MBTI in jobs with people – introversion is a good thing, honest!

I’m an introvert. And so are many of my friends… and that’s despite the fact that our jobs are (basically) about being with people, talking to people, and working with people. No wonder I’m knackered by the end of the day.

It’s something I’m often asked about, particularly by people trying to get with grips with MBTI for the first time:

You can’t be an introvert – all you ever do is work with groups of strangers!

That’s a misunderstanding of the meaning of ‘introvert’ in the Jungian sense – in the sense that MBTI uses it. I can act like an extravert – it’s just that it drains me to do so, whereas I know trainers who’re extraverts who come out of a day’s training absolutely buzzing with energy. After all, they’ve made 12 new friends in the day! 🙂

And I can tell you, speaking as an introvert, that being one is something of a liability because of that – but in another sense it’s an advantage. The advantage is that I’m less ‘bothered’ by the audience/groups responses as I work with them, explaining things and exploring things.

It’s not that I don’t care about them – it’s just that I’m less instinctively ‘swingy’ about things. As an introvert I’m more likely to ‘stick to my guns’. If a things are going well with lots of interaction I don’t so easily get carried away and if they’re not going so well I don’t so easily get brought down.

It makes being an introvert a pretty handy tool for working with people.

(PS: the advantages of being an extravert coming later! 🙂 )

Time Management – deadtime tools

We ran a half day workshop session recently on Time Management – and many of the usual issues came up… There’s no magic bullet and it’s about self discipline… any system for time management works better than no system so stop prevaricating and pick one…Pomodoro, JDI, whatever feels right for you is more right for you than random nothingness! 🙂

StopWatch

But one slightly unusual question did make its way to the top of the pile: how do I best use my downtime? The answer is, of course, that you don’t. Downtime is downtime for a reason and if you try and work for too long without downtime you’ll become inefficient and your work will be more and more error-prone.

The reason is simple – downtime is not the same as ‘dead time’ and the real question should be ‘How do I use my dead time?”.

Dead time is time when you’ve got enough energy (or whatever) to be productive but some logistical problem is stopping you. It might be that your laptop battery has died so you can’t access the local cafe’s wifi or it might be that your phone has no signal on the train you’re on or… you get the idea. The issue is simply a logistical one, whatever the cause of the problem.

First things first – check whether you aren’t confusing downtime with deadtime. It might be simply better to stop, rest and take downtime. In fact, if you don’t you might end up with your ‘doing-time’ being so unproductive it becomes deadtime!

Given that deadtime is 99% of the time a logistical issue, the solutions lie in simply being organised enough to keep on top of your logistics. I can’t promise these ideas will make every single moment of deadtime massively productive, but they work for me…

A kindle – mine has a cover with a built in light so no matter where I am, I’ve always got something useful to read. If you’re traveling with it a lot, I turn of my wifi connection to save on the battery life. The life’s fine but if I’m away for a week, every little helps.
A laptop – I’m meeting someone for a coffee/meeting in a cafe; I’m ten minutes early – where do you think I’m writing this!? Again, battery life can be an issue, but my Macbook lasts for ages. I make a point of charging it while I’m packing, if I’m going away, so that I know it’s fully charged as I leave the house – a simple trick but one that’s saved my a lots hour or two over the last few weeks as I travel up and down the country by train.
iTunesU (and podcasts) – subscribe and they’re on your phone. Pack headphones and you’ve got the possibility of a lecture from some of the world’s leading experts in your ear as you’re sitting on a buss! If you’re not familiar with iTunesU, it’s hidden at the back of the iStore but it’s a massively useful resource of some amazing material (and some dross too, of course!). Take a while to check it out and you’ll see what I mean. By the way, comfy headphones are a must if you’re trying to understand tricky stuff! 🙂
Your phone – personally mine’s an iPhone but whatever you’re using, learn how to use it! You don’t need a notepad an pencil with you any more to jot down those moments of genius you have! There are plenty of apps that will record your voice so you can just talk to it, set the time and have it speak your notes back to you when you’re in the office. No excuses for not capturing your bright idea!
A good diary set-up – pretty much anyone with a busy job/lifestyle can benefit from a good calendar app on their phone and I’ve taken this one step further by syncing mine with the calendar on my laptop and my office computer; there are plenty of ways to do this, but personally I use Google Calendar for extra backup. What’s more, with a few tweaks of the settings, friends and staff can see when I’m busy, when I’m free and book me in… only those few I trust, of course!
Training shoes and a skipping rope – okay this is an odd one, I admit, but when I’m traveling this all I need to make my hotel into a gym for half an hour. (I don’t skip in m room – I find somewhere quite outside to do this). Other people run, but I’m too lazy! I’m also experimenting with a yoga DVD to pop into my laptop for that time between waking up and going down for the hotel breakfast…… but I can’t tell you how well that’s working, yet.
In-car radio thingy – now I have to confess I don’t know exactly what to call this little gadget. It sits in my car and broadcasts to a very short range radio signal (a metre or so) which I’ve tuned one of the stations of my in-car radio to… By attaching my an MP3 player (in my case my trusty iPhone) to this gadget, I can listen to my iPhone in the car. Books, lectures, podcasts and just plain ol’ music. The beauty of this, of course, is that I don’t need headphones, so I stay legal and safe!

