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.

Book Review: Made to Stick

by | Jun 29, 2008 | ,

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!

Curing phone call dread

by | Jun 25, 2008 | , ,

Hey, so this is one of my self-work-themed noozletters that people always used to wish they could comment on. Now you can! Enjoy.
phone

When you really don’t want to make that call …

There’s nothing like a case of phone call dread.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about general “I have no time” stuff or even about your average low-grade procrastination avoidance situation. Also assuming this isn’t about some peculiar phone phobia of yours that kicks in whenever you have to push buttons or something.

This is when you’re dealing with one specific sticky and uncomfortable interaction that you just don’t want anything to do with. For whatever reason, this one is loaded.

How loaded? If you’ve been there, you know the feeling … all the yuckiness of procrastination combined with sweaty palms, coughing and whole-body anxiety. Pretty unpleasant.

Granted, nine times out of ten you already know why you don’t want to make the call, but for the purpose of this exercise, let me toss out some real-life scenarios.

Three scenarios

One would be the “If I talk to this person, he’ll drag me down” phenomenon, which is what my friend Scott deals with on a nearly-daily basis. He finds some of his clients so energy-draining that he pretty much dreads every interaction. Maybe the person you’re dreading is coming across as an energy vampire too.

There’s also the example of a couple of women I worked with recently who can’t stand making follow-up calls to potential clients. Not cold calls, mind you. Calls to people who have already specifically expressed interest in hiring them.

Still scary, because if you have a “what if they’ve changed their mind?” or “what if I’m bugging people?” question lurking in your brain, making the call is pretty much the least appealing thing you could want to do.

Then there’s the kind of call dread that’s all about unpleasant confrontation. I experienced this one recently myself when a studio where I taught a workshop “lost” my check, and didn’t want to write another one.

Of course in some way, it almost doesn’t matter who you’re calling or what it’s about — or whether it’s the thinking-about-it part or the not-doing part. When it’s one of those calls, it’s hang-wringingly awful in a jittery, guilt-laden, hyperventilating kind of way and you just don’t want to deal with it.

My fabulous technique: let me show you it

Generally speaking, when someone comes to me with a specific issue, we spend a little time untangling some of the deeper patterns at work instead of just rushing in to apply techniques.

However, for this particular situation, I happen to have a super genius technique that works just about every time. It’s such a valuable tool that I find myself constantly thinking, oh boy I wish everyone knew about this so I could stop explaining how to do it.

So please think of this technique as a “you really need to have this one in your toolbox” one.

∗Even if you’ve never, ever experienced phone call dread and never plan to, just learn it and save it for a rainy day.

The technique — a “mediation exercise” if you’re not a wacky energy person, and an “alignment exercise” if you are — is pretty easy to do. In fact, it’s so simple that I’m pretty much counting on you not being impressed by it.

All I can say is 1. it works like a charm and will knock your socks off every time, and 2. if you want to know why it works, we can cover that part some other time.

Just saying: even if it sounds kinda wacky or just plain stupid, do me a favor and play with me here. You know, that whole “don’t knock it til you’ve tried it” thing.

Wanna practice?

Here’s how it works.

STEP ONE: Stop guilting yourself for five minutes about how you think you really should be making that call, and sit down with a pad of paper and a pen.

STEP TWO: Make a list of things (qualities, characteristics, whatever) that you and the person you’re calling have in common. As many as you can think of is the rule, but if you want more specific instructions that that, how about this:

Try coming up with half a page if it’s, say, the phone company, and more if it’s someone you have hard-core entagled emotional patterns with. Let’s say at the very least you want to try for ten things.

–> If it’s someone you don’t know at all (for example, you’re calling your insurance company and you have no idea who will be picking up the phone), then generalize:

“I’d hate working at a call center and I bet this person isn’t crazy about it either. I’ve had jobs where I had to put up with crap to make money and that’s probably what this person is doing too. I hate it when people take their anger out on me, and no doubt that this person deals with a lot of that too.”

And so on.

STEP THREE: Read your list at loud as if it’s a conversation. Don’t worry, you’re not going to have to say any of this in real life. This is just for you.

You can do this conversation-thing as though you’re describing the person in question to a friend (“So this guy, Joel, is really stressed out at work, just Iike I am …“).

Or as if you’re talking to the person yourself (“I have the sense that both of us feel uncomfortable with confrontation or conflict, so that’s something else we have in common …“).

STEP THREE AND A HALF: Usually Step Three starts working its magic and at some point you just let out a big sigh and realize that you’re going to make the call now, but if this isn’t happening, repeat Step Three while gently tapping under your eye.

You just keep your index and middle fingers together and bring the pads of the fingers about an inch (2.5 cm) below your eye and tap there. Don’t ask why. Just do it.

That’s it.

Oh, let’s have an example

Okay. I’ll just give you the rundown of what I did when I had to call the studio to get my check written. And yes, there was much private fretting and fist-shaking until I remembered this technique. Here’s what my describing-my-list-to-my-friend part looked like:

So I’ve never met their accounting person and don’t know anything about her, but I can imagine that if she works in a yoga studio, she has to be at least a little bit of a yoga person, right?

Actually, she probably just wishes things would resolve themselves in a harmonious way, just like I do.

I don’t know if she enjoys her work, but she helps people, just like I do. Even though it’s annoying that she doesn’t want to okay another check, there could be a good reason for it that I don’t know about.

Now that I think about it, I realize my anger right now is really directed towards a bunch of different yoga studios I’ve worked with that have had a lot of flakiness in their dealings with me.

This woman’s an accountant for heaven’s sake. She probably hates flakiness. In fact, she’s probably sick of bubble-headed yoga teachers losing their checks all the time. She’s frustrated, just like me ….

The results (AND a surprise ending)

At this point, I was totally empathizing with the poor woman in accounting having to deal with all those cupcake-for-brains people, and not just once every few months like me, but all the damn time.

It seemed completely obvious that the thing I wanted to do was to call her right now. I figured, if I make it clear that I get her situation, and that I’m not actually one of those mush-headed flakeroony people, it’ll be fine and we’ll hash out some solution together.

So — and here’s where it starts getting wacky — now I’m feeling great, so I open my computer to dig out her phone number. And in my inbox is a message from my contact at the studio: they just decided to write me the check and it’s all taken care of.

Yeah, I completely dissolved the not-wanting-to-call thing, AND got the result I wanted without ever having even made the call.

Plus the relief and the joy (and it is seriously joyful) of realizing that even the people you’re busy hating on in your head are busy dealing with the same kinds of fears, anxieties and resentments as you are.

There’s no moral of the story here. Just a “take it from me” request.

Learn this technique. Use this technique. Because at the very, very least it will make you feel better about the thing that’s driving you batty, and give you some interesting insights into your own issues and patterns.

Betty Boop is my business coach

by | Jun 23, 2008 | ,

And she could be yours!

But to backtrack for a minute. I was in Ann Arbor this weekend so I did what everyone visiting Ann Arbor does and went to Zingerman’s for brunch.

If you went to school at the University of Michigan, know someone who does, or have ever met a townie, you know that Zingerman’s has the best sandwiches this side of pretty much anywhere. All those people who make a four-hour drive just to pick up a reuben aren’t crazy. Devoted, maybe, but not crazy.

Or if you listen to NPR, you’ve heard co-founder Ari Weinzweig talk foodishness, food history, foodie-ism and other things food-related. Or if you’re interested in business, you’ve read about their phenomenal success story in Inc. magazine and in Bo Burlingham’s excellent book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.

And in my case, I’m actually all those people. Yeah, it’s not easy being an Inc.-reading, NPR-listening, born-in-St-Joe’s-hospital Ann-Arborite and own a business, but someone’s got to do it. Okay, fine, lots of people do it.

Anyway, everyone agrees that Zingerman’s is the best and that they’re clearly doing something right, and that yes, even a plain bagel-with-creamcheese there is a toe-tinglingly great experience.

But the thing that really made an impression on me on this visit was realizing that the Zingerman’s guys and I go to the same business school.

If you’re a company, here’s how to impress me

The best thing about Zingerman’s from my perspective is that it’s a hugely successful local company that never acts like a company. It acts like a family, but one where everyone actually likes each other.

The people who work there are all genuinely friendly and seem to be having a good time at work — and not in a “Listen up everyone, word just got handed down from corporate that we’re all supposed to smile today” kind of way.

This low-key foodcentric happy family thing permeates the entire organization — everything from goofy amiability of the note printed on the recycled napkins to their Jews and Blues southern dinner event (please introduce your brain to the concept of Creole Matzoh Ball soup) comes across as sincere, funny and personable.

If you have a business, you’d call this “staying on brand”. Or if not, you can just call it being mensch-like. It’s smart. And it works too, but only when this “be human” philosophy grows organically and isn’t forced. Which is why Zingerman’s wins, because they get it.

“Authenticity”: you’re doing it wrong

Of course, lots of companies try to get away with presenting an “authentic self” as their brand. But using an artificial personality as a marketing strategy bombs every time because it never stops feeling phony and contrived. Hmm, maybe because a construction of authenticity is — by virtue of existence — a big fat lie.

If you’ve ever called Tonik insurance and been forced to listen to their irritating “we can’t take your call because we went out for pizza — just kidding, we’re actually, like, totally busy here” answering message, you know instantly that this is a front.

You can practically picture the 30-something copywriters hired to pretend they’re 20-somethings in the hopes that they can make the company sound “like, all real and authentic and stuff”. Blech.

It would be way more authentic — and reassuring — if they said, “Hi, we’re a giant corporation with more money than we know what to do with. We don’t actually care about you personally but it’s important to us that we give you that impression.” In fact, I’d have a lot more respect for any company that was that upfront about how they do business.

Real-live-human-being-ness: it works

The reason the whole Zingerman’s thing works is that their entire business is based on the idea that you can just be a real-live human being, and do things the way you’d do them even if no one were watching, and that this is a good thing.

It is a huge relief as a business owner to see this modeled for me and to see it working. I’ve pretty much been trying to do things this way from the beginning, against just about everyone’s advice.

For example, I’ve never understood why my website is supposed to say stuff like “About Us” when it’s really just me and my duck. Or why I need to write about myself in the third person and list a bunch of boring credentials. Or to say things like, “But wait, there’s more!”

Mostly I do things my way because the way I’m apparently “supposed” to be doing it is uncomfortable, unappealing, and unnatural to me. But over time I’ve come to recognize that on the rare occasions when I just do what everyone else does because I think I have to, it’s no fun.

The result: I end up feeling miserable — and people pick up on the cognitive dissonance, so it doesn’t work anyway.

But when I do things the Betty Boop way, everything is in flow … and Selma and I are much happier.

The Betty Boop marketing philosophy

I’ve come to the conclusion that success in everything you do pretty much all boils down to your willingness to just “be human”.

Or as Betty Boop puts it, in an unforgettable way that will, once heard (warning: this is what the German endearingly call an earworm), never leave your head:
“Be human … won’t you even try?”

I’m including the “Be human” song and semi-disturbing (no nudity, but animal violence and a bizarre revenge subplot) video clip for your benefit, so that you too can claim Betty Boop as your own personal marketing coach.

Also, for the record, I have to say (though I probably shouldn’t) that if you’d told me a year ago that there’s nothing in the entire world funnier than watching a cartoon cow being punched in the face, I would have been shocked and horrified.

However, you would have been right. It really, really, really doesn’t get funnier than this.

Book Review: The Design of Everyday Things

by | Jun 22, 2008 |

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: The Design of Everyday Things
The author: Donald A. Norman
The rating: 4.5 ducks

Years ago when I was still tending bar in Tel Aviv, this one bar I worked at was set up in kind of a weird way that meant you had to pull open two different doors in order to reach the part where the bathroom was. And everyone would get this part wrong.

Despite the fact that each of these doors was clearly marked with a “pull” sign in both Hebrew and English, everyone (read: not just drunk people) would push instead. And even after years of working there on and off, and hanging out there to the point that I spent more time at the bar than in my apartment, I still — often as not — made that mistake too.

Guess what? The most common reaction– “Wow, could I be any more of an incompetent idiot?” — is wrong, and The Design of Everyday Things is here to help you make the mental move away from it. I’m pleased to report that once your brain has been introduced to the concepts in this book, you’re much more likely to realize, “Ooooh, it’s not me, it’s just bad design.”

This is great news. When things are designed properly, they work without you having to work. It’s easy to default into an automatic state of self-blame — this book serves as a useful reminder that this is not a healthy pattern.

It’s also a terrific intellectual companion to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. You can apply the ideas in here to so many things. Especially useful (for me) is the way you could apply these principles to thinking about how people use your website. How they interact with the visual and design-based clues you think you’re giving them as opposed to what they’re actually experiencing.

Ironically, the book was originally called “The Psychology of Everyday Things”, which misled most of his ideal readers to think it was actually about something that didn’t interest them. (But wait — it interests me! Write that book too!)

More ironically still, many of the diagrams in the book are actually not very easy to understand. (Which makes me think I — and Donald Norman — should also read Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information, which I know of mostly by way of Calyx Design).

Still, the primary ideas are completely genius, and absolutely as useful and relevant as ever:

  • A “push” sign on a door is, for all intents and purposes a manual. When something is designed correctly you know intuitively what to do and how to use it without having to think about it or worse, guess, or worst of all, ask someone to explain it to you.
  • What looks or feels like user error is actually a design error. In other words, you’re not an idiot or mechanically inept because you can’t figure out how to program the VCR.

    It’s the job of the design to make everything obvious. (Thank you!)

  • We tend to explain things away when in fact we ought to pay more attention to them. If the dog is barking, go see if someone is lurking outside your window instead of telling poor Muffintumbler (okay, clearly I don’t have a dog) to be still and shut up.

How this stuff relates to the whole “changing your habits” thing

I’m going to guess that our Mr. Norman didn’t intend this to be a guide to “working on your stuff” (though, on second thought, his interest and background in psychology say otherwise). But who cares because a. you can still use it that way, and b. I’m physcologically incapable of not relating things to the work-on-your-patterns process.

If anything, this book is a reminder that it’s not you, it’s your patterns. Case in point: when you pull a door instead of pushing it, you’re not the moron. It’s your patterns showing up.

The pushing is a pattern and the name-calling is a pattern. And what you’ve got now is a couple of opportunities, namely:

  1. The opportunity to notice when you automatically heap abuse on yourself or repeat the things you learned about yourself from others. (Personal example: My own pattern is thinking: “Oh, I’m clumsy.” When this is actually me just repeating what my mother says about me.)
  2. The opportunity to separate what is hard for you because of traits or qualities in yourself, and what is hard for you because it wasn’t designed with you (or anyone, for that matter) in mind.
  3. The opportunity to shift your thought from “what am I doing wrong?” to “where do I assign blame to myself, and is it possible that there are other things going on here that don’t actually have anything to do with me?”

All this is the stuff that it’s not necessarily fun to notice or learn (okay, it sucks) but gives you some useful clues that you get to use in untangling your issues. Which you want to do because it gives you the freedom to stop tripping yourself up and start doing stuff differently.

Bottom line

There’s a reason this book is a classic. I took it out from the library twice (I can be slow that way) before realizing that it belongs on my shelf because I’ll be referring to these concepts forever. Get it here if you like or at your local independent bookstore.

(Thanks to JP Collins for recommending this to me twice, which, by the way, is the best way to get me to read something.)