Category Archives: Personal Improvement

I also use a neat trick I call “identical differences.” It involves taking two words that many people assume mean approximately the same thing and differentiating them strongly, so that the other person says, “We’ve never considered that. We need you.”

Some examples:

Teams/Committees: These are entirely different structures, with the former requiring everyone to “win or lose” and the latter providing for some to win and some to lose. You can’t engage in “team building” with a committee.

Mentor/Coach: The former is reactive and situational, the latter is proactive and comprehensive. I can mentor a consultant, but no one has created the role of a baseball mentor for the team.

Preventive/Contingent: The first reduces the likelihood of a cause, the second attempts to minimize the effects of a problem. A sprinkler system is contingent, and so is an insurance policy. The fire marshal is preventive.

Problem/Decision: A problem requires a deviation from experienced performance with an unknown cause, and sufficient concern about it. A decision is a choice among options. Two entirely different starting points.

Oral/Verbal: “Verbal” communication is the usual umbrella for these, but that embraces everything to do with words. “Verbal” doesn’t mean “oral,” and it includes writing. These are two separate skills requiring two separate forms of development.

Strategy/Planning: The former is a picture of the future to which you aspire, the latter is an extrapolation of the present. Hence, “strategic planning” is an oxymoron, and a focus on planning will kill strategy.

You get the idea. You want the buyer to stop in place and consider the fact that this is “fresh air” and a new perspective, and needs to be heard and applied.

© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.

Cognitive dissonance is a state where two conflicting ideas or experiences collide. Many people in consulting and related professional services are almost incapacitated by this phenomenon, because their frustration and stress are exponentially increased.

And I’m here to tell you why that is.

If you call yourself a “consultant” but are usually hired merely to complete a task for the client, you are not a consultant, you are a subcontractor or part-time employee. This is especially prevalent among “IT consultants.” If you are paid to write code or program some sequence simply because the client has no one around who can do it—and a thousand people like you can do it equally well and exactly the same way—you’re not a consultant. (And you’re subject to enormous price pressures, because you’re a commodity.)

Consequently, if you call yourself a consultant, but find that you can only charge a few dollars an hour, have to work at someone else’s beck and call, and have zero differentiation, you’re facing one heck of a set of conflicting ideas and experiences every waking hour. At the very least, that’s beyond depressing.

Consultants help improve the client’s condition by providing ideas, advice, intellectual property, best practices, proprietary approaches, unique behavior and other interventions which not only make them distinctly attractive, but draw people to them. Consultants are not another pair of hands. They are a new brain.

If you are hired by clients to teach courses the clients have already developed, you’re not a consultant. You are a contract trainer, simply providing help that their own training people (or lack of them) can’t handle. You are one of kibillions of people who could do that. But if you design the program, or bring unique intellectual property to it, or arrange for it to be conducted remotely, then you are a consultant, improving the client’s condition in your distinctive way.

If you contribute a chapter to a book, you are not a book author. If you create a work of 20 chapters contributed by other people you haven’t created a book, you’ve created a compilation. If you have four insurance products to sell in health, property, life, and disability coverage, you’re not an “insurance consultant,” you’re an insurance agent. We scoff at garbage collectors—who perform important work—who call themselves “sanitary engineers.” Why is that ludicrous, but a speaker with a single speech calling himself a “sales consultant” is not?

I found a teacher from nearby Warwick—on strike—in a coffee shop here once calling herself not a teacher, but a “Warwick educator.” Maybe that’s part of the problem.

I wrote an earlier piece here on the blog about not lying to me by first not lying to yourself. If you continue to call yourself one thing but act in a completely different fashion, the lie you try to maintain will cause you great stress, because the goal you seek can’t be found on the road you’re traveling.

Everyone in a bank is a vice president today. Yet most of them can’t even authorize a new set of checks, let alone find you a loan. You are not your fancy business card, no matter how many colors, photos, and cute sayings you print on it.

