The power of speaking language of listeners

I often heard about the power of speaking the language of the listeners when I was a kid but I didn't really feel it. I remember the time that made me deeply feel that power when I won the heart of a Spanish lady by a smile and a word 'Si'.

My friend and I went to the enrollment office to register for my Masters in Spain some years ago. They rejected to help us register because we couldn't speak their language, Spanish. I then convinced the staff to let me talk with their manager. The manager also rejected to support us as we didn't speak Spanish. 

I smiled at her with the gratitude that at least she came out to talk to us and I said 'Si'  (meaning Yes) and nodded with everything she spoke.

'Come here, little girl'

She suddenly called me to come over to her. She then started speaking Spanish with me more and I said 'Si' even more. She then realised I only could say 'Si'. She laughed and then helped me and my friend then registered anyway.  She told it was just because of my smile and the Spanish word 'Si' that made her think I had a good attitude and could speak the same language - Spanish - as her. 

I went home and still smiled inside me, thanks to a smile and a word 'Si'. 

Speaking other's language, either their language or the way they speak can create powerful results. 

During my journey of learning about communication, I found 'SOLAR' is a powerful model to help us build rapport with the listeners by using non-verbal communication apart from verbal communication:

• Squarely face the person
• Open posture
• Lean towards the person
• Eye contact
• Relax

(Egan, 2002)

What are your tips for effective communication? 

Be VIRO

Have you seen this model VRIO?

It is a great business strategy tool to help company be competitive in the market. I see it can be applied in our daily life: be VRIO to be our best self.

***VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability and Organisation) in organisation***

According to VRIO, a firm's resource or capability must be valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable, to become a source of sustained competitive advantage (Barney, 1997; Grant, 2016; Henry, 2012). For example, a company named Sense Worldwide has open innovation based on co-creation as the key source of their sustained competitive advantage.

***VRIO in your daily life***

Values (identity) - 3 words to describe my values are:... 

Rare imitable skills - 3 unique skills are:...

Organisation (daily action) - 3 ways for me to develop my identity and skills everyday are:..

Finish the year 2017 strong to start an extraordinary year 2018

Free download 1 PAGE ACHIEVER - tool to increase x10 productivity and free conversation here

Finish the year 2017 strong in the next 28 days (if you are reading this post on 3rd Dec 2017 ^_^)  is the first step to gain the momentum to start an extraordinary year 2018. This post shares information covered in the live seminar on 3rd Dec 2018 that you can use to gear up for an extraordinary year 2018. Thanks to all speakers (Jen jenvuhuong.com; Allen  - allen.blackwell.gm@gmail.com  and Angela - afumpson@white-tiger.co.uk ) and amazing proactive audiences. 

***

We all have dreams and goals but we may not always feel taking action and omitting to our goals or dreams. Why don't we DO things to achieve what we want? The main reason resides in the UN-ALIGNMENT between what we want to achieve (conscious mind) and what drives our behaviours (subconscious mind). This means we all somehow have RESOURCES or can CULTIVATE resources to achieve what we want, we just need to work on how to align our CONSCIOUS and SUBCONSCIOUS mind.

***

PRINCIPLES (facts):

4 principles to collaborate with our mind (particularly to create the alignment between our conscious - which controls less than 10% of our behaviours  and subconscious mind - which controls more than 90% of our behaviours)

1. Interest: Our mind works the best with what we are interested 

2. Pain and pleasure: Our mind helps us to avoid pain and gain pleasure 

3. Images: Our mind works best with images 

4. Familiarity/Habits: Our mind acts upon what is familiar 

***

TOOLS/TECHNIQUES (you need to try to see which one is working the best for you):

1. Managing your state of mind with visualising techniques before entering an important event or making a decision or when you have negative feeling (for example, thinking about what do you feel thankful the most, step in that moment of feel them with all senses). This technique primes our SUBCONSCIOUS mind to positive grateful state. Our mind cannot focus on 2 different feelings at the same moment, either positive or negative. From that point, you can make a decision or take bolder action to create better results.

