Episodes

  • How To Provide Great Customer Service

    How To Provide Great Customer Service
    Aug 4 2024
    Great service is so fleeting and illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone. One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude. Good service, consistently delivered, is no accident and so it has to be made to occur. How can we do that? Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service. He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book “Moments Of Truth”. Carlson’s insights flooded back to me when I checked into a hotel in Singapore. By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singaporean Government, who spend millions every year to develop and maintain their landscaped, leafy, green, tropical thoroughfares. This is smart. You are already in a pleasant mood just getting into town. While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice. Singapore is very humid and trust me, after a long flight, that ice cold beverage went down very well. I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel. One of Carlzon’s observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery. For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answering your call in a pleasant, helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand. The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy, disinterested and unfriendly. Instantly, your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer. How do you feel when you are given the run around from department to department? So back to my story. As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn’t working. After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on. There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room. Actually, I discovered the same system in the elevator, when I unsuccessfully tried to select my floor. Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant, busy young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two salient facts to me. Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand. Let me mention a customer service breakdown I particularly dislike here in Japan. When you call just about any organization here, you get a very flat voice answering the phone saying in Japanese ,“XYZ company here”. You ask to speak with that very excellent and impressive member of staff, Ms. Suzuki whom you met recently. The flat uninterested voice tells you that she “is not at her desk right now” and then you are abandoned to stone cold motherless silence. The “may I take down your name and phone number so that she can call you back” bit is rarely offered. Instead, you are left hanging on the phone. The inference of the silence is that if Ms. Suzuki is not around, that is your problem buddy and you should call back later, rather than expect a return call. Again, to Carlzon’s point, these inconsistencies of customer service directly damage the brand. In this example, when I had previously met Ms. Suzuki, I was impressed by her and consequently I had a good impression of the whole organisation. I was projecting that positive vibe to the entire company. The person taking the call has just put that positive image of the brand to the sword. When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service. You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department’s efforts to create an excellent image of the organization. After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven’t you? But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand? Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn’t get properly briefed. I heard one of my recent hires in the sales team answering the phone with an unhelpful tone in his voice. He actually sounded like he was angry. He was in his fifties, so no boy, but obviously that had been his standard, ugly phone manner throughout his entire working life. A perpetual brand killer, client ...
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    14 mins
  • Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo

    Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo
    Jul 28 2024
    I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses. Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate. Stepping on to the floor The dojo is the ultimate equalizer. Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else. You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, society status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities. In business, we forget this primary lesson and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities. We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded. Starting The class begins with a short meditation interval. This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what is to come. Next everyone is bowing toward the front. The front of the class represents all who came before us. We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization. By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going. Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion. Finally, we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travelers on a journey of self-discovery. How do we start the work day? Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there. In our office we review one of the Dale Carnegie Principles each day. We then share our scheduled meetings, our highest goals for the day, end with a motivational quote and a final rousing call to all do our best (ganbarimashoo!). Stretching We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at the highest possible levels of performance. If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice and coaching or are you just practicising on the client? Basics We repeat the same drills over and over, every class, every year, forever. We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution. We are aiming for absolute efficiency and economy of movement. We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought. A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity? Sparring There are two formats. Prearranged sparring dictates what is coming and the order in which it comes. Free sparring is one hundred percent spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of ploy and counter ploy. At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in under one minute, but using our physical techniques with total body commitment. When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker? Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes? Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains and speed over their brawn? Kata These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents. The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection. The form is set and so we can release the mind into a Zen state enabling us to go beyond the form. Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected? Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness? Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation? Strengthening and warming down Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance. We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles. Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace? Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people? Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested. Finish We repeat the bowing and this time we add our Values. We voice carefully chosen words which represent the value system of our dojo, (Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect). These are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our normal routines. How do we end the workday? Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow? Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better? The system of the martial arts hasn’t changed all that much over the many centuries and for a very simple reason. It works. How about your company? Are you perfecting your systems for the ages?
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    12 mins
  • 320 Client Contact Insights

    320 Client Contact Insights
    Jul 21 2024
    Japan is merciless with salespeople. When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss. They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”. If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly. They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back. They never will. No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name. They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through. The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of. They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”. They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”. Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different. It has worked for thousands of years here. So how do we break through the steel barrier. Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name. The last day of the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one. Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th) are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc. If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day. This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up. Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery. Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained. They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns. I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them. I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point. I could never get past the gatekeeper. She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened. I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets. You would expect he would want to talk with me. No such luck. In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff. I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country. Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them. That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are. This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm. The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am. They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch. This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there. Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there. Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up. If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had. Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them. Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to...
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    12 mins
  • 319 Nerd Presenter Errors In Japan

    319 Nerd Presenter Errors In Japan
    Jul 14 2024
    I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology. Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses. Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry. He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years. The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow. It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent. Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company. Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space. Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable. Apart from that quibble though, they were well done. I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material. I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time. Where was he looking? He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and behind him at the monitor he was using to show the slides. In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form TV monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time. They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee. He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at it the whole time. Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter. He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience. Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles. He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject. Unfortunately, he preferred to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety. I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher around shoulder height, so they would be more visible. He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence. I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible. What was going on here? I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge. He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience. He didn’t seem to understand that in order to convince an audience of your point of view, you need to engage them. Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day. He must have imagined that his personal part in the process was not relevant. Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him. He just continued to stare at the screen. By the way, the words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at. The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal. Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader. We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language. Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds. Longer than that it becomes too intrusive. Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person. Don’t do it in any predictable order, because people will anticipate what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet. Rather divide the room up into six sections. Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room. Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject. Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm. He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit. The quality of your content may be the best on the planet, but that does not remove your role in explaining it. Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.
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    11 mins
  • 318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan

    318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan
    Jul 7 2024

    Focus is under constant attack. The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor. Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable. That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics. The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team. The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed. The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients.

