Successful Blog

Images & Words: Are You Ready to Make Opportunity and Change the World?

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When I started blogging in summer 2005, I wanted to keep the writer’s discipline of writing every day. No one could have predicted, that it would lead me to several blogs, a fabulous business partner, a conference and consulting business, and place in a fabulous community. When I started photographing the sunrise in spring 2011, I wanted to keep a writer’s discipline of remembering to look out my window every day. The photos are starting to write stories with me. Now I’m starting to wonder where that will lead …

How to Make Opportunity and Change the World

Our businesses and our lives are in a constant state of change. We can try to tie things down, keep things where they are. It’s a battle that we’ll never win. On the other hand, they say some things never change. And the more they change the more they stay the same.

Change is like the rain. It’s not good or bad. How we see it is what makes us think that.
Do you see change as a problem or an opportunity?

See the opportunities.

Do you live in the sun or the shadow?

It’s your choice you know.

Do you see the clouds on the horizon …
or the color beyond them?

Maybe it’s time to move your focus.

Sunrise looks empty without the clouds

Notice how everything contributes.

Sunrise – sometimes it’s where you look for it.

Find and define new ways of seeing things.

Carry a sunrise in your heart today!

Shed light on the good things that you can make happen.

Problems and opportunities are the same things seen with a different attitude.
The minute we quit fighting a problem it becomes an opportunity.

To make opportunity, we need to trust enough to see what we’re not yet imagining.
To change the world, we probably should change how we see what’s wrong with it.

Are you ready to make opportunity and change the world?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Brand YOU – When An Apology Is in Order

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The Challenge of Apologies

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Handling an apology can seem like an overwhelming challenge, especially in a business situation. At the least, it makes everyone involved self-conscious. With a clear head and a eye toward resolution, apologizing can be the same as handling any other problem. Follow the same five basic steps.

Handle Yourself Not the Apology

      1. Give yourself a chance to breathe.

 

      2. Slow down your thinking.

 

      3. Know the part where you are wrong.

 

      4. Gain your balance and make a plan.

 

    5. Move forward with calm and confidence.

Remember again to breathe.

Giving and Receiving Apologies

Don’t let the words, “I’m sorry,” scare you. They’re powerful words that, when given with care, can gain you more respect. An apology well received can do the same. It’s the fear of those two words that makes apologies go wrong.

Realize when you walk into a situation where an apology is going to happen that there is no person who has not behaved badly at some point in his or her life. If you’re having trouble starting, say so. If you feel you can say things more clearly in writing do so. Then offer the other person the choice to listen while you read it or to read it while you wait.

With apologies, less is more. Mean what you say and keep it simple. Don’t use an apology to move an agenda forward. Use these principles to uphold the integrity of your brand and to help everyone involved feel like a person of value.

When Apologizing

      1. Own what you did wrong.

 

      2. Start by saying why you are apologizing–that you value the person and the relationship and why it is important to you.

 

      3. Say you’re sorry and say what you’re sorry for. “I’m sorry, I behaved badly.”

 

      4. Don’t expect a response. It’s okay, if there isn’t one. Leave the other person a place to stand.

 

                 5. Thank the other person for listening.

When Accepting an Apology

      1. Know that the other person feels self-conscious too. Be gracious and accepting.

 

      2. Do say thank you. It feels more honest and equal than, “I accept.”

 

      3. If you’re sorry too, say so. Don’t say things that aren’t true.

 

      4. Always leave the other person a place to stand.

 

    5. Always give the other person as much time as he or she needs.

Have a conversation after the apology. It’s a chance to get to know that person in a new way. Be thoughtful and honest, and you may forge a stronger relationship built on new respect.

A True Leader

Once you have apologized or heard an apology, move on to cooler more interesting matters. Don’t keep apologizing or talking about the incident. The horse is dead. The sale’s been made–don’t buy it back. Too much talk about it will devalue what’s already been said. The power of “I’m sorry,” diminishes the more times you repeat it. It also makes for more discomfort.

Do spend quality time as one human being with another sharing undivided attention. You may not make a new best friend, but you will find a person who has a few things in common with you. That’s a starting point for a new working relationship. You’ve just been through something hard together.

Apologies are never easy, but they don’t need to be scary or humiliating. The ability to apologize with grace and respect is a quality of a true leader.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Brand YOU – Handling Problems
Images & Sound-Bytes of a Brand YOU Leader
Start in the Middle 3: Alligators and Anarchists
Brand YOU – Making Your Weaknesses Irrelevant

Have Failure of the Imagination

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Plan B No–Fail Fast and Move On

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The meeting had just started. We were talking to the company’s major owner-partner. We had laid out the framework of how we would turn the company around. The partner turned to the company president and said, “And do you have a Plan B, in case this doesn’t work?”

