Jesse Meijers » Self Improvement

A lesson in empathy – How to place yourself in someone else’s shoes

Jesse Meijers — Sun, 01 May 2011 07:00:47 +0000

Placing yourself in someone else’s shoes can be extremely hard. Recently I wrote an article about a lesson we can learn from Abraham Lincoln. Today, I found this fantastic empathy experiment on Ted.com. It is a great experiment and will take you on a journey to understand the world from the perspective of others.

Sam Richards: A radical experiment in empathy

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A lesson in empathy by Abraham Lincoln

Jesse Meijers — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:22:47 +0000

One thing that I used to be rather bad at, was empathy. Placing myself in someone else’s shoes was hard for me. For an entrepreneur this is very important, it is a lesson worth learning. The story that helped me learn this lesson is about Abraham Lincoln, a very inspiring man. It will help you too!

The young Abraham Lincoln

When Lincoln was a young man, he was a very critical man. He would give his comments on just about anything you can imagine, including cynical remarks about other people. It is hard to imagine this man would become on of the most influential and admired people the world has ever known.

The turn around came when the young Abraham, then a state legislator, published anonymous letters in the Sangamo Journal of Springfield, criticizing the work of James Shields, attorney and auditor of the State of Illinois. Back in those days it was rather common to challenge someone to a duel, which was exactly what this man did.

Since Shields had challenged Lincoln, Abraham had the privilege of choosing weapons. He chose the broad sword. On the day of the duel, it quickly became apparent that Lincoln had made a wise decision; his long reach ultimately led to Shields backing out of the duel.

This dire situation learned Lincoln a lot… he vowed never to criticize another person again. Instead, he would do his best to understand the other person. Lincoln learned to use empathy instead.

Empathy during the civil war

During the civil war, Lincoln showed his greatest act of empathy. It is this moment that I always remember when I come to situations that need me to put empathy to use.

After being defeated twice in battles before, general McClellan had finally gotten General Lee defeated. Both parties had suffered enormous losses, and Lee saw no other option than to run. McClellan and his army gave chase. It came down to a very important choice; attack Lee again or give up the chase…

McClellan decided that his men had suffered enough and blew off the chase. When Lincoln received his debriefing he was furious. He immediately wrote a letter explaining McClellan that he could have won the war, if he hadn’t such a stupid decision… The letter was never posted however, and was later found amongst the papers that remained after Lincoln had deceased.

What did happen was that Lincoln placed himself in the shoes of McClellan. His men tired, wounded or dead. Not enough supplies to get back, let alone fight. Lincoln decided right there that if he had been in McClellan’s position, he would undoubtedly have made the same decision. So who was he to criticize!?

Remember that this decision led to many more deaths. Something Lincoln knew all too well. Still, he could imagine making the same decision. This is empathy. And whenever I find myself in a situation where I need to place myself in someone else’s shoes, I remember this story. If Abe Lincoln could do it when so many lives would be lost due to this decision; then who am I not to do the same for far lesser problems?

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Beyond proactivity: Accelerating personal development

Jesse Meijers — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:27:45 +0000

About 5% of people on the world are proactive by nature. The other 95% are procrastinators. It is no small feat to overcome procrastinating and become (more) proactive. Yet this is one of the main things that separates successful people from the rest.

But that is just half of the story. Obviously the 95% of people who are not by nature proactive, should aim to become so. But proactivity alone is just the beginning. If it is not combined with thinking, it will lead to nothing.

Are you an acter or a thinker?

People can be divided into 2 categories. Those whose first reaction is to think about something, and those whose first reaction is to act on something. The latter group is the 5% who is proactive.

Whether you fall into the group of thinkers or acters is rather easy to determine. Just imagine someone comes up to you with a business proposal. This can be anything. What is your first reaction?

If you’re an acter you’d probably make your decision as an impulse. And immediately get to work. If you’re a thinker you’d probably ask a couple of questions to create a pro/con list, to determine whether this is a good idea.

