– By TC North, Ph.D.

Sick of being tired and tired of being stressed? Sometimes so stressed you feel overwhelmed? These can be symptoms of brain-drain time sucks. Time sucks come in many forms, from technological to emotional. Below are seven emotional brain-drain time sucks that kill productivity and happiness, along with suggestions on how to minimize them…
 

Effective time management from minimizing emotional time sucks.

1. Having irrational fears. There are rational and irrational fears. Irrational fears create brain drain. Fear of failure, success, rejection and selling yourself or your ideas can suck your energy and drain your brain. Fear resides in your midbrain, primarily the amygdala, which is known as the emotional brain. When you think with your midbrain, you have limited access to the most evolved part of your brain, the neocortex, also known as the executive brain. The executive brain houses identity, personality and your higher brain functions, including rational thought, reasoning and problem solving. Thinking with your midbrain not only drains your brain but also limits your access to the most rational part of your brain. This four-step technique can help you master your fears: 1) Identify your fear, 2) embrace it, 3) disidentify with it and 4) accept your worst-case scenario. Here’s audio program to master fear.
2. Worrying. Worry is fear that keeps looping through the emotional part of your brain, the amygdala. It’s like a dog chasing his tail around and around. Unfortunately, with each circle through the amygdala, the fear gains strength my recruiting more neurons. Most of our worries are about something we can’t control. Worry is a 100% energy time suck. With worry, you drain your brain and take no action. Decide that instead of worrying, you’ll take action or do everything you can to replace your worry with constructive thinking. Click here for a process to replace destructive thoughts with constructive thoughts.
3. Being wakefully unconscious. When you’re physically awake yet somewhat unconscious of how you affect people, you create an unnecessary amount of conflict and negativity in your life and those around you. To counter your unconsciousness, pay closer attention to your thinking and emotions and notice how others react to you. Stay fully awake and conscious of yourself and everything around you.
4. Victimizing yourself. You a victim of your own thinking when you blame, complain or make excuses. World-class athletes, business leaders and humanitarians own everything in their lives! By doing so, they can effect change; it strengthens them. Here’s a wonderful example of owning it: According to the National Association of Realtors, the typical full-time Realtor completes about 10 transactions a year in the Denver metro area. One of my clients, Angela Fox, is the top Realtor at The Berkshire Group in Denver. She completed 72 real estate transactions in 2012. Angela is not only a great Realtor she is also a great mother for two young girls, wife, friend, sister, daughter, charity volunteer and client! Angela continually works on mastering her mind. To stop the victim time suck and maximize your personal time management effectiveness, stop blaming, complaining and making excuses and focus your thoughts and positive actions on correcting your mistakes.
5. Beating yourself up. What happens when you beat yourself up emotionally? You use all of your energy to create negativity. Stop it! There’s no value to beating yourself up; it’s a complete time and energy suck, you’re going to make mistakes. Instead, decide how to correct what’s gone wrong. Use imagery to rewire your brain. When you’ve made a mistake. Imagine in detail how you would have liked to have thought and acted to have been at your best in the situation that you messed up. Each time you imagine being your best in the situation you previously messed up, the bigger and stronger the neuronetwork in your brain becomes for that type of situation. Eventually, it will become the dominant pathway and you will likely be at your best in a similar situation in the future.
6. Focusing on what’s out of your control. When you’re not in control of our thoughts and actions, you will often try to control people and situations that are outside of you. Instead, Focus all your control on gaining control of your thoughts and actions, when you do, you’ll also gain control of your emotions.
7. Lacking purpose. Living without a sense of purpose may be the biggest time and energy suck of all. When you have purpose, your thoughts and actions have meaning. This is true in terms of living your life’s purpose as well as knowing what your purpose is in everything you do daily. I often ask my clients, “What’s the purpose of …?” It’s an important question to address whether it’s about your life, a marketing activity, a new strategy, a conversation with an employee or even running a meeting. When you know your purpose, you’ll think and act with greater efficiency and joy.

