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Trust. Everyone is talking about it.

This is Part 2 in the second of a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our late August announcement on our new programme on Trust.

In this series we interview Nick Morgan, President of Public Words Inc and author of Give Your Speech, Change the World, Working the Room and Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. He started his career in writing political speaches and  is a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and former editor of the Harvard Management Communication Letter.

In this interview we discuss the differences between audience vs. face to face delivery, executives’ rights and wrongs for speeches, trust, the importance of passion and a few stories from his past experiences.

Link to Nick’s Podcast

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust is about being, not doing. In fact, in Laurel Delaney’s blog How to Build Trust, Marilynn T. Mobley says “It isn’t something you do – it’s what you are.”

Our clients don’t leave meetings with us and analyse our actions and come to the conclusion that ‘because he kept to his word he can be trusted.’ Keeping to your word is, of course, essential. But this kind of behaviour is just the entry ticket to play the game of business.

Trust is sensed. It’s about how our client feels when in our presence. These feelings derive from all the unconscious signals we send out as we interact with our client.

We can’t strategise this by deciding what behaviours we are going to engage in to create trust. We can’t fake it. It comes from our intent.

If our intent is to do the  best we can for our client irrespective of sales targets and other pressures – just listen and give them what they need – then we will unconsciously communicate authenticity.

So the starting point is to look inside ourselves honestly and ask whether our goals are the right ones for long term business development and ultimate success.

All of us need to audit our own purpose and aspirations from time to time. Take the time for some introspection instead of always looking at the outside world for answers.

When we are familiar with our internal world and are authentic, then the outside world pretty much takes care of itself. This, I believe, is the key to building trusting relationships that lead to increased business success.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Last week I allowed the business environment to ‘get to me’. In the face of a challenging sales scenario I looked to the future and saw black clouds. This perception affected my drive and I started to become despondent. The change in my mood in turn affected my behaviour and even my speech became slower and less decisive. This, of course, affected the response I got from people I do business with.

Have you noticed any change in your thinking, mood and behaviour? Perhaps you just experience an underlying tone of anxiety as you go about your business. The problem is, this change directly affects the way others feel around you and about you, creating a knock-on effect on all kinds of results. If you’re client-facing, their experience of you might affect their attitude towards your organisation.

What’s happening here?

This is why it is critical for every executive to understand what’s happening to them and get control of it. John Assaraf, in his book Having It All, says “We don’t see everything there is to see; we only see what we are conditioned to see.” What this means is that we interpret information coming to us through a very personal filter. And this filter is made up of what we believe about the world around us and the kinds of things we tell ourselves all day long.

Our perceptions of the world are unique to us, and we can either allow these perceptions to de-motivate us and affect our performance, or we can look at our beliefs and internal messages and understand how they control us.

How important is this?

John Assaraf goes on to say “We talk, act, and pretend out of the prejudices of our beliefs. As a result, our beliefs and habits affect our self-esteem, our relationships, our prosperity, our job performance, our mental and physical health, and even the way other people treat us, because people treat us exactly the way we see and treat ourselves.”

What can we do?

It is essential to our performance that we find the time to sit down on our own and think about what we truly believe about ourselves and others and link these beliefs to our present thinking, mood and behaviour. It is an awakening when we realise that a belief we developed many years ago is controlling our performance today, even if that belief is no longer relevant.

It is also important to realise that these beliefs are just thoughts that we have created in our own minds. They are an illusion. And as such, we are free to eliminate them and replace them with new beliefs that serve us today. This point is crucial – we all have the ability to control what goes on in our mind, and being able to do this on a constant basis is the secret of mental and emotional strength and ultimately, success in what we set out to accomplish.

Back to my story – I realised that my despondency was the result of a belief that I did not have control over my destiny. Changing this belief into a more empowering one meant that I was able to turn my mood around and become less stressed and more productive.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

What do we mean by ‘downturn’? What do we mean by ‘economic crisis’?  

The meaning we attach to words such as these, and hence to events that happen to us, is a very personal thing.

I may see the ‘downturn’ as something absolutely devastating to me personally, to my finances and to the happiness of my family. My morale will be sure to be rock bottom. On the other hand, you may see the downturn as an opportunity to cut out bad spending habits and save more of your income.

Even if you lose your job, you may see it a great opportunity to re-evaluate your life and start afresh, even if from a lower income base.

