Writing S-l-o-w-l-y: Tracking Your Train of Thought

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your decision making process. Reading time: 4:24

Of course you can text and tweet with the best of them. You have the fastest thumbs on executive row and you relish every opportunity to prove your digital dexterity -at your fingertips and in cyberspace. Whoa! Hold on there Thumb Dumb.

How sweet would your tweets be if you could use only one thumb?

What if you then you had to stop every five keystrokes?

What if you then had to take a two second break-before continuing your tweet -five strokes on, two seconds off? No way you say.

Now let’s up the ante. What if you had to write a status report -or even a book- with that same texting limitation -one thumb, 3 key strokes on 2 seconds off? No way, you say.

Hold On There Thumb Dumb

Yet slowing down your tweets and text just might speed up your transition to the executive suite . After all, tweets and texts are anathema to the most effective leadership thinking. At least if you consider the writing process our forefathers used to write the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. With a quill pen. An ink well. And the forced intermittency to dip one in the other. S-L-O-W-L-Y.

How would your leadership decision-making change if you were forced to tweet and text more slowly? Continue reading “Writing S-l-o-w-l-y: Tracking Your Train of Thought”

Sound Off With Your Personal Sounding Board

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to problem solve more clearly. Reading time: 3:28.

Tim the Tool Man is troubled again. The star of the 1990’s television sitcom — Home Improvement-— wanders out into his backyard, alone. He needs help thinking through a problem. And somehow, Wilson — his next door neighbor -is always there. Wilson is heard more than seen. His face is always partially hidden by a fence or a camera angle, giving him even more credence in his auditory role as Tim’s Sounding Board.

Wilson, always hidden by the fence, serving as the sounding board for Tim the Tool Man
Wilson is heard but not seen

And no wonder. Every leader needs his or her Wilson.

Every leader needs a sounding board, someONE to bounce ideas off.
SomeONE to weigh options with.
SomeOne to validate reality with.
And someONE to creatively solve problems, issues, concerns or conflicts with.

To foster those Wilsons in their lives-those sounding boards — every effective leader I know has honed their own personal thinking place away from the office where friendships evolve into sounding boards, whether from a regular tee time with a golfing partner or from a regular evening saunter in your own backyard.

How do you develop your own Wilson, your own sounding board? Try booking One friend at a time rather than Facebooking a lot of friends all the time.

Book ONE Friend Instead of Facebooking Many Friends

Booking that One friend is vital, the kind of friend developed through heart-felt listening to and learning from each other, the kind of friend that comes to know you better than you know yourself, the kind of friend that can tell Tim Taylor — a.k.a. Tim the Tool Man -that his name (Tim Taylor) is an anagram for “Morality.” Who knew? Wilson knew. After all, sounding boards like Wilson access and assess (sound) information more comprehensively and therefore help a leader better project their (sound) thinking . Continue reading “Sound Off With Your Personal Sounding Board”