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Category: Growth

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Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

The 5 Don’ts of Frequent Feedback

The 5 Don’ts of Frequent Feedback

The transformation of the typical performance review process often includes the phrase, “make feedback more frequent”.  That sounds like a good idea. It is if certain conditions are in place.  There are five conditions which will either make or break the efficacy of frequent feedback.

I was out of town for a weekend and decided to play golf at a local course. Because I was alone the starter connected me with a threesome.  One of the men frequently spoke. He spoke during everyone’s shots. He was whispered when someone was about to hit their shot yet you could still hear him.

He would not, or could not, stop himself. His frequent babbling was annoying enough but he made it worse by talking only about himself.  He babbled about how he had played this and that hole.  He added unnecessary details about the unfair bounce that prevented a par etc. etc.  It was not helpful and it was annoying. The same annoyance and lack of value can occur with frequent feedback about work performance unless these five conditions are met.

The Five Don’ts

The first of the five conditions important for adding value during frequent feedback is to have a clear standard of behavior that everyone agrees will add value. In other words, don’t forget to create a clear standard of specific and observable behaviors.  With a clear standard, managers and employees can provide helpful feedback based on that standard.  They can avoid expressing opinions.

This leads us to the second condition. Don’t forget to use data during feedback and avoid unsolicited criticism.  When a clear standard exists, everyone and anyone can ask if the behavior matches the standard.  Criticism or opinions are unnecessary.  A manager expressing an opinion about the performance of an employee can create fear in that employee.

Often the feedback will lead to emotions.  This is especially true when there are challenging performance issues which have not been addressed in a timely manner.  When there is emotion empathy is needed.  Don’t forget to provide empathy.  Empathy is the sincere expression that you understand the emotions someone is experiencing.  Feedback without empathy is worthless.  Empathy allows the person receiving the feedback to absorb it and use it.  If there is an emotion and there is no empathy the feedback is rejected.  The entire interaction becomes a waste of time.

This next condition don’t will seem out of order. Don’t forget to ask permission.  Get the person’s consent.  Ask permission to provide feedback. Even better, ask everyone in your organization to ask permission before they provide feedback.   Make it a rule or part of the standard.  Allow the person who is to receive the feedback to say, “no, I am not ready”.  Give them the opportunity to wait for a better time.

Our Declaration of Independence states, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  Feedback is delivered between men and women with the consent of those receiving the feedback.  Give them the choice. Allow them to consent.

The most important condition is last.  This condition is also the biggest change in how the typical manager thinks about feedback.  Don’t make the feedback about the person.  Make the feedback about process or method.  Two of the earlier conditions were “don’t forget to use data during feedback (avoid unsolicited criticism)” and “don’t forget to create a clear standard.”  If these are handled then the only thing left to discuss is either the process within which the employee is working or the method the employee is using to perform.

Feedback doesn’t have to be about the person. Give them feedback about their methods and how those methods can change.  This will eliminate fear of change.

Frequent feedback is not enough to create optimum value and optimum improvement.  Be sure you create the right environment by implementing these conditions.  It will make the feedback easier and more effective.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.

Fearless Feedback

 

 

 

Categories
Management Marketing Skills

Life’s Choices and The Roads to Which They Lead

“Sunday Negotiation Insight”

“The decisions you make in life will determine the roads you’ll travel. Manage your decisions better and you can travel better on life’s roads.” –Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

“Life’s Choices And The Roads To Which They Lead” 

Most people are very much aware that the choices they make in life determine what they’ll experience in life. That’s to say, some are aware of such at an intellectual level but are not mindful of such in their everyday practice. Such a lack of attentiveness to the choices we make and the impact they have on our life lead some people down a road upon which they had not planned to travel. Worse, such inattentiveness can lead to unintended consequences.

As you engage in your daily activities, be mindful of what you’re doing and the decisions you make. The impact they have on your future can be long-term. In lending your attentiveness to making such decisions consider:

  1. Is this the best decision I can make at this time?
  2. Do I have enough input/insight to make an intelligent decision?
  3. Where might such a decision lead and is that where I’d like to be?
  4. What cost or gain might I incur by not making a decision at this time?
  5. If I make the wrong decision, what procedure might I put in place to inform me of such? Then, how long might it take and at what cost to correct the decision?

