The Invisible Mentor

Archive for September, 2010

“It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was always as if I had the right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into a self fulfilling prophecy” says Sam Walton in Sam Walton: Made In America about his days as a football player. He was a good football player who had an uncanny sense where the ball was going to go. Sounds familiar? Wayne Gretzky, the Virtuoso of Hockey, was adept at knowing where the hockey puck was going to land, and skated there in anticipation. Do you know which trends will affect your business so that you take your business there? If you have not done so already, it’s a good time to read Review of How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate by Honest Ed Mirvish, which is another biography.

When Sam Walton was diagnosed with bone cancer, his family encouraged him to get serious about writing his biography. Whether or not you like Walmart, and the way that it’s operated, there are some things that their founder Sam Walton did right. After reading his book, I can say that I do not agree with some of his philosophies, but I found a lot of very useful information. I have pulled together some information from Sam Walton’s biography that might interest you.

Sam’s 10 Rules for Building a Business

1. Rule 1: Commit to your business and believe in it more than others do.
2. Rule 2: Share your profits with all the people who work for you, and treat them as partners in the business.
3. Rule 3: Motivate the people who work for you, and keep things fresh, interesting and never become predictable. Give them the opportunity to switch job functions to learn other aspects of the business.
4. Rule 4: Communicate everything you possibly can so everyone knows and understands what’s going on.
5. Rule 5: Appreciate what your workers do for you by simply saying thanks or publicly acknowledging them. Money and stock options are great, but sometimes the little things can make all the difference in the world.
6. Rule 6: Celebrate your successes and find humour in your failures.
7. Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company, especially the front line workers who directly serve your customers.
8. Rule 8: Exceed your customers’ expectation.
9. Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition.
10. Rule 10: Swim upstream, go against the grain and ignore conventional wisdom.

Strategy

Growth: Organic – by increasing sales and opening new stores – and by takeovers

Inventory Management: Have sophisticated information systems, and vendors are connected so they can monitor their product levels

Distribution: Have large warehouses within a certain distance (usually no more than one day’s drive away) from the stores, and have their own fleet of truck

Information Systems: Have one of the most sophisticated computer system, which allows them to be agile and responsive to the market

Theft Management: Greeters were originally introduced as a deterrent to potential thieves

Customer Acquisition: Competitive shopping to look at what competitors are doing well, as well discover what their prices are, then make the necessary adjustments at the store. Conduct information interviews to identify trends, and discover ways to do things better. Sam Walton was part of a research group which was actually a form of peer mentoring. His peers would visit his stores and give honest feedback, which he used to make changes. His focus was to give customers the best deal.

Hiring: For the senior level positions, he hired people who were skilled in the areas he wasn’t, and that was key to their early growth

Major Regret: Didn’t include associates in the profit sharing plan when Walmart went public in 1970.

Five Great Ideas

1. You can ride through any crisis if you look for the underlying opportunities
2. The best opportunities are created out of necessity
3. If you do not give your customers what they want, someone else will
4. Learning never ends. Look at what others are doing right and doing better, then try to incorporate that into your work
5. Innovate to take things beyond where they have been

I recommend that you give Sam Walton: Made In America  a read and I am sure you will not agree with all of his philosophies, but if you own a business, or planning to start one, you’ll find information that you can immediately apply.

What do you have to add to the conversation? Is this the kind of book you’d enjoy reading? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

All book links are affiliate links.

Further Reading

Review: The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence

Innovate The Steve Jobs Way

Review of How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate by Honest Ed Mirvish

Review: Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp

While I was reading How to Get Great Ideas by Estelle H. Ries (1961), it became evident that it was simply a new spin on the information by James Webb Young (Technique for Producing Great Ideas) and Graham Wallas (Creativity Model in Art of Thought, which is an extension of Hermann von Helmholtz‘s model) that we have covered on this blog, but generating great ideas is an important art so it’s worth repeating. To make this process relevant, think about the following or any other pressing need, and use the formula to see where it leads you:

• Process that needs improving at work
• Product does not work the way you’d like it to
• Past ideas that were ahead of their time that could work now
• Problems that keep recurring
• Or any pressing issue that you’re facing

Step One: Preparation

• Choose your topic of  interest from the list above
• Develop a set of decision criteria to judge the quality of the ideas

There are two types of information to gather:

Specific

1. Gather as much information as possible on the topic of interest
   1. Look for  case studies in your industry and unrelated industries
   2. Conduct research on the internet
   3. Conduct research using commercial databases, you can access many through your public library portal
   4. Research industries different from your own to determine if there are ideas you can transfer
   5. Interview subject matter experts
   6. Brainstorm with colleagues
   7. Conduct focus group interviews
2. Read all the information gathered and synthesize them
3. Write down the information on 3×5 index cards, one item per card
4. Classify the information by sections of the topic of interest

Read the post How to Analyze Information to evaluate the quality of the data you gathered.

