Clean Your Grooves

This is a vinyl cleaning machine. A recent purchase. I am a very happy record collector, crate digger and music listener.

As we go through life, much like a vinyl record, we pick stuff up along the way. When we start out, our grooves are clear, we know where we are going, our song is true. But as the days, weeks and years progress we can find ourselves picking up dust and fingerprints. Other people’s priorities impinge on what we originally set out to do, we accrue ideas, roles and habits. And let’s face it, there is a LOT of dust in this social-media driven world. Plenty that gets in the way of us singing our true song. Plenty that distorts our music.

Serious vinyl collectors clean their records on a regular basis, whether they look like they need it or not, and I think this is a good practice.

How can we also get to what our undistorted music is? How can we focus on the things that matter and only those?

Firstly, do you know what is important to you? Have you spent some time considering exactly what that is? It might not be just one thing; after all, we do lead multifaceted lives. Then, in the medium term, what do you want to achieve with these priorities? Thinking about this can help guide you towards what you need to do daily to support your goals. You now have the tracks for your record.

The next task is to play those songs every day and not to let other noise overwhelm them. However, it’s inevitable that we will accumulate dust, so it’s important to clear the grooves from time to time. We need to check in with ourselves and review whether our priorities are still appropriate. Maybe we need to add a new track to our album. Is our method for reaching our goals still optimal? And have we picked up any dust along the way? If something is distorting your music, it’s time to clean it out.

In my re-focus, one of things I realised I needed to do was update my website, and that was an opportunity for a deep clean. What areas of work did I really want to do?  What do I enjoy? Where do I think I can add the greatest value to organisations? In that respect, my song has a lot more clarity and definition now. I wish you the same!

Hold Your Focus

On a recent trip to Japan I took this photograph in the grounds of Kyoto’s Eikan-do Temple. It’s a typical Japanese scene, considered, peaceful, tranquil. What you can’t see is that the actual scene was anything but tranquil. There were hundreds (probably thousands) of people in the gardens. I was shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other people taking photographs, squeezed together on a parallel bridge, being buffeted by passers-by. I waited as people walked between the trees in my camera’s viewfinder until I could get a shot where they weren’t so obvious. I worked hard to keep the focus of the image on what I wanted to portray.

With business communication we also need to cut out the extraneous information. Then the person on the receiving end gets the focused message we want them to have. They get the right picture.

I work with a lot of people on their presentations. When I review their slides we almost always decide to cut back the amount of information they are showing because it is not focused on making their point. Unnecessary information gets included because “It might be useful, you never know…”, or because “It’s always in presentations like this” or because “It was already on the slide when I copied it from the other presentation.” Can you hear my teeth grinding?!

If you want someone to support your idea, you need to give them the information necessary to make a decision or take action - and nothing else. Don’t make them work hard to pick out what’s relevant and what isn’t. Don’t distract them. Show them the picture you want them to see. Hold your focus.