I like the idea of my own blog, but the reality is I like interaction and readers and I have a LOT more of those, engaged readers, on Google+ than I have on either blog.

It’s the engagement of the readers that’s attracting me. Granted, I’m pretty careful about who I circle, and while over 2k people follow me I don’t follow that many at all. I’m just over 300 that I read, but I add more all the time, and sometimes remove people. There’s such a feeling of community, of conversation, of participation on Google+ I find I’ve spent far more time there than here.

I need to figure out what’s going to happen next obviously. Mirroring or merely importing those posts to here is a possibility but it seems like it’s diluting things. If you’re on Google+ look me up. If you’re not… the conversation there is absolutely incredible.

He’s a 20+ Iowan teaching in Chile. Here’s the thing… he went down there and THEN looked for a job! If you’ve read the 4-Hour Workweek I think it was? It suggests that the best way to see the world is GO where you want to go and get a job there. Become a local and see the sights. I hope I got that right. It seems especially timely with the death of Steve Jobs and his oft replayed and shared 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

(If you haven’t seen it go watch it. It’s worth it.) Jesup seems to be following Steve Jobs’ advice to do what he’s passionate about and it’s paying off in a rich and interesting story that he’s living. Go give him a read, add him to your news feed and let his example inspire you.
 

I’m over on google+ and invite you to circle me if you’re over there. It’s NOT just another Facebook, or just another twitter in my experience. There’s more content, more community, and more discussion. It’s still growing and this morning I wrote this over there and thought I’d share it with you over here as well.

I find myself going to things like group.as and wondering what group I want to be a part of… where to look for like-minded people… then I find myself wandering off… the little snippets of description aren’t enough to hook me so I wind up not using it.

I find I’ve no time at all for the Seth G.’s and Guy K.’s and Robert S.’s out there any more. In the same way Kim Kardashian is famous for making a sex tape and then claiming to be a celebrity I find these three famous for… I don’t know what. I know I’m the only one, but it seems like if the three of them talked about why Downy fabric softener is blue within a week there would be a million thought pieces about it on the internet and I don’t find the things they talk about interesting. They plant seeds that others pick up and re-plant just because they are who they are, and don’t seem to pay much attention to what they’re saying and their qualifications for saying what they say is that they’ve said so much before that other people have listened to and parroted. I know that’s unkind, but I can’t get past that feeling I get from them.

I wonder if every morning they wake up feeling like they’re playing a part… being a character created by our perceptions of them and hoping like hell that they can keep running long enough…. because the rest of the Internet follows them so they’ve got a perfect Papier-mâché backside but the front is all just bamboo framework holding it all up, an empty facade that they go to sleep at night praying nobody notices.

Perhaps once they were fresh and new and exciting and that’s why people followed them, but now… now I don’t get that feeling. I didn’t like them then either though… they’ve always seemed affected, put on, like an act.

I’m sure they’re wonderful people underneath the Internet personae that they’ve cultivated. I just don’t click with them at all. When I find myself following a link that winds up at their place I close the tab. I just can’t be bothered to get caught up in the cult of personality they have built around themselves…. did they build it on purpose? Did it happen accidentally and then the beast was so big they didn’t know how to stop it? I can’t imagine it was an accident, but I can’t imagine anybody setting out to have as their job “personality” either. It just feels creepy and needy to me… and vaguely unhealthy.

Their words carry weight not because of their content but by virtue of who said them. That is troublesome to me… That’s the short version.

The sweat comes in when I’m not working. When I’m just me and I’m dumped into a social situation where I know the people who invited me but nobody else. I’m awful at those things. They’re exactly the same as the work situations in numbers of people or how well I know them… but my comfort level is off. Suddenly I’m no longer chatty or friendly or smiling. I’m stand-offish, and could just as easily stand in a corner, sip a drink until it’s gone, find the host, thank them for the invitation and sneak out the door after having “made an appearance.” What I’m describing isn’t rare either. It’s really normal social behavior for me. I don’t know why it’s so different. I’m confident, social, affable, and outgoing at work functions. Throw me in with non-work people though and I’m an awkward self-conscious wall flower.

