“When you lose something, you are just making space for something bigger”

I have received a call last week from one of my clients, who for internal reasons had to cancel one of the  biggest contracts we have signed this year. To tell you that I wasn’t deceived would be lying; The news could have ruined my whole day, week or even month because of the magnitude of such contract. However as I am committed to have a high EIQ (emotional intelligence quotient), I had to analyze the choices I had, so I quickly drew the below mindmap (click to enlarge).

As you can see, by just changing my paradigm from deception to choices, a multitude of options started flowing  and I was suddenly enveloped with a warm feeling of happiness. It is strange and weird but in the nicest possible way.

So I continued my analysis and tried to come up with computer and IT analogies; when we delete files in our computers we are just making space for another file, the same goes in our lives; when we lose something we are just making space for something bigger.

A lost opportunity = more focus on a bigger one
A lost job = a chance for doing what you love
A lost family member = more love for other family members, or more focus on continuing what the lost one has started
A lost friendship = opportunities for a better one

And the list goes on...

A women in Lebanon has lost her son in a water sports accident, and after grieving him for a while she felt that her life had stopped; You just can imagine how hard it is to loose a child. But one day she woke up and asked herself the following question: What is the reason that my son was taken away from me at a young age? What is the message behind it? How can I use this incident to serve others?

A week later she has started a foundation with a purpose of making parents aware of the dangers of inattention when it comes to their children. So going back to her choices, she had two choices; either grieve her child for the rest of her life, or help thousands of other households save their children. With the latter choice she now feels that her son’s decease was a rebirth for a thousand more child.

“When you lose something, you are just making space for something bigger”

So if you just think about a loss as a free space, you will not get stuck in the past and will start generating opportunities for the future. It is all about using your energy- any kind of energy; negative or positive - and turning it into choices that will get you closer to your goals.

To know more about increasing your efficiency and how to generate healthier choices, visit our website: www.ideasgrp.com

You can complain or you can....

 

The world that we live in presents enough challenges for de-motivating the most positive people on earth. On the other hand, people seek comfort when they start sharing their problems with others; and some take that comfort to the next level and will find a need for complaining. As one of my friends puts it: “As human beings, we love to be victimized. Being victimized is perhaps the best way to run away from our responsibilities.”

This implication of being victimized spreads across all aspects of life: Relationships, education, health and most importantly careers.

Looking at the career and professional aspect, it is really annoying to be around people that whine and moan every day at work; sometimes this excessive negativity will drag others into it and will have a slumping effect on performance.

So how do we stop those people from complaining and how do we lift our moods if we think that we are in an awful situation.

First of all, Start by auditing your life: List the good things that are happening in your life and the bad things that you are exposed to and ask yourself those two simple questions: 1) How can I increase the good things? 2) What can I do specifically to change each of the bad things on my list?

Second, Don’t be positive: Yes you are reading correctly. Being positive and wishing for good things to happen is like staying at home without contacting anyone and waiting for Microsoft to ask you to become one of their Vice Presidents. Instead of being merely positive, have a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) and draw plans, while acknowledging that you will face some negative challenges. So have a PMA and identify what might go wrong so you will be able to pro-act and not re-act.

That brings us to the third point which is Be Proactive. As Dr. Stephen Covey puts it in his habit 1: “Take responsibility for your life”. If you cannot see a change make the change, if things are not going the way you plan, you have two options: sit down and watch things go terribly wrong or take control of the situation and ask yourself how can you change the situation. The how questions open a lot of doors and will get you closer to your desired situation.

The choice is yours; take the driver’s seat and lead your life to your own victory or complain while watching other people climb the peaks of success.

To learn more about how to increase your Leadership Quotient and other workshops by ideas group visit our website on www.ideasgrp.com

Social Mania

At First Companies have rebuffed all social media, claiming that it was a waste of time for their employees and that it weights on corporate productivity. Then, as soon as some success stories rose about the use of social networks to make money – the likes of dell making $ 3 million in less than 2 years just out of twitter, and Perez Hilton becoming the friend of celebrities just by blogging about them, all corporates wanted to have facebook profiles, a presence on linked-in and a need to tweet. However this was done the wrong way.

