Thinking time

Fear, Human Brain, possibility thinking, Thinking, Worry

Inspite of having so many productivity tools, we are so busy these days that we are not able to take out time to think.

Over the years, I have been sharing how I have tried to regain some of my life by eliminating apps from my mobile phone and tablet, so that they don’t interrupt me. That has definitely helped me regain at least about an hour, but given the amount of travel we have to do, its still a small piece.

Even on weekends, we have chores to run and family and friends to meet and interact with, which eats up time. Now we need to do all these things, because they help us get away from being caught up in our mental rut.

If you can somehow plan out your week, month, year in advance to cover 60% of what you want to achieve and leave 40% slack for unexpected situations, then you can genuinely achieve a lot. But if you have not got time to think, then you can’t plan.

So figure out ways to carve out at least 50 min in a week, in one stretch, when you will plan of the next set of activities. Once you do that, you get a lot of clarity on the next steps you have to take. To give an example, I have been thinking on ways of how I can increase my passive income. However it was always something to do. Today morning I took out about 40 minutes of time to just think of ways, because this was causing me a lot of insecurity. Finally I figured out an action plan, which I will need to put in place from tomorrow.

Now that it’s moved from your brain to the paper for execution, the brain is relieved that it no longer has to bother about protecting me and therefore my fear and insecurity has fallen. Tomorrow onwards, I will just need to ensure that I ticking off the points that we have identified.

Once the brain knows you have an action plan, it stops showing resistance and throwing up all the disaster scenarios.

Take time out for just thinking – put on some soothing music and let your brain dump out all the points it has and then figure out an action plan. This will also showcase possibilities that don’t come up when you are in the transaction mode.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Leveraging on soft assets in the market

assets, Leverage, Marketing, possibility thinking, Riding the elephant

I have always spoken about “riding the elephant ” a philosophy which is extremely useful when you are a small player trying to get into a new market.

Sometimes you have a reverse scenario. You have something “deep ” in the market. It could be relationships withkey customers, some typically solutions which only you have, or a place in a specific location.

I remember there was a time about 20 years back, when the company I used to work for used to do trainings for internal staff. So there were multiple training rooms. These training rooms had servers, individual desktops etc.with individual network connectivity.

Many a times, these training rooms used to be vacant. Since we had already spent capital in setting up these class rooms, if left vacant, they were only getting wasted. At that time we were going through a crunch and had to figure out what other possibilities existed for making profits.

So we went about figuring out who else could need training rooms with the specifications that we had. Necessity is the mother of invention. To utilize the asset we had, we now needed to find a buyer who would use the asset only at times when we didn’t use it.

Jay Abraham is a master at building and utilizing these kind of assets. I used the strategies he lists in his book to figure out how we could leverage. We figured that companies could use these rooms, but not everyone needed the individual computers, so those companies were not willing to pay a worthwhile amount. Then we thought of software companies who need to get trainings done both for their staff and customers.

That was the master stroke. Once we could get a handle of who owned customer trainings in these companies, we showed them the rooms and to top it we offered to take care of 2 meals and tea/coffee during the sessions.

It became so good that some of the people who came for the training then asked us about our primary business and we ended up making some of them, our customers for the main business as well.

This was pure profit because the asset had already been paid for, so increasing the utilization only increased the profits.

Till next time then….leverage on what you have and count the gains

Carpe Diem!!!

Using reverse psychology in our daily life

mindset, possibility thinking, psychology, Sales

When we are in school we are taught to follow a rule book and solve problems in a given manner. If you don’t solve it that way the teacher may actually deduct marks. There are benefits of this system, because it helps the teacher grade her students on a fixed set of parameters. It’s not good for the students because when they do go out in the real world they find moving targets with no method to directly use.

Since we get so used to being spoon fed through the school system, we are not able to think different possibilities.

One method which I use is to let people experience the challenge of the straight jacketed way of solving a problem. If I try telling people the challenges in their solution then they resist my ideas. So I tell them how I would go about it and then I ask them.

I ask them of how they think they would like to solve the problem. Once they tell me the solution and if I don’t think it might be a workable solution, I ask them to proceed with solving the problem their way. But I put a low risk milestone. Only if the low risk milestone can be realized, are they allowed to move ahead otherwise they have to find another way.

This way they don’t feel that I don’t listen to their ideas and I am also ‘not betting the whole farm’. In addition if their solution works then, I have learnt a new way to solve the problem. On the other hand if it doesn’t work, I can then tell them the reason why doing it my way has its benefits and they get to learn from me.

As we grow older, we get more and more fixated with our ideas and resist ideas from others. So if you try to push something , it doesn’t work . On the other hand you let them try their idea with a low risk outcome and then show the problems , they may be more willing to listen to your ideas.

Professional negotiators have a complete arsenal of these kind of techniques to get people to come to a win – win solution. Sales is another specialized negotiation. In yesterday’s post I had written about how you could use the same concepts.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Puzzles are no “child’s play”

possibility thinking, problem solving

Yesterday I spoke about how the puzzles are so difficult for people like me to solve. Even though I talk a lot about being open to possibilities, to think laterally etc. there are times when you give up or come out with compromise solutions.

However the puzzles that we give children to solve, have a single solution which needs to be identified. Most children are able to solve these problems by trying multiple times with an open mind. They also don’t operate on time pressure generally.

In the corporate world we generally have time pressures, but maybe I could be using it sometimes as a excuse. However when we are dealing with humans in the problem, there is no fixed solution because human beings can change stance. Then we are dealing with a moving target.

The main thing about myself , I would think is that I run out of patience, in trying out different options. I think that’s one take away after working on the puzzles.

Working on these puzzles is addictive in nature. So some kinds of puzzles like the simple to medium Sudoku, and word puzzles I am able to solve quite fast. But puzzles like Mashu have taken me an enormous amount of time for me to figure out eventhough the instructions seem to be simple.

The big difference between children and me I think is that I tend to take the instruction as the only possibility and not trying out the possibilities that have not been listed, assuming they are not allowed. This is the biggest problem with most of us adults. We don’t try to identify unlisted assumptions and explore solutions using that.

Till next time then….see what other possibilities can be explored.

Carpe Diem!!!