General

1. This is an ongoing process throughout your life. Information from wide experience prepares your mind to see a particular subject matter in relation  to other things
2. Record any interesting information you come across in a scrapbook or other filing method that makes sense for you
3. Use your cell phone if you have one, or a camera to capture any interesting scenes that you see, both photos and videos and create a file on your computer in which to save them
4. Attend speeches, workshops, seminars and so on that are unrelated to your work just because they interest you, and take notes
5. Visit the websites How Stuff Works, AskNature.org and Ted.com often and read for a while
6. Go to your favorite bookstore and pick up magazines that are unrelated to your area
7. Go to magazine portals such as MagPortal.com and Magatopia and read about what’s happening in other industries and countries
8. Find incubator programs and innovation centers to learn about what new innovations are in the pipeline. There is a National Business Incubator Association. There is an association for practically anything
9. Discover what university research labs are working on
10. Re-read the answers to, “What process do you use to generate new ideas?” in the interviews conducted on this blog
11. Subject yourself to new experiences
12. Every so often, pull up the information and review them

Step 2: Working Over the Information in Your Mind

1. Look at the information you gathered from many different angles
2. Synthesize the information
3. Merge two facts and see how they fit together
4. Connect the information with what you already know (could be your general knowledge), nothing exists in a vacuum
5. As tentative or partial ideas come to you, no matter how crazy or incomplete, document them on the index card, one idea per card
6. Do not stop until you have at least one partial or incomplete idea
7. When everything is a jumble or it is pointless for you to do additional work, it is time for the next step

Step 3: Incubation

1. Turn over the problem to your subconscious mind
2. Take a break or work on an unrelated task or do something which stimulates the imagination and emotions

Step 4: Illumination - Eureka! I have It

1. When you least expect it, the idea comes to you (You have an aha moment)

Step 5: Verification/Implementation/Shaping & Developing the Idea

1. The idea will unlikely be ready to be implemented as is
2. Subject it to criticism – test it, then refine it
   1. Use the criteria you developed in Stage I to judge the quality of the solution
   2. Refine the idea if you have to
   3. Implement the idea
   4. Evaluate the idea
   5. If you find that the solution doesn’t work, go through the process again

How did the process work for you? Was it easy or difficult? What do you have to add to the conversation? What process do you use to generate ideas? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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Leadership Question # 5: Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

Steve Jobs: “We have always been shameless been shameless about stealing great ideas”

Sylvia Lafair – Your Invisible Mentor

Company:  (CEOinc) Creative Energy Options, Inc

Website: http://www.ceoptions.com/

How adventurous are you? Do you take time to have some serious fun? In Part Two of Sylvia Lafair’s interview, the theme of adventure continues. Her favourite quote is by Helen Keller, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing… Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure” because it moves her. And her response to, “What excites you about life?” is, “The adventure of the not knowing.” How would your life improve, if you lived your life like an adventure? Sylvia isn’t just about having an adventure so read on…

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am a searcher and an adventurer, and have a PhD to prove that I search academically in clinical psychology. I became a family therapist who then morphed into an executive coach and conflict management expert in the business world. I’m married and have two grown daughters and a couple of grand kids. Life is good.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

I’m in a lucky place with integrating my personal and professional life. My husband’s first wife died from breast cancer. He began a search as to why he wasn’t able to help her heal, and it took him on a journey to look at health, wellbeing and relationships. When we met, he was in an interim place in his life, and I had gotten divorced and wasn’t ever going to do family therapy again because I couldn’t keep my family together. We found each other, and one of the things he said to me was, “You have such talent in what you’re doing, can’t you just redesign it? And so we began to work together, so integrating my life has been easy for me. We travel the world together, and we always make sure to take extra days before or after, to explore new territory and do exciting and interesting things. We share his kids and my kids together, and that works well. I am living what I believe, and that’s a joy for me.

