My 32 Faces and My Source

Life is full of opportunities to practice the habit of "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." The other day I found myself interrupting someone in mid-sentence. She had to tell me "Let me finish." And I appreciate that learning moment. I'm grateful that she was assertive enough to tell me that.

"Seek first to understand" starts with letting someone else finishing their sentence and their thoughts.

Get set and go

Get set and go
Originally uploaded by allnode

When I grew up in Hong Kong many years ago, people typically would not have waited for the traffic signals to cross the street. HK people were impatient and did not behave then according to regulations. Well, they have changed now. They do wait for the green lights. Goes to show people can change.

Faith and Listening

According to John Maxwell and Jim Dornan a "person of influence" has faith in people and has the capacity to listen to them.

Here are some quotes about faith:

1. When you believe in people, the do the impossible.
2. Difficulties seldom defeat people, lack of faith in themselves usually does it.

In last LPG meeting, we shared perspectives on:

1. What is faith?
2. What does it have to do with trust?
3. What does it have to do with prior evidence?
4. Are you someone who grants trust first?
5. Or, do you expect that trust must be earned?

We also discuss the merits of the following techniques to become a believer in people:

1. Believe in them before they succeed.
2. Emphasize their strength.
3. List their past successes.
4. Instill confidendence when they fail.
5. Visualize their future success
6. Put them in a position to experience small successes

A person of Influence...listens to other people. We talked about the following:

1. No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.
2. Be impressed and interested, not impressive and interesting.
3. The best way to impress someone is to let them impress you.

The slides we used to trigger our LPG conversations can be found here.

Motivate In Action

Motivate, according to Maxwell and Dornan, is the second level of the 4M of Model (Model, Motivate, Mentor, Multiply)in "Becoming a Person of Influence".

Last LPG meeting we had good discussions on the meaning of Nurture as an essential element to practice "Motivate".

A person of Influence nurtures other people. And when you nurture others, you give them: "Love, Respect, Sense of Security, Recognition and Encouragement.

Some memorable quotes:

Love: The length and breath of our influence on others are directly related to the depth of our concern for them.

Respect: While love focuses on giving to others, respect shows a willingness to receive from them. Respect acknowledges another person’s ability or potential to contribute.

Sense of Security
People feel secure with you when your actions and words are consistent and conform to a high moral code that includes respect

Encouragement
When a person feels encouraged, he/she can face the impossible and overcome incredible adversity.

Last Thursday, I witnessed Nurturing in action when Kiwanis Rochester helped Harriet Bishop Elementary School form their K-Kid Club.

The adults: Kiwanis members, Harriet Bishop teachers, and PTSA, along with area K-School (Century, JM, Mayo) high school mentors, gave the elementary school students support and encouragement to start their own service club so that the students can develop the passion, skill and commitment to be in service to others.

From Charter K-kids

The kids elected their officers. There were multiple candidates for each office and candidates gave speeches and answer questions from their fellow club members. They showed poised, commitment and ability to think and speak on their feet.

From Charter K-kids

I was inspired by their club charter night and glad to play a small part in it.

And that is Influence in action.

Next Monday, we will continue our journey to Becoming a Person of Influence.

Tips for a better life

Your Raise Me Up

I have been reflecting on Motivate, the second M of the 4M model in "Becoming a Person of Influence" talked about by John Maxwell after our LPG meeting this Monday.

Maxwell says one of the things we do when we motivate others is to encourage them. At our LPG meeting, however, there was some concern as to when encouraging someone becomes giving false hope, offering flattery, or building someone up to fail.

Tonight for some reason the song "You Build Me Up" kept coming up in my head. I even tried to hum it and played a few bars on the piano. Then I turned on TPT. There it was, Daniel O'donnell was just getting ready to sing that song. How much more a co-incidence can that be?

The song's lyrics speak precisely to what encouragement would do for someone.

You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up... To more than I can be.


Here is a link to Josh Groban's rendition.

I believe the habit to encourage others is to consciously act to raise them up so they can indeed climb mountains (small or large). It's having the attitude of focusing on other people's strengths and not their weaknesses.

Organization Modeling

It seems to me that an organization can also benefit by using the 4M methodology being discussed in our LPG meetings to increase its influence on the domain in which it operates.

For example, Diversity Council has just refreshed its mission statement to:

Through education, we use our diversity as the foundation to build a healthy, inclusive, and prosperous community.

How we arrived at the new mission statement was through a process of being open to the diverse opinions from our board members and stakeholders. And it has been an educational process in which we respectfully obtained ideas and suggestions from everyone and modeled how to distill from the wide spectrum of ideas to an essence--a mission statement--that everyone buys-in.

We followed our DC board process. and refined how to use Web 2.0 technologies like discussion forums, goggle forms, etc and then wrapped up by focused face-to-face discussions to come to a consensus.

We work in a way that honors our mission statement. We have modeled how a transparent, open, diverse organization should work. That is a good thing.

Speech Contest

The IBM Toastmaster Club is running a speech contest this Friday. Several LPGers are taking part in it including me.

Speech making no matter how often I have done it still brings up the butterflies in my stomach. Being nervous is human nature. Shawn White talked about how nervous he was before his half-pike snow boarding jump at the Winter Olympics. That is the champion athlete who would win Gold by a wide margin.

Learning to deal with pressure takes practice. When an opportunity to practice presents itself, you go for it. The attitude of LPG is this: it's not so much whether we have to be good at something before we will do it; it's doing something so that we can become good at it.

At LPG for the last couple of sessions we have been talking about Integrity. At its core, it boils down to walking the talk.

TM speech contest gives me an opportunity to "talk" the talk (pun intended). And I will have a chance to practice talking about beyond labeling--a topic I really care about.

Guests are welcome at our TM meeting.

Becoming a person of influence

Last Thursday was our first LPG meeting of the year. The topic is based on John Maxell's book: "Becoming a person of influence."

I believe every one has a circle of influence. Some circles are larger than others. To say some one is becoming a better leader is similar to saying that their circle of influence has expanded.

I remembered when I first join the board of directors of Diversity Council I had a relatively small circle of influence. A year later, I can honestly say that I am making a difference: My views, my suggestions and my actions are noticeably influencing the group. And I am grateful for that.

With the knowledge of Maxell's book now, I can make a case that how I (or anyone for that matter)gain influence in a new circle is traceable to Maxell's 4M: Model, Motivate, Mentor, Multiply.

Maxell says Model is Integrity. But what is integrity?

I have a simple formula: Integrity is aligning your actions with your intentions. Or put it more simply, follow through:

If you promise or imply that you will do some thing, do it.

My intention (and my hope) is that I am wise enough to only make promises that I can keep and that I keep the promises I have made. For the next two weeks, I will keep a mental log on how well I am doing in this area.

Our presentation deck has other suggestions for you to use to track your Integrity index.

You decide.

Travel Tip

This morning's Toastmaster meeting theme was travel tips and experience.

Here was the story that I shared:

On our honeymoon many years ago, my wife and I, courtesy of an IBM assignment. found ourselves in Paris. We went to visit the famous Louvre museum.

At the court yard, urged on by a friendly man who motioned to us that he would like to take a picture of us, naively we stopped and let him click his camera.

It was one of those instant photos. He then came over and asked us to pay something like 10 dollars for it. A great deal of money (at that time)for one photo. We were shocked. and said No.

The man said: "If you didn't want your picture taken. Why did you pose for me?"

We did end up buying the picture.

The lesson is: "Pose only if you want to spend the money."

All for a good cause!

Happy New Year! I would like to invite all my friends to join my table at the 21st Diversity Council Annual meeting.

Please RSVP me to my facebook.