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How Are the Words, “I Can’t” Holding You Back?
There are so many challenges we face everyday it is no wonder we easily find ourselves falling into the trap of saying, "I can’t ." Its an extremely negative response and really does nothing for us as it’s more of an easy excuse than a real useful reason. Without getting into all the specifics as to why you should have a more positive outlook I’m going to focus on doing just one thing more positive. That is to change your thinking and response anytime you would have said, "I can’t" to "How can I?". There are 4 major areas I’ll explore around the benefits of changing this response.
Stay Open to New Things
Saying "I can’t" will immediately shut down any opportunity as you don’t even consider any way to work with the suggestion. Changing that response to look at how can I do something is far more positive. It allows you to look for ways and if nothing else, think about ways to do that. Even if you don’t act on those new things, staying open minded about them keeps options available for the future. You never know when you will change your mind and want to focus on that very thing you otherwise would have said, "I can’t" to.
People learn from your responses and if you have a habit of saying "I can’t" then others remember that and come to you less and less frequently with those new opportunities. "How can I" lets you question it yourself and gives you a chance to see those new things from different perspectives. People will be much more likely to come to you again with an idea or question if you look for ways to do it instead of simply shutting down the idea in the first place. Keep your interaction with others open and welcoming simply by changing this response.
Don’t Limit Yourself
Keeping that open mind lets you experience new things, new relationships and lets you see areas to make changes in your life. Some of these for the better, some not so, but keeping the choice available is useful. There is no point in limiting your choices in life and that’s exactly what "I can’t" does. It becomes a mind set to you and others that you are not willing to even try and that you give up easily. This is not a limiting belief that anyone should have!
Find and Offer Help
My favorite reason to never say I can’t and instead ask the question How can I is that it is often a way to find or offer help to someone else. Most of the things we say we can’t do are because we don’t believe we have the ability to accomplish something on our own. This is a perfect chance to then find some help and to see the same situations for others where you can offer help. Offering help is easily a substitute for saying, "I can’t" as well since you are still willing to be involved but perhaps at a simpler level, just offering help. This is very powerful in the workplace since even though you may already have a full workload, offering some help can be a huge benefit to others while requiring little of your own time. Obviously this depends on how much help you are offering, but there is nearly always something you can do to help, even if it is just a few minutes of your time.
Accomplish More
As others discover you have a habit of looking at ways to accomplish something instead of avoiding it, you will keep them interested in coming to you. You will have more accomplishments under your belt as well since as you develop a way of looking for solutions and ways to achieve things instead of ways to avoid them. Balance this using priorities with your other work and focus on the most important tasks only will keep you from being overloaded can give you a massive boost to accomplishing many things. Keeping some time available to always ensure you can offer help or ask when needed will allow you to ask that question of "How Can I?" without feeling overwhelmed by more new tasks.
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Guest Post on Organize IT about Changing Your Habits
I wanted to point everyone to a guest article of mine on organizeit.co.uk about overcoming bad habits. Its called How To Make Definitive Changes To Your Habits . Please go on over and check out the article. I would appreciate (I’m sure James would as well) any help you can offer by stumbling or sharing the article on your favorite social media site if you enjoy it.
Thank you James for including my article on your blog and I definitely encourage all my readers to check out some more of Jame’s articles, as he has some great content and an excellent blog.
I especially have liked these articles from the last few months:
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Book Review: The Dream Manager
Author : Matthew Kelly
Well I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for a few months now as I’ve been catching up my backlog of books and I’m so happy to have finally read it. I have read a few other recent reviews lately and while they outlined a bit of the content covered in the book, they never expressed a lot of personal effect the book had. I want to share mine and my main comment is that this is a fantastic book. Not only for a manager but anyone wanting to manage their lives and the lives of those around them better. From the title, I expected the book to teach me how to be the dream manager, which I thought would be one that people would dream to have or the best possible manager. The funny thing is as I started reading and found out quickly what the dream manager was, the book wasn’t directly teaching that at all. I love the ideas and as I got further into the book and realized that the concepts put in practice do need to be in place by any manager, I fell back to thinking and definitely think it now, that doing what this book teaches, will make you the dream manager. A manager who puts the dreams and ambitions of an employee first in order to build them up only on the hope and knowledge that that will pay back more in the future really is what the ideal manager is. As I continue to learn in so many ways, put people first and the rest falls into place. The story is captivating as I couldn’t put the book down wanting to find out the impact of the new initiatives and programs put into place in the story.
The book is written as a fable (my favorite style of business book as I find it far more applicable to real life) about a janitorial services company struggling with a massive turnover problem. An innovative approach that is used and demonstrated in the story is that of a dream manager program. The program all started out by the company doing a survey to find out what the employees think causes the high turnover. This led to recognizing some common goals among the employees and the idea that a dream manager hired on at the company could help to facilitate the dreams of the employees. This would in turn help employees feel like the organization truly valued them and that they would ultimately feel more loyalty to the company and be more productive with their work. The presented concept in the story delivers many times over with the turnover problem and the company sees massive improvements in employee productivity and profits.
One of my favorite quotes from the book is,
Our employees are our first customers, and our most important customers.
