Kenneth speaking to 120 of Becton Dickinson's Asia Pacific Staff

Do you personally think that motivational talks are important? Or is it some kind of high energy rubbish designed to make people feel good for one day and before it dissipates next day?

So… What do the experts got to say?

First of all, I’m a Certified Behaviourial Consultant and according to motivational theory, it is believed that we cannot ‘motivate’ another person. A person can only motivate himself/herself. Therefore, we cannot ‘change’ a person, but we can influence them. We can influence them to a set of thinking patterns and help them create more empowering belief systems that will make them be more resourceful in life. This leads to them becoming more successful.

People have asked me whether motivation really works and my magic answer to them is:

“It depends….”

It depends if this person is open to change.

It depends if this person is currently happy with the results that he/she is getting.

It depends whether this person at this stage of his/her life is hungry to learn.

I have given many talks to multi-national corporations and government agencies. In my experience, no two people are similar in their appetite for learning and growth. One person can be so fired up and talking about the philosophies that I have just shared, while the other person next to him just claps his hands and asks when is lunch break?

Kenneth sharing a personal story

But one thing I know, I can influence a crowd to relook at their lives, look at where they are and how much greater they can be. What I am doing is creating a desire for change and it will be up to them to decide how they want to change their lives. When people understand that they have the power to change and make a difference, they will not want to be the same again.

When you truly empower people, the results are phenomenal. I have a lot of people usually coming up to me at the end of the seminar saying that it has changed the way they think and the principles taught are really useful for the workplace.

CAUTION: Let me warn you… motivation is like eating. You need to feed yourself with a healthy dose of it every day. I mean… can you survive a week just by eating a day? Some people have this weird belief that motivation is a one day thing that will TOTALLY change your live. I see it as a process where we find out what motivates us and bathe in it every day to get the results that you want.

So… back to the question, does motivation really change you and make you successful? It depends whether you choose to let it and then take massive action to make things happen.

PS: If you need someone to get people to be pro-active and change mindsets, you can engage me to speak for your organisation.

Related Readings:

The One Decision That Changed My Life

How to Motivate Yourself for Greater Heights!

Importance of Surrounding Yourself With the Right People

How Do You Change Yourself?

To read the entire unedited article, click on How do I Create my ‘A’ team?

Other Related Articles:

Have You Heard Of A ‘Self Made’ Person?

Lessons of Teamwork from F1 pitstops

Why Most Teambuilding Programs in Singapore will not work!

Teambuilding Lessons From Growing Orchids

Things happen in life so that we become stronger and wiser from our mistakes. In fact, in the last 2 years, Deep Impact’s growth as a  Impactful Teambuilding company were a result of mistakes that we made and learnt from. It was the commitment of not making the same mistakes twice that helped us to become much better.

It is also important to learn from other people’s mistakes, so that we do not need to pay the price they have paid for it.

Listen to Starbucks founder and CEO, Howard Schultz  on why Starbucks can command a premium for their coffee, why you need to celebrate your mistakes and Starbuck’s philosophy.

I have been following the recent mass recall of Toyota’s Prius and other hybrid models. A total of 8.7 million recalls of cars and trucks have been issued (updated on 10 Feb 2010). To give you an idea of the magnitude of the recall, Toyota sold 7.8 million vehicles globally in 2009.

The recall is due to the accelerator pedal that does not move back to its original position after being released. In some worst cases, it actually gets stuck.

It is a great pity and regret that such an incident happened in Toyota, because there were many books written about “The Toyota Way”; how their values spurred the company to continuously improve and solving root problems.

In fact, one of Toyota’s core values is RESPECT. From its website, it mentions that

“Toyota respects others, makes every effort to understand others, accepts responsibility and does its best to build mutual trust.”

This is something that I really like about them, but recent news seems to suggest that this value was not followed closely. They did not understand their customer complaints about the brakes and thus resulted in many deaths from faulty components. This created a massive distrust in the safety of their cars.

In any company, Core Values are really important and because they provide guiding principles that your staff should live by. The best part about having clear values are that whenever you are faced with tough decisions (in Toyota’s case, it was to recall so many vehicles and take a substantial hit in their profits), you will make the right decision.

I know that in many companies, values are often overlooked and it is something that only the management talk about and not the rest of the staff. However, it is time to dig out the values and understand what each value actually means to the company and individual.

