"I learn teaching from teachers. I learn golf from golfers. I learn winning from coaches." — Harvey Penick

What you get from coaching is largely up to you.  Whether it’s a teacher, a mentor, a sports coach, or a coach at work, making the most of a coach is a skill that you get better at with practice.  If you can master your ability to leverage the coaches in your life, you can accelerate your success, drop bad habits like a hot potato, grow new skills and abilities, and make the most of what you’ve got.

Make the Most of Your Coach
I’ve been lucky to have some incredible mentors and coaches from wrestling coaches that taught me to "never give up" and "don’t be a mental midget" to Microsoft executives who taught me to see the chessboard from other angles.  I made the most of my coaches by staying curious, testing their suggestions, listening to their feedback, using them as as sounding board, communicating openly and honestly, and working through the tough stuff.  Nobody said change is easy, but when change helps unleash your best, it’s worth it.

Coaches come in all varieties and different styles.  What do Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, and Rocky’s coach all have in common?  They set the stage for growth by asking the tough questions, challenging, motivating, and coaching where it counts, and providing timely, relevant, and actionable feedback.  What did Luke, Danielson, and Rocky all have in common?  They all worked hard at changing themselves and they made the most of their coaches.

10 Ways to Make the Most of Your Coach
Here are 10 ways that you can make the most of your coach:

1. Decide to make the most of your coach.  Your attitude goes a long way in enabling or limiting what you get from your coach.  There’s an old saying that when the student is ready, the master appears.  Making the most of your coach means starts with deciding to make the most of them.  You can start by asking, "What do I want to accomplish?" and "How do I make the most of their experience, insight, or feedback?"
2. You change yourself.  Your coach doesn’t change you.  Your coach is not a crutch — they’re a potential change agent, but change is up to you.  There’s an old saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink."  An effective coach will ask you questions and provide feedback that help lead you to your ah-ha moments, but it’s ultimately you’re the one who changes you.  If you want fast results, remember that it’s faster to change yourself, than change others.
3. Expect change to feel awkward or even hurt a bit.  It’s like working out for the first time and that’s what growth feels like. Work through your humps and know that practice will get easier over time.  What’s important is that you don’t get hung up on how it feels awkward, and instead, focus on doing the things you know you need to do, to get the results you want to achieve.
4. Accountability is still with the people with the job.  The coach can help you navigate risks and add another head to your problems, but they aren’t the worker bee.
5. A coach doesn’t change who makes the decisions.  A coach is an influencer. You still own your decisions. One way to think of this is a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.)  Your coach is Consulted or Informed.  On a team, it’s the team members who are still accountable for the work getting done and responsible for doing it.
6. Feedback is a gift.  Treat it as such.  You can choose what to do with it.  An effective coach holds a mirror to you or to the team.  You have basically three ways to respond: 1) You can just take it all in at face value without any filters, 2) You can put it into context and consider it, or 3) You can ignore it.  If you’re not getting the feedback you need, ask for it.  If it’s not specific enough, then clarify.  For example, I like feedback to be specific actions I can take or thoughts I can think for specific events.  This helps me immediately act on it and start testing it out.
7. People down from your command chain are your responsibility. If you’re in a management role or leadership position, you have to set the stage for effective coaching.  If your coach recommends you change X, but your reports like X, then you have to look at all their feedback but you have to support coaching decisions at your higher level and tell your reports to ‘go with it’ and have objective evaluation later.  The reverse is also true — you may feel pushback, but you should voice it and not “hide” behind your reports’ opinions.
8. Don’t let style issues get in the way.   Style issues are things like communication approaches.  For example, some people like direct communication, while others might prefer more tact.  Some people are more audio while others are more visual.  Some people prefer face-to-face, while others prefer email.  The best way to work past these is to focus on the goals, call out style differences, and find a way to communicate that works for everyone involved.  Being flexible in your style can help you avoid limiting yourself, and finding ways to bridge styles can exponentially improve communication.
9. Don’t let your coach set you outside your values.  Style differences are one thing, but your personal and organizational values serve as effective boundaries.  Give your coach feedback if you think they are proposing things out of line.  Find out what they want to achieve with the recommendation that you don’t like and see if you can design a different path together that is closer to your beliefs.
10. Stay focused on goals.  It’s easy to get lost along the way or focus on improvement for the sake of improvement.  I find it’s more compelling to have a goal in mind that you can test your results against and checkpoint progress along the way.  This helps with motivation and it helps with more actionable feedback.  It also helps you ask your coach more specific questions, which keeps them engaged in the process.  While you stay focused on results, enjoy the process along the way.  The process is your growth and goals are simply a way to pick a path and measure.

