Tag Archives: Communication

What Coaching Is and Isn’t

Before we start today’s post, answer the following question.

What does coaching mean to you?

In the past, I answered that question as telling someone what to do. That’s what I learned from the popular culture. Sports coaches tell you what to do and how to do it. Sure, a life or business coach would do the same.

A few years ago, I took a coaching course, and I realized that my definition of coaching wasn’t correct. Coaching isn’t telling people what to do and how to do it, in fact, something entirely different. It is asking people questions to make them find out what to do and how to do it.

The Socratic Method

The Q&A method of coaching has deep roots. It is based on the Socratic Method. This method is more effective than preaching. Preaching creates resistance in the receiving end.

When you use the Q&A method, the coachee finds their own solutions to their problems. This has advantages on multiple levels.

First, the coachee is less resistant to the solutions found in the coaching session because they came up with those solutions. Those solutions weren’t dictated to them.

Second, the Q&A method bypasses the ego of the coachee. If your definition of a coach is someone who preaches you, you might think that a coach-coachee relationship puts you in a lower position as a coachee.

If the Q&A method is used, there’s no hierarchical relationship between the coach and the coachee. It’s a relationship of equals. Two individuals are discussing a matter to find the truth, which is the most important life skill.

Overcoming Resistance to Coaching

When there’s no hierarchy in the relationship between the coach and coachee, it’s much easier for a prospective coachee to hire someone as a coach. This is especially true for accomplished individuals.

When you are already successful and see coaching as someone better than you teaching you, than you’ll have a hard time getting into such a relationship, because of two reasons.

You might think that people more successful than you won’t work as coaches, and you might not want to be preached by someone who isn’t more successful than you. If that’s your perception of coaching, you’ll be missing out on some opportunities.

A Coach Is Genuinely Interested

In a proper coaching session, the coach is genuinely interested in the problem of the coachee. The coach asks questions to clarify the events and the way the coachee perceives and approaches the problem at hand.

During a coaching session, two things can happen. First, the coachee can realize how they contribute to the problem at hand, and decide to stop doing that. When someone has a persistent problem in their lives, most of the time, they are doing something to contribute to the problem.

Second, the coach can ask a question that would stimulate a solution in coachee’s mind. I remember a coaching session where I wanted to brainstorm about how to find customers. My coach asked me which message I wanted to convey to my prospects. That question made me look at the problem at hand from another angle, and focus on my message instead of obsessing about customers.

The Q&A method is not only relevant to the professional coach-coachee relationship. It’s helpful in various contexts, such as boss-subordinate, parent-child, between friends and romantic partners.

Which friend would you like to have? The one who starts preaching to you once you start talking to them about a problem? Or the one who listens to you and asks you questions to process the problem at hand?

Summary

Unlike the common impression, coaching isn’t about preaching people what to do and how to do it. It’s about asking questions to someone to help them find their own solutions.

The Q&A method of coaching is more effective at motivating people because the solutions aren’t dictated to them but reached by themselves.

Developing good questioning and listening skills is not only beneficial when working as a professional coach, but also in boss-subordinate, parent-child, friendship, and romantic relationships.

The Reason and the Remedy of the Most Common Communication Problem

Google is great if you know how to formulate a relevant search query. To do that, you need to have some knowledge on the topic such as basic terminology. In other words, you need to know what you don’t know to search for it on Google.

Most of the time, we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why reading books, articles, blog posts, and consuming content in other formats is so beneficial. However, sometimes, we have a burning question, and we don’t have the time to read all the books in that domain. We need a quick answer.

I such cases, Q&A sites are useful. As a programmer, Stack Overflow was a great help. I’d formulate a question and receive an answer within a day. I don’t ask questions on Stack Overflow anymore because nowadays, I can find my answers with Google fairly easy.

Google is great, but it doesn’t have the intelligence to understand what you’re really looking for if you aren’t clear about it. Q&A sites use human intelligence. If enough people read your question, there’s a good chance that one of them will have a more relevant answer than Google.

The Downside of the Q&A Sites

The online Q&A process isn’t perfect, and the reason for that is relevant to our day-to-day communication with our family, friends, and colleagues.

When you write a question on Quora, you describe the situation from your own perception, and your perception isn’t perfect. It’s clouded by your mental filters, biases, and fallacies.

When someone else reads your question, they understand the situation from their own perception. Their perception isn’t perfect because of the same reasons. As a result, that person answers a completely different question than you intend to ask.

You read their answer, and you interpret that answer using your own filters. You give a completely different meaning to their answer.