For example, if doing the right things is one of the core values in your company: this could mean that you will always seek to do the right thing regardless of situation; even if it means it costs more to develop environmentally products, or admitting to a mistake that could become a massive Public Relations disaster and costly recall or even apologising to your colleague when you are wrong.

I am happy that Toyota’s chief wrote an article that he will take personal responsibility for the entire situation, learn from their mistakes and quickly correct them (see their values on Genchi Genbutsu and respect).

For people in management, the Toyota incident is a great way to revisit your core values and what it means to each and every person in your organisation. For the rest, what are your core values and what do you stand for?

Do leave your comments below! I want to hear you.
PS: If you need team building or training programs that help you clarify and instill your core values to your team, do contact us!

As some of you know, I am part of the Asia Professional Speakers, Singapore (APSS). As speakers and trainers, we have decided to do what we do best and give back to the community by presenting a seminar called “Raise Your Game”. We will donate all the money we have collected from this seminar to the Singapore Cancer Society.

In this program, you will get to listen to top notch speakers in Singapore on Mindset Change, Increasing Productivity, Attracting people to you, Steps to raise your career, increasing your memory power, service excellence and much more!

Date: 1 Mar 2010
Time: 0845-1730
Place:Singapore
Lecture Theatre 23, 3rd floor,
SIM Headquarters, 461 Clementi Road
Cost: $188

To register or donate, click here.

Here is the line up of speakers:

Play a Higher Service Game in 2010…and Win
Ron Kaufman

Lessons from Everest:
Climbing High when Everyone Else is Feeling Low
David Lim CSP

5 Key Steps to Success to Consistently Raise Your Game
Shirley Taylor

Turning Everyday Struggles into Everyday Greatness
Dr William Tan

Simple Strategies for Becoming a Magnet for Success
Christian Chua

Raise Your Career, Raise Your Team and Raise Your Life!
Michael Podolinksy CSP

Raise your Game by Maximising your Memory Power
Nishant Kasibhatla

To register or donate, click here.

I appeal to that you come for this event. As you learn and be empowered, you are also giving back to the community. Let’s do our bid and show love for our fellow friends.

Do forward this blog link to your friends!

Well… I can’t argue with that logic… hehehehe

In my previous blog post, I asked people to define “what is leadership to you?”

There were a lot of great definitions and answers that were contributed and allow me to share with you mine.

Leadership is all about INFLUENCE. It is about who listens to you when you speak and how much influence you have over them. People who have higher influencing ability tend to have a larger group of people following them. If you want to know whether you have strong leadership ability, it is pretty simple. Just look behind and check if anyone is following you.

Most people tend to find leaders by their titles given to them, eg. he’s the group leader or she’s the director of this department. However, I want to caution you that this is the lowest level of leadership. This is because you can be a leader by position, but that does not mean that you will be able to lead people by their hearts. A higher form of leadership exists where people follow you simply because of what you say, stand for and believe in, rather than your position.

So, how do you influence more people? I would like to suggest that there are many ways, but I will list down a few principles:

1.    Move in integrity. When you are integral in your life (meaning, your thoughts, actions and speech are coherent), people will have more faith and trust in you.

2.    Willing to spend time and invest in people. When you develop a person’s life in some area, whether through coaching. mentoring or teaching, you are demonstrating that you are truly interested in their growth.

3.    Establish clear communications. Everyone knows exactly what you mean and will not misinterpret your message. To have less communication breakdown, you will need to spend time with people (point 2).

4.    Lead themselves well. A great leader leads himself or herself well, with or without people around them. They understand that their credibility and consistency is important before people listens to them.

It is in my firm belief that anyone can develop in their leadership ability, since it is an observable behaviour. However, to be a great leader, you must have outstanding character and talent as well. Before you lead others, lead yourself first!

Without great leadership, great organisations can fall.

Before I talk more on leadership, let’s define what is leadership to you?

Please post your comments! I want to hear from you right now!

I will give you my definition in the following days.

Are you constantly struggling to find more time to finish your work?

Do you constantly lose focus and get impatient when things are slow?

Do you feel that you are ineffective sometimes and do not bring results to whatever you do?

If the answer YES to any of these statements above, this article might just change your life!

Everyone is busy nowadays. There are more things to do and problem is that we still have the same 24 hours! Being an entrepreneur and a business owner, I constantly find myself doing a lot of different things that demand my attention.

Everyone and everything seems to be so important or urgent that I almost felt that I was going to break down. There was even a time when I could not sleep for four days in a row, thinking about work and the stress of not getting enough sales.