I said, “If you don’t mind . . . ” and asked if I might edit his question. We knew each other well, and so he said, “Sure.”

My new version was, “Is the plan flexible enough that if you find one or more parts not working, you can adjust your plan and keep moving forward?”

. . .

After the meeting, the owner-partner queried what my thinking was in editing his question. I said that it was two-fold: that how he thought affected our thinking and that to talk of Plan Bs at that juncture was to give permission to fail at Plan A before we’d even tried to make it work.

I really don’t like assumptions that Plan A has a chance of failing. I really don’t like Plan Bs for that reason. I don’t mind failures. I like to see them coming, fail fast, and move on.

Failure of Imagination

I actually seek out failures of imagination. I have them on purpose often. This is not a literal “my imagination does not work” kind of thing. It is my imagination conjuring all kinds of failure situations.

I use imagined failures to get ideas for writing and for all kinds of problem solving. Here are a variety of situatons and ways you might use failures of imagination to bring you to a stronger outcome.

Getting Ideas for Writing

Ask questions such as these.

    Personal Failures as Ideas
    What would I not be good at?
    What do I wish I had done differently?
    What invention do I wish I had because I keep failing at something?
    What college course could I teach based on my failures?
    What failure do I hope my kids never have?
    What failures turned out to be the best things that ever happened to me?

    Questioning Other Folks’ Possible Failures
    Why is this person not qualified to teach, say, or do this?
    What would happen if I actually tried this?
    Where’s the flaw in this argument?
    What information is missing from this report?
    What failures are in the famous person’s past?
    How many failures preceeded this invention?
    How long before this gadget breaks down?

Designing a Process

Ask questions such as these.

    Where is the process likely to break down or jam up?
    Where is the step we missed, the piece we forgot?
    How have we messed up this kind of process before?
    What if we have to do everything faster, where will we look to speed things up?
    Where’s the pin that we could pull to make the whole process fall apart?
    What part of this process could fail and not be noticed by anyone but us?

On an Interview or With a Client

Ask questions such as these.

    What are the most difficult parts of this job?
    What worries you most that someone might get wrong?
    What kind of miscommunications happen?
    How do you define failure and success?
    What do your vendors do that drives you bonkers?
    What sort of sample might I do to make sure we’re shooting at the same target?

On Your Brand Identity

Ask questions such as these.

    What situations cause me to forget my goals?
    When do my weaknesses tend to take control?
    How might I use this failure to strengthen my brand or a relationship?
    If I failed at this, what would happen?

On Promoting Your Blog

Ask questions such as these.

    Have I failed to capture my own attention?
    Have other posts like this one failed to gain readers? Why was that?
    Does this page say what I think it does?
    Will my page fail to load for my readers?
    What problems might my readers see here?
    What would make me click off this page quickly?
    If this weren’t my article, would I pass right by it?
    Have I read this post six other places before?

Positive Negatives

No need to jump to the negatives. Instead, use them to keep your life positive. The trick is not to focus on the unproductive, but to seek out unwanted outcomes to find fun, positive ways to avoid them. Think of imagining failures as building a safety net for the tight rope walk that is your brand and your business.

Having a failure of imagination can be a fantastic resource for protecting your business. It’s so much more fun than working out a Plan B that, if you think about it, could easily have the same failure opportunities as Plan A does.

Can you have a failure of imagination? Are you positive or negative?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Start in the Middle 1: Write a Three-Course Meal
Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet
Brand YOU–Making Your Weaknesses Irrelevant
Creative Wonder 101 as Promotion and Problem Solving

Creative Wonder 101 as Promotion and Problem Solving

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Wondering

We look at each other wondering what the other is thinking but we never say a thing.
–Dave Matthews, Ants Marching

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Did you ever wonder the same thing about someone you were with?
Did you ever wonder what the story was behind a song you like?
Do you wonder how some singers get to be famous when they can’t sing?
Do you wonder about things as much as I do?
Are you wondering why I’m asking so many questions?

What Is Wondering ?

Wondering is that sense of awe mixed with curiosity that little kids and imaginative grown-ups get when they see something out-of-this-world unbelievable. It’s the real feeling behind words like awesome, incredible, amazing, stunning, and wonderful.

Wondering is looking at a starry sky and thinking that there are more stars and more universes than you can possibly count, . . . that numbers go on into infinity, . . . that space is a vacuum without any sound at all . . . that the light from the stars can travel days just to reach us. Wondering is trying to get your mind around the idea that biggest jerk on the planet can appear to be happily married with kids who seem to like him–and can have more money than we’ll ever dream of having.