The more you’re aware of the impact today’s decision may have on the long-term aspects of your life, the more you’ll be mindful of controlling such decisions. Doing so will relieve you of the potential angst that you might have otherwise experienced … and everything will be right with the world.

What does this have to do with negotiations?

When negotiating, one has to be highly aware of where a decision might lead. To haphazardly engage in a negotiation with a ‘go with the flow’ mindset is to engage in folly; you leave the outcome to chance and chance favors the person that’s more prepared and thoughtful.

To thwart folly, have a well thought out negotiation plan. Consider the possibilities of where one decision might lead versus another and what impact such might have on the negotiation outcome.

Negotiations are like a game of chess. The more thoughtful you are about your decisions and the more you can think of the moves you’ll make down the line, the better you’ll be able to control the flow and outcome of the negotiation. That’s how good negotiators win more negotiations. The question you should now consider is, how good do you wish to be in any of your negotiations? To enhance your negotiation win rate, make better decisions by considering the impact of those decisions.

 Remember, you’re always negotiating.

 

 

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

The 3 Types of People in Your Life

The 3 Types of People in Your Life

You’ve heard the adage: You are the average of the 5 people you spend most time with.

Let’s do a riff on that.

Think of the people you spend the most time with in these contexts:

  • Work
  • Family
  • Socially

Which version of you do they relate to:

  1. Historical You: Those who cling to an antiquated version of who you once were. They themselves are likely stuck in the past, and don’t want to acknowledge the who you’ve become. Your progress is threatening to them because it means you’re leaving them behind.
  2. Present Day You: Those who see you as you are today – your current title, marital status, financial status, etc. They are supportive of this version of you. They are comfortable with your progress, as long as it’s not too big, bold or dramatic. Too much change too quickly scares them, also because they fear being left behind.
  3. Highest Self You: That rare breed of person who sees past your present-day greatness and limitations and only speaks to the most elevated version of who you are, and who you can become.

 

What Type Do You Surround Yourself With Most? 

I reckon our biggest impediment to progress is the percentage of #2’s we carry around (so true on so many levels…).

While the #2’s are well-intentioned, and their support feels comforting…when they become the predominant influence in your life, they can anchor you to your present state. The size and speed of your progress is hindered.

Therefore, your growth is directly correlated to the percentage of people in your life that speak to the Highest Self version of you.

These are the people who stand tall for you even when you’re unwilling to do so for yourself. They are the ones who call you on your BS.

They are the ones who push you beyond what you believe is possible.

It’s because they see YOU.

Not who you were, not who you are now, but YOU.

 

I Challenge You….

Challenge #1: Take 60 seconds and identify the people in your life who belong in category #3 – those who only relate to the Highest Self version of You.

Challenge #2: Identify a strategy to create one more #3 to each of the contexts – work, family, socially – in your life.

Your Highest Self Awaits.

-DQ

PS – If you want to accelerate your path to your Highest Self, be sure to pre-order my book – Design Your Future: Stop Drifting and Start Living – which is set to hit Amazon in November/December.

 

Categories
Growth News and Politics Personal Development

Words Can Kill… and Do

Recently, 20-year old Michelle Carter has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison. This is an unprecedented case in that Carter sent texts to her friend, Conrad Roy III, telling him to kill himself. Roy, who was 18, rigged a generator to his pickup truck, jumped in the vehicle and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The fatal incident occurred in 2014 in Massachusetts. There has never been a case of manslaughter where words alone caused someone’s death.

Michelle Carter received the sentence which includes the stipulation that she spend at least 15 months in prison. The judgment was immediately stayed to determine how to handle a case like this.

It is unusual since words were actually the killer of the depressed boy. While Roy was in the car he was texting Carter, who sent numerous taunting texts about “just do it.” Some of the things she sent to him were:

“The time is right and you are ready…”

            “You can’t think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don’t get why you aren’t.”

At one point Roy ran out of the car to get some air. Carter texted him to “get back in” his truck, which he did.  Consequently, Roy died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz found that the texts “constituted wanton and reckless conduct.”

I wrote about this exact subject, “Words Can Kill” in my book “Who’s Changing the Meaning?”  Here is an excerpt:

“Words are powerful. They can set our mood, change our beliefs, determine our actions and motivate or cripple our life. A positive comment from someone can lift our spirits and have us soaring throughout the day. Conversely, a negative comment can depress us facing the day with a bad attitude. That’s how powerful words are. Or should I say that’s how powerful we allow words to be. 