As a result, you misunderstand the wrong answer to the misunderstood question that was formulated wrongly, to begin with.

The same dynamic happens all the time in our day-to-day communication with our family, friends, and colleagues.

We misunderstand what others couldn’t express clearly, and in turn, they misinterpret our wrongly formulated responses. When these misunderstandings go back and forth enough times, we have a serious conflict.

How Can We Avoid the Misunderstandings in the First Place?

The first step is to know that your partner might have expressed themselves inaccurately or you might have misunderstood them. When you come from that place, you’ll be more kind and compassionate toward them.

The second step is to tell your partner what you have understood and ask them for confirmation. If your partner doesn’t confirm your formulation of their expression, you go back and forth until you agree on the issue.

Now, you express your views on the issue, and you repeat the same. You ask your partner how they understood your answer, and you go back and forth until you’re sure that they understood you correctly.

That way you’re sure that you understood each other correctly. There’s no room for assumptions or misunderstandings. You don’t have to agree with each other, but at least, you know where each of you stands on the matter at hand. This is a basic principle of communication.

Of course, you don’t have to clarify each sentence in each conversation, but you better do it when the stakes are high, and there seems to be a conflict and a chance of misunderstanding.

Summary

We express our views from our own mental filters and biases. We interpret other people’s expressions through the same filters and biases. As a result, there’s a great room for misunderstanding in our communication with each other.

To minimize misunderstandings, we need to ask each other questions to confirm that we have understood each other correctly. This might sound like overkill every time we have a conversation with our family, friends, and colleagues, but it’s a must when a misunderstanding can have dire consequences.

Your Perception of Reality Is Skewed

Here’s How to Fix It.

Back in the day, when our ancestors had to survive in the wilderness, they had to take every threat seriously.

In those days, the humans who expected the worst and prepared for it survived and passed their genes to the next generation. As a result, we inherited the negativity bias from our ancestors.

The negativity bias helped our ancestors to survive in the wilderness, but how useful is it now? Moreover, what is its impact on our lives today? Those are some questions that are worth pondering upon.

The Negativity Bias in Communication and Leadership

Since negative stimuli have a higher impact on people, its common communication and leadership advice to balance an instance of negative feedback with five instances of positive feedback. This is also known as the 5-to-1 rule.

The same rule is also useful in our relationships with ourselves. If you’re finding a lot of faults with yourself, you might be damaging your self-esteem. This is a common pitfall of personal development.

For that reason, when you come up with points of improvement, you need to balance them by acknowledging your accomplishments, no matter how small. This is something that we aren’t used to doing, because of several reasons.

First, it is discouraged to blow your own horn. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t acknowledge your own accomplishments. Second, our negativity bias makes us underestimate our accomplishments, almost blinds us to them.

The Negativity Bias and Your Perception of the World

There’s another use of the 5-to-1 rule, which is much subtler because it is on the level of perception. When we perceive the world, we notice the negative more and discard the positive easily. That keeps us from forming an accurate account of reality, which is a crucial skill to succeed in life.

To calibrate our perception to match the reality, we have to make a conscious effort to recognize the positive to balance the effects of the negativity bias.

The Negativity Bias and Relationships

This idea is especially useful in relationships. Think about a person in your extended social circle that you aren’t fond of. This can be a colleague, a relative, or a neighbor. Why do you dislike this person?

You might come up with a list of reasons to dislike the person you’ve chosen. Now, think about a list of reasons that makes them a good person. Think about the instances when this person was nice to you.

If you’re objective, you’ll find as many reasons to like a person as to dislike them, but you ended up disliking them because of the negativity bias. You needed five times more reasons to like that person than to dislike them. And that person didn’t provide that many reasons to you.

The Negativity Bias and Your Life Situation

This is not only relevant to relationships but also to situations. Maybe, you don’t like your job, your finances, or your health. But if you look closely to them, you’ll find as many reasons to like them as to dislike them.

Again, the idea here is to make a conscious effort to recognize and acknowledge the positive in your life situation.

Conclusion

Our evolutionary inheritance includes the negativity bias, which makes us perceive the reality worse than it is. That had some advantages for our ancestors that used to live in the wilderness.

The negativity bias hurts us more than it benefits us today. It lowers our quality of life by keeping us in a constant state of discontent.

The way to overcome our negativity bias is to recognize and acknowledge the positive in our lives and in our relationships.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t come up with points of improvement and work on them. That means having a positive attitude when working on them.