    The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time. Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse. Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate. Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives. "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses. If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state.

    We are not delegating enough. We know we should do more of it but we don't. We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload. In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat. After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves. Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do?

    Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds. We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do. The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift. We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished. Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau.

    We never get to any perfect harmony with our team. The ones we want to keep, move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default. The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again. This kills progress. The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode. We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer. Hiring gets harder and more expensive.

    None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon. The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important. The agile yet focused will win in this game. A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness. Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator. We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion.

    The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint. We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going. This sounds simple. But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future? Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward? Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like.

    “I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague. What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction?

    The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment. Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done. We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing. We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds. We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place. The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide.

    So stop what we are doing. Intervene in our busyness. Re-connect with who we really are. Reaffirm our direction. Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.
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    10 mins
  • 317 Sales Is A Process In Japan

    317 Sales Is A Process In Japan
    Jun 30 2024
    Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along. Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale? This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that. We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour. The sale call roadmap starts even before the call. These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company. We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them. Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start. We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects. When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors. I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank. He was an absolute master at this. He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing. We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew. He did this to break the ice and establish rapport. I never did get to brief him on my division! This rapport building is important with clients. We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us. Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them. We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them. In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention. We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering. In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers? Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this. They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs. Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation. We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance. We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have. If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale. We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves. Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don’t need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution. Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company. We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract. We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results. This is where word pictures are very powerful. In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate. So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share. If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too. The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies. Once we have done...
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    13 mins
  • 316 Inspire Your Audience

    316 Inspire Your Audience
    Jun 23 2024
    At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring. Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems. What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves. You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don’t just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence. There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared. You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them. So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it ...
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    11 mins
  • 315 Don't Fear Failure

    315 Don't Fear Failure
    Jun 16 2024
    For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background, in the inner sanctums of my mind. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), big drinker (every night) and a big gambler (every Saturday at the track). If you grew up in a gambler's household, then you know what never having any money is all about. The weekly pay packet received on Friday evening is taken down to the racetrack and blown on Saturday morning. I never gamble, I never smoke and I drink very, very moderately. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) it is called in Japanese – my Dad was my teacher by negative example. So as a gambler's son, you start below the waterline and have to work hard to break the surface and make something of yourself and eventually you do. The strange part is that the fear of poverty, the fear of failing never leaves you. Somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that success is not allowed for you. So you drive yourself hard, constantly dissatisfied with your progress. It is never big enough, never good enough, never fast enough, never safe enough. I could never answer the question of how much was enough, so I just tried to maximize it every time, in every way, in every situation. This put enormous stress and pressure on myself. Then one day, something happens or someone says something, that makes you rock back on your heels and think hard about it. That is what happened to me. I was describing my fears of the cardboard box and my listener questioned that thesis. He said, "Greg, you have a Ph.D., you have a big job with lot's of responsibility, you have money, you have assets and investments, you have drive and energy, so why are you operating on a false premise of failure. Why can't you drive forward based on a different idea? What about the concept that you can live out of your potential, rather than your fear of failure?". Wow. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was stopped in my tracks by that comment. That thought of living out of my potential had never occupied my mind, not for even one nanosecond. Getting good information and doing something about it are not the same thing. I was gripped by what he said and started to ask myself whether that was actually feasible. After so many decades of living out of fear of failure, could I just switch gears completely? Well it turns out that I could. From that moment in 2000, I forgot about a cardboard box bound future. I made the switch by starting to concentrate on what I had going for me and looked for ways to make more of that. Find out more when we come back from the break I made a list of all the things I thought were my strengths and I added that list to my goal setting routine, for daily review. I concentrated on the positive, not the negative. It sounds simple to say that, but this is not simple, when your whole lifetime narrative has been one of probable failed future prospects. I changed my perspective about myself. I started by questioning my basic assumption - why I thought I would eventually fail? What was the evidence for that assumption? Was I still caught up in my father’s paradigm of self perpetuating poverty, as part of the gambler’s curse. He was a hard worker. He started work at 13 out in the bush on a sheep station in the west of Queensland. He tried many things, but he could never get ahead because of the gambling. When I analysed it, what had any of his life challenges to do with me? I said to myself, “Hey, I don’t gamble – ever”. My real narrative should be different to my Dad’s and it should be about who I am, not who my father was. When I put it like this it sounds so obvious but it took me a long time to work that out. I was trapped in a mindset of possible total failure looming in the future. For other fellow "fear of failure" travellers out there, hear me now - we can change gears. We can live everyday with drive and hard work based on a new premise. There is such a thing as working toward our potential, rather than trying to escape from our fear of failure. We can change our view of who we are and where we are going. We can objectively analyse our current and future prospects. We can prepare for the future without worrying about it. We can take steps to head off any possible calamities and take action now, rather than just spinning around in worry circles. Don't be like me though and spend lost decades working this out. Don't rely on getting lucky through the most random chance of a single comment. Hear...
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    11 mins