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Quick Recovery

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No matter what industry you’re in, quick recovery after a failure is always a beneficial quality to have. It could be a major blow of your destiny or a minor act of healthy competition, but if you can’t take it – this will give your opponent an advantage, and this means you’ve got something to improve.

Recovering after some kind of failure is a very hard skill to obtain, but as with any kind of skill, it is quite real and possible to develop. So all I want to do today is to share only a few of the important things to keep in mind when working on your recovery skills.

 

No surprises – no shock

The worst thing about any failure is when it happens unexpectedly. It immediately upsets you that some things didn’t go as planned, and that you couldn’t do something you honestly believed you were quite capable of.

It’s all about an element of surprise, really. If you knew the failure was about to happen, you’d have taken some additional steps to prevent it from happening. So when it comes to improving your quick recovery skills, first of all it should be an improvement of your own awareness of what’s happening.

If you’re taking a part in a game, or if it’s some situation at work requiring a bit of competitiveness from you, or if it’s just another ordinary evening walk you’re having – try to be aware of things around you. Don’t expect anything bad to happen, don’t predict the failure to happen, but at the same time never exclude such outcomes in any situation. Anything could happen, and you can’t obviously be alert 100% of your time and be prepared for any kind of disaster to happen, but every little helps – sometimes doing very little you really protect yourself from surprising shocks.

 

Know your weakness

It might sound simple, but it is the most usual reason of lacking the quick recovery abilities. After all, it is a natural thing that most people hate revisiting their weaknesses. But what’s always a surprise to me, is that many people don’t know some of their weaknesses, and in some cases they don’t know any weaknesses of theirs at all.

It is surprising for me because I rarely do something without some kind of estimation. Lots of things are constantly factored in – sometimes I consider the benefit of doing or not doing something, or it could be that I want to know how time consuming a particular task will be. In many cases it could be your physical abilities. And while some of such factors are fairly obvious and easy to estimate, others are not.

For instance, you wouldn’t try to open a door of your car while driving on a highway and jump out, and you wouldn’t do it not because of some physical limitations – you’re probably strong enough to open a door and make a jump, but because of other things you automatically consider – like what usually happens when you’re out of your car at such a high speed. The same way you consider lots of things when making decisions every minute of your life. But for some reason, this thoughtful approach isn’t always there when you’re competing with someone.

So to recover really quick, you should know your limitations, and at least admit that if you lose because one of them, there wasn’t much you could do. If you accept this thought, and concentrate on your strong areas to achieve the goal, it wouldn’t be as much a shock to you if you make a mistake or lose because of one of your weak areas.

All this would mean is that you’ve just had a very natural thing happen to you – you knew it was your weak area, you tried your best, but there was a point after which you couldn’t do any better. And it’s nothing shameful or nothing shocking – it’s a natural way of things. Remember, that your competitor might have enough skills to recognize your weaknesses and to exploit them – and this fact would again be a valid and possible outcome of the situation, and not a shock.

Another positive side of knowing your weaknesses is that you can then plan and decide on what tactics you should employ to cover your weak areas, to become more competitive. Learn to turn your weaknesses from disadvantages into something neutral and quite normal, something you wouldn’t worry as much.

 

Learn your strong points

If you’re good, you’re good. Know your strong points and make it a habit improving them. Learn to take advantage of your strong points. Learn to use your strong areas to make up for the weak ones.

Strong points are fairly easy to identify. It’s what you like doing most, and where you feel most competitive. The explanation is really simple – if you like doing something, you tend to do it more often than other things. And as practice makes perfect, it excels your skills firstly among the things you do most often.

It is also a good idea to listen what others have to say about your strong areas. You can always ask them about your weak areas too, but somehow people don’t like others telling them about it. We tend to feel more vulnerable when we realise that people around us see our weaknesses so well. But for the strong areas, we’re always happy to hear another opinion. We like people reassuring us how good and strong we are in a particular subject, and it pleases us to know that it’s not only yourself, but others who recognize you strong in some areas.

 

Observe and adapt

It’s rarely a case when you are the only person who could fail. Never forget the simple truth: everyone and anyone can fail at some stage. Not everyone is afraid of it as much as you are, but as we’ve established, this could be helped. So do your observations – look at how people react to their successes and failures, and try to behave in a similar way.

There are few advantages to such a way of adapting. First and foremost – you see other people fail and you realise it yet again that failure is just a part of the game, and a very possible thing to happen to anyone. How many times have you looked at someone really good at their subject, thinking to yourself: anyone could fail, anyone but him. But secretly you hoped something would make this person fail someday, and of course you laughed sarcastically and it somehow pleased you when you finally saw the moment of such a failure.