Dealing with Difficult People

We are all a bunch of programs. These programs are transferred from generation to generation through genes and culture.

Some of these programs are very basic. On a deep level, we all want to survive and reproduce. A lot of our behaviors stem from those two basic instincts. We share those instincts with other animals.

Then, there are more advanced programs, like loving our family members. These programs are specific to mammals.

Primates like humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas have even more advanced programs. We form tribes and relationships with individuals other than our immediate family members.

And of course, we, humans, have many advanced programs that other primates don’t have.

We All Have Contradicting Programs

As a result, each human carries a set of programs from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. Some of those programs inevitably contradict each other.

We all have programs that derive pleasure from the misfortunes of others. Do you think that you don’t have that? You either haven’t been aware of that program, or you haven’t been in a situation where that program was triggered.

We also have very advanced programs like feeling the pain of someone that we don’t know and helping them.

Obviously, these two programs contradict each other, and all of us have these programs in us. It’s one thing to have these programs in us. It’s another to act on them.

Beyond all of these programs, we all have access to pure consciousness.

Develop Empathy and Compassion

When you have to deal with a difficult person, just realize that a program is activated in that person and that person consciously or unconsciously chooses to act on that program. And most probably, you have the same program in yourself, no matter how much you deny.

Maybe, you don’t act on that program, because you aren’t in the same situation as that person. Maybe, you don’t act on it, because you’re further in the evolution of your consciousness. But you have the same program too.

Knowing that you have the potential to behave the same way already makes a difference in your perception of the situation. You understand that person better. You develop empathy toward them. You don’t get angry at them. You feel sad for them.

Some people hurt others just because they enjoy it, but most people don’t. When people hurt others, it’s most of the time because of their accumulated pain in the past. When you recognize the pain of the difficult person in your life, you develop compassion for them.

Developing empathy and compassion for a person isn’t a weakness. On the contrary, it requires mental toughness. Not many people are able to do that.

When you feel empathy and compassion toward a person, your relationship to that person is already transformed. Think about a child that throws a tantrum instead of a grownup who acts consciously. When it’s a child that misbehaves, you will act differently, won’t you?

A Growth Opportunity to Develop Your Conflict Management Skills

The second step is to see this situation as a growth opportunity. You won’t get too far by blaming the other party. You need to take the responsibility. This is an excellent opportunity for you to develop some conflict management skills.

Teaching conflict management skills is beyond the scope of this post. I recommend the audio program: Art of Conflict Management by Prof. Michael Dues. You need to listen to that program multiple times and apply what you have learned.

Make a Decision

If you take the two steps above and the situation still doesn’t improve, you have a decision to make. Will you get out of that relationship or stay with it?

In some cases, getting out of a relationship might not be an option. For example, that person might be in your immediate family. If that’s the case, I recommend improving your compassion to a level where you don’t perceive the person to be difficult anymore.

Loving Kindness Meditation

There’s a way to improve your compassion, and it’s called loving-kindness meditation. I recommend the audio program Noble Heart by Pema Chödrön. As an alternative, you’ll find many free guided meditations if you google that term.

Developing compassion toward a difficult person isn’t weakness; it requires mental toughness. Mental toughness isn’t cruelness. It’s having the strength to not act on your most primitive instincts like lashing out on people.

Moreover, you don’t develop loving-kindness for the welfare of others. You develop it for your own wellness. Hostility is harming you. Loving-kindness improves your physical and mental health by eliminating hostility.

Getting out of a relationship is always an option. The problem with that option is that you miss a growth opportunity. The chances are high that you’ll create, attract, or experience a similar situation down the road. Therefore, it’s better to cease the opportunity in this relationship to grow.

Summary

We all carry a bunch of malevolent and benevolent programs in us. Some of us act on them, and some of us don’t. We all have the potential to act on our most malicious programs when the situation calls for it. Most of the time, difficult people act on their worst programs because of their pain.

Just knowing those facts is enough to develop empathy and compassion for the difficult people in your life. That takes mental toughness. Compassion isn’t a weakness.

The second step is to see the situation as a growth opportunity and to develop your conflict management skills.

If the second step doesn’t work, you can practice loving-kindness meditation to deal with the situation better and to preserve your health and wellness.

Quitting a relationship always seems to be a solution, but if you don’t solve your problems in a particular situation, you’ll likely experience the same issues in the future.

Overcoming Shyness

Throughout my life, I was a shy guy. In my early twenties, I acted like a cool guy to hide my shyness. I didn’t speak much and didn’t get involved a lot. I didn’t want people to see that I was nervous in social situations.