Podcasts. I really like podcasts. I drive a lot for work so I listen to a lot of them. One of my favorite episodes was from Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker from Quick & Dirty Tips. She talks about how to talk to people. She talks about her Mom starting to talk to people in line at the grocery store and how mortified she was by it. I’ve started trying to do this. It’s a little thing, a silly thing, a safe thing. Nobody gets better at something without practicing it so I’ve been practicing my chatting people up out in public with strangers. That way if I botch it I won’t embarrass myself in front of people I know. My hope is that this will help when I get to the next social function I attend that’s not work related. With the practice under my belt, and the confidence of having done this before in non-work related venues I’ll be able to do it a little better with people I will probably see again, and hopefully for more than just “making an appearance.”

So, if you’re shy or reticent to just jump into a social setting give this podcast a listen. Then, most importantly, practice it on people you’ll never see again.

So why do I care about Facebook if I’m so careful about what I do on the Internet? The most common thing I hear about people when I bring up privacy concerns is “If you don’t have anything to hide what do you have to worry about?” My answer to them is, “Why do you use curtains or walls? Why do you shut the door when you go to the bathroom stall?” There are times when you don’t want the whole world up in your business. If I have co-workers and bosses who follow me on facebook, and I did, and they didn’t like what political sites I visited that suddenly showed up on my facebook page could that have consequences? Of course it could. Should it? Nope. But it could. What if it showed that I was on facebook while I was supposed to be working. Would they know I was on hold for the weekly conference call? Of course not.

Those are just the easy work related issues. The thing is. What I do on the Internet is no more Facebook’s business than it’s my phone company’s business if I go to the mall or to Wal-mart. It’s not their business. They don’t need to know it. Just because they CAN know it doesn’t mean they should know it. If they wanted to enrich my Internet experience they’re welcome to it, but ask me first. Let me CHOOSE to ask for it. Don’t opt me in.

I don’t really feel like I should have to explain my expectation of privacy honestly. The part where I expect and want it and am being asked to defend it is almost as offensive to me as my perception of Facebook’s violation of my privacy.

From a social hacking point of view what can we find out about a person from their facebook profile? Often they list their parents’ names which may include “mother’s maiden name” or “Father’s middle name” as appears in some security questions on some websites. Perhaps they show you graduated from Monkeyspanker High School and that security question is also asked, “What was your high school mascot.” Now decent social hackers would know that. That’s sort of my other point. Why should all that information be gathered up by the fine folks at Facebook for the social hackers out there to use? Maybe I don’t list my Mom’s middle name, but perhaps my sisters do, or my brothers, or my trans-gendered first pet whose name was “Sieze-her” and with all the information out there linking back and forth whether I put it out there or someone else does it’s out there.

I won’t deny that I greatly enjoyed re-connecting with my friends on Facebook. That added value to my life in general, and to my enjoyment of the Internet specifically. It was really good to meet them again as adults after having not seen them since high school. There are some really interesting people out there that I knew back when we were just high schoolers.   I will miss them. If Facebook were to decide that our privacy were important I’d gladly be back, but as much as I love re-connecting with everybody I feel like staying says it’s OK if a company has no respect for their customer’s wishes. It’s my saying it’s OK to treat my personal information as a publicly tradeable commodity. I’m not OK with that. My leaving may not make a difference to Facebook, but it will make a difference to me.

Thursday I’m going to be on Farmville meeting a friend of mine to watch Survivor together and then I’m going to log off my account, perhaps deleting it if I can find a way to do that.

The latest sensational “The Internet is going to steal my crap” wave is here in the name of pleaserobme.com and no… I’m not linking there. I think the site is ridiculous as is the concept.

Here’s the idea. It harvests information off twitter from social sites like gowalla.com and foursquare.com that people use to “check in” to places when they go eat, shop, tour, whatever. The two sites use the phone’s GPS to show where you are and you can collect badges by visiting places. What pleaserobme does is gather into one spot when people FROM a certain area, say Austin, TX are checking into somewhere. The idea is if they check into starbucks then they are obviously NOT at home. So… using the gowalla.com and foursquare.com sites is the same as saying to the world, “please rob me.” Or at least that’s what the folks at the site want you to think.