What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

It’s not having the skill to understand relationships earlier.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. One really big one, and I think it’s coming around to all of us now, is that everything is connected and no one wins unless we all do, and that has become so core as I look at everything. I think that’s a critical lesson that we are all learning, especially as we are watching this beautiful planet going through such a difficult time.
2. I can do with very little, even though I enjoy lovely places, my beauty can come from sitting among the trees in nature. I’ve learned that I don’t need what I thought I used to need for life.
3. There is an incredible value in the workplace to create a culture of collaboration, that we can’t do it alone, that there is a lot of fun in working together. I have an incredible staff that I enjoy working with.
4. The hardest pattern to work with is the splitter, and that is someone who will talk out of both sides of their mouth. We had a splitter working with us, and as smart as I think I am, it was hard to detect, and in fact I teach that the splitter is the hardest one to detect in the workplace. I have a better way of looking at it now, because some people will never change. And, the workplace is not a rehab facility, and we really have to do our best. I think one of the things I used to do at work was to think that no matter what a person’s problems were, I could help resolve them. I was like the therapist in the workplace, and I have learned over time that that it is not so, work is not a rehab facility and you have to “un-hire” people if it’s not the right fit.

When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

I take walks. I love to take walks in nature. We live in some beautiful places, the country place in the mountains in Pennsylvania, and our home in New Mexico. I can take long three to five mile walks and just appreciate the sun and the sky, and even the rain drops if they happen to show up while I’m walking.

What process do you use to generate great ideas?

I like to read books and I love to watch films. I will watch a film and all of a sudden something will come to me that I’d never thought of in that way before. If I am feeling stuck and stale in my thinking, I will get a magazine that it as opposite to who I am and my personality, and I’ll spend time with it. I’m not a motorcycle person but I’ll get motorcycle magazines, and I’m not particularly into the stock market but I’ll do some reading about that so it sort of juggles my brain a little bit, then all of a sudden I get that aha moment. So it’s really doing something that’s really different than I normally would do.

What’s your favourite quotation and why?

My favourite quote is “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing… Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure” by Helen Keller. This quote moves me.

How do you define success?

Success is continuous learning to live with an open heart.

In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

The formula for success is to know that we’re in it together, all of us, that everybody have come from somewhere and have their own stories, that if we listen and really appreciate each other, we can learn so much. We are here to help each other grow to the next level

What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Initially I got a PhD in Psychology and studied with some of the most amazing people, and then as I made the transition into the workplace, I found mentors who were really thinking differently. Willis Harman who was the President of the Institute of Noetic Science in Sausalito, California was really instrumental. He told me to take my talents into the workplace. He wrote some beautiful books, and I would call him up every so often and say I don’t know about this and he would say keep going. That was really important to me.

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

The field for me is consulting in the workplace, and the best advice I have is to take some classes in leadership psychology. It seems to be a new field that’s finding its place, study neural psychology because they give us the clues on why we have our buttons pushed, and also study about family relationships because what we do whether we want to or not, is bring the patterns from the original organization, the family, into the workplace, and they play out. Those of us who are working in this area who can begin to see that, can help people make very quick changes. Within three to six months you’ll see major changes in people, in teams and in organizations

If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

1. I would like to sit at the feet of Mahatma Gandhi and say, “What was it like for you to stay true to yourself?”
2. I would like to sit at a dinner table with Steven Spielberg. I find the work he has done and the quality of his work important and powerful.
3. I’d like to sit with Thomas Jefferson and ask him about life during those times and how he was able to pull together what was going on his personal life and what was going on in this country, and how he saw the things that were happening in his life.
4. I would love to have been able to sit with Eleanor Roosevelt and find out what it was like for her, even though I have read the books and I understand, I would like another version of what it was like for her to be in a marriage that was so complex to a man who was so complex, and to be one of the first women’s libber before the term ever came to be. She stood for women to be able to stand on their own two feet and make a difference.
5. Another one would be Abraham Lincoln after I read Team of Rivals, and looking at the research that was there, the more I’d like to sit with him and talk about how he worked with the sadness that was in his life and that he saw around himself.

Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

I read a book that I loved called Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. The author is very unique, and I love language, and when words are put together in a sentence. The story takes place in New Orleans, but the essence is a tale about how things are connected, and how we are so much bigger and vital than the small beings we have been led to believe that we are, and that we are connected to a deeper source where magic can happen.

