The Three Month Vacation Podcast

In 1970, two psychologists did a very interesting experiment called the “The Good Samaritan experiment”.

It was meant to determine whether we're kind other some conditions and oblivious at other times.

What makes us kinder, more generous?

Is there something that's been under our nose all along that we've been missing? Let's find out.

You can read the transcript here: #167:The Incredible Power of Kindness (And Why It Has Nothing To Do With Business)

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A few months ago, my brother in law's house was burgled.

What do you say to someone when their house has been burgled? What do you say when you run into a friend, and you find she's lost her father? We live in a world that's filled with kindness, or else we wouldn't function on a day to day basis.

However, as one writer wrote: We're only one generation away from anarchy. We're all born selfish. Kids hang on to their toys and bawl at the need to control the entire ice-cream stand.

We have to be taught to be kind.

And kindness comes in different forms

It's not just about charity or letting the other driver cut into your lane on the motorway. In today's episode, we go all philosophical, simply because of a book I'd been reading (which I didn't complete, of course). It's a book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

Sandberg and her husband, David were on vacation to Mexico. David was on the treadmill exercising when he collapsed and died alone. In her book, Option B, she recounts the horror that inhabited her brain at the time of the accident, and for months later.

This episode isn't about business. It's about kindness and its many forms.
Let's find out how we can be adults in a world of “kiddy tantrums”. And how we can be kind as children, in a world of jaded adulthood.

Here are three things we'll cover. I promise it will change the way you look at kindness from now on.

1) Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead
2) Telling someone how they changed your life and being very specific
3) Slowing down, because kindness can be heavily dependent on how much you slow down.

1: Not asking what we should do, but doing something instead.

In 2010, my father in law; Renuka's father, passed away.

I don't remember much about the day. What I do remember was the act of our friend, Cher Reynolds. Somewhere after the funeral, Cher showed up to the house with muffins. “I baked these muffins”, she said. Cher then stayed a while and left. So why did the incident of the muffins stay in my head?

I only realised it when I read Sheryl Sandberg's story.

The difference between Cher and so many people is that Cher left out a question that so many people tend to ask in times of crisis. When there's a disaster, death or sudden misfortune, we feel helpless. And our helplessness shows because we all make a similar sort of statement.

We say: If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know.

On the face of it, such a statement is exceptionally kind. In effect, we're writing a sort of blank cheque. We're saying we'd go completely out of our way to help, no matter what the request.

And yet in its kindness, the statement becomes a bit unkind. It's asking the person who's under enormous stress, to let you know what they need.

The stress is so high that the person is often cut off from reality and can barely function. It's at this point that we misguidedly ask them to “think up a list of what they need”. Author Bruce Feiler writes, “that the offer while well-meaning, shifts the obligation to the aggrieved”.

Cher didn't ask if she could bring muffins

Instead, she took a decision, made the muffins, drove halfway across town and gave the muffins. In the book Option B, Sandberg talks about her colleague Dan Levy. Levy's son was sick and in hospital. That's when a friend texted Levy with a message that went like this: What do you NOT want on a burger?

Levy could see how the friend has not dumped the obligation. “Instead of asking if I wanted food, he made the choice for me but gave me the dignity of feeling in control”. Another friend texted Levy saying she was available for a hug if he needed one. She added that she would be in the hospital lobby for a whole hour, whether he came downstairs or not.

Kindness comes from specific acts, writes Sandberg

“Some things in life can't be fixed. They can only be carried.” My brother-in-law and sister-in-law weren't the same people I'd met just a few days before the incident. They were shocked beyond belief that someone had violated their space.

It's at times like these that we sip from our cup of helplessness and ask that question, “how can we help?” It's at this time that we have to step up and act.

That's just the first act of kindness, however. There's more. Like letting someone know how they changed your life. And be specific about it.

2: Tell someone how they changed your life and be specific

At the end of every Psychotactics course, we do something quite unconventional.

We ask for feedback. What's so unconventional about that, you may ask? This act is unusual, because clients are expected to give about 1000 words of what went wrong, and suggestions on how to fix the course.

Which means that if there are 35 clients on the course, we get a mind-boggling 30,000-35,000 words of feedback. And it was on one of these courses that I got feedback from a client named Gordon.

Here's what Gordon wrote to me, separately in an e-mail.

“Whenever I do an assignment incorrectly, you take a lot of effort to tell me what's wrong. You help me get back on track when I'm struggling. And I really appreciate that a lot. However, when I do an assignment, or part of an assignment well, you simply say, “That was good”.

You get what Gordon is saying, right?

He wants specifics both when he's going off the road, but also praise when he's done something correctly. And then for good measure, he wanted to know exactly which part he got right and why I thought it was so very good. In hindsight this request seems so very obvious, doesn't it? Look how quickly we snarl when the coffee's cold, but never stop to tell the barista when the coffee is perfect, and why we think it's so well done.

Every day we get countless opportunities to get mad—and probably just as many where we can be exceptionally kind

Being specific is the key because just a pat on the back, while helpful, is nowhere as good as telling the person why they earned it. Baristas, waitresses, the chef that you never see at the restaurant, they all count.

Even the guy who is trying to get you to buy something at the doorstep counts. And within our own families, our kids, our friends, they all do little things for us, and we often forget to be specific. We forget to tell them how they changed our day, often our lives.

I've learned a lot from my nieces, Marsha and Keira, for instance.

Keira runs in like a typhoon every Friday, turning off all the switches where devices are not charging. I have to remember to tell her how she's changed my laziness with keeping switches on.

Marsha has told me how she often doesn't force her opinion in a discussion, even when she knows she's right. And I've learned to be less pompous as a result. I think we can all be slightly more kind to the people we run into every day.