They’re onto something. What they’re onto is that in the US right now, since 9/11, fear sells and business is good. The idea that Bad Guys are sniffing the twitter stream to see when someone goes to McDonalds’s so they can go bust into their house is ridiculous.

• It doesn’t say that NOBODY is home, just the one who is posting that they aren’t home.
• Bad guys have always been able to tell by if your sidewalk is scooped, grass mowed, lights on/off, mail picked up etc. if someone is home or not. This isn’t new or as effective as ANY of the old ways.
• If your twitter profile gives your street address you were an idiot before this site existed, and not because you’d get robbed but because you don’t put your real life address out there on the internet for safety’s sake ever. That’s just stupid. People who “check in” to their own homes… they’re the ones who are saying please rob me, attack me, go stare at my kid’s through their windows. Not the people who say “I’m at McDonald’s”

So, before you call all your relatives and tell them that the social GPS game sites are going to get their house robbed, calm down a little, take some deep breaths, go check in at a Starbucks and tweet them to meet you there. If they’re friends with you on foursquare or gowalla.com they’ll know where you are and can meet you there. If you’re worried about your friends breaking into your house while you’re away maybe you should get a better class of friend.

Commons sense tips for using the GPS enabled social-web.

1. Don’t ever GPS identify your house or your friends and families homes.

OK. Any questions?

This post prompted by the usually sane Solo-Technology blog and my guess is sometime this week he’ll not be home because he’ll be at work during the day while his wife is at work and his kids are at school… he lives in the Denver area knock yourselves out!

EDIT: I should clarify: I don’t mean to imply the author of Solo-technology is an old woman. I’ve met him and he’s an old MAN. lololol. His post about the site is what I’m referring to. I don’t believe he’s hysterical or over-reacty. (No, not a word I know.) But the topic he’s blogged about has been over-sensationalized by others out there and I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to give them any link-fu. I won’t link to hacks or nutjobs… that’s why solo-technology got the link.

I’ll break it down into Use Daily, Use Weekly, and Mean to Use But Forget. I almost included a “Can’t imagine a use for” or “Never use” but that just seemed mean. I’m going to include things I use for work and personally.

Daily:

1. Android Phone – I switched from Blackberry to Android the day it came out for Verizon and was in love immediately. Personally and professionally it’s changed my work flow completely. The syncing with the Googleverse made using it immediately easy and seamless on and offline. I couldn’t imagine using a different phone. Just like TechCrunch‘ commented on it’s seamless integration with Google Voice was a huge plus. The transcription of voicemails to text messages and e-mails, even when not perfect, and it rarely is, is a huge time saver. Aiming it at whatever phone number I want to aim it at is a huge plus as well.
2. Gmail – I really don’t understand how anybody would use anything other than Gmail for their mail. I use it to grab my work e-mail from the work servers and still act as if it were coming from our work domain when I send mail. My bosses don’t know I’m not using their godaddy web-interface, they just know that I can find any e-mail they’ve ever sent me in seconds. They believe I’m very organized. I just know how incredibly useful the search function is on Gmail. The huge mailbox size is also a huge help. While my work mailbox could fill up (It doesn’t due to Gmail gobbling the e-mail out of it) my Gmail box doesn’t. Co-workers get full e-mail boxes. I don’t.
3. Kindle – Technically a kindle2, but that’s splitting hairs. The e-book reader from amazon has changed the way I read in the less than a year that I’ve had it. For one thing I read a lot more often now and a bigger variety of books. Now that they’ve added PDF support to it I have an even larger selection of reading material to choose from. I can carry enough books for months of reading in my backpack on a work trip. I can get more books while I’m in my hotel room without having to get out of bed. I can bookmark, annotate, search, highlight, and mark-up a book from within the kindle and nobody accuses me of tearing up a book.
4. iPod nano (and itunes)– I know I finally sold out completely and don’t just refer to it as an mp3 player. The features of the iPod and itunes together, and it’s the magic of the two of them together that I love mind you. One of the things I like personally about the iPod is that it works with the Nike+ site and the iPod doo-dad that helps me with my running. No other mp3 player does that for me. Audiobooks, audible.com, and podcasts are what I primarily use the iPod for. I have music on it, but I’m mostly a spoken word person and itunes is excellent at grabbing my podcasts and managing them for me on the iPod.
5. Dropbox – This one is surprising to me when everybody doesn’t use it. It’s a small program that sits in my taskbar and syncs some folders I aim it at with a site on the web. I can then choose to make those folders on the site public, private, or share them with only certain people. The default is to make them private. I recently went from a Macbook Pro to a PC Laptop and it was the easiest transition I’ve ever made. I had all my work stuff in a folder in Dropbox already (called “Workrap” respectfully enough lol.) Now, imagine if you have multiple computers… you install Dropbox on all of them, log onto them with the same account and suddenly your “Workrap” folder is on all your computers and if you update a file at work it’s automatically updated on your home computer and on your laptop as soon as they get on the internet. If you update it while you’re offline, when you get online it’ll sync up just fine. Seriously changed my workflow. Using another person’s computer? Log onto dropbox online without installing anything and get the file you want to show them and you’re set.
6. Evernote – My brain. I’m not exaggerating. I store everything on Evernote. It’s similar to Dropbox in that it’s “in the cloud” and I can keep things synced across multiple computers and my phone. I store all my information in there. Online, offline, on my phone. If I need to find Mom’s Gumbo recipe and I’m in the grocery store I fire up Evernote on my phone and grab it. If I’m on my laptop and someone calls I automatically open Evernote as my capture device.
7. OpenOffice.org – I haven’t paid for Microsoft Office since the early 90s when I bought Works. I’ve used the free open source alternative for Word, Calc, and Presentations. I love OpenOffice, couldn’t be without it.
8. Laptop – I use it every day but I don’t love it. I loved my Macbook Pro but it wasn’t working out for me at work. I found myself running in parallels all the time for stuff so I’m back to Windows. Now, I prefer Windows 7 to Vista, but it’s hard to come back to a PC after being a Mac user.