Why you need to both acter and thinker

Which category of people you fall into, only determines what your starting point is. The hard part is that you need to learn the other skill. If you act without thinking about it, you will just make the same mistake over and over again. If you think without acting, you will think of the greatest ideas … but they never come to be, because that needs action!

Thinking and acting have a certain rythm to them:

Think of the pattern as a walking pattern. If you are inside a room, choose 2 locations. One location represents the ‘Thinking’ spot, the other the ‘Taking action’ spot. When you think about something you are in the thinking spot. If you then take action, you are basically moving from the thinking spot to the taking action spot. And vice-versa.

This is the pattern we all travel, between thinking and taking action. Whether you are a thinker or an acter determines in which spot you feel most secure. You are comfortable there. For example, I am a thinker by nature, so I feel quite comfortable thinking decisions through. Instead of taking action.

My business partner is an acter by nature, who always takes action. This is what he feels comfortable with. We both had to learn how to use the other side of the pattern… He had to learn to use his thinking to supplement his acting, while I had to act to supplement my thinking!

The usual patterns

The usual patterns don’t look like the pattern in the last section… Rather they look more like the image below, if we picture the pattern as a moving pattern:

Acters spent almost all of their time in the doing area of the pattern, while thinkers spent most their time in the thinking part. Both have great hesitations to leave their location, and don’t remain in the other location for very long, if at all.

The goal is to get balance between the two locations. So that moving away from a location feels as safe as moving towards it.

Taking the first step towards balance

It is hard to get out of your comfort zone. But that is exactly what you should be doing: move to the location that is not your normal behaviour. So the first thing to do is become aware of the fact that there is a different behaviour that is possible in any given situation. And it differs from your instinct!

There are always 2 ways to go to the other spot. Before you act on your instinct, or after. Moving before your instinctive reaction is hardest, but you will learn the process faster. I recommend this.

Thinkers

For thinkers the best way to do something is to simply revert to ‘gut feeling’ when it comes to a decision. Give yourself no longer than 1 second (yes that is short) to decide. As soon as you notice yourself thinking, making a pro/con list, etc, you need to make the decision immediately.

Usually you will lean to a certain decision and thinking only increases your own belief that this is the right decision. So just pick it instantly next time.

Alternatively, you can postpone the acting part a little. This means you do the acting after a little bit of thinking. Just set a timeframe to make your decision in and stick to it. For example, agree with yourself to decide tomorrow at noon. And hold your promise!

Acters

For acters the impulse is to act, so their biggest challenge is to not jump into anything. As soon as an opportunity presents itself, keep yourself from making a decision. Promise yourself you will postpone the decision to noon tomorrow. And, again, keep your promise!

Alternatively, if you have acted, you can use thinking retrospectively. This means that after you have acted, you reflect back on the process. Think about what you did, why, what the concequences are, etc.

Once you achieve balance

Once you have achieved balance in this pattern, there is one more step to take. That step is to increase the speed with which you go through the pattern. If you want to visualize this, it is moving the two positions closer to each other.

The idea here is that you can very quickly switch between thinking, and doing. There is no real trick here, as long as you are aware of the fact that you can increase the speed, it will happen automatically!

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The Pygmalion Effect – Using Self Fulfilling Prophecies to your Advantage!

Jesse Meijers — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:03:44 +0000

You have probably heard of the Pygmalion effect, usually called a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is used to describe the effect that when you’ve talked about something bad happening, that it would actually happen. The fact is, this is much closer to the truth than most people realize. And you can use this to your advantage!

The science behind the Pygmalion effect

The reason why self-fulfilling prophecies work, has to do with our subconscious mind. Whenever we talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy, for example when I say that I will be successful, I am imprinting this into my subconscious mind. The brain works in such a way that it remembers better when we repeat this, so every time I say it, this imprint becomes stronger.

An interesting interaction happens with the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is heavily influenced by the subconscious mind, but we hardly ever realize this. This interaction means that whatever we have imprinted in our subconscious mind, will be picked up consciously and executed.