No one is saying you need to be a saint, of course. We all need our moments of anger and frustration, but when we turn on our faucet of kindness, let's make sure we turn it all the way up and tell people how they make a difference to our lives.

Which takes us to the final aspect of kindness

Strangely, this has nothing to do with how we choose to act. Instead, it examines what causes us to stop and be kind. It's the odd phenomenon that's now known as the “Princeton Seminary Experiment”. But what was this experiment about? And how does it determine our ability to be kinder people?

3: Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent on an unusual factor

If a traveller is assaulted on the road, who stops to help?

If you've ever read or heard the story of the Good Samaritan, you'll be familiar with how a traveller is assaulted by thieves and left to die. A priest and a Levite pass the injured traveller but don't stop. The Samaritan stops to help the traveller, bandage his wounds and takes him to an inn, where he proceeds to pay for the care of the traveller.

In the 1970s, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson decided to run a modern-day Samaritan test

The students of the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Once they had reached a reasonable level of preparedness, they were expected to deliver a sermon on that very parable. However, in order to give that sermon, they need to get to a studio, in a building across the campus, where they were told they'd be evaluated by their supervisors.

Bear in mind that all of the students were studying to be ordained priests. And every one of them had already been buried in their preparation of the story of the Good Samaritan. Both these scenarios would suggest that if they ran into a scene where someone needed help, this group of all people, would be more inclined to help than any other group.

However there was a little monkey wrench thrown into the mix

As the student prepared to go across to give his sermon, he was given one of three sets of instructions:

“You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition.
“The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition.
“It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition.

The students—all the students—were then expected to walk by themselves to the studio

In every case, the student would encounter a “victim” in a desert alley, just like the injured traveller in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The victim was a plant, but the seminarians didn't know that. All they could see was a slouched, destitute-looking person who desperately needed assistance. In such a scenario, and bearing in mind how they were influenced by the parable, how many seminarians would stop to help the “victim?”

The research findings were startling

Only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and a whopping 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations stopped to help the victim. The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going.

Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behaviour, but being in a hurry decreased it.”

Time, or the lack of time, that was an overwhelmingly important factor when it came to being kind

To be kind, we all need time and energy. This isn't to suggest that someone with more time will be a kinder person, but when we're in a hurry, we are definitely more aggressive. Tunnel vision comes into play, and we fail to see how we can help others who are in need of our kindness.

It's scary to realise that our lack of time could make us inadvertently selfish

And the anguish that comes from the lack of time isn't new either. Way back in 1911, poet, Henry Davies wrote about how we lead a life of care, and we have no time to stand and stare. Over a century ago, time or the lack of it was still the problem. There's no easy way to solve this problem, of course. We have to hurry up, but there are moments when we can decelerate, so that we have time to be kind.

Kindness isn't something we're necessarily born with. We learn kindness along the way.

To get more kindness in our lives, we need to look at three core aspects.
1) Stop asking what we should do, but doing something instead.
2) Tell someone how they changed our lives, and be specific about how they did it.
3) Slow down, because kindness is mostly dependent when we're not in a hurry.

Epilogue

The motto of 5000bc is “Be kind, be helpful or begone”. Kindness is a lot of work and I'm very grateful for everyone that pitches in. All of those who ask questions are being kind because you're helping others who are reluctant. Those who help out in the critique section or in the Taking Action forum, or in the Technology forum—you're all taking the time to be kind.

The way you welcome a new member, that's an extreme act of kindness, because nothing is better than feeling safe in a new environment. And there are the Cave Guides who voluntarily step in to help new members navigate their way, plus the Cave Elves that step in to make sure all is well while we're away on vacation.

Every one of you makes a big difference.
Thank you for your kindness.
Thanks very much.

Next up: Why Happiness Eludes Us: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome


What causes clients to keep coming back?

Is it information?
Or could it be entertainment?

For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun? And what if you had a ton of fun as well?

Let's find out how to speed up client learning with some pretty minor tweaks in your e-books, courses, presentations and webinars.

Click here to read the transcript on the website: 
#166: How To Speed Up Client-Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment

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When my mother-in-law, Preta, was in her twenties, she was teaching at Sunday school.

Like most Sunday schools, the kids were there to learn about the Bible. However, my mother-in-law decided to teach the girls how to sew tiny dresses for their dolls.

Within weeks of her starting up, all the girls wanted to be part of her class. Ironically, this made the other Sunday school teachers jealous. They complained to the “higher authorities”, and Preta was called in to explain herself.

“We've heard you're not teaching them about the Bible, and instead only involving them in play”, said the person in charge. “You can come in and test the knowledge of the kids,” retorted my mother-in-law, “and you'll find they know they're well-versed in their Bible studies”.

You can clearly see the wisdom of play in this story, can't you?

You can also see how people in charge resist it a lot, even though it's apparent that we all have a maddening streak of playfulness we can't seem to shake. That when learning something, we want the trainer to bring a sense of joy into our learning. Instead, most education is soulless, incredibly dull and it's not surprising that clients drop out. The problem is that we're pretty sure we're guilty of this callous training and teaching as well.

But what if we were to make fun the core of our system?

What if we postponed designing the information-based section and thought about the fun elements, instead? What if fun wasn't an afterthought but part of the entire structure of learning? How would we do things differently, if this were the case?

In this series, let's look at:
In this series, let's look at:

1) How to create Infotainment
2) Why we need to understand the goal
3) How to place the fun elements in your training

1) How to create Infotainment

If you were in charge of getting a kid to write, would you start with “slimy, oozy eyeballs?”

Here is a story of Jen Jackson from Seattle. She'd started a small English tutoring business aimed at kids that were being homeschooled. One of her students was Michael, Michael clearly despised writing, despite being able to read well. His mother tried “everything”, but her methods weren't working, so she called Jen to help Michael write.