The emotional time-suck fix:Master your life … by mastering your mind.

“If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be ‘critical’ or ‘negative’ when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode.” This was the opening sentence in a blog in the Harvard Business Review, written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School. 

Negative feedback can have great value.

Halvorson made a strong case for the value of negative feedback (defined as beneficial corrective actions), and I agree with much of what she wrote. However, her understanding of how to best use negative versus positive feedback to enhance learning and/or improve performance is incomplete; she partially but doesn’t fully account for the level of competency or expertise of the person receiving the feedback. This is a critical variable to consider.

Halvorson referenced research by Stacey R. Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach who found that novices wanted and responded best to positive feedback, and experts sought out and responded to negative feedback. This is a finding consistent with  sport psychology research on athletes.

It’s been well known for decades in sport psychology—which is really high-performance psychology—that beginners learn fastest with 100% positive feedback on the skills they are learning, while elite athletes, or experts, learn fastest with 100% feedback on what they can improve. It’s a continuum. On one end of the continuum are beginners, who learn fastest with 100% positive feedback, while experts improve the most with nearly 100% negative feedback.

100% positive feedback is best for beginners to learn.

Interestingly, when elite athletes or experts begin to learn a new skill, they will learn fastest with 100% positive feedback on what they are doing correctly, learning that skill even though they are a master of many other skills (which they continue to refine through negative feedback). Think of a senior corporate executive who wants to learn how to use golf in building business relationships, and she goes to her first golf lesson. If all the feedback that she receives is on what she’s doing wrong, she will have no idea how to swing a golf club at the end of her lesson and will leave frustrated, probably never to return. This executive is a master of many skills in her business, but a beginner at golf. She, like all of us, will learn the golf swing fastest by initially receiving feedback only on what she’s doing correctly with her swing, so that she can keep repeating what she’s doing right.

How do positive vs. negative feedback affect motivation and speed of improvement at different competency levels?

For the beginner. Give close to 100% positive feedback, and the beginner learns the fastest and is most excited and motivated.

For those who are good. To help this person go from good to great, offer a combination of positive, feedback to reinforce what the person is doing correctly, and negative, feedback to point out how the person can get better. Both are stated from a positive perspective of helping the other person. You know you have the right amounts of positive and negative feedback when the person you give the feedback to is grateful for it and motivated to improve.

For the expert. They want to know how to improve, give them mostly negative feedback. In 26 years of coaching clients, I’ve had two clients say to me, “I want you to help me find every block in my conscious and subconscious minds that might be limiting my success and help me resolve it.” These were both masters in their fields; one was an extraordinary entrepreneur and the other a master sales professional.

What do you think happens when you give 100% positive feedback to an expert, like an elite athlete? This astounded me when I learned it. If you give an elite athlete 100% positive feedback, that athlete’s performance tends to get worse.

Positive vs. negative feedback, which is best?

Assuming that these concepts generalize to fields outside of sport, and in my experience, they do, the amount of positive versus corrective feedback will vary not only on the general level of competency the individuals have in their work, but also on the specific skill being developed.

When I mentally coach Olympic or professional athletes, or successful entrepreneurs and executives, they’re actually happy when I help them identify something they can improve.

Do you love learning how you can improve? Consider seeking out opportunities to unblock your success and evolve as a person and as a professional. This is what high performers do.

Short-term goals: a setup for successful resolutions.

Do you dread setting goals because you’re afraid of not attaining them? A lot of people are and according to one study only 8% of New Year’s resolutions are made. A New Year’s resolution is a type of goal. A new year is a fresh start; it really is a great time to commit to making an important change, but unfortunately few people actually attain their New Year’s resolutions. Here’s one small change that has been proven to increase goal attainment success…

Setting goals: Ask—don’t tell!