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

1. One of the key books that I’d like to have is Jitterbug Perfume because it’s a book I can read over and over.
2. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
3. An Anthology of  Shakespeare’s work (World of Shakespeare: The Complete Plays and Sonnets of William Shakespeare (38 Volume Library)). Shakespeare touches the core of what relationships and human essence is really about.
4. I would like to have the Bible and it really would be for me, something that I’ve never delved into in the depth of understanding the cultural, language and relationship part of it.
5. I’d like to have Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It’s a big, thick book and the author did an amazing job. I must admit that I speed read the book.
6. I would like to add Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson.

What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

The music is from an interesting album that is called War Child by Pavarotti and Friends, and it was produced to raise money for the children who grew up living in war torn places, which sadly never seems to go away. In this he sings with Lionel Ritchie, and some of the best people on the planet singing all kinds of different songs. The song I love the most is called the “Magic of Love,” and is about the power of love in spite of whatever is happening in the world. It’s not huggy, kissy, cutesy love, it’s about the depth of agave love.

If you cannot view this YouTube video of “Magic of Love” click here

The movie is from a play on Broadway called Into the Woods by Steven Sondheim. It’s a story about fairy tales that you are familiar with, and how they all weave together, and it’s got a Shakespearian flavor to it, in terms of showing connections and how our lives will play out in spite of ourselves, and what happens when we learn to handle conflict and chaos with dignity.

Latest Trailer for Into the Woods

If you cannot view YouTube video please click here.

What excites you about life?

The adventure, not knowing what tomorrow will bring, and I just love the “I never thought of it that way before.” I love meeting people, and I love being in places when I can turn around and say, and who are you? It could be anyone, taxi cab driver, the person I’m sitting next to at dinner. It’s the adventure of the not knowing.

How do you nurture your soul?

I meditate and love to listen to beautiful meditation music. I will sit down and read some of the things Thicht Nhat Hahn (Vietnamese, Buddhist monk) writes. I find beautiful books to read or get a book of beautiful pictures. I sit and fill myself with beauty.

If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

I feel like I’m giving you the Miss America answer but it would be world peace. My wish is that we as a species begin to understand how the patterns of the past have locked us into behaviors that are no longer sustainable on this planet, and begin to see us helping each other more effectively with everything we need to do in terms of health and wellbeing.

Complete the following, I am happy when…..

I’m with people who want to make a difference.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

All book links are affiliate links.

Video Credit: Latest Trailer for Into the Woods Uploaded by digitaltheatre on Mar 24, 2011, YouTube video of “Magic of Love” Uploaded by space2lovebird on Jul 29, 2009

Further Reading

Wisdom Wednesdays: Eleanor Roosevelt, American First Lady, International Diplomat, Writer and Philanthropist
Wisdom Wednesdays: Helen Keller – American Activist for the Visually and Hearing Impaired
Wisdom of Life: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, Led America through the Civil War

Sylvia Lafair – Your Invisible Mentor

Company:  (CEOinc) Creative Energy Options, Inc

Website: http://www.ceoptions.com/

Grow, learn and be of service, that’s Sylvia Lafair’s raison d’etre. Conducting interviews is an enjoyable, yet humbling experience. For me, I am always reminded of how little I know, and how much I can learn from the interviewees. In hearing Sylvia Lafair’s story, I realize as usual how much we can learn and apply if we stop and digest what she has to say. She operates her business with high integrity and is not afraid to walk away from work that does not align with her values. The people I gravitate toward, and the people I present to you, realize that life isn’t just about them. We are all part of something much bigger.

As you read Sylvia’s story, think about the similarities between you and her. What are five lessons that you can learn from her.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am a searcher and an adventurer, and have a PhD to prove that I search academically in clinical psychology. I became a family therapist who then morphed into an executive coach and conflict management expert in the business world. I’m married and have two grown daughters and a couple of grand kids. Life is good.

What’s a typical day like for you?

It’s interesting, on a typical day, I have to fight my initial reaction when I get up to go right to the computer. It is so addicting to me to sit down, so I take a few minutes to have a cup of tea and do some deep breathing, and then I go to the computer. In the morning I like to do some blogging and checking out what’s going on, on the news, and it’s sort of a meditation for me. I love to write, and since I finished writing my book Don’t Bring it to Work, last year, I have found other ways to write, and blogging is one of them. I usually get up at 6:30 am and by 7:00 I’m at the computer.

Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 my staff comes in. During the day, I’m in meetings, on coaching calls, conference calls and doing a lot of planning. That’s when I’m at the Retreat Center, and we also have groups that come up here for team building and conflict management. We have our leadership program, which is called Total Leadership Connections, which is one of the joys of my life. It’s another form of a child that was birth from my ideas, and is now almost 10 years old, so that’s a typical day for me at the country place.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Years ago I made the decision that I’m here to grow, learn, and be of service, and so every day when I wake up, I spend time centering myself for the day wondering what opportunities and who will show up in my life, and what I can do to make the best difference that I possibly can, in any way I can. I know that may sound a little “pollyannaish,” but that’s what I believe.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

When I started out, the business world was not as open to women as it is now. And it was not a world that I was particularly interested in. I had always wanted to understand the working of the human mind, so psychology was always there, but there are so many more opportunities now in terms of leadership psychology and business psychology. I think I would have moved into that arena earlier than clinical psychology and family therapy, which is where I spent a lot of years of my life.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

It’s one that comes and circles back all the time, and it has to do with the more I let go, the more I get, and the more I don’t worry about the outcome, the more that magic happens, and if not magic, at least I get some good fertilizer to grow beautiful flowers in, and it will eventually works out in a perfect way if I just do my part and not try to control every thing.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

The change came when I left family therapy and the world of psychology to go into the business world. I think it has happened and is happening as we speak, there is a growing momentum for people in the business world to understand that relationships are at the core. Without relationships, it doesn’t matter what your product is, it will fall off the face of the earth if you do not really manifest and work on both internal relationships in your own organization, your own personal relationships in your own life, and relationships with colleagues and customers. So it’s circling back to more and more people getting to see that a) we are all connected and b) that relationships do make a major difference.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

The economy is challenging for everybody, and it has made people pull in and say we can’t invest in team building, and we can’t invest in conflict transformation, so initially that has been a tremendous threat.

The environment is another threat to all of us and so we are very conscious. Recently we had a meeting, and someone was handing out a booklet they had produced internally, and the first comment was “I wonder how many trees felt their end point from that.” So I think the threats are bigger than they used to be. What’s happening in the south with British Petroleum and the oil spill is becoming a bigger threat, as well as eating properly and health. Those are the big threats and they affect me because I am in the people part of the business world.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

One of the things we’ve discovered is that we’ve been living with the illusion that we can separate who we are at home from who we are at work, and it has created some real destruction. The Bernard Madoffs of the world, at home were living a different life than they were at work. What we do is help people become whole and see we aren’t meant to be different, we are meant to be aligned and show integrity, and who we are is who we are. We offer that in our programs, we offer that in the book I’ve written, Don’t Bring it to Work, which really drills down into that concept that we really need to become aligned with our selves and that’s who we take to work.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

The major challenge with work is to bring some fairly new concepts into the workplace without scaring people, and one of the situations, which comes to mind as we’re talking is a man who was in an HR nightmare at work. I was called in to work with his team. He kept on talking about one of the women who was one of the first who went to HR, and he was going on and on and on. And one of the things I know is that if you are that upset over something, if your buttons are that pushed, you better look further back in your life to see what else is going on, so I said to him, “Can you tell me about your relationship as you were growing up at home?” He looked at me and said, “That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard and I really should throw you out of my office.”

I sat at the edge of the chair wondering if I was going to stay or leave. I made the decision that I was either going to go where I knew the deeper work I was doing had to go, or I’d rather leave, so I said, “You don’t have to tell me your whole life story, just tell me one or two things.” I picked his father since it seemed like the most logical place and he looked at me and said, “I mean it Sylvia, I want to throw you out of the office.” And I said, “That’s your choice. I told you when I first came in that this work was going in a different arena and it’s okay if you don’t want to go there, but you’ll have to find someone else to help you out of this mess with HR.”

We looked at each other, eyeball to eyeball, for what seemed like a month but was maybe a minute, and then he finally said, “Okay, I haven’t seen my father in 25 years and I thought he was an absolute bastard.” I asked him why and he said, “He was self-serving, only thought about himself and caused lots of problems.” That was all, I didn’t say another word. Way later in the conversation, things settled down and we went back to business talk if you will. I asked him to tell me about this Roberta girl that drove him so crazy. And surprise, surprise, he said, “She’s self-serving, only thinks about herself and causes lots of problems.” I didn’t say anything to him then, but I think he was fighting a dual battle with the gal at work and with his father.