Using self-fulfilling prophecies to your advantage

Actually, using the Pygmalion effect to your advantage is very simple. The idea is actually very old, in the form of mantra’s. A mantra, which originates from Hinduism, is a form of prayer that has a powerful effect when repeated. As such, it is basically the Pygmalion effect: repeat something, so it becomes imprinted in your subconscious mind.

So the only thing you have to do, is create your mantra (or mantra’s) and keep repeating them. This doesn’t have to be done out loud, you can do this silently too. The key factor is repeating, so your subconscious will pick up the idea and make it grow stronger and stronger.

A word of caution

The nasty matter of fact is that the Pygmalion effect can also be used in a bad way. Have you ever noticed how people who claim that they always have bad luck …. always have bad luck? The key here is to only concern yourself with positive thinking. Stay away from bad ideas, because repeating those will also imprint them in your subconscious!

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It is good to make mistakes

Jesse Meijers — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:25:02 +0000

Most people are affraid to make mistakes. This is only logical. After all, no one likes it when they look bad. Because of this, they will often refrain from doing certain things where they feel the chance of success is small. Or rather: they don’t take action. So I wanted to share with you an amazing story that explains how you can increase your success, by not worrying too much about mistakes.

Taking action is more important than taking the right action

First of all, I have experienced that taking action is much more important than taking the right action. Mistakes can be mended. Missed opportunities however, rarely come again.

Let me give you a first hand example. In my first company we had a problem to solve. We didn’t have a good distribution network to sell our product through. When we came in contact with someone who could help us, we made a wrong decision. We took him onboard, while he couldn’t commit 100% to our company.

Do I look back at this as a mistake? I do. Do I regret making that mistake? No I don’t.

If we hadn’t taken action right then and there, we would have missed our window of opportunity. Now we missed our window of opportunity because we couldn’t get sales to work the way it should have. But at least I took action, made a mistake and learned from my mistake.

When I ended up in a similar situation a while ago, I knew exactly what to do. Had I waited back then and not taken in the sales person, the company would probably still have failed. But I wouldn’t have learned such a valuable lesson!

Results within 24 hours

The other week I got back in contact with a friend that I hadn’t spoken to in about ten years. She is currently unemployed and has been looking for a job for a long time. We got talking about my businesses and how I started my current company after I stopped with the previous one.

Since she’s an artist, the conversation shifted towards interesting things in the market for artists. We talked about independent artists and how they work, which business models there are which can be used, et cetera.

Apparently this inspired her, as I got a message from her the next day, telling me she had decided to take action. She had spoken to someone she found through LinkedIn, who started a clothing brand: Supa Dupa. He was very enthusiastic about her artwork, and she is currently starting to do some designs for them!

Talk about fast results just by taking action!

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The secret ingredient for success

Jesse Meijers — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:37:19 +0000

There is a secret ingredient that successful people have, and others lack, or don’t use. This ingredient is a personality trait. One that you can learn if you are not in posession of it already. And train if it is not yet at the level it should be.

Thomas A. Edison

When Edison was trying to perfect the incandescent light, he ran into a problem. He didn’t know which gas to put into the bulb. But he never gave up … he tried 10.000 different gases. None solve the problem.

Yet, he still didn’t give up. Instead he tried a vacuum, which turned out to be the solution to his problem!

Persistence

Every person who is successful at what they do, is persistent. Persistence is the personality trait you must have to succeed. Since success is only the last step of a long process which includes many temporary defeats.

Luck has nothing to do with it!

In the media you never hear the true story about success. Since success sells, the story of the many temporary defeats people have suffered is rarely given more than 2 lines in a complete cover story. This makes it look easy, or may even cause the reader to think that the successful person was just lucky.

In reality, successful people may be lucky, but it isn’t luck which causes success. It is the persistence those people have when everything seems to be going wrong, which causes them to be successful.

Learning and training persistence

If you want to learn persistence, or train it, there are many exercises you can do. Basically, they all amount to the same simple process:

Find an activity or task of your choice
Determine the edge of your comfort zone
Plan the activity/task in such a way that the goal takes you over the edge of your comfort zone

For example, I like hiking. If I want to use this activity to improve my persistence, I can plan a hike which takes me through terrain which is slightly out of my comfort zone. For me that would be cold environments which means ploughing through snow fields.