2. The power of perspectives: Looking at things in different perspectives (re-framing techniques) to take better action or change from negative to positive things. You can use 3 questions to re-frame most of any events:

+ How do I/you know that?

+ Redefine the concepts with different words (our mind works the best with certain words, you need to find what words work the best for you)

+ Think from the time aspect (how do you see the things differently with the past, present, future)?

3. Empower empowering beliefs: We need to acknowledge our eliminate our limiting beliefs but we also need to emphasis them and amplify them:

We can use 3 questions for strengthening one empowering belief:

+ What does it mean?

+ How do I know that?

+ What make me do that well or be that person?

4. To feel centered and content in the here and NOW:

You can use 3 principles for meditation:

+ Be comfortable 

+ Awareness and focus 

+ No attachment with outcomes 

5. Reflection to take bolder/better action

Reflection and celebration for any wins in 2017 to gain the momentum/pleasure that makes our brain understands that what is good so it drives us to keep it up. At the same time, we can reflect on what is not pleasure and how we can gain pleasure by improving on it. 

6. Plan 

Using tree diagram to identify for our yearly, monthly, weekly, daily action.

Schedule your free conversation and Free download 1 PAGE ACHIEVER - tool to increase your productivity x10 and sustain your habits here.

7. Sustain empowering habits

Reflection

I heard from a lot of my friends/clients especially ones who run their own businesses that they are overscheduled, overcommitted and overextended (and I used to feel that way and maybe some of you also feel it sometimes). It likes we are on a treadmill and couldn't stop running. Studies have given us evidence that REFLECTION can be a great tool for optimal brain functioning that leads to higher productivity level or sustain our productivity/performance.

We can do reflection after each important event, in the end of each day or in the weekend.

This week, let's spend some moments to get to the nature and do some reflection to gear up for the new week. THIS WEEK. EVERY WEEK.

Free Download Reflection form

How to pay attention to details

How to pay attention to details?
I heard from a lot of my clients and friends who shared with me 'I am not a detail-oriented person' and that negatively influenced their successes. 
I also used to tell myself 'I am not a detail-oriented person' but then I started teaching myself to improve on it (and it is still going on) after I noticed it tremendously negatively influenced on my personal and business life. 
The most recent result of not paying attention to details of mine was related to a brochure for my Empower You seminar on 3rd of Dec. I made a quite 'nice' graphic brochure (I think^^) with information of speakers, the theme of the seminar (plan for an extraordinary year 2018) and the address of the seminar. I then shared it on my social media with the line 'Exciting to the seminar with empowering audiences and speakers'. One of my friends cleverly commented 'Is it the one on 3rd Dec?' Wow, I realised there was no info about the date either on the brochure or the line. I then took down the brochure and edited it by adding the date to it. I thought everything would go well then.
It turned out even worst!
A member of my mastermind group yesterday looked at it and couldn't stop laughing 'Oh, it is 3rd Dec 2018, so far to go.' I also couldn't stop laughing because of my hilarious mistake 'Oh no, 'it is on 3rd Dec 2017, just one more week to go.' I added the date but with the wrong year (Who would plan for an extraordinary 2018 at the end of 2018^^).

You can see my terrible mistakes were due to not paying attention to details. However, it doesn't mean I use the categorised sentence 'I am not a detail-oriented person' as an excuse to not improve on it.  So do you. 
We may be not good at details. Nothing is wrong with it. But if we use it as an excuse to make the same mistakes over and over again, it is the time to wake up and admit and do something about it. With dedication and practice, we can improve on it. 
Remember, it is not about the 'details' but it is about what important to what you are doing. If something is important enough, no matter they are details or big picture, you want to improve on them, no excuses. 