Accept it – everyone fails, and not always it’s due to the personal qualities and features. Quite often there is absolutely nothing you could do. There is nothing anybody could do. So all you do in such situations is to accept this and think one step forward – what needs to be done next to make up for the opportunity you’ve just lost.

Observation also helps you recognize a typical reaction of people to their failures, and when you learn the basics of it, you could react in exactly the same way when and if you fail. Observation and adaptation of a common reaction will absorb the shock of a failure, because not only will you know that there’s nothing wrong with a failure, but you will also know that your behaviour is absolutely normal, because that’s exactly the way so many others reacted to a similar failure.

You could also use adaptation as an advantage. Just do what everybody else did when failing, and you’ll make sure that no one can really guess how hard a blow this failure really is for you. Use is to protect yourself. Act the most common way and you’ll make it as hard as possible for anyone to see your fear or your frustration about the situation.

Always remember, that no matter what happens – there will be people around you doing the same observation and adaptation. So even if hiding your real feelings or natural reaction of yours for a given failure could be of huge importance and advantage.

 

Never stop

This is the last piece of advice I have for today. Never stop – this means if you do stumble and fail, make yourself take the next step. Don’t allow yourself to stop, overcome all your fears and frustration, pain or hesitations, and push yourself forward. Just remember, that failure is never a good moment to analyze the situation. When you fail, you naturally feel upset, and your judgement is bound to be clouded by this. And since it is in your interest to at least make sure the situation doesn’t get worse, please do take this extra step forward and only then, when there’s less pressure and less frustration left, take your time to think why you have failed and what could be done to prevent it.

This is in essence what people call a quick recovery – when even after the most horrible mistake made you find strength to move forward no matter what, to stay in the game and to remain competitive. And this is exactly what makes them take a closer look at you to either admire the strength you’ve found for a recovery or to suddenly realise how much better a player you really are.

So never stop, and don’t you worry – there’s always plenty of time to analyse what went wrong and to find ways of improvement later. Now, don’t take this last advice of mine directly. If you made an honest mistake, take it easy and move on. But don’t do anything stupid just because you think you have to do something.

There should always be a common sense involved in all your actions, so by asking you not to stop I really mean if you failed but think you can push yourself just a bit extra harder to hide your frustration and move on – please do so as it’s in your interest. But if there isn’t much to be done right away – accept it. Don’t rush things in, don’t immediately try to repeat the same set of actions as they’re most likely to incur the same kind of mistake yet again.

 

Well, hope this helps. I really should be giving more examples from my everyday life, so I think that’s what I’ll start doing with my next entry in a few days time. Till then, good bye!

Finding Time For Everything

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How often do you have to decline an opportunity to do something fun or exciting simply because you have no time for it? How often do you give up bright ideas which keep occurring again and again? How often do you find yourself feeling guilty for letting the opportunity go simply because you thought you had no time for it?

 

Time management is very important

No matter what you do – it is always a good idea to be time conscious. Even having a pretty good idea of how much time you have at hand and what exactly your progress is, the task of successful time management is not an easy one.

Some people like the idea of having a daily plan accurate to every minute. They would know what time they usually arrive at work, when it is time for them to leave, when and how long a lunch break is going to be. They are making every appointment they’ve arranged, they’re sticking to the plan and never let a single minute escape their productive and effective approach.

Unfortunately, it’s a luxury not many of us can afford. Such is the real life of many – not everything is up to us. In most cases we’re being regulated by someone else’s idea of the best way to spend our time. At work, we’re advised about our lunch break time – we’re basically told when it is the good time for us to stop working and leave the office for an hour. We’re also advised in a similar way when to do many other things related to our work.

And face it, it is not so often that we’re told HOW to do things, or when exactly. We’re generally expected to give some results within a certain deadline, and we are to manage the time allocated for the task on our own.

Project management, they say. Use your time wisely, they advise. And it’s not always that you get a chance to attend a relevant course – on project or time management, so most of these things you’re simply expected to know or to pick up from your colleagues.

The good news is that it’s quite possible to learn and obtain such skills, so you should be fine if you have a colleague or two willing to share the knowledge.

 

Time-saving tip one: be conscious

That’s all time management is about. Be conscious about everything you do. It’s actually very easy.

From GTD, I’ve learned about the 2 minutes approach: when given a task, instead of diving into it right away, sit back and take 2 minutes to break it down into smaller tasks. Think of the ultimate goal you have. Enlist the steps you think are necessary in order to achieve this goal, and propose the time you’re going to need for each step. Don’t spend much time thinking about it, literally spend 2 minutes and not more. Write down your goal and steps to achieve it, and note the time.