For decades, I’ve wondered why goal-setting motivates some people and demotivates others. If focusing on a goal demotivates you, science may have provided you with a new, more effective approach to goal attainment:

In a series of studies, Ibrahim Senay, Ph.D., concluded that those who write goals in the format “I will … ” were less likely to achieve their goals than those who frame their goals with “Will I … ?” For example, an entrepreneur who says, “I will increase business 25 percent” is less likely to achieve the goal than an entrepreneur who writes and focuses on the goal as “Will I increase business 25 percent?”

This initially seemed completely counterintuitive to me! Senay’s explanation, however, makes complete sense:

– By TC North, Ph.D.

If you’re feeling unappreciated, uninspired and unhappy and you’re working for somebody else, who’s to blame? Findings of the Bad Boss Study, as well as an post in the Harvard Business Review blog, suggest it’s your boss’s fault.

The Bad Boss Study found that, in general, bosses leave their employees feeling unappreciated, uninspired, lonely and downright miserable. Before we evaluate who’s at fault, let’s review some of the study’s data. The below information was released by psychologist Michelle McQuaid, a leader in the field of positive psychology, and based on interviews with a cross section of a thousand U.S. workers:

• 64% of workers are unhappy in their job.
• 31% of employees feel uninspired and unappreciated by their boss.
• 15% are bored, lonely and miserable.
• 42% say their boss doesn’t work very hard.
• 20% indicate their boss has little or no integrity.
• 47% suggest their boss loses his or her cool under stress.
• 73% of those in their 20s and 30s say their health is at stake because of their relationship with their boss, and 40% of those 50 and older feel the same.
• 38% say their boss is great.

As you can see, the study indicates there are a plethora of bad bosses. (Are you nodding your head as you read this?) According to McQuaid, “This current situation … is costing $360 billion a year in lost productivity.”

If you’re an executive, manager, or supervisor, note that how to be a great boss, or  what makes a good boss are the opposite of he characteristics of a bad boss.

Now, let’s get back to who’s at fault. I don’t think many people want or strive to have bad boss traits. As an executive coach, I haven’t met any. I think most leaders, managers and supervisors want to be either good or great bosses. And the entrepreneurs, managers and leaders who seek executive coaching generally learn how to be a great boss. So why aren’t more bosses in this study great? Why do only 38% make that grade?

Few folks who supervise, manage or lead received enough training in how to be good or great. If you haven’t been trained, then to a great degree, it’s not your fault. But if you know my work, and many of you who are reading this post do, you probably know what I’m about to say: If you recognize that you need training and your organization doesn’t supply it, you must find it outside of your organization. Either be the master of your destiny or victim to your own lack of initiative. Yes, it’s money out of your pocket, but the financial, emotional and relational ROI over your career will likely be phenomenal. It will also greatly enhance your job satisfaction because when you become a good boss at work, you become good or great at managing or leading, people will love working for you. And being more satisfied, happy and confident in your job as a result of additional training might also have a positive impact on your personal life (you are leaving work happy).

Here are six critical competencies on how to be a great boss and to consciously develop as a leader:

1. Coaching others to be successful
2. Building rapport
3. Preventing and resolving conflict
4. Running effective meetings
5. Planning
6. Being resilient

Notice that these are all skills you can learn and, in time, master.

And one more thing: If you want to be a great leader, you must have passion for what you do because passion is the fuel of greatness. People love to follow those who are passionate!

What do you think is the most important trait in someone becoming a bad boss? A great boss? Is it a trait we have listed, or some other trait?

– By TC North, Ph.D.

What do you, Michael Phelps, Missy Franklin and Jordan Wieber have in common? Maybe nothing, maybe lots? If you are a high performer in your field, if you are, you may share some of the success traits that I have found in many of the Olympians, professional athletes and business leaders that I have mentally trained over the past several decades (I have not mentally trained the individual athletes mentioned above). In the NBC/KUSA 9News interview below, I share some of the success secrets that …

Mental Tough is a great success trait

high performers need to mentally for success in most any field. Some mental tough traits include:

• Have the courage to fail… on the path to success!
• Be maniacal about your mindset!
• No blaming, complaining or excuses!
• Passion is the fire to accomplish your dreams!