So let's crack it together with 3 practices for 3 scenarios:
1. You don't have a lot of time to prepare or to do something. For example, you have to chat with your clients or email them as soon as possible. You only have minutes to do that. 
You can finish the answers or email then take a deep breath, going to the toilet, going for a walk 2 or 3 minutes then read it again. You can send to your phone or other devices or your own email first, imagine you as a reader, are you going to understand the answers or are you going to get benefits from that? You may realise some small mistakes that ruin the quality of your work then your values. It is like the food is great but is contained in a messy box, chances people don't even bother to try it and have some bad perception at the beginning about it.

2. Scenario 2: You have a longer time before sending or completing your work. You can change your state of mind with longer activity such as going for a run or swimming and coming back and read or check your work again.
You can also leave it rest for a day and later on coming back to read with a good state of mind and see are you understanding them?
The further step is to send to others for help to get feedback. That's what happen with this article where Sophie helps me to edit it. For sure it can be still improved, but for a certain amount of time, we try to do our best. Don't fall into the trap of perfectionist then you delay it longer. 

3. Think about doing your work as the last chance you do it. If it sounds negative to you, thinking about you in 5 years with much more reputation and success, are you going to be proud of it? Last but not least, thinking about the readers, their energy and their time, if they respect your time and energy, also respect others' time and energy, they may give up on you just because of your lazinesses in trying to pay attention to details.

So let's get back to the question of 'Does it matter to us?' not about we are now good at or not. We can work on making it better, maybe take a long time depending on each person, but we know discipline, we can do it. We also want to think from the readers' perspectives that if we were they, would we continue reading or listening?
If you have commitment to read this article till here, please share your thoughts to improve together.

How to make good decisions

Lack of the ability to make good decisions is the major reason of our procrastination as well as failure. Any decisions we make consciously or unconsciously determine the direction of our life.

We can learn to train our muscle of making good decisions: 

1. The sooner, the better

Although there are some decisions may take longer time than others, the sooner we make a decision, the better it is. For example, if we decide to move to other country to live for a while, it may take longer time than deciding to go to a meeting or not. No matter what, over analysing paralysing often leads to procrastination. Making quick definite decisions is the antidote for procrastination. Hence, we can refer to other following points to make decisions sooner.

2. Refer to our criteria

We can set a list of criteria for decision making to consult to.

The criteria are compatible with your values, interests, abilities, purpose, your best self (your future self in 5 years), people around you, or society.

3. Do good research and refer to good references

Lots of us get influenced by opinions that make us make bad decisions. We need to make sure we consult right people.

• We need to identify the objectives or outcome we want to achieve from making the decisions. We then can brainstorm and come up with several possible choices by gaining different perspectives, gathering as many facts and as much information we can to assess your options (people you trust, people who are successful)
• Refer to the good past experience if the situation is similar to the past situations where we made good decisions, if not we should avoid using similar patterns of the past.

4. Make a decision and stick to it

Sometimes the decisions make us feel fear because of the changes we need to make even though we know if we make them happen, the results would be good; we should make the decisions and stick to them.

Instead of wondering around and being worried, we should make the decisions sooner. 

Stop putting it off, make that decision and most importantly, stick to it.

Here's how to make networking support your goals

We may not deny the benefits of networking but it can be tricky if we only love the idea of networking instead of actually turning networking activities into results.

Here are 3 steps to turn networking into results:

1. Choose the right networking events 

You may think 'right' means people who have same interests or goals. However, it can be a network of people who have total different interests. 

• Networks of people having same interests as you create a safe comfortable environment for you to express yourself and share ideas because they have tolerance and maybe same frequency as you. That's great.
• Networks of people having different interests challenge you to accept different ways of thinking and perspectives. People may not have same level of interests in your interests compared to people in the above networks. Hence, it gives you the chance to get out of your comfort zones. However, making sure that these networks are networks of people who have growth service mindset and certain levels of success in life. These people could uplift you to the next level of frequency of success. 

For example, if you are a student who wants to improve your speaking skills. You may go to speaking club of students. It is great. However, you can challenge yourself to go to business meeting that you may learn from different successful business owners who may go a further step in life compared to you.

