What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
Ask Havi #1: The “How come?” edition
Because I said so
Actually, the credit for the brand new Ask Havi category all goes to Kelly Parkinson (aka Copylicious).
Kelly, who is also my amazing writer-friend slash colleague slash cheerleader, likes to regularly point out how unfair it is that I don’t let people peek into the contents of my inbox.
This happens whenever she asks me for genius-advice on something. She asks, I give it, and then she wants me to put it out there for everyone else.
And because she’s always right and because she’s careful not to use any icky marketing words like “leverage” (ewwww) when she brings it up, I said I’d think about it.
Then Naomi started in. Yes, that’s Naomi-my-internet-crush aka Itty Biz, who is also my another amazing writer-friend slash colleague slash cheerleader and is also always right.
Actually, Naomi recently wrote a great piece about why to be nice to the people who contact you, which now makes me feel even worse about the way I’m completely going to recklessly disregard her smart advice again.
When it’s good to be a helper-mouse …
The weird thing is, I actually love the idea that one quickie email answer of mine could help more than just one person. Also love the idea of being part of a living library of useful, practical, here’s-what-you-do information.
And, generally speaking, I like being what my gentleman friend would call a helper-mouse (don’t ask).
Who doesn’t want to be a helper-mouse? Hey, that’s pretty much the whole point of my business.
But just to fully establish my helper-mouse street cred before I blatantly refuse to be helpful a couple paragraphs from now: over the past few years I have gone way, way, way out of my way to help a ton of people who aren’t clients and probably won’t be.
Nice people. People in need of a helper-mouse. Mostly fellow Israeli expats who are now in America and Europe.
I help out partly because they ask (hello, to be Israeli is to live the Art of the Ask).
Also partly because I’ve moved countries three times in my own life. Having had to grapple with the harsh learning curve, I completely identify with how incredibly head-banging-against-the-wall frustrating that particular change can be.
Learning new ways of communicating and/or doing business: so not fun. I absolutely remember how great it is to have a helper-mouse, and how miserable it is when no one wants to be one.
When you really don’t feel like being a helper-mouse!
So yeah, helping people is what it’s all about.
But, sometimes you just don’t want to do it. Welcome to the downside to the “hi, I’m an approachable helper-mouse” thing.
People know I’m “that way” and that I have a duck and that I’m a big believer in acting like a real live human being.
Thus, the deluge. I get all sorts of requests from all sorts of people.
Some of them I’m happy to answer. Sometimes requests even lead to friendships. In fact, this weekend I’ll be having tea with Sandra Gross, a yoga teacher from Zurich, who came all the way to Berlin to see me teach mind-body brain training at the Berlin Yoga Festival. And also with Gabriela Rosa da Silva, a photographer from Paris.
But a whole bunch of them I don’t actually feel like dealing with. Ever. In fact, I have so many of these in my inbox right now that I don’t feel the slightest bit like being a helper mouse.
At all. Ever again.
Screw helper-mouse-ism. Screw who-knows-what-future-benefits. Screw good-person-ness. Screw karma karma karma. I just don’t feel like it.
Today, anyway, I’m feeling more like a grumble-mouse.
Hmmm, what kinds of requests, you ask.
Oh, for example, the “Would you mind rewriting the copy for this event I’m doing so that people will actually come to it?” requests.
Uh, yeah, actually I would mind. I don’t even know you and it takes time, energy and dusting off my genius hat. Grumble grumble.
Or the steadily growing requests (three this weekend!) which start something like this:
“I know we haven’t talked in fifteen years, but …”
“I found your profile on LinkedIn and you went to Tel Aviv university and I went to Ben Gurion university, which are totally in the same country, so ….”
“I’m also a teacher/healer/coach/etc so we have a lot in common, so …. “
And end with:
“… would you please review my website and tell me what you think and what I’m doing wrong?”
Urm…
So here’s what we’re going to do
The truth is, I think it’s super important that people feel comfortable asking for things and get better at letting themselves ask for things. Yay asking for things!
And I also think it’s super important that people who aren’t in the mood to give those things feel comfortable about saying no when that’s the true answer. Yay boundaries!
More than that: it’s also important to me personally to be able to step into helper-mouse mode when I feel like it … and without it ever morphing into a “should”. Yay minimal amount of self-awareness!
So, taking a cue from my father, who is big into the “there’s always some sort of solution that you’re just not seeing” kind of thinking, I came up with a compromise. Yay compromise!
Alright. People ask me for stuff. Good for them. And if you’re one of those people, you can keep asking.