The “Olympic lesson” we can all learn is, mental tough, or mentally tough is critical for high-performance success in any field. Enjoy this very short interview… (you may read the text below if you prefer).

Olympic Athletes Can Inspire in the Workplace

Greg Moss 9News:

Hard not to have Olympic fever right now but if you find yourself watching these superhuman athletes on television and saying to yourself, “Man, I could never do that!” you’re not alone! But you can become a gold medallist. Maybe not in the field or in the pool – but certainly in your office. Joining me right now is Dr. TC North. He is a sports psychologist and business-performance consultant. Good morning and thank you for coming in.

TC North: Good morning. It’s good to be here.

Greg Moss 9News: It’s good to have you. Let’s just call you our own personal business coach for the next few minutes – all right?

TC North: All right! Great!

Greg Moss 9News: You have actually coached – been a personal coach, not a physical coach but a personal coach – to more than thirty Olympians. That’s pretty amazing.

TC North: Yes, a mental coach – and you know, I live in Boulder so we have lots of them there and I worked with the USSA for a while as an outside consultant.

Greg Moss 9News: What can we learn from Olympic athletes, as business owners or business people in the office place?

TC North: Well, Missy Franklin – you know, first of all I’ve got to say I’m so proud of her, you know, being from Denver, from Colorado, and representing our country. She’s such a great example: here’s a teenage girl who has learned how to manage her energy. You know, last night she swam the 200 and qualified and then had fifteen minutes to swim the 100 – and she won a gold medal, which is absolutely amazing. It’s not even her best event.

Greg Moss 9News: Yes – and she’s got more to go!

TC North: Yes! And what can we learn from that? It is she didn’t complain about that setup, you know? And most of us put a lot of energy into blaming, complaining and making excuses in our life – and she is so not the victim of that schedule.

Greg Moss 9News: You know, you’ve hit upon something that’s pretty important I think, and it’s part of the four tips that we want to impart to people today – and we’ve got a full screen of these. First up is, “Have the courage to fail.” What do you mean by that?

TC North: Yes, it’s actually one of the differentiators I’ve found in all elite people, is they have the courage to take the risk that maybe they could fail at what they do. And certainly Michael Phelps – I mean, lucky he didn’t, you know, he came in fourth in his first race in the Olympics – he didn’t have anything to prove in this Olympics but he’s back, for whatever his reasons.

Greg Moss 9News: And, “Be a mindset maniac” – what is a mindset maniac?

TC North: [laughs]

Greg Moss 9News: Is it that positive attitude and not being negative?

TC North: These guys – let’s go back to Missy Franklin: she had to manage her energy before that race; she had to think the right thoughts. If you read her quotes, she has thought about this moment so many times, done the imagery to prepare this, and what she said I love: she said, “Swimming is so mental.”

Greg Moss 9News: Yes.

TC North: And so they mentally prepare before, they have to keep their focus during, and then they have to learn from their mistakes and what they were successful in after.

Greg Moss 9News: And, “Own it.”

TC North: And own it.

Greg Moss 9News: “No blaming” I’m assuming is what you mean by that.

TC North: Yes – no blaming, complaining. It’s like, you know, the good stuff is yours, the bad stuff is yours – it’s all yours. And if you want to blame it, then you have no control so you can’t improve.

Greg Moss 9News: The most successful athletes that we see today absolutely have some incredible passion – and that’s what you mean by this, “Excel with fire.”

TC North: Yes. I have not met anybody – business, athletics, dancers, performers – they have so much passion for what they do, you know, they would do it no matter what their pay.