2. Setting intention before any networking events 

• What can you give to the networks (e.g., your black book of contacts, your passion)
• What are 3 outcomes you want to learn from the events 

3. Taking action 

Going to networking events is a great bold move if you are not a networking person yet. However, it is usefulness without any further action. 

• Record these people whom you meet in a database (e.g., excel file with name, email, phone, etc)
• Contact at least 3 people to go for a coffee or Skype call 
• Follow up, share ideas, add values and maintain relationships with people are matter to your goals 
• Find at least 1 person you think you can support and offer to support them to achieve their goals 

And yes, don't forget to bring the JOY to the networking events.

Nonstop love, live, give

Authentic power

This week I shared a story about my second oldest sister in a speaking event. After the event finished, some people came and asked me whether the story was true or not as it was interesting to them. I feel thankful to have my sister who has been my 'unlimited resources' of stories for my speeches. People love my sister's stories. She is brilliant. 

She does not read a lot of books. She does not travel a lot. However, she is the most authentic 'book' that I have read. She is my icon for the authentic power. Although having an accident that broke her one leg, she took it as the second chance to live fully with her authentic self. She always smiles. She always sees things with opportunities. She has a courage to do what she loves. She makes people around her happy. She gives unconditionally. She inspires my first book 'Nonstop loving, living, and giving'. 

Anyway today I am not sharing about my sister's stories but about the authentic power.  You may know about different benefits of having authentic power such as having deeper love for yourself and others or enhancing real courage. Society somehow conditions us that dilutes our authentic power.
However, we can unleash or free it through daily action:

• Expand your emotional awareness: Keep checking your emotions 

• Create conscious intentions: Always set intention for each day, each meeting and each event in life

• Make empowered choices: Be fully responsible for your choice. Make a choice based on what your soul truly wants

• Access the wisdom of your Intuition: Have you ever known that something was going to happen before it happened? This is your intuition bursting through your rational thinking. Learn to recognize and trust intuition by daily connecting with your purpose, your goal and take immediate action 

• Cultivate spiritual partnerships: Practice meditation, yoga or mindfulness. Go to the nature more often and keep your journal

To make good decisions

Lack of decisions is a major reason of our procrastination and bad outcomes. We can train our decision-making muscle.  

1. Decide to make a decision sooner

Although there are some decisions may take longer time than others, the sooner we make a decision, the better it is. For example, if we decide to move to other country to live for a while, it may take longer time than deciding to go to a meeting or not. No matter what, over analysing paralysing often leads to procrastination. Hence, we can refer to other following points to make decisions sooner.

2. Do research to make a good decision

• Identify the decision to be made as well as the objectives or outcome you want to achieve
• Brainstorm and come up with several possible choices by gaining different perspectives, gathering as many facts and as much information you can to assess your options (people you trust, people who are successful)
• If you don't have some different perspectives to make sure you have a good choice not in a hurry. Avoiding using the same patterns of your past to make a decision for your future if in the past you didn't make any good decisions

3. Determine if the options are compatible with your values, interests, abilities, purpose, and your best self (your future self in 5 years)

• Weigh the probabilities or possible outcomes. In other words, what's the worst that can happen? What will happen if I do A, B or C and can I live with the consequences
• Make a list of the pros and cons. Prioritize which considerations are very important to you, and which are less so. Sometimes when you match the pros against the cons you may find them dramatically lopsided.

Make a decision and stick to it

Leadership Identity

The most recent research consider leadership development as ‘identity development’ (first introduced by Strauss and Corbin, 1998).

Identity here refers to the processes of making meaning associated with particular situations or roles that influence the way individuals perceive themselves or others as leaders.