Here’s my solution. Ask away, but know that I might fold my advice to you into a blog post. If I’m giving you my time and energy, then everyone gets to share.
And I want a small favor from you. Well, not a favor, exactly. I just want you to do something for me before you ask, and that is to read the rest of this post and follow the advice therein.
Yes, I said therein. Oh, I told you it was grumble-mouse day. It’s so grumble-mouse day.
Before you ask me (or anyone) for website advice: step #1
Run, do not walk, to your nearest independent bookstore or online independent bookstore and grab a copy of Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think”.
Yes, that guy I’m always quoting in my noozletters and such.
Internalize his approach to usability testing, download his freebie test script so you know exactly what to ask people, and then test your site for usability. Observe how people navigate, what they don’t click on, what confuses them, and take notes.*
∗ Ummmm …. please see my Hi-I’m-a-cobbler-and-my-kids-are-barefoot disclaimer: It’s been eons since I tested for usability on my own site.
Before you ask me for website advice: step #2
Talk to Men With Pens. They’re smart, they’re funny, they’re polite and sensitive in a way which only Canadians (or people pretending to be Canadians) can get away with. What’s not to like?
Also, they do this awesome $30 site review, which they call a “Drive-by Consult“. They’ll tell you what’s not working and why, and then you fix it. Excellent.
No, I’ve never done it, but I hear from reliable sources that it rocks, so maybe I will. And really, for expert advice, $30 is absurdly cheap.
Once you’ve tested for usability and gotten your site shot up by Men with Pens, then I’ll tell you what I think. And I’ll even thank you for saving me 9/10ths of the work.
Before you ask me for freebie advice on everything else:
Hmm, I guess the best thing to do would be to read everything on this website.
But in general, if it were up to me (I know, it’s not, I’m still in grumble-mouse mode) and I got to choose how I’d want you to ask for freebie advice on any subject imaginable, it would be exactly like this:
Hey Havi, hey Selma! I loved the piece you wrote about [for example: solving the but-I-just-don’t-have-time problem].
I’ve been trying to apply this stuff but I’m getting stuck with X, Y and Z. Do you think you could write a piece that addresses this angle more specifically? Especially how to [whatever]? Because that would be so great!
But regardless of how people ask — and again, good for you for asking — I’m going to be doing a lot more of my answering here on the blog in the newly christened Ask Havi section.
(Don’t worry, I won’t name any names unless you specifically say you’re cool with that!)
That way, I’ll have more fun with it, and (she types hopefully) my helper-mouse moments can function as a useful resource that’s available to all sorts of people (especially the ones that would never dream of asking for help).
And best of all, that way I’ll be back in helper-mouse mode and out of the grumble zone. Because the grumble-zone isn’t good for either of us.
That’s it! Ask away.
(photo credit: Richard Miller :: Calyx Design)
My 100% guilt-free email policy
The end of email guilt
The other day someone apologized yet again for not getting back to me sooner, and it occurred to me that maybe it’s really time I reference my guilt-free policy in every email.
Which would be awesome. Because then I could just say (chirpily), “Please see my 100% guilt-free communication policy“.
Of course you can’t actually see it, since it’s in my head, but it’s still a policy.
Yeah, that’s right. I have a strongly-held 100% guilt-free correspondence policy.
Because, for some reason, despite the fact that it seems to me as though I do nothing but talk about my guilt-free email policy, no one seems to actually know about it.
My policy? Why, yes, I have one. Haven’t I already told you about it? It’s 100% guilt-free, guaranteed. For real.
So here’s how it works.
If I write to you and you don’t write back, and I find myself really wanting an answer on something, I can always send another email that says “Hey, could I get a response on this thing?”
Otherwise you’re good.
Only write something when you feel like it. Don’t write when you don’t feel like it. No need to feel bad if you do feel like it but you don’t get around to it. We’re cool.
You know when you write to me and say “Sorry for not getting back to you, but …”?
Don’t do that. You don’t have to say that.
That’s what a guilt-free email policy means.
It means I assume that — like me — you’re busy with a hundred different things, you’ve got stuff going on, and that you still love and adore me, like I do you. Mwah.
It means that guilt is unnecessary and it’s harmful and there’s no reason to take it on when you don’t have to.
It also means that, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need those irritating Tim-Ferriss-ey autoresponders that say you won’t be getting back to me for X amount of time … because I don’t care. Get back to me whenever. Seriously.
I said you couldn’t see my policy, but now I’m going to write it down so you can.
Which is silly, because just reading the words “guilt-free correspondence policy” should have done the trick and calmed you the heck down. But whatever, here’s the policy.