If I plan such an activity it means that I can mentally prepare for it. Nonetheless, I will still have to show persistence not to quit after a day or 2 of hiking, because I don’t like the snow or the cold.

I bet you can find an activity that you can use to apply this very simple principle. You can even do this with changing a fosset in your house (if you’re not the DIY type of person for example), as long as it means you have to show persistence.

The most important thing: make a deal with yourself that you won’t give up until you’ve completed your goal. If you have to get creative, call in the neighbour, wait a long time, whatever. As long as you reach your goal and don’t give up!

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The simplest, easiest way to have less problems INSTANTLY!

Jesse Meijers — Sun, 23 May 2010 11:31:23 +0000

We all have problems from time to time. Without problems, you could even argue that life wouldn’t be worth living, since the good times wouldn’t feel as good without a reference to problematic times. But let’s face it, when it comes down to it, we would all like to reduce our problems… This post is about the simplest, most effective way to reduce your problems … INSTANTLY!

Your own problems

There are 2 categories of problems. Those that are really yours and those that are not yours. Problems that are yours are those problems that truly originate from you. A very good example is money shortage. This is a problem that many people face, and which originates from a poor spending habit. This is the type of problem that you can only solve by self improvement.

Other people’s problems

The second category is other people’s problems. A good example is when a friend of yours is in money troubles. You lend him money, which effectively makes this your problem. Especially when you are a little short on cash a month later and are stuck, because your friend is out of money still…

This is how we make other people’s problems our own problems. I bet that when you think it over, you can identify a bunch of problems that you’ve had or still have, which are actually other people’s problems.

Eliminate problems of others

The simplest way to eliminate problems is to identify the situation when someone is trying to shift their problem onto you, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The same holds for situations where you are trying to ‘help’ people, but in effect you are creating extra work or stress for yourself. You can easily eliminate these problems once you have identified them.

In the example of a friend who has run out of money, there are a few simple ways to avoid this problem becoming your own. The first is to not lend the money, but in exchange, offer him help with getting his finances sorted out. After all, the real problem is his spending habit most probably, so try to work your way to the real problem.

Another way to solve the problem is to let him earn the money. For example, I could have him do some work at the office which needs to be done such as filing, or some other chore that is not urgent but important and never seems to get done. This way we create a win-win because I get cheap labor, and my friend gets some money. If you don’t run a company, you can have your friend help you out with a day of hard gardening, home improvement or other things that you can use a hand with.

Less problems instantly

If you adopt this method of problem solving, you’ll notice that the amount of problems you have is greatly reduced. Instantly. And if you solve it by creating a win-win, you don’t even have to disappoint people by not helping them!

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How to use the Law of Reciprocity to your advantage

Jesse Meijers — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:54:36 +0000

Last week I was driving home from a client during the rush hour. There was a long queue of cars, which I was in the middle of, slowly moving to the traffic light. I would say we were driving about 5 km/h (3 mph). There was a man who wanted to turn left, and join the line of cars… right in front of me. I was about to experience the law of reciprocity in action.

Reciprocity

There were 2 things I could do: I could let the man join in front of me, or I could quickly close the gap so he’d have to wait for another spot. I decided to give him the spot in front of my by stopping and signalling him. A moment later when a similar situation happened to the man in front of me I just let in the queue, and he also decided to let the other person join.

This example illustrates the law of reciprocity. It states that any act is followed by an equal act of the other party. If I would have cut short that person, it would be extremely likely that he in turn would have cut short the third person.

The human factor

When we use the law of reciprocity there is an interesting thing that happens. If I give someone one dollar, the law of reciprocity says he is going to give me back something of equal value. Yet he will most likely give me back something of greater value. This is called the human factor.

It is human nature to give back more than what we received. However, this is also true when what we give is negativity!