I never spoke up or participated in social life. Deep down, I wanted to speak up and get involved. I wanted to enjoy an exciting social life.

The World Wants You!

Shyness can come across as coldness, even arrogance. If you are shy, remember that there are people who want you to speak up and get involved. People want and need your social contribution. By holding yourself back, you are denying them your social contribution.

Moreover, you’re also denying yourself the rewards of active social life: a better career, better relationships, and an overall improvement in the quality of your life.

Everybody Is a Little Shy

Even great public speakers become overwhelmed when they have to address a stadium full of people. Critical conversations, business or political negotiations, and talking to a potential life partner make even the most confident people nervous.

That’s why the society rewards the people who dare to go out of their comfort zones and act in demanding social situations, no matter how overwhelmed they are.

Courage and Practice

Everybody has different confidence levels in different social situations, and everybody can improve their confidence levels in every social situation, including you.

If you want to succeed in any area of your life, including your social life, you need to adopt the growth mindset. Improving your social skills requires courage and practice.

Shoot for the Stars!

If you want to make a quantum leap, think big and shoot for the stars. For example, set yourself the goal that you’re going to speak in front of a stadium filled with people and huge spotlights directed to you.

It doesn’t matter how unrealistic this goal might sound to you. The bigger your goals are, the more motivated you’re going to feel, and the faster you’re going to make improvements.

Visualization

Visualization is one of the least demanding exercises to overcome shyness. Visualize yourself in social situations that are outside of your comfort zone. Get into the feeling.

Your emotions don’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. Think about a vivid dream that made you feel intense emotions. The dream wasn’t real, but your feelings were.

Try to create a reality in your mind that triggers the feelings associated with shyness. You can get better at doing that with practice.

Once those feelings are triggered, stay with them without trying to change, escape, or suppress them. After a while, their intensity will decrease by themselves. This method of dealing with unpleasant feelings is called the Letting Go Method.

Visualize yourself handling the situation at hand courageously and confidently and succeeding at it. Then, go out to the field and actually, get involved in the situation that you’ve visualized. The more you visualize, the more confident you’ll feel in real life.

Graduated Exposure

Courage is not the lack of fear. If you had no fear, you wouldn’t need any courage. Courage is “feeling the fear, and doing it anyway,” as the name of the book by Susan Jeffers suggests.

Graduated exposure means getting out of your comfort zone to the extent you feel some fear, but not to the extent you feel panic, and doing that over and over.

Every time you get out of your comfort zone, you extend it a little. This is how you cultivate world-class courage in a single year.

The farther you go out of your comfort zone, the faster you’ll improve your confidence in social situations.

The opposite is also true. The more you stay in your comfort zone, the more it shrinks. This is called positive feedback loop.

Here’s a list of steps to practice graduated exposure.

  1. Make a list of activities that are out of your comfort zone, the longer the list, the better.
  2. Sort your list from the easiest to the most difficult.
  3. Visualize yourself doing the easiest activity.
  4. Go out to the field and do the easiest activity.
  5. Use the Letting Go Method to deal with the unpleasant feelings in the steps 3 and 4.
  6. Repeat the steps 3, 4, and 5 with the next activity in your list.
  7. Add new activities to your list regularly.

You can use your imagination to come up with your own original or derived exercises.

In the book Goodbye to Shy, Leil Lowndes offers 85 ideas and exercises to overcome shyness. My favorites are joining a club and traveling.

Join a Club

My favorite club is Toastmasters International, which is a public speaking club. It’s very affordable, friendly, and accessible to people with different levels of communication skills.

They have regular meetings and speech contests. That way you’ll be exposed to different activities that are out of your comfort zone but fun.

The idea is to make friends with stress, take a deep breath, and turn your fear into excitement. Think about it as a trip to the thrill rides in an amusement park.

Traveling

My second favorite activity is to get out of my comfort zone when traveling. In vacation destinations, everybody is relaxed and want to have fun. They are more open to social interactions with strangers.

You can practice your social skills with people who offer services in restaurants, shopping malls, etc. For example, if you enjoy the service in a restaurant, take a minute to tell the staff that you appreciate their service, and what you like the most.

You could even find a job that requires a lot of social skills, such as becoming a salesperson.

Stay Away From Drugs and Alcohol

Whatever you do, do not rely on drugs or alcohol. That’s a recipe for disaster. If you really want to improve your social skills, approach each situation completely sober. Using prescribed medicine isn’t my favorite either.

