simplerich

The Daily Five Minutes (D5M) as talked about, shared, given away for free on the Internet, by Rosa Say is the single most important management tool I’ve run into. I found it on her blog, bought her book, and have built a relationship (online only – no jealous husbands coming after me please!) with her almost entirely because I fell in love with this practice of hers.

I don’t do it often enough. I intend to, but I get busy and I forget. I do it more than I used to. I need to do it more. Here’s the thing. Doing it mostly is better than doing it never. Doing it all the time… I can’t imagine how powerful that will be. She’s starting a program, this is an alpha run of the program in conjunction with Ruzuku.com (A site I’ve never heard of until now).

The shortest one-liner version of The Daily Five Minutes is to listen to your employees with active listening and find out what’s important to them. (Go read more about it here, even if you’ve done this before, bear with me. I’ve got a point to make here.) This is huge. It’s me shutting up and letting them talk. It’s me getting out of their way and letting them have the talking conch for a while. That’s hugely important at work right? It helps build relationships. It helps us their bosses find out what they’ve got going on in their lives and what they’re struggling with and gives them a chance to feel safe and ask for help without feeling like they’re whining. It allows them to bounce ideas off us.

If it’s that great for work think of how great it would be with your friends and family! Seriously. Pay attention on the next phone call to a friend or family member. How often are you planning your next thing to say or looking at the Bush’s baked beans wondering which ones to get while Aunt Mable tells the story about how her Beagle Indiana Jones (We named the DOG Indiana!) got into the garbage for the fourth time this week? How often are you talking about your day and not asking and listening to theirs? Seriously? At dinner how much time you do you spend listening, really listening, and engaging the person talking? If it’s a great idea for us and our employees it’s an amazingly super-fantastic idea for family and friends.

So, join us November 2nd, whether your manager or not, in the Alpha test of Rosa Say’s The D5M Challenge: 15 Days to Build your Daily 5 Minutes Habit online coachy thing. Rosa Say is an author, coach and speaker who has been making her living doing this stuff for a while now. She knows what she’s talking about and if you do it… I mean really do it and find at the end of the fifteen days  that you didn’t get anything out of it. I will personally return every dime of the cost of the program to you myself out of my pocketsess…

PS: If any of you say “Why Richard, this is simply Dale Carnegie with leis and words I can’t pronounce!” I’ll say it again slowly… go read the link I gave you and come back. My abbreviated version doesn’t do it justice. I’m abbreviating. There’s more to it than my thumbnail OK? OK. Mahalo, punk! (That was in my Clint Eastwood voice. I even squinted some when I said it.)

The Daily Five Minutes for your life by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.