Except for the fact, that Jen didn't make Michael write at all.

The two of them read joke books, challenged each other to tongue twisters and did everything but write. The second meeting involved fun drawing games and drawing a monster. Still, no writing was included. It was only the third session where a Monster Cafe was created, apparently to accommodate Michael's monster.

That's when Michael wrote out a short menu that included slimy, oozy eyeballs. In the sessions to follow, Michael went on to create many menus for different monsters. Today, Michael is not exactly prolific, but he willingly writes short paragraphs and is eager to keep improving.

When we read this story, we can see how entertainment has led to information success, can't we?

Yet, as an educator it somehow feels scary. Even if you embrace the power of entertainment as the doorway to learning, how are you supposed to implement it? If you did what Jen did, wouldn't Michael's parent look at you funnily, wondering if you were just wasting their time and money? What are you supposed to do when you're not dealing with kids, but adults instead—and in serious fields like marketing or finance?

The core of entertainment is to take the pressure off, completely

Let's say you wanted to learn Photoshop. If you've never looked at Photoshop before, that sounds a bit intimidating, doesn't it? So how do you make it fun? You look at the what causes people to freeze. Incredibly, it's the computer and Photoshop itself.

When I'm showing clients how to use Photoshop for the first time, I usually take them to a cafe—without the computer. We sit down and work our way through some core shortcuts. If the client wants to learn to draw, what alternatives would they need? Wait, you're reading this, so you can easily play along.

Let's say you want to get the brush tool. Which letter on your keyboard would you press? Yes, you're right, it's the letter B.

What if you wanted to change the opacity of the brush to 30%? What number would you press? Some clients say 30, but of course, the answer is 3. What about 50%. Yes, it's 5. And 70%?

I'm teasing. Of course, you know the answer. Let's move on to the brush size. If you wanted to increase the brush size and you had to choose between the left and right square bracket, which one would you choose? Most of us correctly select the right square bracket, which means that the left one will reduce the brush size.

Imagine you're sipping a cup of coffee, there's no computer in sight, and you're told to create a theoretical drawing in Photoshop. You have to get to the brush, get the opacity to 90% and then reduce the brush size?

Notice how much fun that whole exercise turned out? The first way of taking the pressure off a person or a group is merely to get them as far as you can from the activity. When you put yourself (and the student or client) in a different setting, the pressure is instantly off and a sense of play sets in.

However, not everyone can waltz their way into a cafe or garden

Some teaching needs to be done at the venue itself. What do you do, then? One of the best and most effective ways to get the pressure off is to get the clients to do something wrong. Let's take an example. Of the many workshops we've had over the years, one of the more intimidating ones is the uniqueness workshop.

The fact that we were going to take three days to get to uniqueness didn't help. How do you take the pressure off? You get the uniqueness wrong, that's what you do. Within minutes of starting the workshop, I gave each client an advertisement for a local business.

They all had the same ad, and they had to figure out the uniqueness of the company in under 10 minutes. However, before they started, I informed them, that all of them, no matter how hard they tried, would get the assignment wrong.

Imagine you're in the room right at this very moment

You can hear the hush, can't you? You have an assignment, but you're going to get it wrong. But that quiet lasts only for a few seconds. Everyone has a big smile on their face as they take on the assignment that they just can't get right. The pressure to get it all correct is gone, and they can have a jolly good time.

They start the assignment, complete their version of it, and then they're all chattering away and having a great time. After which everyone is called upon to give their answers, and a logical explanation follows. They've been entertained as well as informed! Tah, dah, infotainment!

Good teachers know the value of play.

Good workshop trainers will take the pressure off as quickly as they can.

Excellent writers and speakers will use the power of stories to get their audience smiling, long before the main guts of the information comes along. The more pressure you put on a student, client or audience, the more the brain goes into shut down mode. Which is why we have to release the tension.

But more importantly, it's because you need to understand the real goal. But what's the purpose? Ah, that's easy. You want the client to want to go forward of their own accord. You want them to beg you to continue. They must enjoy themselves so much that what you're teaching them must feel like a bowl of warm, chocolate muffins. Understanding the goal is what makes the client—or student come back repeatedly.

Let's find out how we can get this goal going, shall we?

2) Why we need to understand the goal

“‘Better, faster, cheaper.’

That was NASA's mantra around the year 1999. And it was in this very year that the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed. On Nov 10, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million satellite was supposed to become the the first weather observer orbiting over another world. For the orbiter to do its job, it needed to get into a stable orbit around the red planet.

But something had gone wrong. The software was required to control the Orbiter's thrusters, and it did so, using the system of measurement of “pounds”. However, a separate software was processing data in the metric unit—”newtons”. The two systems of measurement threw the entire mission entirely out of whack, and atmospheric friction likely tore the fragile satellite apart.

From the outside, it might look like a doofus-plan: that sophisticated scientists didn't notice that the software was calculating in two completely different units.

And just like that, the mission—the $125 million mission—was no more.

When training clients, the burnout rate is consistently like the Mars Orbiter

That's because we're using completely different systems of measurement in our teaching methods. The goal isn't necessarily to get the ideas or learning across. Yes, that's the final goal, but not the primary goal. The primary goal of any training system is to get the client back.

Remember the story about Jen Jackson and how she tackled Michael's writing problem?
Remember how my mother-in-law got her students to get all excited about Sunday school?

When you think about education in an objective sense, you may feel that it's your job to get the information across. But knowledge is tiring. It's frustrating. It's the wrong system of measurement. And it's most often what causes the client to burn up before the mission so much as gets underway. Instead, think of how you can get the client back using fun and a factor of entertainment.