In the past, I received a prescribed medicine to take my nervousness under control. I did well in a few presentations. However, one day, I was asked to do a speech without any prior notice. No preparation, no opportunity to take my medication.

I was nervous, but I did OK. Most of my colleagues didn’t even notice that I was nervous. On that day, I figured out that if I had to succeed, I had to rely on my internal resources, my inner power. I didn’t need anything external. That holds for you and everybody on this planet.

Fear vs. Excitement

Your body registers the fear and excitement the same way. If your mind feels positive about what’s about to happen, you feel excitement. If it feels negative, you feel fear.

Whenever you feel fear, make a decision to feel good about what you’re about to experience. That way, you’ll turn fear into excitement.

Don’t try to suppress the stress. Stress is your body’s response to support you in a critical situation. Use it as a fuel. Get empowered by it.

Don’t Hide Your Nervousness

A good deal of your social anxiety comes from your fear of others noticing your nervousness. Trying to hide your nervousness intensifies your anxiety.

Let that fear go. Let people see that you’re nervous. So what?

Imagine you’re listening to a public speech. Which one is more exciting to listen to? A speaker that is so comfortable that they’re almost going to fall asleep? Or a speaker that is speaking intensely because of their nervousness?

Immersion

Immersion is the opposite of graduated exposure. It’s jumping into the deep end of the pool. That way, you’ll experience the worst that can happen. Once you deal with that and get over it, you can deal with any situation.

If you want to get over your shyness and social anxiety as soon as possible, pick the scariest activity in your list, and do it.

One Last Word

You can learn a lot about shyness and anxiety from books and articles, but the only way to overcome it is to go out of your comfort zone regularly and practice your skills in challenging social situations over and over.

The books and articles provide only guidance. It’s up to you to do the work and apply those ideas in real life!

Bonus Tips

  • Imagine, everybody out there will be friendly, because they are!
  • Find yourself a hyper-social buddy and hang out with them. Model them, learn from them. Make this a competition. Try to be even more social than them.

Conclusion

Overcoming your shyness and social anxiety requires changing your mindset and practicing in the real world.

You need to become aware of your limiting beliefs such as “I should hide my nervousness,” and replace them with empowering beliefs such as “it’s OK that people notice my nervousness. It shows that I care.”

When it comes to practice, you have two choices, graduated exposure and immersion. In graduated exposure, you get out of your comfort zone one step at a time. In immersion, you face your greatest fear right away.

Whatever approach you choose, remember that the only difference between fear and excitement is your attitude. You can switch from fear to excitement just by switching your attitude from negative to positive.

The Critical Principle You’re Violating

There’s a simple principle that gets violated often nowadays. This principle is a critical one in our personal and professional lives. It’s one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’d call it empathy, but I’ll use Stephen R. Covey’s definition.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Covey divides the 7 habits into three groups, independence, interdependence, and continual improvement.

The Illusion of Absolute Independence

With the advances in the technology, we grew more and more independent. We think we don’t need people around us anymore.

The Internet provides us with more than enough entertainment. We don’t need to go to a store, everything is delivered to our homes.

As a result, we have the illusion that everything happens by itself and all we have to do is to pay the price. We forget the people who run this system because most of the system is automated.

With the advances in technology and automation, we became more and more independent. And that’s a good thing.

The High Tech Culture

The companies that provide us with the latest technology have a unique culture that emphasizes independence.

Engineers are encouraged to deliver a product that works. They aren’t encouraged to talk to their customers, build relationships with them, and make sure that they keep their customers satisfied.

As we excel in independence, we forget interdependence.

Communicating with others and building relationships with them are seen as a waste of time. This will be an even greater problem for the new generation.

The Generation of Loners

When I was a kid, I had at most one hour of TV time per day. I wasn’t limited by my parents. That was all there is for children on TV where I grew up.

In hindsight, I was lucky. I had to communicate with other children and grownups for entertainment. Otherwise, I’d be bored out of mind.

That’s not the case with the new generation. All they have to do is to get their hands on a gadget connected to the Internet, and they have an endless stream of entertainment. What a fantastic babysitter, isn’t it?

You’ll Need Others

If you think you’re completely independent, I have bad news for you. At a certain moment in your life, you or one of your loved ones will need medical attention. Then, you’ll understand that there are other humans, and you actually need them.

I really like how Stephen R. Covey calls this principle, seek first to understand, then to be understood. This definition is simple yet covers everything I wanted to explain in today’s post.

If I had to explain this principle in other words, I’d call it being sensitive to other people’s conditions and needs.

