Jesse Meijers

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

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.

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A lesson in empathy by Abraham Lincoln

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. More recently, there was a very interesting TED presentation on the same topic, yet from a completely different perspective. These two sources will help you become more emphatic in no time!

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It is good to make mistakes

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.

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See one, do one, teach one

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who has worked for NATO and United Nations. We got talking about learning skills and how rules of thumb which explain methods can help you in easily remembering a process to learn something. In his line of work, the method 'See one, do one, teach one' is used. This is a very good method to remember when you want to learn a skill yourself, and to remember when you are teaching someone else a skill.

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Go R.O.W.E – Results Only Work Environment

Recently I posted about location independency. This is one of the great opportunities that the Internet has given us. But it also means that we need to adopt our management strategy, to match the location independency of our team. The Results Only Work Environment is a proven strategy used by a few very successful companies (large and small) to do just that.

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How to bring good news and bad news

From time to time we have to bring people bad news. Luckily, we also have good news to bring them now and then, so all is not lost. But how do we make sure that we take advantage of good news, and we minimize the impact of bad news?

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The simplest, easiest way to have less problems INSTANTLY!

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!

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Create a win-win with these 3 simple rules

The concept of win-win was introduced by Stephen Covey. A win-win situation is one where both parties in an agreement 'win'. For example a customer of mine wants a special software application. I know that I can sell the same application to another customer, with a few minor modifications. So I give my customer a discount (his win) in return for the right to sell the application to another customer (my win). In this situation I have applied 3 rules for creating a win-win. If you use these rules you will make sure that any agreement you will make is a win-win agreement.

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How to use the Law of Reciprocity to your advantage

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.

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

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.

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