Entertainment doesn't just mean you're rolling out tacos and a Mariachi band
But then again, who says learning has to be all work, work and more work?

In the headlines course, for example, we start off with an assignment that goes like this:

Day 1: Introduce yourself
Day 2: Watch three videos—and these videos are from the movie, Karate Kid
Day 3: List five topics and many sub-topics

And what does their list look like?
Ice Cream
•   Cup
•   Cone
•   Scoops
•   Buckets
•   Sprinkles
•   Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup
•   Brown Cow
•   Whipped cream

By Day 5, clients are clearly having fun

Mermaids, dinosaurs, deep sea aliens (yes, deep sea aliens exist, you know)—they all make a list. And everyone is having a blast. They're getting to know the members of their tiny group; they're coming up with all of these crazy topics and sub-topics. And it's a lot like what happens at our place every Friday.

On Fridays, for the past four years, we've taken our niece Marsha to the food market

The assignments could involve walking to the veggie section, weighing an object and writing down the weight. Or we might have to skip—no walking, just skipping—to the dairy section to find out how pricing works, and how Swedish rounding of prices works. In short, Marsha (and I) have been running, jumping and skipping through our learning exercise.

She's learned about frozen, dried and fresh foods. She's learn about weights and measures, about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Then when we get home, we do spellings in the garden or walking around the car (yes, I get sneaky steps on my Fitbit when I do that activity).

However, let's make this really boring. Let's hunch over a desk or dining table and you get the idea why most kids detest having to study. There's zero entertainment and a lot of screaming and do this, do that, involved, instead.

So what would Marsha want to do the following week?

And the week after? Doesn't take much imagination, does it? If our goal is to educate, to train, to impart knowledge, you and I are sure going about it the wrong way. A workshop doesn't need your audience to reverentially worship you as you show them slide after slide. At Psychotactics workshops, clients go for walks and do their assignments.

They sit by the pool. We have games, we have soft toys like Jordan the otter, and of course, Elmo comes along wherever we go. At one workshop, two our clients, Jessica and Alia, who happened to be belly dancers, taught one part of the group to dance, and the other to clap along and create the mood.

Would you want to go to another dull, reverential note-taking-workshop or come to a Psychotactics workshop, instead?

If it sounds like too much fun, and no work, that's not the case at all

Every course online, every workshop, every book you write needs to be result-oriented. If the client buys your product or service to get a result, a result needs to be the finale. But why does it have to be boring? The only reasons why any learning is boring is because the trainer doesn't realise that fun is possible, or they take the easy route and do what they've already done a million times before.

To create a fun-based situation takes a lot of work on your part. It's not as if to suggest that a serious training session isn't a lot of work. It's just that you need to do so much more planning when fun is involved. Entertainment is great for the learner or the audience, but it's a hard grind for you to put into place.

However, the results of information + entertainment are incredibly predictable

Clients come back repeatedly. If you were to attend a Psychotactics workshop, you'd find close to 50% of the audience are back for a second, third, fourth helping. Clients travel long distances just to be at the workshop. And they sign up even before we have time to put up a sales page. For instance, if you take the Singapore Landing Page workshop, ¼ of the seats are already gone.

With the Brussels workshop, ¾ of the seats were taken before we completed the sales page. A similar trend plays out when we're conducting courses online.

There's the Article Writing Course—yes, the live course online—in July 2018

The seats would go on sale by early March. And before you know it, and often within 24 hours, that course is filled to the brim. If you look at a presentation, there are compelling videos, loads of cartoons, a touch of animation—all designed to give the audience respite, even though the presentation may be under 40 minutes long.

And if you've read a book from Psychotactics, you know that once again there are cartoons, a recipe in the middle of the book and an epilogue at the end of the book telling you the process of how the book was made.

What's the goal of education?

To come back, that's what the goal should be, shouldn't it? Imagine you as a kid wanting to race to school every day, because, hey, school was so much fun. Imagine desperately wanting to continue a video series on a topic like Photoshop, because the presenter is so amusing. Now make no mistake. It's not about pure entertainment.

You're there for the information as well, but why on Earth does the process of imparting information have to be so boring?

“Better, faster, cheaper”

That was the mantra, the chant that caused the Mars Polar Lander to fry just 23 days after the Mars Climate Orbiter. According to an article in Wired Magazine, vibrations in that craft’s legs may have convinced the craft’s on-board computer it had already landed when it was still 100 feet in the air.“The specific reasons [for that failure] were different, but the underlying parts, this overly ambitious appetite, were the same.”

“NASA made some “big-time” changes after that,” said NASA engineer Richard Cook, who was project manager for Mars exploration projects.

They got rid of several other missions, including one that involved bringing rocks back to Earth. NASA, it seems, reevaluated what they were doing, based on strategies and concepts that had stood the test of time.

When teaching, what stands the test of time better than entertainment?

Would you rather go back to a place that is boring, or one that is a fun-learning experience?
Which one are you most eager to go back to, time and time again?

Well, since we're on the same page, let's go to the third part. Now that we're pretty sure that fun is part of learning, let's move to the third part and find out just where we can put fun parts in the learning.

3) How to place fun elements in your training

Rob Walling has an unusual video in the middle of his presentation that takes the audience by surprise.

In May 2017, I spoke at the Double Your Freelancing conference in Sweden. Rob was one of the speakers, and his topic was about the topic of “how to launch a startup.” Rob's a pretty easy-going speaker, with well-thought-out slides and a gentle progression. Until midway, when the entire presentation seems to stop for an intermission of sorts.

Walling decides to show the audience a video of how his son solves a problem progressively. It's a home video, nothing flashy, yet the audience laughs as they watch the story unfold.