You’re set to go – start working on steps, taking them one by one. After working on the problem for the time you expected you needed to complete it, stop and review the situation. Analyze the tasks list and answer few more questions to yourself: Have you reached your original goal? Has your original goal changed after taking one of your steps? Have all the steps proved to be necessary? Did any step take longer or shorter time than expected?

Even this simple approach – extra 5 minutes overall, is bound to dramatically improve your performance. You will not work any faster or any harder that you would usually do. Instead, you would have your approach optimize for each particular task, and by brainstorming the goal before and after the time allocated for it, you would see the potential for improving your timing.

 

Time-saving tip one two: be patient

Don’t expect to improve momentarily. Such things don’t happen overnight, so be prepared to spend at least few weeks working on all your daily tasks and goals with exactly the same approach. Don’t be lazy to write everything down. If it takes you longer than 2 minutes to take notes of your planning, do so – it’s always better to spend another 5-10 minutes planning your tasks that to lose a day working on some step only to realise later it was completely unnecessary and irrelevant to the overall goal.

You’ll soon discover that some global goals need more time for breaking them into smaller steps than others. Don’t be afraid to spend this extra time, in fact when you do start distinguishing goals and realising how much consideration time they require, this will mean you’re on the right track and that you’re improving.

 

Finding time: use 2 minutes approach

Our life isn’t about sacrifices, but if there are any we’re making at all, then time is definitely one of them. To do anything, you have to put your time to it. So whenever a new opportunity arises, don’t simply throw it away by saying you have no time. Take the 2 minutes approach again. Look at the opportunity. See it a goal. See what the positive sides are. Try and quickly break it into some steps, and try to predict the time commitment required for each.

Chances are, you’d lose the same 2 minutes by simply regretting you’ve just missed a good opportunity. When you deny yourself even the slightest chance of trying something exciting out, you’re bound to be thinking about it for at least some time later on. So instead of not doing something and then losing time regretting about it, just take the time and consider the possibilities.

Once you agree that 2 minutes is a fair price to pay for a good chance, it gets easier. Once you’ve given something a proper thought, you’ll feel more relaxed and assured – you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you might be missing, and after just 2 minutes you’ll have a list of some kind of the benefits you may gain should you agree to spend the time necessary. Try this, and you’ll be amazed how many good opportunities which seemed to be real time wasters will turn out to be the things you can quite easily afford.

You can spend 2 minutes considering the opportunity, and therefore improving your chances for a right decision, or you can lose the same 2 minutes regretting the missed opportunity later. One more thing: often you regret something just because you have not properly assessed it. Lots of opportunities seem attractive, but turn out to be somewhat different once you take time to analyze them. So you may feel upset and ruin the rest of your day simply because of some opportunity which in reality was no benefit to you anyway. But because you haven’t taken time to look at it closely and see this, you’d regret that you have let something go.

So all it takes to find time is really to take a closer look. And once you make yourself comfortable with the idea of spending 2 minutes in order to save yourself hours, you’ll feel much better and easier about making such decisions. You’ll also be sure to look at every opportunity closer, and to make sure that you never miss a really good chance or never take up something you really shouldn’t have. Of course, 2 minutes aren’t going to make you 100% right about every decision you make, but they sure are going to improve your chances.

[tags]finding time, time management, planning, efficiency, self-improvement[/tags]

Never Leave A Question Unanswered

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Every day we hear dozens of questions asked and answered, so what I’m going to say is probably a kind of situation most of you are familiar with.

 

Why do we ask questions?

You get a question asked, and it’s the casual type one – you’re expected to give an answer within few seconds, and it’s perfectly okay if you don’t know the answer – the person who asked you will just move on to try his luck with someone else.

How often do you get asked questions? I mean, any kind of question – be it something related to the position you have in your company or some personal advice people want from you? Rarely will you have not a single question asked during an average working day. Chances are, you’ll be asked at least few times during your day. And depending on how popular or smart you are, people will turn to ask for your wisdom more and more.

 

Giving valuable answers

When asking questions, surely people tend to note your answers and how correct and accurate they are, but they also look at your ability to face questions you don’t have an immediate answer for. Sometimes they deliberately ask you a question no one can answer, and they simply watch how you play it. In fact, your ability to find an answer to such questions is considered to be one of the best personal and professional skill you can possess.

First things first – no lies. If you don’t know the answer, don’t lie about it – just be strong enough to admit your lack of knowledge on the subject. Don’t say anything just for the sake of giving some kind of answer – your good reputation and trust of your colleagues may be lost with just one stupid answer you gave abruptly and without proper thinking on it, yet it might take you hundreds of brilliant, intelligent and perfectly correct answers to earn this trust and respect again.

