E10 – Learn How to Build Confidence and Re-Write That Post-It Note on Your Head

You’ve spent months preparing for that date with destiny. The presentation that will make or break your career. You know you are ready, yet somewhere deep inside there’s a voice that says you’re not good enough. You don’t belong. In short, there’s a metaphoric post-it note on your head saying, ‘FAIL’. You need to learn how to build confidence and change that voice.

A man with great facial hair, laying back on his desk… smiling, a post-it not on his head: ‘Be happy :)’

Consider, for a moment, how that impacts upon your approach, your tone, your body language and your confidence.

Listen to our latest podcast to learn how to build confidence by using the ‘word-on-head’ influencing technique. Take back control, write your own metaphorical forehead post-it notes, and change that voice to something more positive. Change the script to ‘SUCCESS’.

Read the How to Build Confidence Podcast Transcript:

“I’d like to share a sticky story with you about putting a Post-it note on your head, on your forehead. My name is Darren and you’re at the home of Sticky Learning MBM, Making Business Matter, Trainers to the UK Grocery Industry. I used to work for one of the top four supermarkets in the head office. Worked there for many years, thoroughly enjoyed it. I had started as a deputy assistant cottage cheese buyer. I have reached the lofty heights of buying cottage cheese, so that was my first job. That gave me a good understanding of buying off supermarkets. I guess I was always destined to go into that role because my father worked there for 40 years. Also, my brother worked there, my uncle, it was almost the family business.”

The Big Job

“I travelled four hours a day on the train, commute, and Tube and walk. Travelling from where we lived in Oxford into Stanford Street, London. As I’ve progressed through my career, various buying jobs, there was the big job that everyone looked for, the one just below the senior manager who reports to the director and they called it C6. C6 was, I guess in nowadays terms, it was a senior buyer or trading manager or a category manager. They were the sort of people who would look after the whole of fruit and you could be responsible for buying a billion pounds worth in a team of maybe 12 or more.”

“I was a C5, I was looking to get my promotion and for this promotion, what the com

You've spent months preparing for that date with destiny. The presentation that will make or break your career. You know you are ready, yet somewhere deep inside there's a voice that says you're not good enough. You don't belong. In short, there's a metaphoric post-it note on your head saying, 'FAIL'. You need to learn how to build confidence and change that voice.

E9 - Procrastinating, Frozen Peas, and the Snowball

Do you have a looming deadline that still seems a long way off?  Do you occupy yourself with 'clearing the decks', convincing yourself that you're being productive anyway? After all, you still have plenty of time... Yet you still feel the stress of it weighing on you. Do your health a favour, do your best work and stop procrastinating!

[caption id="attachment_31798" align="aligncenter" width="930"] A man in extreme winter conditions, wrapped up in a coat, throwing a snowball.[/caption]

Perhaps you tell yourself that the looming deadline isn't urgent or important enough to make a start. You simply put it off.

In fact, you know that you have too much time. If you got a jump on the deadline and made an early start on that presentation you will undoubtedly tinker with it until the last minute, wasting more time!  Listen to our podcast to learn some useful tips to help you stop procrastinating and start learning to trust yourself.

Read the Stop Procrastinating Podcast Transcript:

"I'd like to share with you a sticky story about being so stressed on the topic of frozen peas. You're at the home of Sticky Learning, MBM making business matter. I'm Darren Smith and we're trainers to the U.K. grocery industry. I worked in the corporate world for many years at the head office of Sainsbury's, I was the frozen veg buyer and one of the things that the buyers were asked to do at that time was to present as a subject matter expert on a topic. And it was a bit about presentation skills, a bit about raising your profile in front of senior people and a bit about sharing what you knew about your category. And that was fine."

The Presentation

"So the schedule was published, there were about three, 400 buyers and a few of us got chose to go first. That's great. And the schedule said that in six weeks time I was due to speak about my category or one of the frozen peas. I did what most people do. I put it off, I don't know anyone who doesn't put off the stuff that they just don't like doing or they consider isn't urgent and important. That's if they've gone through that conscious decision-making process to arrive at is this urgent and important Eisenhower's Boston Matrix well worth looking up. I hadn't done that."

"Subconsciously. I think I'd gone, Hmm, that's not as hard as this stuff I'm doing right now at work. I need to negotiate prices, have supplier meetings and so on and so on. Manage the category that can wait and I did what most people did and put it out of my mind."

Days Go By

"Coming up to the six weeks and a few days before the thoughts wore of, Oh, I must do that presentation. I really must get that done and my days in the run-up to that went like this. I'd arrive in the office, let's say 7:30, 8 AM. Grab a cup of tea, coffee and then go to my desk and I just have a quick look at my inbox. I'm looking through my inbox. Someone would come over that just joined. Hello. Hello. Good morning and I was still looking through my inbox, just getting a sense of what's going on. But then I'd look up probably an hour and a half later. I had a couple of people at my desk and answer their queries. I've done a lot of emails or so thought I had time. And then into my half, nine, 10 o'clock meeting."

Running Around Like a Headless Chicken

"That would last an hour and a

Do you have a looming deadline that's still some way off? You know that if you got a jump on it and made an early start on that presentation you will undoubtedly tinker with it until the last minute, wasting more time!  Listen to our podcast to learn some useful tips to help you stop procrastinating and start learning to trust yourself.