Real Life Examples

Let me go over a few examples that I come across frequently, and that explain how critical this skill is in your personal success.

Imagine a team of brilliant software developers. They spent all of their lives with computers and programming. They know the software technology inside out. However, the software developed by these geniuses is impossible to be used by the average person.

Their average customer uses a computer at most one hour a day. They don’t have that much experience with computers and software.

The software is developed for geniuses. These developers didn’t think that their software would be used by anyone less knowledgeable than them.

They didn’t seek to understand their typical customer. Neither did they try to be understood. Now, they have to deal with all the support calls they receive.

Business and Marketing

When we develop a product or offer a service, what we are doing is obvious to us. This isn’t the case for our prospects. Yet, most of us ignore that fact.

I came across so many online businesses where I had to search their website to find a blog post that explains what they are actually doing.

You can create the best online business out there, but if you can’t explain what you’re doing in three sentences, you won’t have any chance of surviving.

Communication in Private and Professional Life

Once in a while, I receive a collaboration request. I can understand that it’s an honest request, but I don’t get what is expected from me, and what I should expect from the counterparty.

The answers to these questions are obvious to the counterparty, but they aren’t included in the request.

Did you ever have a friend who told you “let’s meet sometime?” When you came back with a specific idea, they didn’t return your message. You know how annoying that is.

On the other hand, some people tell you the exact location where to meet, with as much detail as possible, like the date and time.

“Let’s go for a coffee in the coffee shop across the post office near our office at 4pm on Tuesday.” It’s impossible to misunderstand and waste time.

My Own Sins

Even though I’m writing a post about this principle, I won’t claim that I’m perfect at it. No one is, and no one can be, but we can improve ourselves by paying more attention.

One of my sins when it comes to this principle is that I provided way too many ideas and feedback to my colleagues.

As a result, they got overwhelmed and started to ignore my ideas and feedback over the years. Nowadays, I pay attention to keep my lips sealed and only speak up on issues that truly matter.

A Skill You Can Develop

The fifth habit is a skill you need to pay attention and practice to develop. Always ask yourself some questions about the counterparty.

  • What do they know about what I’m offering to them?
  • What is their background?
  • What is their experience?
  • Which skills do they have?
  • Who are they?

That list is not even close to complete, but I hope you get the point.

In essence, you need to step into the shoes of someone and look at the world from their perspective.

That’s not easy, because you don’t know a lot about that person, but at least pay attention and ask questions instead of making assumptions.

One of the advantages of this habit is that you perceive clues from your environment faster. You use them as feedback, which is a growth opportunity.

Resources

Empathy is a huge topic, and this post is just a reminder for you to pay more attention to it.

If you want to dive deeper into it, I recommend the books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes. Both are included in my list of 12 life-changing personal development books.

Conclusion

With the advances in technology, we get more and more independent, and that’s a good thing. However, absolute independence doesn’t seem to be possible in the near future.

We will always need other people one way or another. Therefore, we need to pay attention to interdependence and improve our skills in this area as well.

How is Black Friday Still a Thing?

How did we come up with Cyber-Monday? Why does every web page that I visit have a red countdown clock urging me to buy their stuff? Why do I receive three emails per day the whole weekend from the same website about their Black Friday offers? Do people really think that this stuff still works? How come some people think that the first thing I’m going to do when I accidentally land on their website through a Google search is to enter my email to their newsletter subscription box in their pop-up and hit enter? Seriously?

I buy from the people that I already have bought from, because they provide solid value. There are two or three websites that I have been buying from regularly for years, Amazon being the main one. I could appreciate a single email from them and that could encourage me to change my purchase schedule to buy earlier. But that’s it. I’m not going to buy more or anything else than what I regularly buy just because it is Black Friday.

Time’s have changed. People aren’t interested in more stuff anymore. Because we all have access to as much stuff as possible. They are not an object of desire anymore. On the contrary, we realized that more stuff is more pain in the ass. Buying that bigger and better car is a pain in the ass, because now you have to look for a bigger, safer parking spot wherever you go, let alone the administration the purchase of a new car requires. Buying the latest smartphone is a pain in the ass, because you have to import all of your data to the new one and the new one has more or less the same user experience unless your old one is about to crash.

What we are looking for in the 21st Century is not newer, more stuff. Who needs that? What we are looking for is more, better human connections and relationships, because that isn’t available in the marketplace for a Black Friday discount. What we need is meaning, service, and producing value. Those are the challenges of the 21st Century, not some crappy new gadget. Everybody has access to that anyway.