So there you go – a quick run through a few of the ways I’m combatting my deadtime. Your mileage will vary of course, and they won’t all be useful to you, but a couple of ‘em might be.

Let me know… … and if you’ve got any useful tips yourself, let me know that, too!

Presentation special kit time

It’s only just a week away…. our big Bamboo and Oak delivery day for South Lakeland – and that makes it kit-testing time! 🙂

With a big venue like this the projector will have to be a long way from the screen, obviously, to get a big enough image for everyone to see easily, even at the back. From our point of view, however, we want our laptop on the screen so we can see what’s coming up and be able to control things better.

That means the projector and the laptop will be a long way apart. Hmmmm… the solution? Our new 25 metre VGA cable. The only downside is the weight! 😉

Bamboo and Oak, by the way, is our large scale presentation on coping with pressure and stress and being resilient – when it feels like the world is out to get you. Last time out we got feedback like “Sell the Renault and buy yourselves that Porsche!”. Roll on next Friday!

A bit of a brag… :)

Some of you will know that we have up our sleeve a big presentation called “Bamboo and Oak” and you’ll know we delivered it to headline the Norther HR Briefing…… and the results are in! Here’s the feedback comment section:

Very interesting, good to finish session on a high. Good techniques delivered and will be tested.

So refreshing.

Different and challenging.

Very helpful, well presented – will try these things.

Fab.

Some useful practical tools that I will use back at the office.

Some really good hints and tips and I think Simon should sell his Renault and buy a Porsche!

Some useful tools/tips.

Practical.

Very helpful.

Very applicable.

Best speaker – really enjoyed.

Very useful stress busting techniques.

Excellent delivery and content. Good use and explanation of tools and story telling. Very engaging.

Good ideas well presented. Stimulating and enjoyable.

Uplifting finish – well planned.

Great ideas for keeping sane at work.

Time to break out the smarties and have a cup of tea to celebrate, I think. 🙂

Online training courses

Great new for all you time-short people!

The first three of our online training courses are now available here. There are about half a dozen more to come but for now we’ve got up three courses on confidence, designed to help anyone who needs a bit more confidence in their lives and work or who’s getting stressed about having to say ‘no’, take a bit more control of their lives or cope with the big events. Enjoy!

Stress vs Pressure

Stress isn’t pressure. That’s a simple fact, true by definition – but it’s not how people perceive stress.

The definition we use is this: stress is pressure you can’t cope with. In other words, no matter how much pressure you’re under, it’s not stress if you (feel that you) can cope. What that means is that there’s no such thing (in this sense) as a ‘high stress job’. You can have a high pressure job, sure, but if you can handle it, it’s not stressful.

Brain surgery is high pressure, yet I’ve never met a stressed brain surgeon. Why? Because they are confident they can do what they do. That means it’s ‘just’ pressure.

On the other hand, if you don’t think you can cope, it’s stress, no matter how little pressure you’re under, objectively.

What does that mean in practice? Well for starters it means we can stop telling ourselves we’ve got a high stress job… because that builds expectation of getting stressed.

And what do expectations do, all too often? Become self-fulfilling prophesies, that’s what!

MBTI audios

MBTI can be a little tricky to get your head around first time, particularly if you’re not someone who likes to read stuff. With that in mind, we’ve created about an hour’s worth of audio which explains and starts to explore MBTI in audio form (MP3). We’ve broken it into bitesized MBTI-chunks, too!