(Adopted from Komives et al., 2005)

The influences on identity development includes: adult influences, peer influences, meaningful involvement, and reflective learning (they change across the stages of the central category):

• • • adult influences,
      • (adults were particularly influential as role models)
      • Later, adults continued as models and became actively engaged mentors
      • In college, adults continued as models and mentors, but also become meaning-makers and even evolved into friends
    • peer influences,
      • same ages served as friends, old ages served as role models
    • meaningful involvement,
      • clarify personal values and interests
      • learn about self, and develop new skills
      • Team-based involvements such as sports, theater, and band taught students to do their personal best while concurrently supporting others.
    • and reflective learning
      • Structured opportunities for critical reflection to uncover their passions,integrity, and commitment to continual selfassessment and learning

5 ways to beat Procrastination

If you have a tendency to put things off, here are 5 things you can do to beat procrastination and enjoy a happier, more fulfilling life:

1. Make a decision

Just like right and left, up and down, hot and cold, there’s procrastinate and decide.

2. Identify the patterns

• On one sheet: elaborate on how you procrastinate—what you do, when you do it, etc.

One of the common symptom of it is you always say to yourself "you will do it better the next day"

• On the other sheet: What would be the exact opposite of that?”
• Read and rewrite what you wrote on the second sheet every day until you notice that you’re no longer procrastinating.

3. Break it down

Sometimes we procrastinate because we don’t know where to begin. Break large projects into milestones, and then into small, actionable steps

4. Stop trying to be perfect.

Perfectionism is an illusion that slows you down and prevents you from reaching your goal. Act quickly, doing the best you can.

5. Celebrate small wins and keep gratitude journey

When you accomplish something you want to put off, reward yourself. Take a coffee or tea break, go to a movie, or eat at a restaurant you’ve been wanting to check out. Do whatever will make you feel good about overcoming the procrastination.

You see, expressing gratitude isn’t only for things that have already happened. Being grateful for things that you want and expect to happen raises your vibration, and thereby helps you get the results you want.

LEAD

How many of you here who believe you are a leader? Why not?

“I never call myself as a leader. I just have that willingness to take responsibilities to be the best that I can be and help other people’

That’s the answer of a leader that I interviewed recently, she owned 3 companies and has been CEO of 4 international organisations; quite an achievement…I thought how many more companies you need to own and lead then you call yourself as a leader? Even 1000 companies …I would answer the same…but I would have that attitude to take responsibilities to make things happen…

…I winded out the clock, when I was a little kid, 5 years old, I always saw myself as a leader, at least of my life, no companies I owned at that time yet, no people I helped yet, actually just made noise and made my parents worried…but the one day changed my entire life, the day I decided to be a leader of my own life, after my mum punished me because I didn’t do my homework, I knew I had to take responsibility for my own life, be a leader of my life…

So my friends, it is not about whether you call yourself as a leader or not, I BELIEVE and I KNOW that everyone of us can be a leader to some extent, either to our own life, to our family, our circles of friends or to society. Even if you hate the title LEADER, don’t call yourself that but do the action as a leader does…leading to making a difference either in your life or people life...because it is not about the title, it is about what do you do as a leader instead of being led by social norm, negativity or things that do not help you to be the best you can be and contribute the best as you can.

…having that mindset…you are the one who take responsibility for your life, not anyone else…you take control of situations, not the situations….you take control of the news, not the news take control you…and never stop learning…LEAD

Every moment stories - Weekly podcast

How to avoid being overwhelmed

To avoid overwhelming

1. Stop saying YES to everyone, everyone, using the rule 80/20 (focusing on things that matter to your life)

2. Take control of your morning to take control of your day 

Using the rule 5W to identify the specific information of each project everyday and put them in your calendar- where, when, what, why, with whom you will work with

3. Block time between different important tasks

For example, take a break (e.g., nap, go for a walk) between writing an email and meeting someone 

4. Reflection after each day and after each week

For example: spend 30 minutes everyday to evaluate your day and plan your day before going to sleep 

Spend 30 minutes every weekend to plan the next week

And don't forget to include what do you feel thankful for.

Nonstop love live give

FREE you

Have ever felt trapped because of your work, because of your relationship or because of your health condition?

If you have, do you want to FREE yourself from that?

It is just the state of your mind so you can change it. To change the state of mind, you need to change your thoughts.