Greg Moss 9News: Anybody can do this.

TC North: Anybody can do this. You know, think of – let’s use Missy Franklin because she is so in the news and so present right now – most of us work during the day and then we go home at night. What if we took that fifteen minutes that Missy Franklin did last night to switch mindsets; instead of carrying all our stuff from work, all our stress, all our frustration and maybe our anger and taking it home with us, what if we could do what she did and put it aside, put it behind us and get present again?

Greg Moss 9News: I’m going to do it. Right now.

TC North: Great.

Greg Moss 9News: How about that? Thank you for coming in. I appreciate it.

– By TC North, Ph.D.

Are you at your best in the most challenging moments of your life? The best Olympians are, and they thrive under the pressure that crushes those who don’t have their mental toughness. Like the great Olympians, you can learn to create the optimal mindset before engaging in your most challenging personal and professional situations to give you great happiness and success.

One of the keys to being your best personally and professionally is …

Pre-event routines

having a pre-event routine to prepare for what is most important to you. Did you know, Kobe Bryant, basketball player, MVP of the 2009-2010 NBA finals, always does exactly the same routine before every free throw? Before a ski race, Lindsey Vonn, Olympic winner of three medals in women’s skiing in the 2010 Olympics, creates a clear image in her mind of a perfect run. Why do Olympic and professional athletes work to perfect pre-event and pre-shot routines? Because they perform better when they do. So will you.

If a pre-event routine helps an Olympic athlete be more successful, will it help you? 

Julia had been a regional sales director at high-tech company, and after 10 years, was a solid middle of the pack producer.  She wanted more, so she developed a pre-selling routine using three techniques before and during every sales call. She, 1) observed her thinking and changed any negative thoughts to positive ones, 2) only focused on what she controlled and 3) slowed her breathing and centered herself.

Julia became the top producer in her company and credited her pre-selling routine for her dramatic rise in sales.

Julia joined the ranks of elite athletes and Olympians working at being technically, physically and mentally ready to be at their best in their most important endeavors, and so can you.

There are high-performers in all fields who have learned to create an optimal mindset before engaging in their challenging and important business and personal situations.  Big sales, leading meetings, speaking, interviewing for a job, conducting or receiving a performance review, and even arriving home after a hard day can all be improved with pre-event routines to create the optimal state of your mind and body.

Want to be a great spouse, or parent? Do you have a pre-arrive at home routine? After working your tail off all day, do you have a process, a routine to help you be physically and emotionally ready to be your best with your significant other, children or extended family?  Our relationships are important.  Do you show up and give your family your best or do they get the wrung out, depleted, frustrated you?

Take a moment. Think about the areas of your life that you want to be most successful in, what matters most to you, when do you want to be your personal best? What thoughts, emotions and focus would help you be your best in these areas? Do you consciously create these before you engage in what’s most important in your life?

Develop a pre-routine

1. Imagine yourself, in great detail, being your bestin the situation in which you want to excel.
2. Imagine thinking the one or two most important thoughts that focus you correctly.
3. Imagine having the emotions and energy level that best serve you.
4. Now, what can you do before engaging in the situation you are thinking of to create the right focusing thoughts and emotions that best serve you? This is your pre-event routine that will help you maximize both your success and happiness.

Don’t be victim to an undisciplined mind.  Use pre-routines to help you take control of your thoughts, thus your emotions to be your personal best. The rewards of mastering control of your thoughts and emotions in the most important situations in your life … priceless.

– By TC North, Ph.D.

Tough times are defining moments in a leader’s career.  Moments that result in greatness or mediocrity.

Great leaders emerge in tough times, whether difficulty stems from economic conditions, merger or acquisition activity, product, service or customer problems, or even discontent or striking employees.

During tough times leaders … conceive a new vision, create belief in the new vision and transform employee fears into excitement.  The following five leadership attributes and actions reveal how leaders take charge.