However, when I understood the following principles, my life started to restabilise and I felt in control of things. These are some of the things that are taught in my training and let me share with you my experience and lessons learnt:

1.    Decide On what NOT to do

Most people know there are many more things that they have to do, however, not many actually know what NOT to do. Time is limited and therefore we must always ask ourselves, what is something I can do less?

For me, I seek to eliminate ineffectiveness in my life (this was what I was), eg. checking emails 8-12 times a day, doing little or no value work, writing ideas on loose sheets of paper instead of putting everything in a note book, constantly finding things. I realised that elimination is important to remove clutter in my life.

One great way I saved a lot of time is to only check emails thrice a day. Morning at 10am, 1pm (after lunch) and 4pm. This helps to clear things in a quick matter and not being constantly distracted and seeing if anyone has emailed me.

2.    Outsource part of your work

Once I got rid of the inefficient things in my life, I started to look at the quality of work that I am paid to do. I decided that anything repetitive could always be outsourced. Anything that was logistics and administration in nature (preparing files, name tags, attendance confirmation of participants and etc), I tried to out-source them to part-timers to do simple filing and even hired someone to look after this portion of my business.

Consider using strategic partners to help you in your work as well, eg. courier services, programmers, marketing collaterals, design work. I realised that successful people often outsource work that are not within their core business, while ineffective people often want to do everything! The internet offers a large variety of options and good prices for out-sourcing options. Check out elance.com or getafreelancer.com or ideas on what can be out-sourced. Almost EVERYTHING can be out-sourced, including bathing your cat or buying flowers for your wife!

3.    Master The Art of Delegating your work

Delegation is an important art that most people do not understand. We delegate work out and monitor results and not actually how work is to be done. People that we delegate to should always have the freedom to choose how they want to do it without being micro-managed by their supervisors.

Decide on what results you want and be clear about it. One simple question I constantly ask myself is “What are the signs that I have to see in order to know whether he/she has achieved the results?” This forces me to be clear about my expectations and also manage people according to results.

Conclusion

Outsourcing and Delegation has become the buzz word of the 21st century. The question is not why, but when. Take charge of it right now so that you can be effective and concentrate on what you do best! This will result in more satisfaction in your life and money pouring in!

Remember, the DOD principle; Decide-Outsource-Delegate!

Image from www.streatsahead.com

Honestly, what I am about to share may provoke you. But I feel that it is rather important to let you know this at the expense of our relationship. Therefore, I will risk offending you in the process.

I hope to provoke you to consider why you might need to relook in the way you set goals.

Why do people not see success over the years? Well, here are some reasons:

1. They set BHAG (Big Hairy and Audacious Goals) with NO track record

One of the best ways to disappoint yourself is to set BHAG goals and not achieve anything at all. There are tons of people who ask you to set BIG goals. Nothing wrong with that, it is just that if you do not have a track record of achieving them, you are just setting yourself up for major disappointment. For starters, I usually set low hanging fruit goals which I know I can handle. This helps to build momentum and faith that I can achieve small things easily. The goal then gets bigger and more audacious over time. Consider breaking your yearly goal into quarterly goals. It is much easier to manage and achieve.

2. They can’t remember what goals they have set

Previously, I recall setting so many goals that I can’t remember them all. This leads to not achieving any one of them. To force myself to remember them, I placed my goals (which have been reduced to a few) all over places that I will frequent. Even at home, you can see it next to my work desk, mirrored cabinet, wall of my bedroom and even the toilet.

Remember: Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Therefore, keep your goals in sight!

3. Do not bother to review their goals

If you not review your goals, how will you know where you are currently? During my university days in Australia, a group of friends and I will usually travel to a different state every semester. We will constantly take rest stops to just check out where we were and whether we were headed in the right direction! There were a couple of times when we made wrong turns, but this was quickly corrected simply because we reviewed our progress! Progress helps to determine whether you are reaping the RIGHT things in your work, rather than just focus on activity.

4. They do not give a compelling reason to achieve it

Most people make goals that just look good or exciting to them. However, the drive behind it is really the main crux. Why do you need to achieve it? What will happen if you do not achieve it? Will there be any consequence? I strongly feel that we must identify our drive to action. I made a decision at one critical point in my life and it changed me. One of my mentors said: If your WHY is big enough, you will naturally find your HOW to do things. The bigger your WHY, the more likely you will succeed.

Conclusion:
Make this year a great year for you! Set your goals and take massive action!

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
Robert Heinlein