Do you remember a time when you worked for someone else and they tried to explain something that was simple to them but totally perplexing to you? I have on frequent occasions over the course of my life and it seems to be the curse of those that ‘know’ (and sometimes at a highly proficient or expert level), but can’t teach to save themselves!

Just recently I was learning a new process from someone and I was getting more frustrated the more I did it. They were watching over my shoulder while I was attempting to complete the tasks and pointing-out all my mistakes as soon as I made them. All I was getting was "you don’t do it like that" and "why did you do that for?" really useful stuff for a learner.

I realized that doing what I felt like doing (picking up something heavy and throwing it as far as I could), was probably not the best way of venting my frustration. So, I focused on remaining calm so that my stress levels wouldn’t rise too high and cloud my brain so that nothing at all would get in.

I reflected upon my ’learning experience’ later that night and came up with ten reasons why many people who are experts, professionals or just know something that others want to know, can very often be hopeless at communicating that information to others.

So here they are:

1. They don’t have empathy for the learner or try to understand how the learner might view their communication

2. They forget the process involved in learning the information, skill or knowledge that they now possess

3. They enjoy the power of knowing something that someone else wants to know

4. They enjoy telling learners that they are wrong or watching them fail when they inevitably make mistakes

5. They are impatient

6. They are not aware of nor allow for the vast amount of subconscious knowledge that they may possess

7.  They have not structured the necessary learning in a series of building blocks for the learner

8. They do not encourage, inspire or motivate the learner

9. They do not utilize rich communication tools that feed the learner information on multiple levels

10. They are assholes!

That’s probably a reasonable list to start with but please let me know if you can think of some others?

Thanks for reading and have a great week - Jason

 

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"A life unexamined, is a life wasted" according to Carl Jung and I agree completely! This statement is challenging and may not sit comfortably with some but I have seen, read and heard about many ’great’ people who have created great and enduring businesses through the power of "examination".

To use a medical example, a doctor would be unlikely to provide an accurate diagnosis of a patient with a broken ankle if they didn’t ask questions or assess the patient.

I love the moments of insight in my business (and personal life), which bring me to realize something is performing poorly that I’m not paying attention to. Often the insights enable me to adapt and improve different aspects of my business and learn a great deal in the process.

Sometimes the clarity with which I am able to show my business processes and procedures using video enables others to comment and point out areas that need to improve or change. For example, by showing a video of a new customer contact process to staff, they were able to offer a number of extremely valuable improvements that reduced the number of procedures required from twelve to seven! It was easy and fast for me to create and share the video and the clear understanding of the new process by staff was amazing!

The faster and more clearly you can see every aspect of your business the faster problems and issues can be detected and fixed and significant improvements realized. The more thorough the "examination" the more success you will attract and that’s what it’s all about.

Thanks for reading and please leave a comment.

Jason

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What was your favorite meal, cake or biscuit (cookie), as a child? Do you have a childhood memory of an amazing home cooked meal that your mother or grandmother used to create that makes your mouth water just thinking about it? Chances are you have and you know just how different the taste is when compared to anything you might have recently sampled - and by recently I mean in the past decade or two!

Our modern convenience foods are so highly processed that the natural flavors are all but eliminated (see the Bionic Burger). Not only that but many of the common chemicals in modern foods such as preservatives, flavorings and colorings are damaging to the body, providing little or none of what we really need for good health.

So what was so good about the food our mothers and grandmothers produced? There’s a two part answer involving specific, physical ingredients and the knowledge on how best to combine those ingredients in specific ways and under specific conditions.

Now, our mothers and grandmothers may have built a vast amount of experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t from preparing food daily and often for a large family. They had to be creative and resourceful and find ways of extracting every ounce of flavor from the available ingredients - and weren’t the results amazing!

Unfortunately, as our loved ones passed away so did their craft as their vast knowledge and experience went with them which is a terrible shame. However, those that wanted to share their knowledge carefully detailed the ingredients and methods in recipes that combined the art and science of their craft so that if followed correctly could produce identical or similar mouth-watering results.