The Official 100% Guilt-Free Correspondence Policy
There is no need to feel guilty when you don’t answer an email right away. Or ever.
Sincerely, Havi Brooks and Selma the Duck
If you’d like you can send a short “Can’t get to this at the moment, will catch up when I can”. But you don’t have to. We’re cool.
Got it? Good.
(Unless you work for me, in which case some policies, ahem, may not apply).
Hold the schnick schnack!
Did you know? I’m sitting right now in my favorite cafe in Berlin. Which also happens to be my favorite cafe in the world. Favorite!
To the point that were there to suddenly be some completely ridiculous law that from now on cafe-sitting is like marriage, and you have to choose only one that you’ll sit in for the rest of your life — this would be the One.
It’s the one where I always like the music and it’s always at the right volume. Where I always feel completely at home. Where the mirror in the bathroom makes me look fantastic. And where they have the best home-made cookies in town.
Yes, I know, I don’t eat cookies.
But even when you don’t eat cookies, you at least get to successfully convince other people to go out of their way to meet you, because you’ve promised them the best cookies ever . And then they come and of course you were right and everybody’s happy.
But you don’t want to read about my holiday abroad.
And actually I’m sitting here and thinking about “service” and what it means — in business and in general — because that’s the sort of thing I think about.
That elusive something or other
The impossible-to-pin-down je ne sais quoi. Or … das ungewisse Etwas, as we say here in Deutschland.
It can be kind of hard to determine what constitutes “good” service, since what you want and need at any given time tends to vary. And it varies so completely from person to person as well.
In general, of course, you can say that people have “stuff” and they want their “stuff” to be acknowledged and respected, rather than stepped on.
(This is what the Californians call “being sensitive to your needs”, and unfortunately my time in California wasn’t sufficient for me to be able to say this without a little sarcastic edge to the air quotes, but you get the idea.)
Personally the kind of service I tend to like is the “leave me the heck alone, but be there if I need you” variety.
Like in my favoritest-cafe-in-the-world* , where they smile happily at you when you come in and then happily ignore you once you’re settled in.
∗ I know it’s not a word, thank you.
They’ll also wax rhapsodic over which cookies are the best today (hazelnut!) but only if you ask. Suits me perfectly, because I’m more a cat than a dog, if you know what I mean.
But — beyond your personal cat vs. dog preferences — when it comes to being served, there are also some things that are pretty much always good and some things that pretty much always suck.
No schnick schnack, please: things that are good
Today I was at the T-Mobile store because my German cell SIM card stopped working. The guy replaced my card for free, which was awesome.
Then it turned out that in addition to the card issue, there was a phone issue (but more about that in a minute). I was going to have to buy a new phone, preferably a cheapie since I’m only in Germany for a month or so of the year.
The T-Mobile guy was pleasantly insistent that I needed the simplest possible model — without any “schnick-schnack” (what we would call “bells and whistles”) — and he actually ended up sending me to another store a few blocks away where I could get a better deal.
In the end I got a cheap-ass, completely schnick-schnack-free phone, and got to keep my old number as well. Hooray.
But back to things that suck
Turns out that the reason I’m in this absurd phoneless situation to begin with is this:
The people at Motorola, when specifically asked the question, “So which phone will work in Germany with my T-Mobile SIM card?” specifically recommended a phone which doesn’t.
It comes with plenty of schnick-schnack, though. Plenty of ridiculous features that I’ll never use. I didn’t even want this phone, except for the “will work in Germany” part of it.
And the Motorola people got over two hundred dollars because it was important to me that I have a phone that would work in Germany as well as the States, and not have to do what I did today which was buy another phone. As far as I’m concerned, that’s part of the schnick-schnack!
The thing is, it only takes one negative experience to establish the pattern in the brain, which is to associate frustration/annoyance/hurt with what appears to be the cause of it.
Just this week I screwed up with a customer, through a combination of oversight, chaos, poor staff choices and just plain old stuff-falling-through-the-cracks-ness.
Any way you slice it, I was absolutely in the wrong. And even though I can work on doing all sorts of things right, this guy has every right to feel frustrated, upset and disappointed with me.
It’s what Steve Krug calls “mensch points”, and you can lose them pretty darn fast when you’re in the business of serving people, whether in the sense of serving coffee, serving ideas or just caring for people in a deep and personal way.
Ow, right in the insecurity bone!
Actually Mark Silver of Heart of Business does this very cool, very out-there role-playing-style exercise where you physically bow down to your customer in a full prostration. As a way of, among other things, getting in touch (literally!) with the vulnerability of service.