Then, know your strong points and your weak areas. Learn to quickly give any question an estimation which suggests whether you’re capable of answering a particular kind of question or not. Always remember: you’ve got your trust and respect to protect. Evaluate each question, see how important it is to others that you give the correct answer.

 

How to answer questions

Answering questions is easy, once you stick to this idea: a question is asked, because someone wants to know a correct answer. What kind of answer is correct? Most people would agree, that to give a correct answer is to provide a meaningful and useful information, which is 100% correct in your opinion. But not many people realise that simply saying “I don’t know, sorry” is a correct answer as well. Don’t let this idea get out of your sight when you’re looking for an answer.

Remember: you were asked a question because someone believes you to be a reliable source of information. If you say “I don’t know”, your credibility stays the same, because you’ve estimated all the factors, realised you don’t know the right answer, and you’re being honest to say so.

But if you decided to give some kind of answer, and it later proves to be an incorrect one, your credibility will be shaken – people will think and try to understand why you gave this answer instead of simply saying no. And they will probably think something along these lines about you: You simply tried to trick them. You deliberately tried to mislead them. You didn’t know the answer but you were too ashamed to admit it, so you opted for telling the first thing which came to your mind just to look more knowledgeable than you really are.

And as people think of it more and more (remember, we’re talking dozens of questions asked and answered daily), they will make their opinion up about every person they ask around, and it will be very hard to change their attitude to a given person at a later time.

To people looking for some answers, it is important that they get the correct answer. So if you say “I don’t really know”, they will thank you for this anyway – you haven’t given them the answer, but you haven’t given them a false one neither – so they think something like: Oh well, you can’t know everything. I’ll ask someone else.

And they do. And the next question they have from a different field, they’ll probably think again: Hey, why don’t I ask this guy first – so what if he didn’t know answers to lots of questions asked before? He certainly has some strong points, so maybe he knows exactly the answer I need?

 

Patterns we all follow

So when we look at a certain company, or a group of people within, talking to each other and asking questions, it’s obvious that everyone follows some kind of pattern when dealing with questions raised.

Some people, when they face a problem or see something they can’t understand, decide to concentrate for a little bit more and see if they can manage on their own. Others immediately opt for asking someone around – this smart guy at the end of the corridor is a good option, or this lovely girl just across the cubicle – it’s not a big deal if they don’t know the answer, but it’s definitely worth a try.

And in exactly the same way, people follow various patterns when asked a question. Some couldn’t possibly care less and they will say anything simply to get rid of you. Others will take you so seriously that even if you thank them and return to your desk, they will hunt you down after a lunch break to hand you in a pile of paper with their formulas and graphs, representing the ideal answer to your question.

Yet another category of people will fairly quickly think of your question and give you a yes or no, and then forget about it. I think this is the most common category of people. Very efficient approach: they think over your question, they honestly try to find an answer, and they give up or give you an answer fairly quickly.

 

Productivity tip: answer every question

What shocks me though, is that this most common category of people will never come back to your questions once you’re gone. That may be okay for the questions they answered correctly, but it’s a mystery to me why people don’t get curious when they didn’t know the answer.

Again, it’s a case of judging the question – if you see it’s somehow relevant to your work or other activity, you’d probably get a little bit more irritated with yourself for not knowing the answer, but even after this – most of us will simply forget about it few minutes later.

Now, I obviously don’t belong to this most common category of people. ANY question I couldn’t answer will raise some interest in me. But if it’s related to my profession, I simply can’t throw it away – if I have a spare minute, I’ll find the answer myself or google it. If I don’t have an immediate chance to answer the question, I’ll most likely think of it in the background, so once I’m at home, I’ll make some time specifically to find the answer. This way, if I ever get asked the same question again (and you know how some people like coming back to you the following day with the very same question, don’t you?), I’ll definitely have one, and it will be the 100% correct one cause I’ve specifically looked for it.

Some people will say it’s impossible to know everything. And I totally agree. And even if that was possible, you don’t have all the time in the world. And this is true too. But it’s never harmful to expand your knowledge a little, is it?

Once you master questions judgment and estimation, you’ll be able to see how important this question is and whether it’s worth your time and efforts thinking of an answer or looking for it.

Sure it takes time to find an answer for something, but you’ll be surprised how many answers are really easy to find, and once you get into a habit of resolving most of unanswered questions, soon enough you’ll realise that these simple questions and found answers have started building your fundamental knowledge – they help you answer others more quickly, and save a lot of your time in the long run.