You've spent months preparing for that date with destiny. The presentation that will make or break your career. You know you are ready, yet somewhere deep inside there's a voice that says you're not good enough. You don't belong. In short, there's a metaphoric post-it note on your head saying, 'FAIL'. You need to learn how to build confidence and change that voice.

Do you have a looming deadline that's still some way off? You know that if you got a jump on it and made an early start on that presentation you will undoubtedly tinker with it until the last minute, wasting more time!  Listen to our podcast to learn some useful tips to help you stop procrastinating and start learning to trust yourself.

E8 – Email Writing Is Not like DIY! We Simply Can’t Be Bad at It

Unfortunately, email writing isn’t like DIY. We have to be good at it. We can’t put it off or avoid it altogether. Also, we can’t just pay someone with better tools and skills to do it for us.

Each person receives about 87 of them a day. Emails are, therefore, a huge part of our working lives. We spend hours each day trawling through our inboxes.  They are an essential tool. Yet, we were never really trained on how to use them. Listen to our latest podcast to learn some practical email writing tips to help you improve your email effectiveness.

Read the Transcript Below:

“I’d like to tell you a sticky story about a house alarm and how I think that relates to your emails. My name is Darren Smith and you’re at the home of sticky learning. MBM, Making Business Matter trainers to the UK grocery industry. My name is Darren Smith. I worked in corporate for a very long time for one of the big supermarkets and then about 16 years ago I set up founded MBM, we do soft skills training.”

“Many years ago we lived in a house when we were a young family and we decided that we needed a house alarm. There weren’t any particular burglaries in the area, but we wanted to be safe so we didn’t get a guy in or we didn’t get one professionally fitted. I thought I’m in my early thirties I can do this. I should be able to do it yet, I know that my DIY skills are poor.”

The Alarm..

“Anyway, we move on. We bought a Yale alarm. Imagine a great big box turning up a few days later. Rip the lid off. It’s about the size of the kitchen table and it’s full of this house alarm from PIR detectors to the great big yellow box that goes on the front of the house that says Yale, hopefully, to deter any would-be burglars.”

“So I get up one Saturday morning and I know in the back of my mind that DIY is not my thing, but I’m quite determined and I’m motivated to sort this because I think I can. So I spend too long figuring out how to put this alarm together and getting it to work with the house. And you can imagine there’s me with a step ladder, a ladder, a drill, screws. It’s awful. The drill is probably 10, 15 years old. I still got it now.”

“The drill bits are broken, the screwdrivers are blunt. They are not the tools of a professional work person. So I’m there outside the house and the step ladder and the ladder won’t reach high enough to put this box where I wanted it to go at the top of the wall. But I’ve got one foot on the top of the ladder and I’m sort of dangling, hanging onto the window seal with my left hand and in my right hand I̵

Emails are an essential tool. Yet, we were never really trained how to use them. Listen to our latest podcast to learn some practical email writing tips to help you improve your email effectiveness.

Emails are an essential tool. Yet, we were never really trained how to use them. Listen to our latest podcast to learn some practical email writing tips to help you improve your email effectiveness.

E7 – You Do Your Best Work Under Pressure? You’re a Tight Deadline Junkie

Do you leave everything to the last minute? Do you find yourself burning the midnight oil time after and time to meet deadlines? Yet, somehow, every time you pull of a masterstroke of genius and deliver. You deliver, not just on time, but you deliver your best work. You might just be one of the many tight deadline junkies. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Read the Tight Deadline Podcast Transcript:

“Deadlines are a fundamental part of working in business. Are you one of those people like a baseball player? Running for the home run, and you slide in on the last base just as the umpire says, “Yep, you’re home”? My name is Darren and you’re at the home of Sticky Learning MBM, trainers to the UK grocery industry, and experts in making learning stick.”

“Today I’d like to talk to you about tight deadlines. A lot of people are one of those baseball players that just slide in and get the home run, and you might say, “What’s wrong with that?” I’d say nothing, except the stress that it causes. Then people will say to me, “Ah, but I do my best work under pressure”. I’d say to them, “Research disagrees”. In fact, when we’re stressed scientists have proved that our IQ drops to that of a teenager. So when the adrenaline is running, when the cortisol is going around our body, what’s happening is we’re getting ready for fight or flight for the sabre-toothed tiger, but of course, they don’t exist anymore.”

Leaving Things to the Last Minute

What happens at work is when we really need to be our best, make our best decisions, what’s happening in our IQ has dropped. So, you think that you do your best work under pressure, it’s not true. What happens is you get very stressed under pressure and you seem to get a lot done, but let’s look at that a whole different way. A lot of people slide in, getting their deadlines done just on time. A bit like when they go for a train and they’re almost proud to jump on the train having run across the platform as the doors are bleeping. “I made it,” and yes you did, but let’s look at the stress that that caused, and was it really worth it?

“There is an alternative, and it’s not going to be an alternative that you’ll want to embrace, because part of you really likes to the rollercoaster ride of that adrenaline rush. Here’s my challenge. You’ve got a manager who is erratic, disorganized. Often sliding in at last base just to get the deadlines done. Whilst that’s quite exciting, is that really the person that you would want to work for? Would you prefer someone that’s more measured? That knows what they’re trying to achieve? Let’s call it st