The law of attraction

The combination of the human factor in the law of reciprocity and the law of reciprocity itself are commonly defined as the law of attraction. The law of attraction states that you receive what you give.

So whenever you want to use this to your advantage, make sure you do two things:

Be the first to act
Act positively

This ensures that people will always give you back more than you have given them and makes sure that you attract positivity around you!

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Identifying Core Qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges and Allergies in Teams with Daniel Ofman

Jesse Meijers — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 07:27:21 +0000

The post on the Daniel Ofman model that I posted recently explains the Core Quality model very clearly. But it only focuses on personal personality traits, not on those of others. The question is; can we use the Daniel Ofman model for teams? The answer is yes… with a little adaptation, this is certainly possible.

Step 1 – Personal Traits

The first step to use the Daniel Ofman model for teams is to start with a normal model, for your self. Since this process is explained in detail in Identifying your Core Qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges and Allergies with Daniel Ofman, I won’t go into detail here. Remember the complete model:

Step 2 – Pitfall as Allergy

The second step that we’ll take is to identify our pitfall as someone else’s allergy. In other words; something we tend to do which gets on another person’s nerves:

Step 3 – The other person’s personality traits

The final step in this model is to identify the other person’s Core Quality, Pitfall and Challenge. This is done by simply traversing model, starting from the other person’s Allergy, to his or her Core Quality, his or her Pitfall and finally his or her Challenge:

Example

As a final explanation, let me give you an example. This example builds on the previous example, used in the article Identifying your Core Qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges and Allergies with Daniel Ofman:

So, from my Pitfall (being ‘Too Busy’), we can identify that the other person’s core quality must be a Relaxed Attitude. So it is someone who doesn’t easily become stressed. The pitfall for this is Laziness (note that this happens to be my Allergy). From here we can deduce that the other person’s challenge is, in fact, my Core Quality (Proactivity).

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Why every entrepreneur needs a personal coach

Jesse Meijers — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 07:30:00 +0000

In the last year and a half that I have had a coach, I have had amazing things happen to me. Do I think this is coincidence? Not a chance. It has to do with creating a surrounding for yourself in which you can blossom.

Why I started with a coach

I have read many blogs that advocate coaching, but most of those have coaching to sell. I don’t. So let’s just get started with me telling you why I hired a coach a little over a year ago.

A year ago I was just starting the discussions about starting a joint-venture between my company and a management consultancy firm. The discussions had a level to them that I couldn’t understand. There were things being said which I heard, but the meaning was unclear to me. You can compare this to standing in a dark river where you know there are fish because you see fishermen, but you can’t see the fish. I couldn’t see the meaning.

I needed a way to understand what exactly was going on in these meetings and someone I knew told me that I should go see a coach. He knew just the guy for me.

What I’ve learned since then

Since I started with my coach, I have learned more things than I could have ever imagined when I just started. He opened a world to me that includes personal development, sales but also coaching my employees. It is simply fantastic.

My coach has helped me break a barrier that I was walking into only a year ago, that I couldn’t break myself. My problem was that I didn’t use my intuition enough. Well, I recently did a test that showed that I am now actually perfectly capable of using my intuition. It is just a matter of choosing to do so. I couldn’t have done this without my coach, or at least not within a year. It might have taken years and years…

A note on cost

There is one thing that I have come to realise. You need other people to make you better. You cannot do it on your own. That is why I have a coach. But having a coach is NOT cheap. I won’t disclose how much I pay, but don’t expect a good coach to be cheap. You are paying someone for their time exclusively with you, to help you get ahead.

But what you should understand is that this is worth the money. It is probably the best investment of my life. The costs that go into coaching are nothing compared to what I have earned by using these lessons. Not to mention what I’ll earn in the future because of it…

How you can find your personal coach

There are many personal coaches out there and if you search around on the Internet you’ll find many. I however am a strong believer in using your network to find one. Ask around if people know a coach and ask if it is okay to have a free tryout session with them.

If you are on this website and you happen to speak Dutch, make sure you check out the website of my coach! He comes highly recommended!

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