Shorter meetings now

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• Visualizing high performance

• Responding with positives then negatives

• Shorter meetings now

• Keep on rolling

• Oprah Winfrey as life coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Visualizing high performance

Sports psychologists help athletes to visualize high performance. Visualization techniques can also help us with high performance in our jobs. Here is a roadmap to use visualization:

• Focus on process goals more than outcome goals. It is more effective to visualize being calm in a negotiation than visualizing having the customer pay you what you want. We have significant control of our calmness; we have less influence on customer behavior. Frequent visualization of being awarded a gold medal at the Olympics can be counterproductive for athletes. Such visualization can release dopamine, be rewarding in itself, and tempt a person to fantasize about victory rather than doing the hard work. You may visualize becoming a CEO, but it’s visualizing the actions you need to take that elevates your goal from a wish.

• Visualizing a process goal for two to three minutes each day works. Pausing before a significant meeting to visualize the state you want to project is effective.

• Stop visualizing if your imagery is mistake-filled. You don’t want your mind to reinforce failure. You can try again later.

• You can, however, visualize overcoming adversity and setbacks. This became important for the swimmer Michael Phelps when he started a race with damaged goggles. Phelps didn't panic. He was calm and counted his strokes like he had visualized and physically practised.

• Practise visualization when you are physically comfortable. Try a minute of deep breathing before you start to be relaxed.

COMMUNICATION

Responding with positives then negatives

Healthy scepticism is useful to alert us to the risks of a project. Organizations need people to question and challenge. Most of us, however, don’t want to be permanently cast in the role of Dr No because we are reflexively contrarian or pessimistic.

Ordering our arguments can help us be more collegial and more persuasive. If a colleague makes a thoughtful presentation, and it has merit and flaws, try ordering your response with the positives first. This is made more powerful if you then offer to collaborate with the presenter on overcoming the potential obstacles.

PRODUCTIVITY

Shorter meetings now

Please email us if you have heard any retirees lamenting they hadn’t attended more work meetings. We haven’t heard any yet.

Work meetings should create a lot of value. Sum the hourly compensation of all attendees and you can see the actual cost of any given meeting. We also need to account for the opportunity cost of stopping attendees doing other work. In many cases, the meeting is a financial and energy sapping waste of time.

An agenda, all participants being heard, recorded action items, and disciplined follow-up increase the probability that a meeting will add value. In most cases, meetings can be shorter than what is allocated. Participants need to be focused. To not go off on tangents nor get fixated on minor details.

As a default, schedule shorter meetings. One of our clients has a global default of twenty-five minutes per internal meeting. Participants are encouraged to be prepared and succinct. One of their HR managers was renowned for chairing a seventeen-minute project update meeting - she was a disciplined time-keeper even with her C-level colleagues.

For some meetings, a ten-minute conversation may suffice.

Try the twenty-five minute default. Or ten minutes if you think it is doable. You can extend meetings if value is being created.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Keep on rolling

Many executives I coach, who are aged in their fifties, share a similar sentiment: ‘life is short’. Careers go fast. Many of these coachees wish they worried less when they were younger. And permitted themselves to enjoy life more. We can allow ourselves to keep on rolling and be happier now.

GET SMARTER

Oprah Winfrey as life coach

Oprah Winfrey is Chairwoman and CEO of Harpo Productions and the Oprah Winfrey Network. She’s been an author, actor, television producer, talk show host, and entrepreneur. Forbes lists Winfrey’s wealth at USD 2.5 billion and she ranks as one of the most influential women in the world. She holds a BA from Tennessee State University, multiple honorary doctorates, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Some of Winfrey’s life wisdom: