Let’s make some time to read
In this blogpost, I will explain how I managed to evolve from one or two books to at least 15 books a year.
Make it a ritual
In today’s ultra-connected and busy life, we tend to continuously prioritize urgent tasks over important tasks. Replying to your friend’s messages on Whatsapp is maybe urgent, but often not so important. However, an important but not urgent “task”, is reading and learning. Because of the lack of urgency, we tend to forget to read.
In order to help that, I have instilled a new ritual in my life. Every evening, or at least the evenings when I’m home, before going to bed, I mute my phone and replace TV-time by reading time.
The reason why it is important to make it a ritual is that it takes in average 2 months before a new behaviour turns into a new habit (https://jamesclear.com/new-habit), and like you know, habits are powerful because we don’t need to think about them anymore, we repeat them automatically.
Commute
Whenever I’m using the public transport, I read. But because a book can sometimes be very thick, or have a clumsy format, I bought an e-reader, and that was my best buy of 2017. I just love it! Small, light and a perfect ‘paper’ lookalike.
Because reading is impossible when driving a car, I just listen to audio-books or podcasts instead. While audiobooks are nice, I do have a slight preference for podcasts as I find them more easy to digest than books. One of my favorite podcasts on Spotify is on leadership and is called “EntreLeadership” (https://www.entreleadership.com/). Great insights. I’m a strong atheist and this podcast is religious, however, the values that are shared through the interview are universal, so I don’t mind the religious background.
Blinkist: a fast way to learn
One of the greatest apps I recently found is Blinkist. The app “summaries” in a very good, useful and efficient way the most important points of tons of non-fictional books. In fifteen to twenty minutes, you can catch up with the most important aspects of a specific book. It is then up to you to evaluate if you have enough information, or if the book is worth diving into.
Here is a good and transparent review on Blinkist: https://willyoulaugh.com/blinkist-review/
My take home message is try make reading a habit. If reading is too demanding for you or if you just prefer to listen instead, audio-books and podcasts are a great way to go. Apps like Blinkist make it so easy today as they just provide you with an easily searchable library of audio-summaries to help you get a lot of value out of books in a record of time. If George W. Bush was able to free enough time to read 186 books in two years while serving as president of the United States, we can manage to read more than that one book a year, right?
The power of communicating openly and transparently
Last week, I realised how glad and lucky I am to have a team that communicates openly and transparently on a daily basis, as it proved to me how effective it can be.
Core values
A lot of companies have core values printed on paper somewhere in an office. Very few of them, however, are actually creating a company culture built around these core values. Writing them is one step, but applying them is the most difficult step and is therefore often neglected.
When we jumped on this Transformactive adventure almost a year ago, one of the first thing we worked on were the core values of Transformactive which are built around trust. Our first aim was to make sure we respected and followed these values daily. It took several months to define them all, and it took additional months to apply them, and one of the first which we defined was the ‘open and transparent communication’ core value.
When open communication helps to uncover a fear
Last week, we had some important meetings about matters that will have an impact on our long-term vision and we weren’t all aligned. That’s ok, that’s even good, because it leads to debate that enriches the discussion. However, debating was not working. Arguments were used that weren’t making sense, which doesn’t happen often in our team.
That’s when I decided that we had to dig further, and to change the discussion from the meeting’s topic to something broader: We shared our current (global or specific) impressions, feelings and eventual fears. I realised that there was indeed a fear, and some global misunderstanding that led – without any causal relation – to the misalignment on the meeting’s topic. Talking openly and transparently about these aspects helped us in managing the fear, and removing the misunderstandings.
If the team had not clearly communicated their feelings, the misunderstandings would have stayed and a sense of “unfairness” would have grown in the persons’ mind. If not handled well, it could have led to frustrations and therefore to a loss of motivation, efficiency and trust.
Communicate to understand someone else’s point of view
Everyone has his or her own glasses that he or she is using to look at and interpret the reality. However, without sharing the specifics of the glasses you are using, the reality can be interpreted completely differently by someone else. It is thus very important to dare to be open and transparent, even if we think that it could hurt someone, because at the end, if you do it constructively, the person will only respect you more.
My message for the week is to work on communication. That’s a very important aspect in every relation, professional or personal. Sometimes, communicating openly and transparently seems not the right thing to do, or just too difficult to do, but at the end, it’s for everyone’s best interest. The more difficult it is for you to communicate, the more the other person will appreciate your effort. That’s the power of communication.