The thing to realise is that we have a choice about what meaning we attach to events. We can choose to let the newspapers, our friends or our colleagues influence that meaning, or we can choose to be the masters of our meaning.

If today we allow the newspapers or our colleagues to influence how we see our situation, it is likely we will become depressed. And if we then influence our colleagues with our own depressing viewpoints, our group morale will suffer.

But if we stop and think for ourselves and ignore other people’s opinions, we can choose to interpret the situation in any way we like.

It’s simply not true that because companies are losing sales, we all have to be miserable. Companies losing sales is a fact. But what we do with this fact is just a creation we make in our own minds. We can choose to interpret this fact in a way that makes us feel OK about ourselves, our family, or the world in general.

So, my advice is: don’t get swept up in ‘group think’ which lets your morale sink. Don’t follow everyone else’s interpretation of events. Take control of your own mind and find ways to feel OK – whatever is happening in the world, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which, of course, is just someone’s interpretation.)

For leaders, stop a moment and look inward so as to harness your personal resources. Find a new, more positive way to view your company’s situation and help your people attach more useful meanings to the events that confront your organisation.

We are fast realising that self-management is a critical addition to skills enhancement, and if we can learn to tap into our own internal resources, we will be stronger, more confident and more likely to perform at our peak.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Yesterday I had a meltdown.

It started with me receiving a request to perform a series of computer tasks that I was unfamiliar with. Being a relative latecomer to the world of internet marketing, I panicked. I saw myself taking a whole day to accomplish what someone else might accomplish in half an hour.

The result was a series of mistakes that let to a waste of time and effort, until I stopped and looked inside, at my state of mind, rather than outside, at the task that confronted me.

I realised that my mistakes had nothing to do with ability and everything to do with my state of mind. And my state of mind was brought on by a belief which said ‘You’re no good at working with IT’.

I then asked the following questions:

Where does this belief originate from?

Where is the evidence to support this belief?

Where is the evidence to the contrary?

What will happen if I continue to hold this belief?

What  could happen if I believed the opposite?

In what way is this belief ridiculous?

What would be a better, more empowering belief to have?

The result of this analysis was not a new belief saying ‘You’re good at IT’, but one that said ‘You can do anything you put your mind to when you are calm’. It was my ability to manage my state that was the crucial empowering factor.

The result was that I finished the task in a short period of time thereafter with no mistakes, and actually felt elated as I was doing it.

There are many ways that we can change our state, from thinking about something different to exercising to doing a different task to talking to someone.

Whatever it is, there has never been a more appropriate time for executives today to look inward for the source of their frustrations, failure and fear, and to harness the tools of the mind to secure their future.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Our thinking patterns determine how we feel at any moment. How we feel at any moment determines what we do. And what we do determines the results we get in our lives.

Everyone at this time is trying to tell us to change our behaviour.

Be more caring about your clients, engage them with empathy and reassurance.

Take more care over your tasks.

Pay attention and be patient.

Communicate your thoughts to your colleagues and boss with honesty and openness.

While this is all very well, nothing will change unless we all pay attention to the thinking patterns that underly all these behaviours. If I have a belief that says “never trust anyone until they first prove that they are trustworthy”, then it doesn’t matter how much I try to be open with people, I will always default to my underlying belief in practice.

So, if we all truly care about changing the way we do business in this new world, then the only way to show it is to stop all the activity for a moment and listen to ourselves.

How do we see ourselves?

Does our sense of identity match our behaviour, or are we living a false life?

What’s really important to us?

Do our values align with our behaviour, or are we rejecting these with every action we take?

And are we acting upon beliefs that we developed many years ago and which have no relevance to us today?

Are we sabotaging our future with these limiting beliefs?

Once we take control of our minds, the rest will fall neatly into place and we can start picking up the pieces left by an era of blindness to ourselves.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

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Individuals and management must be constantly asking whether they and/or their staff are being effective vs efficient. One can be very efficient,  however, the outcome may not be effective. What counts is what you actually do and what the actual results are.

Let’s look at use of time. It is worth noting that C. Northcote Parkinson, a British citizen and civil servant, spent some of his time teaching in Singapore. While teaching here he came up with the famous phrase “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson’s Law C. Northcote Parkinson was Raffles Professor of History at the University Malaya/Singapore in the 1950’s. The article (and the excerpt below) first appeared in The Economist in November 1955.