Anyway, I put a lot of value on the ideas presented and to the extent the dream manager program were taken in the book. I personally believe 100% in developing people first and seeing the results of that back to the organization second and this message is clear through the story. The book has given me a new spark to maximizing the use of my own one on one times with my team to look at new ways to explore their dreams and help them achieve them. I definitely want to look for ways to bring this into other practice with other managers and the book provides a number of techniques to start doing this, all of them realistic and quite practical. The other thing that Kelly does very well with the book is that he adds a practical handbook section after the end of the fable to explore ways to put this into practice. The best part of this is that he doesn’t limit it to managers. He covers ways to start no matter where you fit into an organization and even more unique in a "business book" is that he looks and discusses how this can be used in other areas of your life with family and friends.
This is definitely one of the top books I’ve ever read for business and management and it was highly useful and will definitely make an impact on my work and more importantly, the work of others that I manage. I can’t wait to put some of these into practice and see the effects it will have in the workplace. I absolutely recommend this book, especially for any manager!
What’s your dream?
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Great Articles/Resources I’ve Discovered Lately
Well, I haven’t listed a lot of other resources lately so it’s due time to bring up some of the great articles I’ve come across over the last couple months that fit well with the leadership and personal development topics I write about. These are the ones I liked in particular.
Articles
Do You Have the Courage to Be an Extraordinary Leader? at Powerful Living
The Manager’s Handbook: 80+ Open Courseware Collections to Help You Be a Better Leader at JobProfiles
Agility Means Simple Things Done Well, Not Complex Things Done Fast at The Practice of Leadership
5 Leadership Lessons: Transparency at Leadership Now
15 Tips for Becoming as Patient as Job at ZenHabits
Resources
TED Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading Excellent talks on various topics
Change This - Some great eBooks and Manifestos
Personal MBA Updated for 2008 - A list of the best 77 business books that exist. All for self improvement in a nice set of categories, a must to check out!
Blog Resources
A huge list of 300 great blogs were published by David Zinger here. These are excellent business and productivity blogs.
Some recent Blog Carnivals that have included several of my articles I’ve listed here as well. These include many other great articles to check out on related topics at each of these blog sites.
The Leadership Development Carnival #1
Working at Home Blog Carnival-Ninety-second Edition
Carnival of Project Management #21
Carnival of Inspiration and Motivation: Fourteenth edition
Carnival of Sales & Management Success
Carnival of Careers #3
The 7th Edition Of The Carnival Of Careers
Are We Balanced Yet? Carnival of Work Life Balance #4
PinkBlocks Blog Carnival on Personal Power
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Better Communication: Writing with Impact
Generous Writing
With the world of text messaging, email and internet everything, there is still a high quantity of communication systems that use text. They are doing it in a more segmented, small content system however. The good thing is that there is lots of medium to write in and many opportunities in our lives and jobs to use writing to communicate. And better than that, there are people who are willing and wanting to read what you have to communicate. There are many places where writing can be used and generally in business, there is room for more writing. Whether its for status updates, issue reports, instructions, directions, requests or simply email messages there is value in being generous with your writing.
I don’t mean to be generous by writing longer messages or more wordy content, instead be generous with what you write about and how often you write. Writing a follow up message or thank you note even after a discussion can be a huge plus with your communication as it reinforces what you had to say and puts a reminder out to your audience which helps to clarify your message and the repetition helps it be remembered.
Style
Develop and watch for your own style in your writing. Consistency with how you write and your approach to putting your ideas to text can lead not only to having a style of your own in your writing, but it also builds on your personality and reputation if you are consistent in how you write. This is especially true in business as written messages and instructions can be a critical part of your perceived personality so don’t take your writing style for granted. Be careful of your tone, clarity and any emotional content you include.
Put some style into your formatting and use white space, lists, and headings to organize your content and keep the attention of your readers. Pictures can definitely help with this as well but are not always necessary. A few others specifics of style which can improve your communication are to avoid slang, jargon, abbreviations, and symbols. These all help keep clarity. Spend some time to refine your style and be careful to keep it consistent as it will have impact with how well you can communicate your written text.
Outline and Plan Your Writing
Its never a bad idea to plan your writing, whether its an email message or a long instruction manual, you should always outline what you want to write and plan it out before beginning to write your content. For example, I always put down my headings for an article before starting to write the paragraph content to ensure I cover the topics I want to and that I can fit things into some structure that is prepared before I begin to write. Putting just a couple of minutes in up front will help you focus your writing on what you intend to cover and will help to keep off topic components out of your writing.
Careful of Negative Emotions
Emotional text is very difficult to clearly write and so main recommendation when it comes to writing anything that has some emotional attachment to it, is DON’T! Just don’t write it. Unless you are a very careful and practiced author, most people cause far more problems in their writing than they solve when they include any emotional content. This includes writing about how someone made you feel, your feelings (not just opinions) on a subject or feedback to someone about how something made you feel. If you find yourself writing under any kind of strong emotional state (especially negative emotions like fear or anger or jealousy), do yourself a favor and just stop writing. You are better off communicating by phone or in person for these subjects and best left not recorded in text.
Now, emotions can play an important role in getting your message across if used to deliver a passionate heartfelt text. This is where emotions in text can be useful, just keep in mind they are hard to express. Think of how a novel author can write for several paragraphs to describe the feelings and thoughts of a character in a story. It can take the same level of detail and attention to express your own emotions accurately with no room for interpretation so make sure you include enough detail to minimize any room for question.
Proofing
While some will argue that its a waste of time to spent much time proofing work for minor errors, there is much more to proofing your written work than just the obvious problems that can be overlooked. Other reasons are more important and the most would be to ensure that what you’ve written makes sense and is worded in a way that delivers the intended message. Eliminating simple spelling and grammatical errors is also important as any mistakes will slow down and distract your reader from what you are wanted to communicate.
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