Out of that conversation, he was able to make peace with this woman, and the team became amazingly successful. He called me one day and said, “I think I would like to meet my father again. As I said, I haven’t seen him in 25 years, and I don’t know where he is.” I said, “If the intention is there, maybe you’ll have a chance to meet him.” Two days later he called and said that he was pretty shook up because his aunt called him to say his dad had called and said he was in a nursing home in Las Vegas dying, and wanted to see his son before he died.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

1. I didn’t want to get thrown out of this man’s office, but I was willing to. I learned deeply not to sell myself out.
2. I’d rather eat beans from a can than the best dinner at the fanciest restaurant if it would mean selling out my beliefs and integrity.
3. I either teach what I believe, or believe what I teach, or I may as well go be a gas station attendant and not talk to anyone about anything.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

My biggest failure, and I grapple with it all the time is having gotten divorced – even though I am married to a really great man – from a man who is the father of my children. I look back and what I now know is that I didn’t own my part in what was going on in the relationship. We had married young, I was 23 when I got married, and 25 when I had my first daughter, and 28 when I had my second daughter, so by 30 I was already through with that area of my life. I blamed my ex-husband for things that weren’t going the way I wanted them to go in our relationship.

I’m remarried, he’ remarried, he sees our children and grandchildren and so do I. It’s pleasant but there has always been a sadness for me that we couldn’t make it work.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

That’s a hard one because I think what I just said was the biggest disappointment, but not to have it re-occur again, is one of the things I have learned is to be pretty honest in my present relationship, and we’ve been together for 25 years. I learned that telling the truth is not spilling your guts, that it’s a very disciplined art form, and in every relationship it’s the foundation of what we have to do, and how we have to live. I’ve learned how to practice truth telling sentences. And, this is what we teach in our leadership program. It is about telling the truth as the foundation of the core of all relationships.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

One of the decisions that I had to make was to totally release the Personal Growth Center that we had in suburban Philadelphia and take that step to work only in the workplace. The Personal Growth Center was very fulfilling, and we had a lot of people we had trained working with us, and we would bring in lots of well known people in the fields of health and healing to teach in our center. My husband and I who was my partner, made the decision that we would be more effective and touch more lives if we closed. It was literally a beautiful Center. We simply closed it. We gave away a lot of the things that were there. We had a beautiful bookstore, we gave most of the books away. We began to build up the retreat center in the mountains to use mainly for leadership programs and corporate groups. It was a big leap of faith, and it was a good move. I was following what was next, from my heart.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

The first is interesting. I was not supposed to be born. My mother had one of her kidneys removed when my brother was born and she was told not to have anymore children. So as the story went, she didn’t want to have only one child so she sort of went obstetrician shopping and several obstetricians told her she shouldn’t have another kid, and then one said this is between you, me and God. She came home and told my father that the doctor had said it was fine and that’s how I was born. And it’s interesting because very early on I had this itch that I couldn’t scratch, that I would always want to challenge what was going on, and I was always looking for something that was different. That’s why we have people do what is called a Sankofa map, it’s a map of your history and generational history. You know it wasn’t such an easy thing in those days to have a child with one kidney, I still think it isn’t that easy, but if she was willing to take a risk then I wasn’t meant to sit around eating the bon bons so to speak. That had a tremendous impact on me.

My father died suddenly of a heart attack when I was 14. He came home from work one day and said, “I’m done,” and we didn’t know how done he was until in the night he had a heart attack and died. He was in a family business with his two brothers and it was fiscally sound but emotionally bankrupt. My passion for working in the workplace is so other kids wouldn’t have to go through what I went through because there is so much tension at work.

The third event was the power of what happened when I got the divorce which is something I didn’t want, but it was another form of death. But I learned that if we can tell the truth, we can transform our lives in much more powerful ways. I had a teacher once who said to me, there is birth and death and they impact us in such core ways, and much of the rest is like sandwich filling.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

At the moment I think it is my book Don’t Bring it to Work. It was sitting in me for twenty-something years. People often said that I should write a book, and I would say yes, I oughta write a book and I didn’t. I was in the doing stage of things. We can make tons of excuses, and I tend to be fairly extroverted in my personality so I love being with people, and writing a book means closing the door, and it’s you and the computer and your good thoughts so it took me about a year to pull the ideas together, and it took me two and a half months to sit and write it. The pulling together of the ideas was a bit difficult, but the writing of the book was pure joy. Other than birthing my two daughters, I found writing the book was just a delight.