Weekly:

1. Google Docs – I should use this one more than I do. I use it weekly to save work documents that I get e-mailed to me by my boss. I open them with Google Docs to make sure there’s a copy out there in the cloud as well. Since I’ve started using Dropbox I’ve used Google Docs less and less. I use it primarily when I’m on the net tracking something a lot and don’t want to wait for OpenOffice to open up. I track my fitness stuff on Google Docs but other than that and the one work document that’s about all I use it for.
2. WordPress & Blogger – I’d like to say I use these two blogging platforms more often than weekly, but I’ve been a little slow lately. I’m getting better, but I love my blogging and both platforms offer something that makes me keep them both.
3. Digital Camera – I love my Canon Powershot. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most megapixels thing out there but it fits in my pocket and allows me to get the shots some of my friends with fancier cameras can’t or don’t get because their camera takes too long to prep for the shot. I enjoy taking pictures, and while I took fewer this year than previous years it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it as much as it was because I wasn’t as happy. Work was/is affecting my quality of life and one of the measures of how happy I am is how many pictures I take. The quiet months are unhappy months. I know, more than you wanted to know, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

Mean to Use But Forget:

1. Pandora – I love this music streaming service but I always forget it. Then I’ll remember it for a few days and then it falls off the radar again for another couple months.
2. Stanza – I’ve gotten so hopped up on using the kindle that I really like reading e-books now but sometimes I have my laptop and not my kindle and I sort of stare at the wall wondering what to do next. It’s only later that I remember I have Stanza on my laptop which will allow me to read many e-book formats. (It also converts between formats so I can get some things on the kindle that I couldn’t before.)
3. Windows Widgets – I keep meaning to turn them back on but I forget. Then I remember and turn them on for a while and then turn them back off. I want to like them but can’t find it in me to stick with them. I’ll try them every month or so.

So, what technology do you use to make your job/life easier.

I’m reading The Spark right now, a book that I will review in much more detail later. It will be a weekend post since I agreed to do book reviews on weekend posts. One of the primary themes of the book is that lifestyle changes, whether they be fitness changes, dietary changes, business changes, motivational changes, any kind of personal, internal change, is best made incrementally with a string of small victories building to a larger change. The pyramids aren’t climbed in one step. They’re made up of many steps that are, by themselves doable goals that lead to something magnificent.

