent incidents on flights in America.

We live in a time where everyone seems hypervigilant to the point where even a slight snub can be taken as an act of deliberate aggression—either reactively or without provocation. People want to assert themselves, and every little social interaction seems to turn quickly into a battleground of entitlement.

Self-Protective Efforts Heighten Entitlement

To make things worse, air travel sits at the confluence of so many things involving so many people (and circumstances) where each “participant” has little direct control over what’s happening to them and others around. Political polarization and mask mandates seem to have intensified these anxieties too. Moreover, the FAA’s zero-tolerance policy toward disturbances and the threat of massive fines are unlikely to disincentivize passengers and staff in the heat of the moment.

When people feel entitled, they’re not just frustrated when others fail to acknowledge and entertain—even listen to—their presumed superior rights. People feel deceived and wronged. They feel victimized, get angry, and exude hostility. Worse, they feel even more justified in their demands and thus assume an even stronger sense of entitlement as compensation.

Idea for Impact: Entitlement and Responsibility are Inextricably Linked

Underlying this kind of anger process is a lack of separation of rights from responsibility. No professional, social, or domestic environment can remain stable and peaceful without everyone respecting the fact that rights and responsibilities are inseparable.

Nobody is entitled to compassion or fair treatment without acting on the responsibility to give it to others. If you don’t care about how others feel, you can’t demand that they care about how you feel. It’s a formula for disaster in human interactions.

The #1 Thing Top Salespeople Do

July 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It is astonishing how many salespeople aim for nothing and hit it every time.

Average salespeople often don’t have a written “game plan” for every sales call. They may have only a vague idea of how to go about their sales call. They usually wing it and hope for the best. They fail to plan and thus plan to fail.

Planning a sales call is vital because it gives you a framework to understand your customer’s buying motivations. You can have “value summaries” at hand to evoke her interest.

Establish the call objectives. What do you want to accomplish? Review your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, meeting notes, or whatever method you use to manage interactions with customers. Reexamine what was discussed the last time you met with the customer. What are her pain points? What might she need that she’s not asking for?
Develop a list of questions you’re going to ask. These questions should guide the “needs analysis” phase of the sales process—they shape her buying criteria. Being ready with prepared questions help minimize the amount of close-ended questions you’ll ask your customer.
Review what you can “value add” to your customers to incentivize getting more business from them. A “value add” could be anything from extending warranties, training staff, selling pre-assembled products, customizing products, providing financing, etc.
Think through what resistance you may anticipate. List possible objections that could stall a sale: bad timing, budgetary constraints, new leadership, market uncertainty, etc. Develop a go-to response for each challenge. Ask yourself, “How can I help the customer get past this resistance?”

Planning a sales call helps you get in the shoes of the person you’re trying to sell to and sell it from their perspective.

Idea for Impact: Always have a plan for a sales call. No matter how rushed you are, how well you know a customer, or how routine the call might be, plan the call. Never wing it. Great brands aren’t measured by units sold but relationships built.

Choosing Your Leadership Style: Detail-Orientation

July 5, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As Amazon’s Andy Jassy takes over the reins from Jeff Bezos, the Wall Street Journal has a profile of Jassy’s ultra-detail-oriented management style:

Former colleagues say Mr. Jassy would spend enormous amounts of time on the narrowest of details if he thought it was important. … When an AWS data center in Virginia was hit by a major outage, Mr. Jassy personally got involved in figuring out the problem. It turned out a technician had been checking a generator and the door accidentally bumped into a switch, shutting it off. Mr. Jassy dug into the incident and pressed the team to redesign the generators. When the CEO is digging at that level, everyone at the company starts to dig at the same level.

Flexibility and a detail-oriented mindset are leadership qualities that Jassy shares with Bezos. As at many founder-led firms, Amazon’s corporate culture has mimicked these traits, and the colossus has historically been able to jump on opportunities quickly and quality-control its organizational capabilities.

Idea for Impact: A fundamental duty of leadership is to guide an organization’s collective awareness. Attention to detail (without micromanagement) matters. When leaders don’t really care about the details and are content to produce low-quality work, their teams will start to do, too.

In areas where influential leaders aren’t detail-focused, they have somebody on their teams that does. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously focused on creativity and innovation while relying on Tim Cook and his tight-knit team of operations executives to run Apple’s operations.

Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks

June 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Do those dreaded tasks first—the ones you don’t want to complete. Those are the ones that are truly core to who you are and what your ambitions are.

To be time-effective, you’ll need to use your will-power, a limited resource that it is, in the most effective way possible. Not only does this give the most time to react and correct problems that emerge from the difficult tasks, making progress on the challenging tasks is an incredible morale boost.

You procrastinate when there’s too much to do, or you dislike a task or don’t know where to start. If you figure out which of these blocks you, you can determine the next steps and get it over with.

Idea for Impact: Tasks you enjoy doing are, in fact, often hard not to do. If you tackle them first, you’ll get to the end of the day and find you’ve not achieved anything meaningful at all—just a bunch of ‘stuff’ which, however gratifying, won’t make much difference.

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Self-Protective Efforts Heighten Entitlement

Idea for Impact: Entitlement and Responsibility are Inextricably Linked

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