Weekly Musings #1 - 2021

Musings - contemplations; reflections; thoughts or comments on something one has been thinking about.

Welcome to the first edition of my new newsletter - Weekly Musings.

In this weekly digest I'll be collecting thoughts and reflections from the past week, both from my own posts and broadcasts as well as others that I come across. No Innovation Fika or crazy Monday Morning greeting this week, that all starts next week ??????

This week has been mostly about promises and New Year resolutions. I started out with an article about "How to make that resolution stick " where I listed some basics and ended with my top three tips for keeping your promises to yourself, and then I followed that with another two-three posts on mindset and perseverance.

However, one thing that struck me though when writing these posts, was that we constantly see motivational posts on how to keep your new year resolutions, but very seldom we see posts on how to help others keep theirs. I can guarantee that we all have a loved one, friend or colleague who is going through the hardships of staying true to their promise.

So then I wrote a post about that, "Respect and support change ", and I got some really good comments on that one. (on a separate note, that's one of the things I like with LinkedIn, that you can actually have good discussions with really smart people).

Like Erik Ohlzon who commented that you always start by asking "How can I help you reach your goal?" instead of barging in with your own personal idea of how change should be handled. That was also the gist of what Glenn Bilby wrote: "People need time and space to transition through change. Some people are binary do/don't people, and others need to change progressively."

The main thing here being that if you want to help someone through change, remember it's about them, not about you.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is the "why" you want to change something in the first place, and then not only the shallow first "why" you come up with, but maybe the third or fourth why. The concept of multiple whys isn't a new one, The Why Method has been used as a problem solving tool for a long time, read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

Say you want to lose weight, if you only say "I want to lose weight" , I'll ask "why do you want to lose weight?" then you answer that, and I'll do another Why? for that, and so forth, at least three more times until we get to the real reason for your why. You might even come to the conclusion that losing weight actually isn't your main goal, you might be looking for something different all together and just THINK that losing weight will fix it, leading to you spending all that time and energy on doing the wrong thing.

I encountered exactly that in a discussion with Thomas Helfrich when we were talking about social media presence. "I want to increase my reach and the engagement on my posts" Why do you want to do that? To get more followers, Why do you want more followers? Do you want to be a famous influencer? No, I don't need to be famous, I don't even want to be famous. Then what is it? To get more speaking engagements? Why do you want more speaking engagements? To add an extra income. Ok then, but if that is the goal, then don't just say "I want to increase my reach", then you have to say "I want to increase my reach in order to build my personal brand as an authority on my subjects and get seen by more potential booking agents and companies that want to hire me as a speaker", and of course "if that is the actual goal here, then is increasing reach and engagement the most cost-efficient way or reaching that goal?" If not, re-evaluate, reset and start over.

Use the why-method to drill down and find the actual reason for doing something and to figure out what the right solution actually is.

Trying to achieve something without knowing WHY risks you missing WHAT you should be doing to reach your ultimate goal in the first place.

Have a great weekend all, and I'll see you in the comments,

Donnie