Weekly Things to Do
Here are some weekly things to do to make the most of your coach:

• Ask for feedback  and give feedback.  Make getting feedback a habit.  Give your coach feedback on their feedback to help them improve their effectiveness with you.
• Introspect about reactions.   Introspection is simply looking inward and reflecting on your conscious inner thoughts.  It’s thinking about your thinking.  This is where you can catch yourself in patterns that you want to change, or where you can find and challenge your resistance.  Remember that what you resists persists, and getting a better look at where you’re blocked can help you get unstuck.
• Use your coach as “a fly on the wall.” Have your coach observe you in action.  For example, take your coach to meetings as a “fly on the wall” and ask them for feedback and opinions afterwards.
• Suspend your disbelief.  Let your coach design plays and try them out; and have a way of coming back and evaluating how well it worked.
• Don’t let your insecurities thrive.  Keep in mind that critique is a tool for growth.  Don’t let your insecurities or concerns brew under the surface.
• Be open and transparent.  The more you share, the more your coach can help.  Be transparent about fears, hopes, etc. so that your coach can help you make the best of them.

Make the most of your teachable moments.  Whether you have a formal coach or not, coaches and mentors are all around you everyday.  Learn all you can, from everyone you can, and make the most of what you’ve got.

Many thanks to Eduardo Jezierski for sharing his insights, perspective, and lessons learned with me for using coaches effectively.

"Life is a big canvas, throw all the paint on it you can." — Danny Kaye

The Web is a fountain of knowledge, especially if you know where to drink from.  This post is a quick tour of some of the main sites I use that make me think.

Top 10 Inspirational Sites

Here are 10 sites that make me think and inspire new ideas:

1. ChangeThis – ChangeThis is focused on spreading important ideas and changing minds. (  ChangeThis | RSS)
2. Charlie Rose – Charlie Rose engages America’s best thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, business leaders, scientists and other newsmakers in one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions.  (Charlie Rose | RSS )
3. Cincom’s Expert Access – Expert Access partners with some truly brilliant and forward-thinking business leaders to participate in its “Ask the Expert” program, including Al Ries, Bo Burlingham, Steven Pressfield, Sam Horn, Skip Press, and Stephanie Palmer. (Cincom Expert Access | RSS)
4. Freakonomics – Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, keep the conversation going from their best-selling book that explore the hidden side of everything. Freakomoics applies economic theory to diverse subjects not usually covered by "traditional" economists. (Freaknomoics | RSS)
5. Gates Notes – Gates Notes is where Bill Gates shares his thoughts, his learning and his travels. (Gates Notes | RSS )
6. MIT Open Courseware – Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (MIT Open Courseware | RSS )
7. NPR (Tell Me More) – The NPR talk show Tell Me More brings fresh voices and perspectives to public radio from the opinions of global newsmakers to listeners’ personal experiences of life-changing travel…the wisdom of renowned thinkers, activists and spiritual leaders…and intimate dispatches of daily life around the world from NPR News correspondents on the ground. ( NPR (Tell Me More) | RSS )
8. PBS (Idea Lab) – Idea Lab is a group weblog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age. Each author won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The authors will use Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the new-media community online. ( PBS (Idea Lab) | RSS )
9. Psychology Today – Commentary, Research and News that cover all aspects of Human Behavior, from the workings of the brain, to relationships and the larger cultural forces that influence our decisions( Psychology Today | RSS http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.rss
10. Ted Talks – TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.  Their mission is spreading ideas.  They believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world, so they built a clearinghouse for free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. (Ted Talks | RSS )

Sample Inspirational Ted Talks

Here is a quick sampling of some of the interesting talks and life changing ideas:

• Bill Gates on Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Education (Video) -  Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world’s biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy.
• Charlie Rose Brain Series Episode 1 (Video) – The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain: consciousness, free will, perception, cognition, emotion and memory with a roundtable of brain researchers.
• Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ (Video)  -  To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world’s "Blue Zones," communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.

What are your favorite sources of insight and inspiration on the Web?