So, towards that end 2010’s goals are going to be many, short and medium length goals, that will set up a chain of successes leading to a bigger over all destination of larger success. The advantage is if there is a set-back it’s not a set-back on the huge, overall goal. It’s a set-back on one tiny portion of the goal. That’s not as soul-crushing as blowing a giant goal. As someone who quit smoking 5 times before having one stick I know what it’s like to slip once and blow the whole kit and kaboodle!

When I quit smoking (6/15/2005) I didn’t quit forever. I quit cold-turkey and quit for the rest of the drive home. Then I quit until the following morning. That next morning I quit until lunch. (I didn’t smoke in between those quits, those were just my goals… like getting a first down rather than going for touch down every play.) You can see the pattern. Mentally staring down the barrel of a forever quit was too daunting. I’ve said before I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner and that is still true today, even when I run (Not that I’m a sprinter either as it turns out. I raced a 16 year old a while back at the campgrounds and he beat me like an old rug. I should have tripped him. He’s young. He’d heal!) So I’m going to follow The Spark’s advice and make a chain of small achievable goals.

Just because a goal is small and achievable doesn’t mean it’s a gimme goal. We recently had an Ownership Thinking workshop at my work and someone set forth as our first goal to do something that was not only 70% complete all ready it wasn’t something we could fail on. It was an assignment. There was no challenge to it. It was a gimme goal and it didn’t mean anything when we accomplished it. It was like having every team member get a trophy after a game where nobody kept score. We didn’t care about it as a first step in the Ownership Thinking program because it was as much an accomplishment or challenge as putting on our socks. That’s not what I’m talking about by small goals. (Things improved after that by the way.)

My Goals for 2010 follow, in no particular order:

• Minimum 10 Minutes of cardio every day with no days off. (Yes it’s low, but it’s doable and constant and I will do more most days. Do YOU do this much a day outside of basal movement?)
• Finish SparkPeople’s 28-day bootcamp that starts January 3, 2010.
• Run a 5k road race in spring in under 30 minutes.
• Run a 10k road race in the fall. (Time to be determined when I know what’s reasonable)
• Make at least two positive blog posts a week in any of the three blogs I’m currently maintaining. (simplerich.com, simplerunner, and my fitness blog over on SparkPeople.)
• Hit and maintain a healthy BMI by February and keep it through the year. (BMI = Body Mass Index)

You’ll notice an absence or work related goals on there. That’s no entirely an accident. I’ve asked my managers, I have 11 of them now rather than 8. I got three more stores to manage last week. I’ve asked them to get me a list of their goals for the month and year. I’ve also asked them to let me know what areas we as a company most need improvement, what areas I can help them the most, and what they would do if a) They owned their store and what they would change on the first day it was theirs, and b) what they would change tomorrow if there were no rule or policy against it. I’m going to use these to formulate my goals this year. It’s going to be a somewhat bottom up approach to managing this year, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. I’ll still be their manager obviously, but I’m definitely not going to be the only one driving this ship this year. I’ve got to do my job differently than the way I have been. I’ve got too many stores for me to continue doing it the way I was doing it. I finally realized the reason I was so burning out was that I was trying to manage the 8 stores I had the same way I was doing things when I had 5 stores and it was just too overwhelming. Then add to it the insane policy changes and I’m not alone in thinking they’re insane but there you have it… Anyway. Things had to change.

So, my goals that you see here are mostly about me and my fitness. My assumption is, if I take care of those things that work will take care of itself. That’s not as sloughing off work as it sounds. I just believe that I need these things to get me out of the death spiral I was in most of last year with work when I focused on work more than anything else and it wasn’t a healthy balance at all. By the end of the year I would have said “Thank you” if I’d lost my job. I’d have handed my boss the keys and hugged him in appreciation. I would have changed my phone number and never missed those calls again. That is NOT a healthy place for someone to be who is as high up as I am in the company. Attitudes are contagious and it was exhausting to try and be upbeat and positive when all I wanted to do was go home and lay under the covers and hope it all would just go away. I don’t feel like that now. But I did.

So, by focusing outside the spiral, by taking my eyes off the thing that was making me crazy I’m going to work on non-work goals as a primary focus and let work be my job again for a while and not my life. Because you know… as lives go… it wasn’t terribly rewarding there for a while. I think it will be better now that I’m remembering it’s a job, not a wife or husband. It’s a career, not the way I define who I am. I’m not my job. That’s I guess my only work related goal in 2010. Remember that my job is not me.

You’re wondering what this has to do with Tigers.  Tiger’s symbolically are representative of Power, Generosity, Illumination, and Energy and my goal in 2010 is to exemplify as many of those as I can in my personal and work life. To me personally the tiger is all about movement, and the energy of a coiled spring or the pent energy of a crouching tiger about to unfold into a long, lithe orange and black missile aimed at something. Their muscles ripple under their coat as they run and their eyes are fixed on their prize as they tear across the landscape. 2010 I want to have that kind of energy, that kind of feel to it. I envision 2010 as the year I reaffirm myself as interested in myself and developing myself and not just trying to go through the motions.

I toddled over to the Microsoft store where I could buy a digital download of Microsoft Outlook 2007 and if past history was any indication with every other digital download purchase I’d ever made I’d be downloading, installing, and clicking away in under an hour. That was the plan.

Twenty hours later I still hadn’t gotten an e-mail from Microsoft with download instructions… my card had been hit but no love in the download department so I complained about it on Twitter. Complaining on social media isn’t new. What is new, and impressed me was someone from Microsoft contacted me through twitter and then through e-mail and finally by phone, seriously… he called me! (Of course they know all my vitals, Microsoft downloads and scans the contents of your hard drive at night, you know this right? JOKE! I sent him my phone number!)

So, because I twittered in exasperation someone from Microsoft, MICROSOFT, got in touch with me and stayed in touch with me to fix the problem and fix it in a way that took me from frustrated to happy customer. They didn’t give me giant piles of free stuff, but they can if they like… they’ve got my contact info! (hint hint) But he fixed the issue, personally took care of the sale and made sure that I got everything I’d asked for and was a happy customer.

This is not a trivial thing that Trevin from the Microsoft Store (online version, not from a mall) did. I’m in retail. I know how hard it is to take an irritated customer referring to your business as pathetic and then be calm, rational, and helpful with the upset customer and turn their bad experience into a good one. Trevin did an outstanding job of it. And I officially apologize for saying his store was bad. I should have contacted them at least one more time before I was so insulting.

The lesson here isn’t that they messed up although I’m sure there are plenty who will say “See, Microsoft screwed up again!” They’re ignoring the important part. From a customer service point of view they didn’t just screw up. They recognized it and then they reached out to me, their customer, and fixed it in a way that was fair. It didn’t give away the store and it didn’t make me feel like they weren’t giving an inch after messing things up so badly.

I wasn’t after a free lunch. I just wanted to shop with them. Today at my work I had one of my employees tell me about an upset customer experience she’d had and how the customer was going to come back. Whenever I hear those I wince. I want them to come back to shop, not to complain. She’d really tried to make the customer happy and things had just conspired against her. I suspect this is one of those customers who won’t be happy until we fire him. (Yes, I’ve fired customers before and it’s not something that’s done lightly but they quit being customers when they quit paying… and he’s getting close to the part where he’s an expense in a bad way.)

So, we’ll try to do as good by the upset customer as Trevin did by me. I’d started the conversation on twitter, effectively yelling “Your company is pathetic!” and he responded with “How can I help fix it?” And then went on from there to fix things. He didn’t react to my emotion or my hostility. He reacted to my problem and worked to address it. In doing so he took me from hostile upset customer to happy customer who will shop there again. His parting words on the phone, were that if I ever had any problem again to get in touch with him. I don’t expect I’ll have troubles, and if I did I would probably do things more right with e-mail through the proper channels, but I feel, as a customer, like I have an “in.” That makes me more likely to shop there again, even if I never use the in… and even though he’ll never remember me and probably handles a dozen cases a week just like mine. (Not because they’re that bad but due to the sheer volume of what the biggest software company in the world must do… at least I think they are, maybe it’s Blizzard.)

So. This week the challenge is to be as good at customer service as Microsoft was to me… and this time when I say that, I mean that in the best possible way. Good job Trevin from Microsoft, and thank you.

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.)