Take responsibility.  Leaders step up and take responsibility for the condition of their organization, even when external factors impact it.  Employees want to know that their leaders are strong — and brave enough to embrace and carry the weight of the challenge.

“The first thing we did as a management team was to confront the brutal fact that we were probably going to have to lay some people off.  … It was stressful for people to hear, but I believe it was better for people to know the facts,” said Terry Gold, president of Gold Systems, a voice automation software company, which last fall faced a declining economy and slumping sales with direct communication and core-business-focused decision making. Taking full responsibility for the situation may be the most critical leadership attribute in tough times.

Establish a clear vision.  “In difficult times people crave clear inspiring vision from their leadership for two reasons, one, it gives employees confidence in the future and, two, it allows employees to align their goals and behaviors with the success of the vision,” notes Mitchell Marks, a San Francisco-based management consultant and the author of “Joining Forces: Making One Plus One Equal Three in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances.”

Your organization’s vision may or may not remain the same during troubled times.  Regardless, leaders must define a vision clearly and have a goal structure suited for all levels of the organization.  If the vision is significantly modified, then the goal structure for all levels of the organization must be modified to align people’s energy to achieve the vision.

As your corporate vision evolves, and if staff cuts are necessary, make cuts to align your resources and strategies.  Too many organizations make cuts then define their new vision.

Tell the truth.  What are the most important communication strategies and actions for leaders to perform during tough times to emerge as a stronger organization?  Gold suggests that leaders “communicate honestly, quickly and as completely as possible.”

Chris Binkley, president of Kaiser Permanente Colorado, echoes Gold’s thoughts:  “Communication is truly the key action/strategy to take.  You have to be honest and open with your employees and when you have customers that depend on you, you have to be honest and open with them.”

The lesson these leaders offer is simple: Communication from all levels of leadership needs to be honest, frequent, congruent and timely to all stakeholders.  This enhances trust during a time when distrust can reign and trust is a necessary leadership attribute in tough times.

Listen.  Listen to employee and customer fears, pains and frustrations.  It’s particularly important to address employee fears.  When people are afraid, they put their energy into their fears and spread them, which leads to under performance.

At Kaiser, “We seek out information on what we don’t know or on what’s being said.  If we hear people are talking about feared layoffs, we point out if layoffs are or aren’t in the future.  There’s no sugar coating, because all that does is create false impressions,” Binkley notes.

To make changes, information about every aspect of the business must be collected.  Listening, to knowledgeable people from all levels of the organization, provides leaders with data to make changes.

Balance short- and long-term needs.  According to Mike Sausa, President of Boulder’s Spectra Logic Corp., “the greatest leadership challenge is always balancing the immediate needs of the business (i.e., survival) with the future need to maintain a dedicated, motivated team of people.”

Sausa recognizes that when times are tough, an important leadership attribute is maintaining a short-term focus, which has to be aligned with and support the long-term goals and strategies. Kaiser’s Binkley suggests a simple method for keeping everyone focused: Start with your own behavior.

“Model the strategy.  Don’t just talk about a plan for change; model it.  Live it.”

To live through troubled times and emerge as a stronger organization, you must create belief in the new vision, align actions with it and turn organizational fear into excitement. Turning fear into excitement, now that is an amazing leadership attribute!

– By TC North, Ph.D.

High performers deal with mistakes differently than under performers, which is in part why they are high performers. High Performers are extremely critical of themselves, but they use their critical evaluation to change and improve, not to beat themselves up with negative thoughts.

This can confuse people because it appears that high performers are really hard on themselves with their thorough self-critiques. Again, the difference is that high performers mobilize their energy to improve themselves rather than beat themselves up thinking negative thoughts. Some high performers learn to get rid of negative thoughts so well that the thoughts are almost nonexistent. Here’s an amazing one-minute video of how Jeremy Bloom, a three-time world-champion freestyle skier turned successful entrepreneur, sharing how he gets rid of negative thoughts. Bloom credits this technique with allowing him to ski to his potential and dominate his sport..