Following the following steps:

1. Write down 3 common disempowering thoughts that you have experienced during the last wee

2. Identify the patterns of that, the stories around the thoughts

3. Change the stories to re-direct the thoughts to make it empowering

4. Take action to reinforce the thoughts

5. Mediation, yoga, gratitude, reflection

The MAP

Each of us has many maps in our hea, which can be divided into two main categories:

• maps of the way things are or realities
• maps of the way things should be or values

We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy, we's usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.

And our attitudes and behaviours grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act.

Example: same thing, diffrent views; the picture of the old and young lady

This perception demonstration also shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people. As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we begin to realise that others see them differently from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view.

Each os us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. Wee see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them. But, as the demonstration shows, sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.

This does not mean that there are no facts. In the demonstration, two individuals who initially now both looking at the same identical facts, black lines and white spaces - they would both ACK these as facts.

Lanmark book: The structure of science revolutions

How to sustain self-discipline

Rule 1: Associate discipline with positive emotions because it helps you to better your life (e.g., if you want to lose weight, you want to discipline eating green, associate it with your image of being fit and the feeling of feeling energetic)

Associate discipline with fun by giving yourself a reward once a week for your discipline achievement (e.g., if you have eaten fast food and want to go green, you can discipline to eat green 6 days and allow yourself to eat a small amount of fast food once a week if you like).

Rule 2: Set up reminders (e.g., your phone alarms, stickers, mail) to remind yourself about sustaining the habits or having accountable partners (e.g., running partners).

Create the environment for your habits by removing temptations (e.g., remove all unhealthy food and replace with healthy food).

Rule 3: Schedule and have break between different projects during the day to refocus to re-energize and refresh your brain.

Rule 4: Allow yourself to move on by thinking there is a bad moment; there will be a great moment so you just change your focus to the empowering side of the situation. Reward yourself to make your brain understand what is good, what is bad; call your friends go out for a chat, go for a walk, buy some books you like.

The gap from HERE to THERE

How to get from HERE to THERE?

How to close the GAP? 

1. Make the THERE appealing (Goal) 

2. Let go the HERE by observing and learning (Action)

3. Dedication and persitention

How to stop worrying and start doing

You have a dream, a goal, or a desire that you really want to achieve but you often keep thinking but not taking action yet.

4 ideas for you to start taking action:

(1) Shift your focus from you to service

Stop focusing on what do you feel because of doing it, start focusing on how can you serve people better.

If you are a writer, stop focusing on people will judge you, start focusing on somebody will get inspired by reading your message.

(2) Clarify your mission and create an action plan

If you have a desire, you want to make it clear and explicit. You want to travel to your goal your desire with your mind, work backward to the current now. Identify what do you want to do monthly, weekly, daily to achieve the goal

(3) Daily action/habits to gain momentum

You want to take daily action to gain the momentum, complete at least 3 things to move closer to your goal.

If you want to be a writer, writing, meeting your writing group, reading would be 3 things to move closer to your goal

(4) Accountability

Have a group of people who work toward the same goal. Keep accountability with them.

How to wake up early

You know that morning routine helps you increase your productivity, but you just have difficult to wake up early or wake up on the time you want to.

You want to make a decision that you really want to change it and there are 4 tips for you to get it done:

1. Stories

Tell yourself empowering stories to wake up in the morning to make your brain excited about it.

For example, I will wake up tomorrow and I will go for a walk and feel energetic for the whole day.

2. Trigger

You can use music to trigger you. And you also can try to write a card for yourself in the morning and put it next to your pillow that when you wake up, you read them that make you feel excited.

3. Cost

What are the costs of waking up late (feel disappointed, behind the schedule, reduce productivity, reduce performance, etc)

4. 1 Must

Just tell yourself one thing, just one simple thing that you MUST do.

When you do that one simple thing, that one thing, you gain the momentum for the whole day.

Podcast: www.podcastgarden.com/podcast/jenvuhuong