“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil…..”

The first sentence sums it all up. So we need to ask ourselves…

 Isn’t it time we start looking at what gets done and how you actually get it done?

(inspired by Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week)

 Trip Allen-Team Egyii, Singapore

It’s at times like these that I find re-visiting classic pieces of writing about performance and success worthwhile. Yesterday I took another look at Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which included this item written in 1934:

“One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.”

Fast track to 2008 and Joe Takash says in his book Results Through Relationships, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m called on to deal with dysfunctional teams, to coach a talented but flawed leader, to increase profit, or to improve productivity and morale; there is always a relationship issue. There may be other issues contributing to the problem, but relationships always play a large part in the cause of the problem… and its solution.”

I know that obtaining degrees and certificates helps to qualify you as an expert in a particular field. I also know that the way most businesses are organised, you are spending the vast majority of your time dealing with tasks such as emails, reports and research. Yes, knowing your business inside out and dealing with everything that lands on your desktop are critical. But isn’t this time of economic turbulence a great opportunity to step back and assess what areas need a laser-like focus to bring you career success and your company growth and profitability in the next few months and years?

The secret is relationships. Your ability to deal with people is now the critical success factor. In fact it always has been. And the only way to deal with people effectively and to get them to do anything, is simply to give them what they want. And what they want is, as John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers said, “to have a feeling of importance”. I doesn’t matter what situation or task you apply this to – what will enable you to forge lasting relationships and influence people is to make them feel valued and recognised. And this, above all else, leads to results.

So let’s spend some time thinking about our people skills and how we are going to use them to achieve much more than we ever thought we were capable of.

We lead a split life. On the one hand, we do what we have to do to earn a living; on the other, we do what we want to do to have fun. But high achievers don’t experience this dichotomy: they love what they do and they do what they love. In his classic study of Americans’ perception of their work Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books 1974) Studs Terkel quotes Nora Watson as saying: “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job… Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”

You can call it a grand quest or a mission – those who discover it find the same feelings as Stephen Spielberg: “I wake up so excited, I can’t eat breakfast. I’ve never run out of energy.”

But how do we discover this passion? All I can do is tell you how I, James Irvine, discovered it and hope that you will tap into what I say and somehow relate it to yourself. I was a banker for 10 years and was unhappy. I certainly had no passion for my work. I went through each day as if a machine was doing the work while my real self was somewhere else waiting to come out. After 10 years of enormous stress resulting not from the pressure of the job but the fact that I was doing something all day long that was against my nature, I quit.

I attended a career counselling program, and did the usual analyses with my logical mind about what interests I had had when I was a child, what I enjoyed doing in my spare time, and so on. These were helpful in a limited way, because they were all thinking processes, whereas what I really needed to do was find some quiet time to listen to my heart. What I realised was that nothing from my past was really a clue to my future.

So I spent some time working in a retail shop while I struggled with this issue. And as the days went by and I started listening to my feelings and the spontaneous thoughts that occasionally emerged, I began to feel a bit like teaching people. It wasn’t a sudden decision like ‘I want to be a teacher’. Rather, I just began to see myself talking to people and sharing some of my own feelings and thoughts, and as I saw this I felt good.

I didn’t make some grand decision to become a teacher. I decided to enrol in a certificate course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I knew I liked languages and grammar, so I thought this was a way to try out my gut instincts without too much commitment. Remember, I had never so much as made a presentation or stood in front of an audience in my whole time in banking or at any other time in my life. I just had this feeling that was good when I pictured myself doing this.

After two weeks of theory and instruction, we had to deliver our first lesson in front of a live audience who came from the local town for free lessons from these student teachers of English. This first lesson would last for 15 minutes, and I had no idea how I would have enough to say and do to last for 15 minutes. I spent hours preparing, but on the day I stood up in front of about 20 adult students and within a couple of minutes felt very comfortable and energised. I actually discovered a new person inside of myself during those 15 minutes. I really enjoyed the experience in a way that I had not when I was analysing balance sheets and drawing up financial proposals. I had found my passion.

Because I enjoyed the experience of teaching so much, I became good at it, and now, as a corporate talent developer with Egyii in Singapore, I wake up every morning feeling the same as Stephen Spielberg. Well, maybe not quite so excited – I still have time for breakfast!