Before jumping on the Social Networks extravaganza, companies, or even people who are looking for a personal branding e-campaign, should ask themselves the below five questions:

1- How is our SEO (Search engine Optimization) benefiting from our social network sites?: Social networks play an amazing role getting our website discovered by the search engines ( google yahoo, bing etc). Using key words on our social network will increase the rankings, if you don’t have a corporate social website its time to do so.

2- Are all of our social profiles and websites interlinked? What makes any website/webpage powerful is the amounts of links directed to that site, when connecting websites with links to each other, then you are creating your own web of sites and thus empowering your reach.

3- Are all of our profiles homogenous? Having different info on different social websites will confuse the visitors and weaken your reach. All the introduction texts in the “About us” section should say the exact same thing, and when updating one social site all the others should be updated in the same time.

4- Are we heard by the right audience? A lot of companies think of adding followers or members randomly. When choosing a “follow-ship” companies should be speaking at the right audience. A good way of building a great database of potential customers is to have a blog that can only be read by inserting contact details. Those blogs can be easily made of subjects that only interest your type of clients.

5- Are we offering to our public something of value? Some social profiles only portray publicity and ways of eliciting customers. The web 2.0 audience is always looking for something of value and for free….Wikipedia, Youtube, mashable, and …. Are perfect examples.

The social networks should be handled the same way we handle the traditional media, you should have a social media strategy, social media officers and an alignment between your overall strategy and online strategy.

Camil El Khoury

What are you giving this Christmas?

It’s here again…that magical time of the year is here again…oh yes it’s Christmas.

Usually every holiday, especially that time of the year, people start becoming forgiving, forgetting and all about giving, and making others happy.

This Christmas, have you thought about what you want to give? And by this I don’t mean gifts or any materials items, I meant what do you want to give people around you?

This might seem selfish; however, to end up the year with a great achievement, what about giving people at the office something that will help them end their year on a better tone.

In order to do that, you have to practice, in a simple yet a very powerful way, the art of coaching, and more specifically how to make people feel understood.

By coaching people, you will strengthen your relationships, people will feel that you are a source of trust and you will feel like you have made a difference in your workplace.

If you are ready, then you are 5 steps away of becoming a workplace catalyst of change :

1- What’s in it for them: Often in our conversations we end up talking about ourselves and fail to understand or learn what people are truly saying.

In order to do that we have to Actively Listen; doing that requires that you give the full attention to people when you ask them a question, yes it means leaving your computer keyboard or your phone to concentrate on what they are saying.

2- Ask open questions: And that relates to point one, the question will have to be about them, and you will have to resist introducing your personal stories in the conversation unless you are asked to. A sample open question is: “What motivates you?” and if they answer growth or achievement resist the temptation to say “me too” or “yes I also like….. because it makes me….” Remember you want to be helping others so try to learn about them.

3- Encourage them to come up with their own ideas: If you asked them what motivates them or what makes them happy, ask them how would they like to take things forward, and by this I mean what are possible ways for them to reach their goals. Again here, resist the temptation of giving personal advice; instead encourage them to come up with ideas and solutions.

4- Listening to their ideas. Listening is a big part of helping others. When someone is telling you about a certain idea, try to learn what this idea truly represents. Summarize what they have said to make sure you got it correctly, this will also show the speaker that you are truly listening to them,

5- Help them turn their ideas into actions Ideas are useless unless they are executed. In order to make an idea happen, one has to turn it into a plan of action. A good way that will make their ideas happen is to make them fill a table like the one below:

What is the action point that you will execute	By when will that point be achieved	What Support do you need and from whom	How will you track your progress measure your success

Make sure they are specific when they fill the table, and ask them to choose a mentor ( it could be you) to follow up on those action points.

Christmas is a time of giving, and the self satisfaction from giving others new ways to think is priceless. So Merry Christmas, and good luck.

Camil El Khoury is The Author of "Do What you Love, Love What you do" and the Chief Vision Officer of ideas group; the leading experiential learning firm in the AME region (Africa and the Middle East)