I wonder about everything. I’m wondering right now if you’re going to wonder why I wrote these words, or if you’re even going to read them.

Wondering is a thinking skill. Name a genius who didn’t have wondering as a core competency.

Creative Wondering 101

Creative wondering is opening your brain to the kind of questions you used to have when you were much shorter than you are now. It’s like brainstorming with questions. If you’re looking to solve a problem, wondering is a painless way to get where you want to be. Point your brain in the right direction, and your wondering takes you to a variety of possible solutions.

These are three benefits of creative wondering that make it useful to everyone. It’s funny kids know these things automatically and most grown-ups need to learn them all over again.

  • Wondering works best when you’re relaxed and in turn is relaxing.
  • Wondering is personally flexible. You can wonder into a journal or notepad to capture your thoughts, but you don’t have to.
  • Wondering is mobile, and therefore, it increases productivity. You can do it anywhere. It’s a useful skill for when you’re waiting in traffic or for that doctor who’s always an hour late. Wondering works in the shower. Reading usually does not.

A Warm-Up

If you haven’t wondered for a while, you might be a little tight. Stretch your brain a bit with warm-up questions. Here are a few:

What if? . . . How come? . . . Who was? . . . What belongs? . . . Why did? . . . Who the heck? . . . Who’s idea? . . . Where was I? . . . What’s wrong with this picture? . . . When did that happen? . . . Who died and made you king? . . . What would Brad and Angelina have to say about this? . . . Why him? Why her? Why it? Why now? Why bother? WHY NOT? and What will I do when I win the lottery?

You could write them down and take notes under each one. Go for it, if that’s the kind of wonderer you are. Don’t you dare, if you don’t want to. It’s wrong to take the fun out of wondering. Then you would spend your time wondering why you are wondering . . . That kind of wandering wondering gets you nowhere.

Wondering to Solve Problems

Now you’re ready to start looking at the serious stuff with a new lens of wondering. Don’t let anything off the hook. Question the whole world, like you questioned your parents when you were three years old.

If you need a solution, do some serious wondering about the problem.

  • Wonder why it’s a problem to start with.
  • Then throw that passel of questions in the warm-up at the problem to pull out the bits that you’re not seeing clearly. Obssess over every detail with every possible question you might think of to wonder about. One caveat–exclude questions that illicit an emotional response. Just the facts for now, please.
  • Do at least 5 What ifs? to get to a variety of possible solutions. Skip the What happeneds? until you’ve found a solid solution.
  • When you have a critical mass of possible solutions laid out, challenge them with questions again–more what ifs? and what makes you think sos? A couple of I wonder, if we changed this one thing here, would that be betters? might work now.
  • When you’ve got that solid solution tested with questions, then you can go back to the What happeneds? to make sure that you don’t end up solving the same problem again and again. The answers will be so much less emotionally-laden now that you have a solution in hand or already in process.

Wondering as a Promotional Tool

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Wondering, asking questions as pure curiosity can get you to a solution that you might not get any other way. I’ve seen it happen. It is a powerful skill to add to your personal branding brochure-resume. Learning to live with a wondering view will automatically incorporate itself into your branding BIG idea.

To be able to say,

I can lead a team to a high trust environment, where problem solving is open questioning based on challenging assumptions and wondering about possible outcomes.

is an impressive thing.

I repeat. Name me a genius who didn’t have wondering as a core competency. Wondering will lead you to learn things that other folks don’t even think about. That’s a trait of a leader.

I can’t help but wonder what you’re thinking right now. What are you going to do with this information? I wonder how many ways you’ll find to use wondering to promote yourself and your business in the next 15 minutes.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Finding Ideas Outside the Box
Brand YOU–What’s the BIG IDEA?
Start in the Middle 3: Alligators and Anarchists
The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future

Monkey on Your Desk? Morph It, Mosh It, Write It Up

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Boring, Broken, or Both.

“The only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart,” a kindergarten teacher told me. “An incomplete toy lets children use their imaginations.”

–Todd Oppenheimer, Schooling the Imagination (About the Waldorf Schools)
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Some days it’s a “have-to.” A monkey crawled on your desk that you don’t want to fix or write about. You’re face to face with something that is boring, broken, or both. You can do the grown-up thing. Dig in, reach for a bandage to fix it, and get things done. OR You can do what a kid would do–pull it apart to see how things work.

Be a Genius–Morph and Mosh It

Take it a part and see what it’s made of. That’s what Leonardo would do. That’s what most curious kids would do too. Don’t put a band-aid on it. Morph it into something else. Mosh parts of other things into it. Make it into something new. Here are some ways that you might do that with that problem or a boring idea that you have to write about.