Words can kill. They can affect our health. Studies have shown that words have a biochemical effect on us. The medical field recognizes that the healing system is tied to the belief system. The best example is when a person seeks treatment for an ailment and the diagnosis is bad. Time and again the person will get worse once they find out the cause of their illness. They had the illness before the news but once they hear the diagnosis, they start to act the way patients with that illness act.

 It doesn’t have to be that way. People can say what they want and usually do. We can’t stop others from saying negative things about us or telling us how to act, but we do have the choice on how to handle those words. We decide how we are going to let the words alter who we are and what we do. We have the ability to control how it affects us. We don’t agree with their words so why would we give weight to them. Instead of letting the words hurt us, we let them go. 

Ignoring something that is said about us or to us can be difficult to do. Yet it is such an effective way to live. If an individual says something bad about us and we ignore it the person has failed to achieve their intent. We need to realize that if someone speaks out against us that is their right; freedom of speech baby. The insult is not where our focus should be. Our focus is to remember that we don’t care what they think. If someone is belligerent enough to talk bad about us, why would we value their opinion!”

Teens, in particular, are deeply affected by what others say about them. They take in the words and allow them to live inside. They need to realize, as we all do, that words do not control us. We control the words and what we do with them.

I don’t know what the outcome of Michelle Carter’s appeal will be. We need to remember that we have the choice on how words will affect us. The power of words can be diffused by us. We take over the power by deciding to discard the words and move on. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me is not true. They can if we let them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

The Real Enemy

The Real Enemy

(Today’s post is also the feature article in this month’s issue of Gloss magazine, an online publication featuring entrepreneurs and lifestyle designers).

Your enemy isn’t pain.

The real enemy is when you don’t feel much of anything at all.

As a speaker, trainer and coach to high-performing big shots like you, I often find myself face-to-face with highly successful people who can’t seem to figure out why they are increasingly restless in the lives they’ve created for themselves.

On the one hand, you may genuinely enjoy the work you do, you’re compensated handsomely, hold an esteemed position in your work and community, and love/are loved by those around you.

Yet on the other hand you’re simply less interested in the life you’ve created for yourself. What once excited you, doesn’t as much anymore. Your highs aren’t all that high, your lows aren’t all that low. And you don’t know why.

Other than the occasional frustration or fleeting moment of happiness, you can’t escape the feeling that you’re not feeling much at all.

Yet you still want to protect the life you have.

And life isn’t painful enough yet to change.

So you remain…drifting into a future of More of the Same.

TRAPPED

This word keeps coming up over and over again when I’m with high performers: “Trapped.”
Sometimes it’s spoken explicitly. Other times, it’s lurking back there behind a façade of achievement, a quiet desperation that something is not quite right, you just don’t know what.

Continue reading full article..

– DQ

PS – In case you missed it, I was featured on the ChooseFI podcast (FI = Financial Independence) last week.

It was their #1 highest downloaded podcast with over 10,000 downloads in the first day alone.

We unpack the key concepts of my book Design Your Future: Stop Drifting and Start Living

  • How to know if you’re drifting in life? Is your life path based on fear?
  • Why most people feel a lack of “progress” in their lives and why this experience can feel subtly devastating
  • How to interrupt your limiting patterns of beliefs and behaviors
  • Practical steps on how to design a future you can’t wait to live into

Check out episode #33 of the ChooseFI podcast by clicking here.

If you have a commute, a workout or long plane ride coming up, you definitely need to check out this ChooseFI podcast.

 

Categories
Growth Skills Women In Business

5 Ways Volunteering Builds Your Personal Brand

It’s absolutely true that we are all busier than we used to be. There are many things vying for our attention – from kids and family to our business commitments. In fact, many times it feels down right exhausting. And you are thinking to yourself right this very moment, “so now you are telling me to carve out time to volunteer?” The number one excuse I hear all of the time when I advise people to get involved in their community by volunteering at events or joining a nonprofit board or a service club is “I don’t have time.” As with anything in life, the benefits of how you spend your time must be worth it. Because there are two things the world doesn’t make more of and that is land and time.