If you want to reduce the horrific, subliminal stress and agita caused by cognitive dissonance, change your behavior to match your objectives. You can’t call yourself a consultant and act like a hired hand without doing damage to your ego.

You don’t follow your dream by following all the people in front of you and lying to yourself that somehow you’re really different. Move out of the crowd and actually be different.

Try this: Print a business card with just your name and contact information. When someone asks, “Who are you with and what do you do?” tell them, “I’m with me, and I help you.”

© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.

• Failing to return a legitimate email request within a day. NO ONE is so busy that they can’t return email messages in a day, unless you are allowing all kinds of spam to intrude or are spending all your time on “social medial platforms.”

• Neglecting to establish a future time and date certain. “Let’s make it Tuesday at three, I’ll call you on your private line,” is not a hard language to learn, like Mandarin or Tagalog. Throwing away momentum with “Let’s talk again soon,” or “I’ll wait to hear from you” is simply slovenly.

• Dealing with people who are easy to see but can’t buy, and rationalizing why it’s okay to do that. Virtually no one in training or HR can approve a major project. At best, they have limited “event” budgets or are intermediaries. And they tend to be rude and obnoxious, which is why they’re in HR.

• Consistently making grammatical and punctuation mistakes that reveal the writer is an amateur. In modern printing, only one space is skipped between sentences, not two (which is a throwback to typewriter days). Commas and periods go within quotation marks at the end of the sentence, no exceptions. If you can’t learn to correct poor writing at your age, why should anyone expect you can consult well?

• Procrastination, especially with prospects. There is not reason in the world—no reason—why you can’t turn around a proposal after a meeting within 48 hours.

• A pecuniary mental set, that impels one to use mail instead of Fedex, a raspy old phone instead of a modern model, and to question whether it’s worth spending money to travel to see a legitimate buyer. No one ever made a million in revenue by cutting costs, and you can take THAT to the bank!

• Hanging out with blowhards and bloviators. The people giving the loudest, most inflexible, most complex advice are almost always people who aren’t successful but just claim to be. (Hint: Take a look at their clothing. The sign of a successful person is expensive, well-tailored casual clothes and accessories.)

• CFO: Creating False Overhead. Unless you are running a several million dollar practice, you don’t need a virtual assistant, advisory board, full-time bookkeeper, sales and marketing assistant, or general factotum. Having a staff doesn’t create a consulting practice. It creates a welfare state.

• Spending more than 30 minutes a day on social media sites. I don’t care about those people who claim they landed a $50,000 “deal” on Plexico or Faceup, and I care much less about the “marketing experts” whose source of income is, gee, telling you how to market on social media. (But what have they DONE?). If you’re selling to a corporate buyer you are not going to make a living doing so on Chainedin, but you will be able to spend a lot of time there avoiding things like networking at events, publishing in the trade press, and speaking at conferences.

• Being afraid to ask for repeat business, referrals, references, and testimonials. If you’re working with a true buyer and doing good work, and you’ve prepared that buyer, there’s no reason in the world not to ask for that person’s continuing good will. In our business, that good will is best expressed through referrals (ever send someone to your doctor or accountant?). If you don’t ask, you seldom get. (Or at least you miss out on a lot you should have received.)

• Not establishing a support system. Your spouse, significant other, extended family, close colleagues, friends, or whomever should be assembled into a support unit, so that you know when you’ve done well, you receive candid, solicited feedback when you could have done better, and you have people with whom you can commiserate. Otherwise, unsolicited (usually worthless) feedback will have far too great an influence on you.

• Carrying around too much of others’ baggage and not creating your own. Consultants often have strikingly low self-worth. You can’t live without baggage (we all need clothes and “stuff”) but it should be baggage you create with clothes that fit you today and stuff you can really use tomorrow. I’m weary of consultants lamenting, “Why should they listen to ME?” If you feel that way, then I don’t know why they should listen to you, because I’m getting tired of listening to you. If you don’t think you’re good and act that way, why would I ever be interested in hiring you? The first sale is to yourself. If you can’t make that one, you’re in the wrong business.

© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.