Become a higher performer, and transform the energy you use thinking negative thoughts into positive energy for change. If you are interested in coaching for stopping negative thoughts and changing them to  positive thoughts, or developing other high-performance mental skills consider engaging a high-performance executive coach.

Here is a powerful four step process to get you started. It takes hundreds even thousands of repetitions to change a thinking pattern that you have had for some years … stay with it…

– By TC North, Ph.D.

Are your meetings a dreaded time suck or an enjoyable, productive collaboration? When summarizing a meeting, have you ever heard, “What a waste of time!” “That was boring!” or “Please shoot me if I have to go to another meeting like that!” Those types of meetings are not only a waste of time, they’re also demotivating!

After the basics of how to run an effective meeting.

After you learn the basics of conducting an effective meeting try these nine unusual strategies to create killer meetings — highly productive meetings that people love: read on …

1. Don’t have a meeting. If it’s essential, hold it only as long as needed. Also include just those who must be involved.

2. Stand or walk. When you can, meet standing up. You cut to the chase … and burn extra calories in the process! Walking leisurely shoulder-to-shoulder for one-on-one meetings can also be extremely effective, especially when you have a difficult subject to discuss with a man. It’s deeply rooted in men’s DNA that a close face-to-face interaction is either an attack or a sexual advance, so they’re much less defensive shoulder-to-shoulder.

3. Think like an orchestra conductor. Conductors are in charge of the tempo, tone, crescendos and who plays at any given time. The conductor creates the feel, emotion and tone of the notes played. Meeting leaders need to pay attention to all of these to maximize a team’s effectiveness.

4. Keep score. Remember Pearson’s Law: “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.” If a team meets on an ongoing basis, at the end of each meeting, summarize commitments to action items made during the meeting. Then, in the meeting when the action item is due, have the progress reported to the team. If you keep track of the action items that are completed on time, you’ll notice that the percentage will often increase to more than 90 percent, a characteristic of a high-performance team.

5. Maintain your parking lot. When topics arise during your discussion but aren’t the meeting’s priority, put them in the parking lot. The parking lot is an ongoing list of important topics that the team may address in future meetings. Check your parking lot when developing future meeting agendas.

6. Celebrate. What do athletes and sports teams do when they win? They celebrate. Most sports teams, like football, soccer and baseball, celebrate every time they score as well as when they win games. Do your business teams celebrate their successes? We in business aren’t as good at celebrating our scores or our wins. If you want to have excited teams with loyal members – celebrate successes. We always begin my Fearless Leaders™ forums with each member’s biggest wins for the month. It connects and energizes all of us and is always a meeting highlight. (Click here for more information on the forums.)

7. Consciously create a team culture. Implement a set of guidelines/commitments for your meetings. Here’s a list of six basic guidelines for all team members: Each team member commits to:

• Start and end on time.
• Participate fully. State your opinion; don’t be a dysfunctional water cooler gossiper.
• Take 100 percent responsibility for the team’s success and failures, not just your percentage.
• Be honest and constructive. State your thoughts with emotional intelligence.
• Come prepared. It’s frustrating and demotivating when preparation is expected and not completed. One high-performance characteristic in both business and sports is preparing more thoroughly than others.
• Engage with respect. Listen, don’t interrupt, paraphrase what others say and appreciate different perspectives. Attack and solve problems, not people. Tempers are triggered when people feel attacked. For example, a team member named John proposes a solution to a problem the team is working on, but you disagree with it. An attacking statement would be something like, “I totally disagree with John’s perspective. …” A mindful disagreement focuses on the problem, not on John. It could be something like, “John, that’s an interesting perspective. Here’s another solution for solving this …” For more on creating high-performance cultures, click here.