How did the video show up in Rob's presentation?

It's the same question that could be asked when you attend a Psychotactics and go off scampering for a scavenger hunt. Right in the middle of the workshop, there's a peculiar assignment. The pre-assigned groups are given 30 minutes to go out and find a whole bunch of items, return and then upload the pictures to the blog.

The next day each group makes a presentation; the best entry is chosen by popular vote, and there's a tiny little prize ceremony.

You noticed the fun element in both the examples, didn't you?

The question is: how did they get there? And the answer becomes pretty apparent even as the question is being asked. Someone has to put it there, because yes, it may show up quite by chance. However, in most cases, the creator of the product or service has to be proactive enough to put in the fun elements.

Your product or service needs this break as well Why should it be?

When I went to school, we had a short break of 15 minutes, then a lunch break of an hour. We'd race out of the class at break time, so we could get onto the playground. Was the play connected in any way to our biology or physics class?

Of course not, but the fact that someone decided to have the short and long break enabled us to study and play on every given day.

Your product or service needs this break as well

The way to go about creating the entertainment factor is to sit down with the book you're about to write. If you could make it fun, more interesting, what would you do? If you're about to conduct a course online, what do the assignments look like? Is there any space for play?

What about your workshops or seminars? Are the participants like prisoners listening to you drone on forever? Or is there some factor of entertainment and play?

If you remember picking up a copy of the Reader's Digest, you have this example with “The Lighter Side of” and “Laughter the Best Medicine” in the middle of some pretty serious articles. Someone sat down and said: “Ooh, all of this stuff is intense. We need to lighten up”.

Not everyone appreciates the entertainment, of course

A scavenger hunt may not go down well with 100% of the participants. Cartoons in a marketing book sound a bit crazy, doesn't it? A door that creaks open on a website (it's going to be on our new website) may seem outlandish. And there are always going to be naysayers.

However, by and large, those are the people who wanted to stay in and do their homework while we ran out during school breaks. If they're unhappy with the entertainment factor, don't go around chaining the rest of your group to ol' grumps. Instead, design the event, the book, the product or service with a bunch of fun elements.

Look through other books or situations to find inspiration

Esquire Magazine may have a joke section—just one joke told by a supermodel. Could you be that supermodel in your book? If you've got a video course, why do you have to be Ms.Serious or Mr.Let's-Get-To-The-End? Have a couple of videos that tell a joke, or show something funny around your neighbourhood.

Maybe take a leaf from Rob Walling's book and put in a video about your kid's crazy jokes. The fun part doesn't always have to be disconnected. It can connect quite easily as well.

In The Brain Audit, there are sections where there's a whole page of cartoons, and they connect quite precisely. There's also a total disconnect with a butter chicken recipe.

Do what you please: connect or disconnect at will.

• Crossword puzzles
• Recipes
• Funny home videos
• Cartoons
• Stories
• Case studies

These are just some ways to entertain your audience while educating them

As this article demonstrates, entertainment isn't just a nice-to-have. Instead, it's a necessity. Sometimes it is the reason why people show up. Sometimes it's the reason why they stay and continue.

And sometimes the entertainment may be right at the end, like when David Attenborough and his crew put in the “how we made this documentary” as an epilogue of their film.

When you see an idea you like, make sure you borrow it and use it well. We've used ideas from video and used it our books. We've been to a Sting concert and used some of the concepts in our podcasts. You can get ideas from everywhere if you look out for them—and more importantly—implement them.

My mother-in-law's Sunday school story didn't end well.

She managed to get the kids interested, but jealousy worked against her. She was told to stop the fun bits and focus only on the serious religious teaching, instead. You, on the other hand, aren't going to be pulled up if you add entertainment to your work.

However, you have to plan in advance. The entertainment isn't likely to just work its way into your syllabus. Sit down, create the entertainment. Start small and build from there.

Work is fun.

But play is just as educational, if not more so.

Next Up: The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly

 


Procrastination is bad, right? Well, not quite. If you break up a project, you're likely to find most projects have five distinct sections. To get to the end of the project, you're going to need a form of managed procrastination. But how do you go about this form of procrastination? And why is it seemingly better to keep you focused? Let's find out in this episode, shall we?

Read the transcript online: #165: How to use procrastination to your advantage

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Imagine you're sitting down late at night to get ready for your presentation the next day. And you find your slide deck is empty.

That's precisely what happened to me when I was conducting a workshop in California many years ago.

Usually, I'm very thorough, making sure everything is in order at least four-five days before we board the flight. This time, however, I'd somehow put off what I needed to do, confident I'd have enough time when I got to the U.S.

When preparing for workshops, I go through my slides anywhere between 10-15 times, and complete full run-throughs at least thrice, on the day before. So how come the slide deck was empty? Our workshops usually span three days or more, and the slides for Day One were just as they needed to be. But who looks for Day Two slides on Day One? Not me, at least.

Which brings us right to the evening of the first day, when I sat down to prepare myself for Day Two. That's when I realised many of the slides had incomplete information.

Procrastination doesn't have a good rap.

And rightly so. Just because we've pushed something out into the future, doesn't mean it's gone away. In fact, there's a good chance that unfinished task is a mega-energy drainer.

If I have to go for a medical checkup, and I can see that white slip in front of me, it bugs me. If you need to finish writing that chapter in your book, you spend enormous amounts of energy just pushing that task out on a future to-do list. However, there are times when procrastination can be good for you.