Then the person in customer-mode bows to you, and you get to feel the vulnerability that’s always there when you share your gifts with someone who has given you their trust.
I don’t know if it’s even possible to give you a hint of the deep, visceral, spine-tingly full-body power of this exercise, but that’s what it was. It completely imprinted in my body a sense of protective mama-hen love for my clients and students.
And it gave me a deeper appreciation for anyone who can be with me in my own state of need, and meet me there.
I so wish Motorola would say to me exactly this:
“Wow, that seriously sucks. We misinformed you, it cost you a ton of money, and now you have a useless phone that you never even wanted to begin with *and* you had to buy a new one. Aaargh. We feel terrible about this.”
Haven’t called them yet, but at best they’re likely to say something like “we apologize for any inconvenience”. We shall see.
Because “serving” people is scary
Yeah, it’s scary and it makes you feel vulnerable. Not to mention that usually we’re so deep in our own issues and stucknesses that we can’t even see our customer’s issues and stucknesses.
What I’d really like for my own business is to keep learning more about the scary and the vulnerable, so I can get better at noticing when it’s showing up — whether it’s mine or whether it belongs to someone I care about serving.
Honestly? I want to be able to give out amazing hazelnut cookies to all my clients. And to ask for a hug from Motorola when I want one. And that we all insert the word schnick schnack into conversation as often as humanly possible.
But alas the world doesn’t work that way (yet).
I’m guessing though that the only thing I can really work on is practicing being in service to myself.
You know, noticing what my interactions with others look, sound and feel like on both sides of the equation, so they can be just that much more human — and ideally — as schnick-schnack-free as possible.
Well, at any rate, it’s a start.
Book Review: Made to Stick
So I read about three nonfiction books a week, mostly biggification and self-work (what regular people call business and self-help). Rated on a scale of ducks: 1 duck = Stephen Covey (yawn) and 5 ducks = Malcolm Gladwell (do a little dance). Books worth reading are image-linked to independent bookstores.
The book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
The authors: Chip Heath and Dan Heath
The rating: 5 ducks
I never say stuff like this, but what the hell. This might be the best business book I’ve ever read. In fact, I think it is.
Yes, it is.
Here’s the thing. If there is one thing you need to know while biggifying what you do, it’s this: it does not matter how great the thing you do is.
Obviously it’s better for the world if it is that great, but all that greatness doesn’t get you anywhere if you can’t present it in a way that’s accessible and memorable and sticks in people’s heads.
If you really, truly want to help people (and if you don’t, it’s hard to imagine that you’d be hanging out here), you need to do them a favor and make it easy for them to find you and adore you.
You need to make the thing you’re trying to give them “sticky” enough that it gets remembered and talked about. That’s the best (and maybe the only) way it’s going to get to the people who need it.
But how do you make stuff sticky?
Ahhh … wouldn’t we all like to know.
This book is a smart, thoughtful, funny, engaging exploration of how exactly that complicated process works. There’s a ton of useful how-to information as well as nice little “oh my gosh” moments that come from the way they regularly reframe old concepts in new ways.
Also, the Heath brothers can write, which doesn’t really happen all that often in business-ey books either. And I especially enjoyed their emphasis on making this information accessible and usable, without you ever getting the feeling that they’ve dumbed it the heck down.
It almost never happens (has it ever happened?) that I can read an entire book without having to mentally argue certain points with the authors — but in this case I either agreed with them completely or was wowed by them on every point.
But the best thing about Made to Stick is probably the way it gets the wheels in your head whirring as you get fired up with thinking about how you’re going to apply this stuff. To everything.
Be like gum, my friend.
All the information you interact with on a regular basis? These concepts give you a different way to relate to the stuff you’re probably thinking about anyway.
Then at some point you start filtering everything through the stickiness filter … and boy is it ever interesting.
Anyway, obviously if you have a business or a project or a venture you can take this stuff and apply it to pretty much every part of what you do … from crafting your message to finally rewriting your web copy to helping your clients/fans/whatever really get who you are and what you do.
And if you aren’t in the process of biggifying yourself, you can still make use of these concepts to better understand how to effectively frame information that you want people to remember. Plus you’ll get better at noticing when and how people/media/writing might be pulling your strings.
As the boys point out on their blog, it’s not really about making things sticky to work the system or even necessarily about business concepts — it’s about understanding how and why stuff works. Which is interesting. And useful.
Good stuff all around. And yes, it should probably go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: totally worth owning and rereading.