How Volunteering Shaped Me

Volunteering was not something I grew up doing much of, nor did I see members of my family doing it. Sure there were the occasional baseball games of my brother’s where we had to work the concession stand, but that was basically it. Other than a few instances like this, I wasn’t exposed to much volunteering.

So when I decided to join a service club in 1995, I was not only busy in both my personal and business lives, but I was about to embark on something that was, quite frankly, way out of my comfort zone. And that’s exactly why I did it.

You see I used to be very shy. I was uncomfortable being in a room full of people I did not know. What would I say to them? How did I go about starting a conversation with someone I knew nothing about? It was paralyzing. Those that know me well always find this fact a bit unbelievable. But that’s the whole point. Being involved with a service club helped me overcome shyness and increase my self-esteem. It was the number one way I was able to grow personally and professionally.

Here are five ways volunteering can help you build your personal brand:

Enhance Skills.

Volunteering can help with many aspects of sharpening your skills or discovering a hidden talent. There might be instances when you will take the lead on a project or lead a committee or board. I do not care how great of a leader anyone is, managing a nonprofit board is always a personal growth opportunity. Besides honing people skills, other skills you may learn include developing a strategic plan, preparing a budget, learning to fund raise, mastering decision making, or marketing an event. The more unique skills you have, the more you differentiate yourself.

Improve Speaking.

It may be as simple as learning not to be afraid to speak up with your ideas in a small group setting, or it may be as big as being the president of a service club and having to speak to a room full of members regularly. There are opportunities at both ends of the spectrum.

For the most part, we are all comfortable talking about what we know very well, but when it comes to speaking about something new to us, this provides an opportunity for growth. As mentioned earlier, I was extremely shy and the thought of standing up in front of others was not something I even saw myself doing.

Now with over 20 years of volunteer and nonprofit board experience – which included serving as the International President for a service club – I have overcome this to the point that I do keynote speeches. If I can do it, you certainly can!

Build Confidence.

Building confidence goes hand-in-hand with learning new skills and becoming more comfortable speaking in front of others. Your confidence will grow when you become better at anything you do.

Develop Empathy.

Empathy is about putting the needs of others before your own. That is what you do when you volunteer. Volunteering demonstrates you care and that you can be sensitive to the needs of others. Giving back teaches you to nurture relationships and take your eyes off of yourself. The atmosphere of volunteering allows you to be open to different views and gain real connections with people, which builds trust. Trust is at the core of every successful business and personal interaction.

Gain Visibility.

When you put yourself out in the community, you will meet new people, thus strengthening your network. Many movers and shakers in your field or community are already volunteering and looking to connect with others. Building relationships is vital to anyone’s success. You may gain new clients or it may lead to new career opportunities. The more you are seen, the more people will think about you for various business, or even personal, interactions.

Building your personal brand by giving back to your community is a powerful win-win. These five areas develop who you are as a person and the value you provide to others. Because in the end, personal branding is about what you bring to others.

I help executives create a powerful image and brand so they look and feel confident wherever they are. Contact me at sheila@imagepowerplay.com to schedule a 20-minute call to discuss how we can work together to grow your visibility through my return on image® services.

 

 

 

Categories
Entrepreneurship Management Operations Personal Development

Lessons From Love-Focused

Love has always been good business. No, I’m not talking about the world’s oldest profession. That’s not love. I’m talking about the kind of love that leads to wedding bells – businesses that cater to people who want to find true love or who have found it and want to celebrate it.

But what can those types of love-focused businesses teach us about how we can use love as a principle that shapes any business? Plenty.

Janis Spindel, the president of Serious Matchmaking, believes the type of trust and confidence you need when looking for personal love are also vital to leadership in any business.

“A loving relationship is about being committed,” Spindel said. “Business leadership requires the same commitment and intuitiveness.”

When people love others, Spindel said, they communicate more clearly and support each other more proactively, which makes for healthy relationships in business as well as in life.

Lindsey Sachs, whose company Collective/by Sachs plans weddings in Colorado and Minnesota, believes love is an essential lens through which to view business decisions.

“Considering love in the context of business helps to make companies human, authentic, relatable and better yet, more than a transaction,” Sachs said. “As professionals and consumers, we all understand the overwhelming feeling love plays in our emotions and decisions. A company that infuses love is more likely to stand out.”