In this series, we'll cover three points:

1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts
2) How Procrastination Can Help Manage the Email Deluge
3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels (And When It’s Bad)

1) How Deadline-Based-Procrastination Helps Formulate Better Thoughts

In 1966, there was a study on the Ju/’hoansi bushmen that wander around the borderlands between Namibia and Botswana. 
It found that the bushmen only worked seventeen hours a week, on average, to find their food. An additional nineteen hours were spent on domestic chores and activities. In all, their 36-hour week might seem pretty excessive when you consider that most working people aim for a 40 hour week.

However, our week is a lot longer

Even back in 1966, a comparable week in the United States was roughly double. 40 hours were spent at work, and about thirty-six, on average, on domestic labour. Today, adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of between 47-50 hours per week. That's more than a whole working day as compared with 1966.

All of this extra work only means one thing

The working brain of the Ju/’hoansi and the busy business owner in Beijing, is similar. But the demands on energy, distractions and travel have made procrastination an imposing part of our lives. Even if you were to go back just to my father's time. He ran a business, a secretarial college and while he put in a long workday from 8 am to 8 pm, he didn't have Facebook or a mobile phone.

Once he got on his train at night, he'd be eating roasted peanuts and nodding off as he made his way back home. In comparison, we have to battle all sorts of crazy stuff, just to get through the day. It's inevitable that as our energy depletes, our procrastination levels skyrocket.

Even so, procrastination can be a great ally when it comes to formulating thoughts

Take this article for instance. I write most of my articles within 5000bc, right in the forum, on forum software. Which means every member of 5000bc can see the progress of the article. This article, for example, started on 19th September. It was just an announcement of the article.

By the 20th, I'd only managed the three topics I was going to cover. As the 21st makes its way to another sunset, four paragraphs are in place. And then there's a “to be continued” added to the unfinished piece. If you look at this form of article writing, you can either consider it to be procrastination or progress.

I think it's procrastination and it's good when you're trying to maximise your creativity

Creative work, according to Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, there are five steps to getting to a sort of finish point. They are:

Preparation
Incubation
Insight
Evaluation
Elaboration

 

When you and I look at that list, there are five whole levels of procrastination

Tiny tasks would blur those five elements together in a matter of seconds. However, the moment you have to write an article, compose some music, or even put that plant you bought last week, it all requires five chunky steps. Trying to rush a project of some complexity through those stages, is likely to be counterproductive.

Even so, every stage of the procrastination process needs to be long enough, but not so long that you completely forget about it. The bigger the project, the more likely you're to push it to the back burner and then it just lies in a corner, unfinished.

Properly managed procrastination seems paradoxical

Procrastination by its very nature is putting off something for the future because you don't want to deal with it right now. Managed procrastination, however, is where you do a tiny bit, then put off the rest for just a little while. In some cases, you may start on the task in the morning, and continue your task a lot later in the day.

For other tasks, it might be a lot better to hit the pause button until the next day. While you're seemingly stuck on the pause button, your brain will come up with different angles to solve the problem. If you're writing an article, you'll have different examples, possibly even a different way of expressing yourself.

The more significant the task, the more the complexity

Writing an article might be no big deal for one person, but for you, it might mean a lot of sweat, tears and a bit of beer too. Even so, professionals tend to have some system that will take them through preparation, incubation, and insight. The job gets done as a first draft, then you come back to evaluation and for some elaboration.

The more we find ourselves working through these steps, the greater the procrastination. However, it's a managed form instead of simply putting things off, like we usually do.

Distraction has a bad name and rightly so

We're off on a tangent when we should be working on our project. Unlike the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, we have too much to cope with all at once. When you accept distraction as part of your day to day life, procrastination becomes even more vital. You realise that once you're done with a pre-designated chunk of work, you're going to reward yourself with some distraction, so your brain doesn't slip into a downward spiral.

Hours later, or even a few days later, you're fresh, filled with a range of ideas and examples (that you no doubt jotted down) and the very same project has a raw new energy. The distraction, unfortunate as it may seem, is not quite so ugly if you plan for it in advance.

In previous versions of the Article Writing Course, I'd get clients to write an article every day

Then around 2016, someone mentioned that she was taking 3-4 hours to finish the article every night. I was appalled at the idea, because in my mind, clients should be taking between 60-90 minutes at best, to write an article.

If you spend 3-4 hours, you merely get exhausted, and the material isn't 300%, and often a lot worse than if you're not so exhausted. Hence I went about re-engineering the Article Writing Course. On Monday, the clients only write topics. On Tuesday they outline the topics.

As the week winds its way to Wednesday, they chip away at the article using the system of procrastination. Instead of writing five articles a week, they may end up with just two. However, those articles are of a higher quality, and the student isn't dreading the following week as much. Make no mistake; learning a new skill or working on a project with twists and turns, is never going to be easy.

However, slaving your way through it is a silly strategy. Going through several stages makes more much more productive, more valuable content and finished projects.

And if procrastination worked for projects alone, it would be wonderful. However, there's another excellent application for managed procrastination. I use it for my e-mail. How? Let's find out.

2) How to use procrastination to deal with the deluge of e-mail.

On Sunday nights, I sit down to go through my e-mail.
That way when I wake up on Monday, I expect my inbox to be empty or at least sparse.

Hah, I should be so lucky.

No matter how much you and I deal with e-mail, there's always more coming through. And easily the biggest problem with e-mail is that it drains you. If you're doubtful about this, start up a new e-mail account and look at the vast blankness of that account. Not a single e-mail sits in your inbox in that new account. And if you sneak back later, maybe 20 minutes later, there's still nothing to be seen.

Now if only you could make your current inbox so neat and tidy, eh?

Well, you can. And it's all a matter of managed procrastination. Email software has gotten very smart over the years and some of it is free, while some of it requires a subscription of some sort. What most modern e-mail software allows you to do is to push e-mail away until it's needed. Maybe someone is requesting an article that I won't tackle until next week.