I’ve often used my Mother’s gingernut recipe to save money on birthday and leaving shouts at my various work places over the years and I always received rave reviews. I frequently got comments like "they taste so much better than bought stuff" or "they have so much flavor".

To actually witness my Mother baking gingernuts in her kitchen adds a whole new dimension to my understanding of her written recipe and renders it largely null and void as long as I’m baking gingernuts regularly. However, that’s not often the case so I have to think hard when following her recipe and normally end-up having to make a phone call for pointers and options when things don’t go as planned. The problem is that a written recipe is at a basic level of process communication and lacks a ‘holistic’ view of the process so can easily confuse or trip-up the inexperienced.

Videos showing a process such as baking or serving a customer are the closest thing we currently have to actually ‘being there’. You see the body language, the expressions, the emotions, the tone of voice, the full richness and depth of information that combines sound and vision in a way that closely matches how we normally experience things in the ‘real world’.

I’m fortunate to have my Mother just a phone call away when goes wrong but I’m not sure how much longer she’ll tolerate my phone calls to ask questions that for her are the most simple yet complex for me!

Jason

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I was having a chat with my Sister today (yes, we do speak at times), about some ‘deep’ stuff. Over the years we were both aware of a large number of people who were clearly ‘not in control’ of their lives. Now, by this I don’t mean deranged or in some way ‘crazy’ but more, things happened TO them - a lot!

There’s no plan, method or system to what they’re doing and certainly no understanding of why they don’t get what they want. These people are often frustrated at all the barriers and problems that keep arising and they just never seem to get traction. You can often pick these types of people quite easily as they tend to blame and avoid responsibility.

As my Sister and I talked a bit more we realized that people who had life happening TO them never seemed to ask the ‘deeper’ questions. You know the one’s - the questions about ’causes’ rather than the ‘end results’. I mean, there is just so much going on ‘underneath the surface’ to produce all those different positive and negative results in our lives.

The human body is an excellent example of an amazing system that is totally reliant on automation. Our physical survival is dependent on involuntary reflexes that we don’t need to think about (and just as well!), like breathing, fighting infection, swallowing, etc. It’s a very simple picture, if we didn’t have our physiological systems running with such unconscious, automatic precision, we would be dead or very different creatures.

Of course, the human body and life are no different to a business in that they are groupings of complicated systems and processes that produce results. Likewise, there are severe limitations in merely surviving and nothing else. It seems to me that the point to life is to become increasingly conscious of the huge number of ’causes’ that can (and need to), be changed to produce the results that we want in our lives, businesses, families etc.

Video is a tool that can be used on any area of our lives to improve, learn, and communicate more accurately and realistically. By knowing and understanding the exact causes of your results you can then try new things and improve your systems and processes to achieve positive consistency, what I term ‘posistency’ (I love making up words!). It’s then a simple matter of recording the optimized systems, processes and procedures using video and sharing them so that everyone can benefit!

Feel free to make any comments that you like.

Jason

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I watched a video by Eben Pagan the other day about keeping focused and working on one thing at a time systematically. What he said made a lot of sense as I use to find myself pulled in multiple directions whenever an e-mail appeared in my In box or the phone rang.

There is just so much information and distraction about in the average Internet business owner’s workplace that attention being paid to any single, valuable task is often just minutes rather than the hours needed. The reduction in productivity and increase in stress takes its toll on you and your family and sucks momentum from your business.

But how does it feel when you follow a defined process and achieve a defined outcome? For example, you create a Google Adwords ad that contains a question and capitalization of the first letter of each word along with an appealing URL. You may have found that this combination of elements consistently brings you better result. Of course, you will still test and track variations of the ad based on relevant new information to see if the ad can be improved upon but you want to start with "best practice" as your base line.

To have to work-out what "might" work for every process that is performed in your business is insanity as there are just so many variables in any single process or procedure. By defining the "dependent" variables or inputs in each process and procedure you are then able to produce consistent results or outputs in your business, and consequently, value for your customers.

Systems bring relief as your business no-longer needs to rely on you or a few key workers for knowledge on how to perform your business tasks and activities. They free-up time to spend on the important, more strategic issues facing your business that take time, careful consideration, and planning.

Jason

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