1. Find the parts. Breaking things down into manageable chunks makes the most boring, broken, or beastly task less powerful. It puts you in charge. It also gives you a chance to see how things fit.

2. Identify which parts need attending to and which do not. When we look at a whole, the details can be a distraction. Push those details out of the way. Pick three things that deserve attention and focus in on only them. Let me track this with two scenarios.

  • Scenario 1–the article: You need to write an article on the vision of your brand. Pick three main ideas you want to share. Set the details aside.
  • Scenario 2–the client problem: You need to unravel a misunderstanding that has cost money and caused damage to your relationship. Define the damage that has occurred. Don’t spend any time on the causes now.

3. Morph it. Arrange and rearrange the parts you have identified. Decide how those parts fit best together. Do it as if you were rebuilding a toy–What if this went here, or here, or here?

  • Scenario 1–the article: Play with how you might order the ideas of your vision–short-term to long-term; easy to more difficult; altruistic to bottom line; head to heart.
  • Scenario 2–the client problem: Set goals for how you repair the damage and decide which goal should be the first that you address. Think about who should be part of the repair crew and what piece of the picture they each add.

Think of the outcome each time your rearrange things. This sounds like a lot, but we’re only talking a few seconds here.

4. When you have the parts where you want them, look for a pattern in what you’ve got. What you’re looking for is the big idea–the whole behind the parts you’ve made. This is the “putting things back together” stage.

  • Scenario 1–the article: Are the ideas for the article about how your company is going to grow? Do they arrange themselves as a statement of altruism, or innovation, or point to an idea that will change the fabric of business?
  • Scenario 2–the client problem: How do your goals frame the action you will take? Is your planned response that of a thinker, a feeler, one who delegates or one who takes the bull by the horns? Did you choose a team who can execute your plan?

If you can’t find a pattern in what you’ve got, rework your parts until they gel. It won’t take long now that you know you’re looking for a cohesive whole.

5. Mosh it. Add some spark from the outside. Ideas from outside the situation add energy and change the way you feel about the task at hand. Re-introduce the details that were there, if they’re pertinent, but be sure to include something totally new.

  • Scenario 1–the article: You might add an anecdote or an analogy to frame the vision, or speak to how the vision came to be. You could include your statement of what the vision means to you personally, or talk about how difficult you found it to write down the vision for others to read. Sometimes I just relate the process it took to get an article done. Other times I choose a TV show or character that readers will know well and let that image, and what it stands for, carry the article along.
  • Scenario 2–the client problem: The way you framed the problem will say a lot about how you want to repair the damage. Before you move on what you’ve found, consider how the client and the others involved might also frame the problem. Are they thinkers, feelers, those who delegate, and doers too? Use that answer to form a more thorough plan of action.

Write It Up

Can’t avoid it any longer. It’s time to write things up, but that boring, broken or both “have to” is under your control. Now you have a plan for what you want to say or do. So writing should go easy on you, and the little voice that would have been whispering in your ear, “I hate this. I hate this,” should be quiet too.

Looking at this process on paper may seem a lot, but actually, it takes far less time than most folks I know spend thinking about how much we don’t want to deal with that “have to” on our desks.

And the payoff is you feel so good when you’ve made that monkey go away, and you know you’ve thought it through so that the hairy guy isn’t going to come back.

I hate monkeys on my desk.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Critical Skills 1: Strategic Deep Thinking
Start in the Middle 3: Alligators and Anarchists
Eye-Deas 1: Have You Started Seeing Things?
Writing–Ugh! 10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing

Eye-Deas 4: Photo Ideas Bank

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Get the Picture?

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Photos can often trigger an idea in a way that words cannot. That’s because photos access the right brain, where words don’t usually hang out. The fun part of using photos to get ideas is that often you’ll see in a photo different things depending on what you’re looking to write about. Here are some photos you that might get you started thinking.

Team Meeting

Open Microphone Night

Gold World

Waiting Room

Fall Colors through Window Hand Stamp

Mainboard

Computer Room

Coffee Sunflower on Beach

All of these photos are from the stock xchng and are restriction free.

Catch the Ideas While You Can

As you look, grab a pencil and write down any ideas that come to mind. You might not need an idea right now, but you’ll have those ideas for later when you need one.

I see articles here on the price of coffee, the need to clean up our waterways, the cost of meetings to business, healthcare, the future of the Internet, the global economy, and so many more. . . .

What do you see?

I’m sure by now you have the idea about getting ideas from images. It’s all a matter of remembering that when you look, you should also be seeing.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Eye-Deas 1: Have You Started Seeing Things?
Eye-Deas 2: Test Ideas with Photo Searches
Eye-Deas 3-Photo Content Checklist
Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet