Month: September 2020

Posted on

Be Kind by MAGIC -Attuning to Your Clients

Being Kind is your business super-power.

How do you Be Kind in Business? By applying the MAGIC formula:

Moving
Attuning
Giving
Inspiring
Connecting

It applies to:

Yourself
Your clients
Your team
Your prospects 
—

Attuning to your clients is all about understanding them, and then modifying how you serve them as a result.

There are three steps to attuning:

Look and Listen

First, you have to look and listen. Observe your client, ask them questions, find out about them and their situation. Spend some time on this; ask the follow-up questions. Note both what they answer and how they answer. Do any questions make them excited, any make them uncomfortable?

Understand

Next, you need to understand what you have found out.

  • Who are they? Get a take on your client’s personality. Maybe a tool such as DiSC , MBTI  or the Enneagram would be helpful here? You won’t be able to do a full analysis, but you should get some interesting pointers and insights. This will help you to work out how much to affirm and encourage, balanced against how much you can challenge them without frightening them.
  • Where are they? You have to understand their situation. What are their problems? Could you help them solve them? Can you see the issue from another angle and reframe it? Or maybe you can see that their perceived problem is not the real problem in the first place? Perhaps the answer they think they want is not actually the answer that they need?
  • What makes them tick? This is probably the most essential aspect in understanding your client. What are their core values, what is important to them? They may well be different to yours, but you need to understand them so that you do not slip up and offend them, or appear to be driving them in a direction which seems wrong to them.

Modify

Finally, once you have understood your client, you can work out how best to serve them. You can decide how you will modify both the style of your presentation and the content of what you provide. In other words, what you say and how you say it.

  • What?
    Think about the most appropriate content for the person or audience in question.
  • How?
    What is the best way to present it? Will they respond best to didactic teaching or participation, to words or pictures, to visual or audio? Or maybe a mixture? And what tone and language will work best? Formal or informal? Lively and bouncy or more restrained? 

Tricks and Schtick

When I’m performing magic, the way I perform the tricks will vary depending on my audience. Often I may use the same tricks but presented very differently. For example, I have a rope trick that I perform at both children’s parties and corporate drinks receptions: same mechanics, very different presentations. And, of course, there are also some tricks which only work in kids’ parties and some that only work in corporate settings.

It is the same when applying my MAGIC formula to help teams and individuals to improve their working relationships. I present it in a slightly different way to a nonprofit manager’s audience than I will, to the leadership of a bank. It’s the same fundamental material, but with a slightly different approach.

How can you modify your offering to those you serve to make it a better fit for each one?

Think about how you can attune to your clients.

Remember:

Observe, Understand, and then Modify.

—

—Download my free eBook “Be Kind to Yourself” and learn how to:

  • Adapt to new ways of working
  • Harness the power of habits
  • Optimise the use of space in your home
  • Use clothes to boost productivity
  • Focus on what matters
  • Plan for the future amidst uncertainty
Be Kind to Yourself – Free eBook
Posted on

Be Kind by MAGIC – Moving Your Clients

Being Kind is your business super-power.

How do you Be Kind in Business? By applying the MAGIC formula:

Moving
Attuning
Giving
Inspiring
Connecting

It applies to:

Yourself
Your clients
Your team
Your prospects 
—

Moving Your Clients

If you work with clients, you can significantly enhance your offering to them by thinking about how you move them.

How do you move them educationally, moving them from not knowing something to knowing?

How do you help them to see things from a new perspective, moving them from one viewpoint to another viewpoint?

And how do you engage their feelings, moving them emotionally, providing them with an impetus to take action?

Be a Favourite Teacher

You can serve your clients by moving them from one state of knowledge to another. In other words, you can tell them something they didn’t know that will be useful to them.

Maybe it is something about the law? Perhaps a new software tool, services they may be able to access, or some other resources that may be useful to them.

Nifty Shifty

Magicians always have to be careful about angles. If you watch a trick from the wrong place, sometimes you can see things that you weren’t meant to! Seeing things from the best angle is very important for the magic to work.

Working with clients, helping them to see something from another perspective can be very useful. Can you help them to shift to see things from another point of view? To re-frame things, see them from a distance, take an outsider’s view?

Maybe they have intellectual or emotional doubts that are stopping them progressing?  Sometimes those doubts are based on real barriers, but very often, the obstacles are just imagined or perceived. The doubts are like little gremlins sitting on the shoulders that need punching in the nose. Can you help them to shift their viewpoint, so they can sort out the real from the imagined?

Imagine How You Will Feel When…

What emotions can you engage in your clients?

Can you excite them about potential, about what they can imagine happening, but also about what they can’t yet imagine happening? The excitement can motivate them to begin exploring new territory.

Can you help them to flip nervousness about the future, into excitement about adventure?

Can you get them to reflect on the changes they have seen and the progress they have made so that they feel satisfaction and pride?

Maybe there’s even space for inducing a little fear about the consequences of inaction?

Even if you are a lawyer, accountant or in some other seemingly unemotional occupation, there is still scope to engage the emotions of your clients. Paint an imaginative picture of how someone’s life will be better as a result of your involvement. Let them see the potential for change and feel the related emotions.

Moving is a fundamental characteristic of living things. Make sure that you and your clients are moving.

How can you move your clients today?

—

Download my free eBook “Be Kind to Yourself” and learn how to:

  • Adapt to new ways of working
  • Harness the power of habits
  • Optimise the use of space in your home
  • Use clothes to boost productivity
  • Focus on what matters
  • Plan for the future amidst uncertainty
Be Kind to Yourself – Free eBook
Posted on

Be Kind by MAGIC – Connecting to Yourself

Being Kind is your business super-power.

How do you Be Kind in Business? By applying the MAGIC formula:

Moving
Attuning
Giving
Inspiring
Connecting

It applies to:

Yourself
Your clients
Your team
Your prospects 
—

I’m Back

Sorry that I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks. Many thanks to those of you who noticed – it’s nice to be missed 🙂

I’ve been on holiday. This has given me a chance to connect to myself, to think about life a bit.

Connecting to yourself is the subject of today’s blog.

Why Connect?

Why should you connect to yourself?

Think about bank statements. Remember paper statements? Some of you might still get them! We all know that you have to open the envelope and look at the bank statement, even if you don’t want to. There is no benefit in denial. It will only make the situation worse.

In the same way, it is vital to connect to yourself so that you are aware of where you’re at, and why you are doing what you’re doing. If something is not right, there is no point living in denial and carrying on regardless. It would only make things worse.

It is so easy to go through life on autopilot, never stopping to ask ourselves why we are doing things. This is how we get stuck in a rut. This is how we lose energy and become listless.

Once you have given yourself the chance to be self-aware, you need to listen to your mind, you need to listen to your body. 

What questions should you ask yourself? What answers should you listen out for? How do you make time to make sure connecting to yourself happens?

The Question of Which Questions?

I have been reminded recently about the importance of connecting with our why. I was talking last week to Amy Rowlinson, who has the fantastic podcast “Focus on Why.” Simon Sinek is also famous for encouraging us to “Start with Why”.

Ask yourself, why you are doing what you are doing? Or, maybe, why you are not doing what you want to be doing?

Once you have worked out your motivation, ask yourself, “Is this working?”

Am I enjoying what I’m doing? Could I do it in a different way to make it more enjoyable? Most of the time, most of the agency for making changes to our working habits lies with ourselves. Work out what needs to change and then make a concrete plan to change it.

Am I working towards my goals or just marking time? It is so easy to fill your day with “busy work” that achieves little and does not move you forward. Could you make any changes to keep you on track?

Body Conscious

Listen to your body.

Am I tired? Am I aching? Feeling sharp? Energetic? Could I make any changes? Revised sleep patterns, change of diet, new office chair….?

Maybe you need to go and see the doctor? Again, there is nothing to be gained by denial.

Life-Saving Routine

Last week, I watched the fantastic David Blaine’s “Ascension.”

I’m a fan of David Blaine as a magician, but he also does these amazing stunts. In this one, he had a bunch of 52 helium balloons. He held on to it as they took him to 23,000 feet, and then he skydived off. The whole thing was live on YouTube. Incredible.

What was very apparent is that he had a strict routine for checking, every step of the way.

At 23,000 feet, held on by a cable to the balloons, he had to put on his parachute. He put it on, and he checked the straps and buckles in strict sequence, at least twice.

It was drilled into him. He had a checking routine. If he hadn’t done it, He would have been risking his life.

Do you have a checking routine for your life?

I would recommend it. If you don’t do it, you are risking a fulfilled life.

What do I mean by this?

Love Your Reflection

I am a huge advocate of building and reflective practices into your life, daily, weekly, and periodically.

Each day, I recommend journaling. A journal can be in various forms. Years ago, I used to do the “artists pages”, recommended by Julia Cameron in the Artists Way (#ad). Two sides of A4 of a stream of consciousness freeform prose, whatever comes into your head. It’s amazing what you write down! You get a real insight into your inner workings.

These days it is more structured and quicker. I do a bullet point journal inspired by Michael Hyatt. It’s a systematic way of reflecting on yesterday and planning for today.

I also walk the dog each day and make a point of not listening to music or podcasts while I’m doing this. My mind is then free to process stuff, to think about life.

Weekly, I do a more involved journal entry every Sunday morning. And I also have a kayaking trip where I take myself off for three hours by myself in nature. Again a chance to process stuff, to think, or even just to zone out for a change. I stop for lunch on the river bank, cook it up on a little stove. It’s a great chance to lie on my back in a field, watch the clouds scud by and ask myself how I’m doing.

And periodically. It’s good to take yourself away on holiday, or maybe even a retreat where you take a deep dive into what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what you plan to do next.

On reflection, are you reflecting enough?

Be kind to yourself, connect to yourself.


—

Download my free eBook “Be Kind to Yourself” and learn how to:

  • Adapt to new ways of working
  • Harness the power of habits
  • Optimise the use of space in your home
  • Use clothes to boost productivity
  • Focus on what matters
  • Plan for the future amidst uncertainty
Be Kind to Yourself – Free eBook