Love, she said, creates empathy and purpose in her work.

“With love present, we can more clearly relate to our clients and staff, find common goals to lead to more powerful solutions, products, and services,” she said. “And keeping love at the forefront encourages us to see our work through a different lens of appreciation. … Reminding ourselves that our work stems from a love of something much greater, our overall context, attitude and ultimately productivity will adapt for the good.”

Businesses that promote love and celebrate love still need profits to keep their doors open, but they understand the powerful connection between loving what you do in the service of people who love what you do. It builds strong relationships, trust, loyalty, and the commitment that allows a business to not only make money but make a difference.

 

Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

How to Give White Flag Feedback

How to Give White Flag® Feedback

Delivering effective feedback is enormously important and enormously challenging.  I have spoken about this in my last two blogs.  I identified the three reasons why the feedback is so challenging namely the confusion between feedback and criticism, the concern about making things worse, and a lack of knowledge about how to give feedback such that the other party accepts it, learns, and applies the learning.

I also explained how we needed a tool that could make it safe to deliver and safe to accept.  I explained the importance of the White Flag® as a neutral symbol to pave the way for giving and receiving feedback in a non-threatening way.  The White Flag® is the international sign of truce.  It provides a context that allows for a free flow of information without fear of reprisal.

But how do you use the White Flag®?  What are the key steps and techniques?  Can anyone do it? The purpose here is to answer these questions and a few others.

There are three key factors that optimize the use of the White Flag® tool.  These three factors can be summarized in three words, Think-Behave-Improve.

First, to use the White Flag® properly it is most useful to think about it in the most useful way.  The purpose of the White Flag® is not to assign blame on a person. The purpose is to partner to uncover the real root causes of mistakes.  The giver and the receiver can partner to search for root causes inside the process. Those root causes can nearly always be found in the process (94% of the time according to Dr. W. Edwards Deming) and not the person. Feedback therefore is not about making someone wrong. It is about making the process right.

In order to trigger the feedback there needs to be clear expectations.  These expectations can take the form of operationalized values behaviors.  There are three categories of values behaviors namely integrity, respect, and customer focus.

These behaviors must be operationalized meaning they are observable by anyone.  By making the expectations observable anyone can decide if the expectations are being met simply by observation. If they do not observe what is expected that becomes the trigger for feedback and therefore the use of the White Flag® tool.

Once we know feedback is needed we must deliver it in a manner that optimizes learning.  We are calm.  We wait if there is too much emotion (either with us or the other person).  We ask permission to give the feedback. We share the data (what we saw or heard) and avoid opinion or judgement.  We provide clarification if necessary.   We ask questions to find the real root cause of the problem. We ask “what process is not working?”  We ask questions to identify the first 15% of that process and then we identify how to improve that first 15%. We do this in partnership not in judgement.  We do it as a team and not in isolation.

All the while we are asking these questions. We are calm.  We are inquisitive. We ask questions to learn and not to blame. We ask these questions to uncover a new action step to address the process issues.  The White Flag® is a tool to decide how to fix a process as a team.

The White Flag® is a tool that makes feedback fearless and effective.  It is simple. It’s not easy and it’s doable and necessary for learning.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.

 

 

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Disrupting the Status Quo – Part 1

Disrupting the Status Quo

I hear the term status quo a lot, especially from thought leaders in terms of disrupting it. I agree with that sentiment so much so that disrupting the status quo was actually the tagline for my business a few years ago. So what is the status quo and why should it be disrupted? What does it really have to do with you and your business?

sta·tus quo (stādəs ˈkwō) – The current situation, the way things are now.  However in today’s context it also tends to imply a sub-optimal state of affairs. It’s the way things are in contrast to how much better things could be.

I find that most organizations can use a disruption of the status quo because things are not working as well as they could be. Whether it is improved employee engagement, increased productivity, more influence within your industry, better collaboration or improved communication, there is often at least one area that needs a good old-fashioned disruption.

A few years ago when I was consulting, I was in my last two weeks with a client that I had worked with for several years. I asked how I could best help in my last two weeks and the VP responded by saying just stick with the status quo. That was his way of telling me to just show up. He wasn’t saying it because I had not been contributing or working while there, but I read between the lines that he did not have any need for me to work on anything for him. That organization was actually the one that inspired the title of my book, The Corporate Detox.

