Empathy Exercise

Empathy

What can you do before you’re asked?

What does your boss need before she sends you an email asking? What does the customer need before they send you a Facebook message complaining? What does your audience need before you wrap up your speech?

Empathize by thinking of what others need before they do, and then acting on it.

 

Stay Positive & Get Ahead By Feeling Ahead

Photo credit

You Don’t Have Enough

Enough

You don’t have enough time, money or knowledge as others.

Nor is it likely you have enough experience, bandwidth or connections.

That’s how everyone starts, though.

The paradox about enough is, if you wait until you have it, you’ll never have it.

 

Stay Positive & Onward Anyway

Photo credit

When To Polish

When To Apply The Polish

The trouble with many creators is they apply the polish too early.

During layout, during planning stages, during the what-ifs of a project.

Polish is meant to coat a project once the big idea is realized.

Until then, all you’re doing is preventing an idea from becoming big.

 

Stay Positive & Polish Later

Photo credit

Save

How The Greatest Marketers Think

You Are Not The Target

There’s one pivotal way of thinking that sets one marketer far ahead of the others.

It’s difficult work, it’s emotionally intensive, it’s mentally laboring, but it’s vital if you’re going to create work that’s meaningful.

The greatest marketers embrace the fact no one they are seeking to influence thinks as they do.

You are not the target. The target doesn’t know what you know. They don’t work or think the same way you do. They’ve had different experiences that have led them to the present moment.

 

Stay Positive & The Answer Is To Empathize

Photo credit

Tomorrow

Making An Impact

You have 24 hours to make an impact tomorrow.

Regardless of what you can’t control (the weather, your boss’s attitude, the ticking clock…), you have the ability to make do work that matters, interact with people in a way that livens their spirit, you can decide to only do what will make a difference.

Curiously, how is tomorrow any different from today?

 

Stay Positive & Why Wait?

Photo credit

If The Task Is Easy

Cut The Easy Tasks

You know me to believe that the more difficult a task is, the more emotional labor it calls for, the more vulnerability it requires, the more it matters.

When a task is easy, not only is it low-value, it’s soon to be nonexistent.

In a world full of process-creators, short-cut developers and those who focus solely on the efficiency of a project, the easy tasks are the first to go, to be placed within a human-less process or to be cut entirely.

If you’re doing the work that only provides 20% of the results, you’re doing the wrong work.

 

Stay Positive & Easy Is Finite

Photo credit

Distractions

Deep Problems

Our lizard brains are the worst. They love distractions.

The problems we need to truly face are buried under layers of them: from lightweight distractions like television and cleaning to tougher ones like working an insane number of hours at work or having a couple of drinks every night.

If you’re going to make meaningful progress, you have to face your root problems: the expectations you have of yourself, the amount of control you’ve given up, your deep-seated fear of failure…

Uncover the truth, then dance with it.

 

Stay Positive & Progress Is Made Distraction-Free

Photo credit