Normally I'd just let it sit in my inbox, because it needs to be done. Or I may put it in a folder that I won't ever see again.   But at this point, and because of e-mail software, I can push it away. In other words, procrastination comes to the rescue.

On any given day, I'll deal with the urgent e-mails right away.

Everything else gets pushed for later. Either later today, which is about 3 hours after reading it, or for the evening, weekend, next week, next month, or at a specific date and time. Like Friday, 29 Sep at 3:13 pm, for example. No matter how important you are as a person, most of your e-mail can be allocated to another time zone, when you're more likely to be able to tackle what needs to be done.

For instance, some emails that require more effort, I'll either deal with right now, or push until later. It's hard to say which ones you should keep and which ones you should push away. How you defer your e-mails depends on your work load and your mood.

But one thing is clear

If you've ever had an inbox with zero e-mails or just a couple of e-mails, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You feel like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders. You feel free. You feel excited—ok, ok, I'll stop. And yet, all this procrastination, managed as it is, may seem like you're just fooling yourself. We all put reminders and alarms and when we're supposed to do the task, we swipe away that reminder.

Won't the e-mail that comes back be just an excuse to swipe it away for somewhere in the future?

I once had a few e-mails that kept coming back

At first I'd send them off for a week, as they were not urgent. But I soon found myself pushing them away for a month. They showed up in the inbox in January, February, then again in March. April, May—which is when I decided I was never going to act on them and simply archived them to pull up, should I ever need them again. If you're never going to read that e-mail now or later, you may as well get rid of it or archive it (because you never know).

E-mail is a fact of life

We don't expect to get less. We're always going to get more. And it sucks our energy to keep scanning e-mails in our box, often opening some we've already read. Much better to clear up that box so that the e-mails appear later, or as when needed in the future. To get this job done, I used Boomerang for Gmail (which is a paid service and costs about $5 a month).

On the Mac, you also have Spark, which does an excellent job and strangely is free. I know nothing about the PC because I walked away from PCs back in 2008, though Boomerang works with Outlook and should be PC-friendly.

All e-mail isn't the same

Some need to be dealt with right away. Some can do with managed procrastination. Use the procrastination and you'll be more relaxed and you'll have that new e-mail account feeling yet again.

Which takes us to the third part—and probably the biggest reason why procrastination helps.

3) Why Procrastination Can Be Good For Energy Levels

If you head to Uluru, also known as Ayer's Rock, your first experience as you leave the airport, is an invasion of bush flies. Within seconds they're swarming all over your face and in some misguided effort, you try to get rid of them. Do what you will, but they keep coming and you have the sense of losing the battle.

Work can seem a bit like bush flies, at times

You try swatting it away, but it comes back with gusto. And as you take on the day, your energy keeps edging downward. That's how our brains function; first at reasonably high efficiency, and then we seem to get slower, even making more mistakes. Procrastination, managed procrastination makes for a great energy reboot.

Which is why I'll work for a couple of hours in the morning, then go for a walk. Then I'll work for another couple of hours and then go cook lunch. All of these breaks may well seem like “wasted time” but it's “time well wasted”.

But even within that “work time”, I'll mix up activities

For instance, I may start writing an article, but then move to answering e-mail, and then to writing detailed answers to questions asked by 5000bc members. Every activity is different and disconnected. The article writing might create the highest demand on my brain, which is when I have to procrastinate after a while. Trying to take on the article on the very same day might be totally counter-productive, so I'll go build the website or go to 5000bc, instead. The activities will vary between high energy and low, all day long.

However, in between there's a clear sense of adding chunks of procrastination.

Going from one end to the other is seen as focus

Most of us revere the concept of focus, but focus doesn't mean that you have to start and finish everything at one go. A lot of activities both work-related and non-work related could all do with the break up of the activity. For instance, when I'm talking a complex dish, I'll make sure I do it in phases. That phase by phase method is really nothing but a form of managed procrastination, and a good use of high energy vs. low energy tasks.

Procrastination is often seen as a form of laziness

And for some of us, that's just what it can turn out to be. We are either so drained by the activity that lies in front of us that we choose to avoid it, causing a further drain on energy. We know it's still on our to-do list and that drives us crazy, even though it's hard to admit it to ourselves.

However, managed procrastination is a whole different kettle of fish. When used well, it can keep your energy high so that at 5 pm every evening you're still raring to go, instead of feeling washed out and unable to do much.

Use procrastination to your advantage.
Use it to formulate better thoughts and better examples.
Use it in your e-mail to keep that inbox clean as a whistle.
And finally keep your energy high right through the day by mixing high and low energy tasks, thus using a slightly sophisticated version of procrastination.

Next Up: Can Resistance be Beaten?

We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the resistance game.

Direct download: 165_-_How_Managed_Procrastination_Works_To_Your_Advantage.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm NZDT

Some days you just feel fed up of your work. You know you shouldn't. You love what you do, but you can't shake the feeling. You almost have to drag yourself to work and you don't know how to turn the day around.

That day can quickly turn into a second day. Before you know it, the week is a puddle of frustration. But there's a way out of this mess and it's incredibly simple. You can turn your day around in 30 minutes. Let's find out how.

You can read the transcript on the website: #164: How To Transform A Miserable Day Into A Happy One, In Under 30 Minutes

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How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes: Episode 166


How To Transform A Miserable Day Into A Happy One, In Under 30 Minutes

Some days you just feel fed up of your work

You know you shouldn't.

You love what you do, but you can't shake the feeling. You almost have to drag yourself to work and you don't know how to turn the day around. That day can quickly turn into a second day.

Before you know it, the week is a puddle of frustration. But there's a way out of this mess and it's incredibly simple.

You can turn your day around in 30 minutes. Let's find out how.

