First published 6 January 2020 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel opened our first episode of 2020 by reading a poem about a cookie thief. A woman at an airport buys a bag of cookies, and the man sitting next to her keeps helping himself. She fumes the whole time, then snatches the half he offers her when he breaks the last one in two. Once she's on the plane she opens her bag and finds her own cookies, untouched.
His point for the year was a simple one. Before you decide someone's being rude, think about what might be going on for them. Nigel owned up to getting wound up on the motorway when people won't do 70, and to expecting this podcast to be uploaded in eight minutes (I'll say no more).
I got onto energy. Walk into the office in a bad mood and someone else will be in one within ten minutes. Nigel brought up that video of a bloke on a train who can't stop laughing until the whole carriage joins in.
Then I read out something I'd written about DJing the main stage at a festival and thinking I wasn't good enough to be up there. When I'd put it on Facebook it got a sniffy comment about empty inspirational words. Nigel's answer was his 2% rule. Two per cent will think you're phenomenal and two per cent will think you're rubbish, and you're neither.
I said I'd rather get 5s and 1s than a pile of 3s. And Nigel told the story of speaking to the Academy for Chief Executives on the topic of you can't have perfection. Everyone marked him a 9. Not a single 10, because, as one bloke pointed out afterwards, he'd told them you can't have perfection.
The bits worth keeping
- Before you decide someone's rude, think about what's going on for them that day.
- Whatever mood you walk into the office with, people will pick it up within minutes.
- Ignore the best 2% and the worst 2% of feedback. Look at what everyone in the middle said.
- On a 1 to 5 form I'd rather get 5s and 1s. People in the middle are sitting on the fence.
- Reality is neither fantasy nor catastrophe. Life happens in the middle.
Sometimes things aren't always the way you think they are.
Nigel Risner
The energy we arrive with dictates a lot what happens around us.
Neil Martin