How did mentors influence your life?

Very critically. When I was in training in the family therapy field, I was very fortunate that in Philadelphia there were all the key people who were helping to create this new field of family therapy. Though it wasn’t so new, they were helping to make it a more important field. Most of them were my teachers and some of them became mentors. I was a good student and loved learning so they took me on and taught me the subtleties. You can get a lot of the easier stuff sitting and being lectured to, but the subtle stuff, it’s really great if you have someone who can be there saying, “What would happen if you said this instead of that, and next time say this instead of that?” That’s been really delightful for me, and I’ve also found mentors in people who were no longer alive who had written books which impacted me deeply. They were mentors for me also.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

To stay true to myself.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would pay it forward and say to stay true to yourself. If we sell out to the luxuries of life, we will lose a deeper part of who we are.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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Joey Asher – Your Invisible Mentor

5 Great Ideas

1. If you’re focused, you can say anything you want to say in seven minutes
2. Speak to your audience like you’re having a highly animated dinner conversation
3. Start your presentation by putting your finger on the key issue or question that your audience cares about
4. Presenting is a spoken art. You can’t prepare by simply flipping through your slides. Rehearse, rehearse and rehearse
5. Know the first two lines of your presentation to help you relax and build your confidence

Three Questions to Ask and Answer Before Preparing Your Presentation

1. What problem needs solving?
2. What are the three things that you absolutely want your audience to remember?
3. What action would you like your audience to take after the presentation?

“The best presentations are conversations where the listeners participate and get what they want. If there are lots of questions, then the chances are that your listeners are going away with what they need,” says Joey Asher in his new book, 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations.

Though this book is only 4 X 6 inches and 106 pages, it’s filled with lots of useful information and tons of examples. At the end of each chapter there is a key takeaway which is a synopsis of the chapter. I was asked to review this book, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

The author Joey Asher suggests that presentations should be 15 minutes long, equally divided between the presentation and the question and answer section. There shouldn’t be more than six slides for your PowerPoint, which are created after you’ve fleshed out what you’d like to cover in the presentation. Is it a surprise that someone would write such a book in an age with micro-blogging at 140 characters, in a world with people who have short attention spans?

15 Minutes Including Q & A has three sections: Part I: Prepare a Seven-Minute Rifle Shot Presentation, Part II: Allow Listeners to Fill in the Blanks and Raise Objections with Q & A, Part III: Deliver the Presentation with Intensity.

Breakdown of Your Presentation

1. Step 1: The Hook – 30 seconds – Quick identification of the problem/issue/challenge and resolution
2. Step 2: The Preview – 30 seconds – Three key points/messages to solve the problem
3. Step 3: The Body of the Presentation – five minutes – Restate and expand on each of the three points, and provide examples to illustrate each point
4. Step 4: The Recap – 30 seconds – Repeat the three key points/messages
5. Step 5: Call to Action – 30 seconds – What next? What do you expect from the audience?

This presentation model focuses on problem/solution, challenge/response and question/answer, and there is a strong emphasis on question and answer section, so the format is more engaging. The book walks you through the process of creating your presentation in the form of telling a story.

The Formula for a Good Presentation Story

• Start with the point
• Tell the story chronologically
• Keep it tight but give some details
• The more personal the story the better
• Remind the audience of the point at the end

For professionals to use this model effectively require them to know what the key issues are that affect their audiences. They have to be focused, and know their content inside out. If you do not know what the issues are, Joey Asher suggests that you call a few people who will be attending the presentation and ask them, or you could also email them with one or two questions. To ensure that you know your content, and come across as being confident, and an expert, simply mean that you Rehearse, Rehearse and then Rehearse some more. And if you are terrified that you’ll be asked questions in the Q & A that you cannot answer since an equal amount of time is dedicated, think about 15 questions that the audience would likely ask, and prepare answers for them, so you are ready for almost anything.

I liked this book because it’s easy to read, and has information that you can immediately apply. It’s practical! Even though it’s for presentations, the model will work for some forms of writing. It’s always important to keep it tight, always focused on the needs of your audience (reader or client). A challenge for this idea, is to convince people that quality is more important than quantity. I recommend 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations by Joey Asher. Click here to download Joey Asher’s How to Create a Seven-Minute Rifle-Shot Presentation free e-book.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

All book links are affiliate links