Straight to the super-genius-books reference shelf!
My celebrity duck
Selma is a superstar
So — much like the kid in the Sixth Sense who “sees dead people” everywhere (a kid with whom I already over-identify as it is) — I’m seeing ducks everywhere.
It does make sense that this would happen. After all, I live with a duck.
I figured it was that Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (the whole “whoah, I just learned some obscure tidbit and all of a sudden it’s everywhere” thing). Or the related and less sexy “your friend buys a blue Honda Civic and all of a sudden the streets are full of ’em” thing.
You know, patterns. Which the brain likes to pounce upon and celebrate. All normal and good.
But this week I realized that there’s another neat thing going on here.
Why, I believe that’s my duck in your bathroom
The place I stay in Berlin is owned by a couple who are friends/students of mine. One of them (Andreas) is a designer for a small firm that specializes in eco-friendly natural-resources green-ey companies.
And in the bathroom is a poster his firm created, celebrating a company producing natural gas as the power source of the future. Featured are fields of flowers, herds of happy cows, and lots of smiling people riding bikes and doing yoga (though not at the same time).
Plus a flock of ducks in a pond, one of which is not a duck-duck but the kind of duck that Selma is.
(Yes, sweetie, I know you’re a duck-duck too, but I need a word for the kind that aren’t you).
Anyway, there’s a chirpy-lookin’ hot-yellow squeaky-duck in there among the other ducks and she’s looking fiiiiiiiiiiiiine, is all I’m saying.
I cornered Andreas and got him to admit that he’s fetishizing my duck (actually he’s not really, but he was very polite about the whole thing), and he said something very interesting. Which was: “I see Selma everywhere.”
Oh, it’s so great when it’s not just me who’s crazy
Of course you do, said I. She is everywhere. People love them some squeaky toy ducks.
The point Andreas was making, though, was this: It seems like no matter where he goes or what he does, at some point a duck will pop up — and then he thinks of me. “Smart branding”, he said, since it’s like life handing you a little reminder to plug into wacky Fluent Self techniques.
Of course it’s not branding at all, at least not in an intentional sense, and I can tell you the story of how Selma came to own my company some other time.
The point is that I’d never realized that when people see ducks, they (the people, not the ducks) make a mental snick! association with useful things they’ve learned from me.
And that is awesome. It’s like a regular spontaneous reminder to keep working on your stuff. Whenever a duck shows up. Which, as it turns out, they do.
Food for thought: bite #1 (snack time!)
Small business owners (the just-you-and-a-computer kind of small business, not the 500 employees in an office kind) often say things to me like, “Hey, I’d like you to give me feedback on my new fancy logo that I just paid way too much for.”
And then I feel awkward because if they’d asked me beforehand I would have told them they don’t need a logo. A “look and feel”, yes. A typeface that loves them, yes. A nice clean type-based logo (or logotype), yes. Paying money to someone who designs stuff professionally, abso-hell-yes-lutely.
But a logo-logo? That’s worse than a duck-duck.
In the vast majority of cases it’s just not necessary. If you’re not a bank on every corner or the kind of company that buys Superbowl ads, you don’t need to engrave some image on people’s brains through repetitively boring repetition.
And even if you wanted to, you don’t have the 7-digit finances to make that approach work.
This, on the other hand, is interesting. Because maybe there is something you can use (ahem, do not take my duck or Selma and I will mess you up) that can give people that sense of ding! which reminds them of how totally happy your work makes them feel.
In which case, ignore all my “don’t get a logo” ranting and go get yerself a mascot.
Food for thought: bite #2 (snack time!)
Having something to notice — or giving people something to notice, as the case may be — is powerful stuff. It introduces a “Where’s Waldo” element that is fun and kinda flirty too.
It’s a bit like unexpectedly catching a glimpse of that person you always smile at on the bus, or noticing your favorite shade of green. Or using a word that doubles as an in-joke with a friend.
All of which reminds me of a great self-work technique that’s so much more powerful than it could ever sound. What you do is you choose a color when you wake up and then every time you notice something of that color, you smile to yourself and think hey, there’s my color.
It introduces a bit of child-like glee to your day, which everyone can use an extra dose of anyway, but it’s also great for practicing the whole present-moment awareness thing (which is also useful for noticing when you’re defaulting into auto-pilot patterns).
Every time you bring your attention to the color and to your focal point for the day, you’re bringing yourself back into the noticing-and-remembering process. By smiling, you’re breaking up automatic patterns and moving the pieces around. More fun than it sounds!
And the point is?
Uh, that’s it. When in doubt, duck!