Right click here and ‘save as' to download this episode to your computer.

 
 
 
 
Sean D'Souza:Three Month Vacation         
How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes           How to turn a miserable day around in 30 minutes          
 
 

Fed up.
Fed up.
Fed up.

I said it thrice on my walk this morning. And then Renuka pointed out that I was saying it yet again, as I reached the cafe. If you know me well, you probably know I'm always darting around at a squillion miles an hour. As a friend, Kimberley Carroll once said to me: “Sean you're a mad person. You're always busy doing things”.

Even so, at some point all of us hit a wall

It's not the kind of wall you're thinking of. This isn't a spiral into sadness, frustration and depression. It's just a feeling I tend to get into, when I sense I need a break. And instead of paying attention to what my brain and body is telling me, I dig my heels in and go to work.

I turn on my phone and listen to another podcast or audio book. I turn that moment into a learning episode.

Except today, my phone decided to have a mind of its own.

I turned on the phone on my walk back, expecting to continue listening to an audio book. Instead, the phone started playing my favourite music. Admittedly my music tastes are pretty eclectic. They go from quawwali, to African drums, some Turkish music.

Buried in the middle of it all is tango, Taylor Swift and Zhu. However, today my phone decided to play Randy Travis.

Yup, country music.

That's the twangy stuff that comes out of Nashville, Tennessee. The stuff that most people like to turn their noses up at.  But for me, country music isn't weird at all. I pretty much grew up with a generous dose of country music.

Think about that; a kid growing up in Mumbai, India, listening to country music. But I didn't just listen to the Randy Travises, George Straits and Ricky Skaggs. I record whole country radio shows and listen to it repeatedly on the sound system

As you can tell, the music floods my brain with subtle waves of joy and growing up. Anyway, my earphones were plugged in, and there I was on my “horse”, listening to country music on my way back home.

But something had changed. I was no longer disgusted. I had a big smile on my face, and Renuka was struggling to keep up with my pace and stride. By the time I was back home, a mere half an hour later, I was a changed person.

The body and brain has a wall

We all run into that wall from time to time. Instead of paying attention to that obstruction, we try to bludgeon our way through it. What the brain is telling us, is that it seeks a bit of distraction; a good dose of downtime.

For most of us, music is an instant mood lifter. Yes, it's an obvious choice to turn our mood around, but strangely we seem to ignore it when we're in a foul mood. But why stop at music? What else makes you happy? I know a visit to the library makes me happy. So does a visit to the cafe, but not with any books or learning to do. Just to sit there and watch the world go by—that's a big fun-trip.

Most days my to-do list is fine, even important, but on some days I need to block my ears.

Instead of listening to my to-do list, I need to pay attention to your brain and body. Bowing to the demands of a to-do list is bound to make me even more miserable. Instead today, instead of wallowing in frustration, I decided to have some fun on a Thursday. I blasted the music, cooked some food, went for a haircut and wandered through the public library. I even thought of driving down to the ferry and jumping on it and going around to the city, for no particular reason.

A miserable day is a miserable day only because we choose to make it miserable

It's not something that can be solved with a tub of ice-cream or half a dozen cookies. Work is a lot of fun for a lot of us, but we often fail to realise that work is a series of projects. Take for instance, the work I've been doing this week. I had to write an entire sales page, draw cartoons, put in videos and organise the layout for a sales page.

We're having a sales page/landing page workshop in Singapore and Brussels next April and clients have been asking for details so they can sign up. Having finished that sales page, I had another chunky assignment. I needed to finish my presentation for a speech I'm giving in Australia in early November. These are big, mind-taxing projects.

What would you do right after you finished this volume of work? I'll tell you what I did. I ploughed right into another project, because just like you I have another twenty thousand things to complete.

Yet that was completely the wrong thing to do and it's no wonder that I was feeling rotten

And that's when my phone decided to take over my life. It played music, instead of yet another audiobook. It's something that we all need to understand if we're to make our work more fun and with greater meaning.

What's really cool is that it doesn't take a lot of effort.

Blast the music.

Do something you really like doing.

In half an hour you'll feel so good, you'll almost feel like going to work. I feel so energised that I came to work, but only to write this article. I'm off to library-land and to drink a coffee with no other agenda in mind for today.

I'll be back tomorrow, re-energised

It's been four days.
Am I still fed up? Or energised?

P.S. It's Monday morning and I forgot that I was irritated four days ago.

The weekend helped as well. I watched a TV series for five, maybe six hours straight on Netflix. I slept at 1 am, woke up at 7. I did a lot of drawings, played with my nieces on the weekend. I suppose that storm has passed for more than one reason.

But the primary reason is that I was jumping from one project to the other.

I wasn't rewarding myself mentally, by taking the time off. And that's when it all feels like too much work. That mental refreshment is underrated these days. We're all supposed to be on the go, go, go, all the time. Instead, just filling in my mind with fun activities and a great deal of no activity, I woke up to a bright Monday with no recollection of Thursday.

I'm still singing country songs.
I must be happy.

If you're keen on turning your day around, this is definitely the way to go

Stop doing work, because work will always be around. Even if you're employed and can't just take the day off, like I could, you can still take a short break, turn on the music and go for a walk. If you're like me, and have your own business, take the rest of the day off.

In all the years I've been in business, I've never ever seen the to-do list go down. No matter how much you do, there's always a lot to be done. Take the day off, refresh your brain, sleep—sleep a lot, because that's what your brain is craving.

And that creates a turnaround. Suddenly work is fun again.

Next up: How To Stop Your Left Brain From Thinking

 

 

Direct download: 164_-_How_to_Turn_a_Miserable_Day_Around_in_30_Min.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:32am NZDT

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