8. Laugh up your creativity. Most meetings are committed to improving or fixing something. Want more creative solutions? Research indicates the more you laugh, the more creative you become. Make your meetings enjoyable or fun and you’ll  increase creativity.

9. Value all processing speeds. This takes us back to being the conductor. Conductors value all orchestra instruments and understand how each enriches the music. Meeting leaders need to give enough time to those who process deeply and slowly so they can digest information and provide their perspective. They may greatly enrich the conversation and improve solutions in ways others can’t. Team members who process quickly are also highly valuable because they keep things moving and provide a plethora of ideas for others to consider. Each instrument, every voice, is a valuable and unique contribution.

If you’re a high-performance leader who runs killer meetings (highly effective meetings), you’ll attract great colleagues and fast-track your career.

Here’s another excellent perspective, Inc Magazine article, “How to run a 30 minute meeting”.

– By TC North, Ph.D.

What’s your rate-limiting step? This isn’t a new bar pickup line to replace, “What’s your sign?” It’s a term I first learned in a graduate-level biochemistry course. Being in psychology, the hard science almost broke my brain, but I was totally fascinated with the concept that one step determined the ultimate speed of a highly complex biochemical process involving scores of other steps. And it seemed like it applied to most everything.

So what’s the high-performance business effectiveness (and life) lesson from biochemistry? … It’s a waste of time and energy to work on improving all the other parts of a process until you can improve the rate-limiting step to the point it’s no longer the limiter.

Simplify effective business solutions.

This simplifies how to improve ourselves, or create more effective business solutions. If you can identify and improve your greatest rate-limiting step, you can dramatically accelerate your business effectiveness and success.

What one thing is your greatest deterrent in attaining what you most want (your rate-limiting step)?

Here are examples of rate-limiting steps, beginning with some from a few CoBiz authors:

Todd Ordal (www.AppliedStrategy.info) is an adviser to leaders on strategy and leadership and writes with a great blend of humor and insight. Todd indicates that some organization’s rate-limiting step is a lack of, or a poorly developed business strategy. (http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/be-ready-for-flat-tires).

Liz Wendling (www.salescoachforwomen.com) is an author and sales coach for women. In her article “Seven Deadly Sales Sins” (http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/seven-deadly-sales-sins), Liz shares seven potential rate limiters, one of which is fear of selling. The antidote is confidence, and an in-depth technique to build selling confidence is included in my last article. (http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/fear-of-selling-heres-my-powerful-antidote)

Julie Hansen (http://actingforsales.com) is an author and sales trainer. In her article “The Seven-Second Sales Test” (http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/the-seven-second-sales-test), Julie points out that people make 11 decisions about you in the first seven seconds of your interaction. Not making a good first impression is certainly a rate-limiting step, not only in our business relationships but also our personal relationships

Tad Lyle (http://tadlyle.com/tadlyle.aspx) counsels executives and entrepreneurs on how to retire with wealth. Tad identifies a lack of positive personal monthly cash flow as a potential rate-limiting step in creating retirement wealth.

Dawn Bjork Buzbee (www.SoftwarePro.com) infers that email can be a time suck (my words) thus is a rate-limiting step and gives guidance on how to maximize your time with email in her article “The Taming of the Inbox Monster” (http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/the-taming-of-the-inbox-monster).

David Coombs is a lean operations expert at Leonardo Group Americas. He has demonstrated that most rate-limiting steps in manufacturing were in the downtime between production steps! Hmm … David found that a product’s production time was most easily improved by decreasing the time in between the steps.

Can you identify your personal rate-limiting step, or your business’ rate-limiting step? Is it something that’s conscious, or obvious, or unobvious? If you identify and improve your greatest rate-limiting step (belief, fear, process, system, action, inaction, etc.), you’ll rapidly improve your business effectiveness. If you, like most people and organizations would benefit from an outside perspective to identify your rate-limiting step, please contact me, I’ll be happy to help you find a resource to assist you. Just email me!

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