Another status quo I’ve seen at clients over the years are meetings that start late with a majority showing up 10 minutes late and project managers recapping everything that had been missed. This was frustrating for those of us who were on time and a poor use of the organizations resources (time and money).

The status quo for an executive might be a lack of shared vision, the ball getting dropped, missed deadlines, lost opportunities, tension, lack of communication or at least meaningful communication, and/or high turnover.

Now I ask you, what is the status quo at your organization? I.e., where does your corporate culture passively settle for something you know is not as good as it should be? I want you to really think about what habits and situations are systemic within your organization. Take a minute, grab a pen, and a piece of scratch paper and write out your description of the status quo where you are right now.

The following are the high level steps it will take to disrupt the status quo:

One thing at a time

Disrupting the status quo is essentially creating change and change can be hard, especially changes to human behavior. Since you will find that most of your business problems are really people problems, the change that are you going to make is most likely around how people behave, think, and work. Since this is hard enough with one person (think of a change you tried to make for yourself,) it is that much tougher with lots of people. That is why you have to address one change or one disruption at a time. Focus time, energy and resources on one thing, do it well, then move on.

Get buy in

Have you ever tried to make a sweeping change by command? “This is how it will be from now on!” It never ends up working the way you thought it would, does it? That’s because even if you have a few amazing people who are going to follow your leadership without worrying about themselves, most people think in terms of “what’s in it for me?” and are scared of change, fearing that it will cause more trouble for them than it will solve. For people to make change they have to want to make the change. So if you want them to get on board, you have to get them to buy into the change.

Communicate status

Once you have the goal in mind, the change you are focused on and the buy-in from those involved it’s time to make sure everyone knows where they are and where they are going. This is going to take a culture of communication. This means that you as the leader are consistently communicating the progress of the change. Are things going as planned? Have you hit a roadblock? Where are you on the road? People will quickly revert back to their old ways and retract their buy in if they don’t know where they are going or where they are. It’s much easier to turn around and go back home than to continue down a dark road with no end in sight.

Stay tuned for more in this series where we will take each step highlighted above and dive deeper into the implementation of each one. If you can’t wait that long email me at sharon@c-suiteresults.com to talk more about this and start disrupting your status quo today.

 

 

 

Categories
Management Marketing Operations Personal Development

Talk Can Be Cheap and Costly

“Sunday Negotiation Insight”

“Evaluate the mindset that gives you advice. One that’s sane or insane, may have the best of intentions, but you’ll bear the cost for following such advice.” –Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert www.TheMasterNegotiator.com

“Talk Can Be Cheap And Costly”

Talk is cheap and cheap talk can be costly. The costly aspect of cheap talk can come in the form of too much bluster setting the groundwork for future activities. To the degree that bluster is believed, and depending on what’s at stake, there can be a high price to pay to bring such bluster to fruition.

When you’re engaged with a prognosticator or anyone that you perceive as being overly zealous of a position and/or expected outcome, be wary. Raise your level of awareness to the possibility of being led to a place in which you do not wish to reside. By being mindful of such insights you might possibly prevent yourself from falling prey to cheap talk. Even if what someone engages in is all talk and no action, such sentiments could cost you time, money, and other assets that you might have used to progress your own agenda.

Understanding the potential cost of cheap talk can allow you to think differently per the cost you might have to incur from following someone else’s ideology. Thus, be very mindful as to the course of direction you adopt as the result of who and what you believe. If you don’t like where someone’s edicts might lead, don’t follow. By being mentally flexible, you’ll always be more adept at making course corrections … and everything will be right with the world.

What does this have to do with negotiations?

In a negotiation, be careful of whose verbal elixir you consume. Instead of it making you younger, wiser, and better off, it might just increase your aging process in the form of more stress, anxiety, and a worse outcome for you. Remember, everything that glitters ain’t gold. Such is definitely the case when it comes to someone espousing words that intentionally, or unintentionally lead you upon a mental path that doesn’t serve you. Sometimes, when you stare into the abyss (i.e. become mesmerized), the abyss stares back at you (i.e. you lose your will). That may cause you to lose your control. Control yourself by controlling what you believe and the source of those beliefs.

 Remember, you’re always negotiating.