It’s free to download – all we ask is that you respect our copyright and that (if you like it) you consider giving us a link to the MBTI page you’re reading this on! 🙂

You can download the first MBTI-bitsized audio here: http://http://www.awareplus.co.uk/online_training/audios/mbti_conversation_part1.mp3

Stress and consequences of mistakes

Don’t stress the big consequences

Sometimes it’s the little things that stress us. As they say in some circles: “It’s not the elephants that get you stressed, it’s the ants!”. We’ve all made trivial mistakes and got away with them (God knows I have). We’ve almost all also made big mistakes and got away with them. (Again, God knows I have!)

I’m pretty sure that we’ve all also made big mistakes and not got away with it – these things stress me but in a sense I don’t mind getting hauled over the coals for that kind of thing… because if I’ve made a big mistake I deserve to face the consequences.

The times I get annoyed though, are the times when I make a tiny mistake and I don’t get away with it – the mistake may have been trivial but the consequences snowball out of proportion, somehow taking on a life of their own.

Putting a stamp on an envelope that doesn’t have enough value to cover the cost of postage is a trivial mistake. If the envelop is addressed to the Inland Revenue and contains your VAT return (in the UK) the chances are also that it’s trivial because the envelop will just travel second class.

But…… if you’ve already left it close to the deadline and you now miss that same deadline, your trivial mistake can have significant consequences.

And in terms of managing our stress, this is a problem.

We beat ourselves up because of the wrong things.

Looking around me in the various places where I get called in to consult and support stressed staff I notice time and time again that people are orientated around the effects of actions, not the actions themselves.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that no one should worry about the consequences of mistakes – just that only worrying about the consequences of mistakes is nothing more than a stress-inducer. Sure there are times when the effects of a mistake are so serious that we’re bound (rightly) to get stressed by them but as a long term stress-survival tactic that’s not a good place to be.

What we should, self evidently, be looking to minimise at a personal, stress-carrying level, is the number of mistakes we make. After all, the consequences of those errors are largely out of our hands. The mistakes themselves are something that we, by definition, can control.

Think of other people as ‘multipliers’. They can be greater than one or less than one but they can only apply to a mistake you make. If you don’t make a mistake, their multiplier can’t work. Multiply zero by anything and you get zero, after all!

If I make a small mistake with a big multiplier because of other people’s actions, the consequences are serious. (Usually we don’t need to get stressed because other people’s multipliers are less than one: one (mistake) times nought point two (the other person barely cares about your mistake) only gives you a total score of zero point two!.

Can you easily(!) control other people’s multipliers? I doubt it. That means the biggest portion of the consequences of mistakes is unchangable from your perspective. Is there any point in getting stressed about that? No.

Can you change the number of mistakes you make? Yes. Is there any point in getting stressed about that? Well no, not really, just try and improve! But if you must stress about something, stress about your own mistakes, not other people’s reactions.

Let’s take a personal example.

I made a mistake when I read, recently, the cooking instructions on a ready-meal. As a result the food was going to be ten minutes late. Had my wife had ten minutes spare in her timetable for the evening that wouldn’t have been a problem at all. As it was, my wife (who’s generally a saint) had real problems finding time to eat her meal before she had to leave the house once more.

Okay, okay, I shouldn’t have had the meal ready ten minutes late, but that was, in and of itself, a trivial mistake. The stress only arose because of other people’s responses (my wife having booked her day so tightly that she didn’t have ten minutes spare to wait for food).

How stressed should I have got? As stressed as I would because a meal was ten minutes late? Or as stressed as I would have got if my wife didn’t have time to eat?

Stress training

While we might not be sure about everything, we can be fairly sure about why one of our other more popular training courses is asked for though – our stress management training courses are obviously just what a lot of organisations need at the moment, with restructuring and cuts making a lot of staff very stressed indeed.

MBTI training – step 2

Our MBTI training is in huge demand at the moment, with MBTI step 2 being particularly popular – if only we knew why!

While step one (the traditional MBTI that everyone know, giving the four letter description) is a fantastic tool, the Step 2 assessment gives a greater and more subtle understanding of your personality. We’ve been using it a lot in FE and HE at the moment, where it’s been, as always, fantastically useful and popular.

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