My Related Posts

• 25 Inspirational Movies
• Inspirational Quotes
• Motivation Quotes

I collect success.  From stories of heroes to gems of insight, I gather and organize principles, patterns, and practices for success.  It’s like a living playbook for life with short-cuts, success patterns, and proven practices.  It supplies me with insight and action that I can use for just about every situation.  Whether it’s motivation or strategies or tactics, it’s my unfair advantage and how I get the edge in life.  It’s truly how I “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Keys to an Effective Success KB
Here are some of the keys to success when it comes to building a personal “Success KB”:

• Think in Nuggets.  Think in terms of “nuggets” or “gems of insight.”   Collect a nugget at a time and chunk things down.
• Keep it Scannable. Think in terms of “tickler lists of insight.”  Keep ti scannable and write in one-liners where you can.  Make it easy to quickly flip, sort, or search through your KB.
• Factor reference from Action.  If you have a bunch of blah, blah, blah, simply add three take aways or key actionable insight to the top.   Ideally, keep your actionable methods and techniques, separate from good concepts and stories, which are really reference information.  This will help you turn insight into action.
• Keep it Simple. This is a must.  It’s crucial to have a simple way to store and retrieve things.   Otherwise, the little bit of friction adds up and it dies a slow death of a 1000 paper cuts.

I happen to use Evernote for my KB now, but I’ve also used pen and paper, Wikis, text files on my hard drive … etc.   Whatever you use, simply make sure that it works for you and it’s simple.

What Goes Into a Personal Success KB
I think the real key to building an effective “Success KB” is knowing what to put into it.  Here are some of the things I collect:

1. Ah-Has – jot down the little ah-has you find or when you connect the dots.  For example, one of my ah-has I wrote down is “legacy is a by-product of giving your best where you have your best to give.”
2. Book Nuggets – summarize the best insights from the best books.  For example, here’s my book nugget Argue Your Way to Optimism from the book, Learned Optimism.
3. Lessons Learned – make a tickler list of your key lessons from mentors or experiences.  You can even draw from movies.  For example, here are my Lessons Learned from Peaceful Warrior.
4. Mental Models – write down lenses you can use for looking at life.  For example, add the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to your tool-belt to help you understand yourself and others or the Johari Window to help you know and share yourself more effectively.
5. Patterns – note down patterns you see, including your own success patterns, and name them so you can remember them.
6. People – collect stories of success and lessons learned.  One way is to summarize lessons learned from your heroes.  For example, here is my lessons learned from Stephen Covey.
7. Principles – note down timeless principles.  For example, Covey provides a nice set of principles to start your collection with.
8. Questions – write down the best questions you find help you in any situation.  For example, some of my favorite questions are, “Is it working?” … “Who else shares this problem that I can learn from?” … “What do you need to be successful?” … “What do you want to experience?” … “What’s my next best move?” … “How can I use this?”  As you can see, questions are my game changer.
9. Quotes – write down words of wisdom and the best quotes you hear from friends, books, people, movies, songs … etc.  The right words said the right way can change your life.   For example, here are some of my quotes collections.
10. Success Stories — summarize success stories.  You come across success stories everyday, whether they are your own, or on the news, or somebody you know.
11. Techniques – write down techniques, ways or methods for doing things.   This is your colleciton of “know-how.”

Ultimately you end up with a consolidated set of distinctions and reference examples to draw from.  The sum is way more than the parts.

Start Small
I started small.  A few years back, I got into the habit of dumping quick little insights.  If I took training, I would make sure I had three key take aways.  When I met with my mentors, I got into the habit of taking brief notes.  If I read a book, I summarized the most important, actionable things.  If I heard a great quote, I jotted it down.  If I saw a movie, I walked away with three key take aways.  Next thing you know, turning insight into action became second-nature.

Remember that the goal isn’t to take the place of experience.  It’s to supplement it and help you stack the deck in your favor.  Often what you don’t know can hurt you, and in many scenarios, there is no need to start from scratch.

Photo by totalAldo.

“The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it.” – Danniel Tammet

One of the most important skills I mastered early on at Microsoft, is information management.  My ability to organize information directly impacts my success.  For me, information management is the key to daily productivity from researching to learning faster to keeping my email inbox empty.

When I first joined Microsoft, I found myself spending four or more hours on administration and email.  Then one day I decided … enough is enough.  From that point on, I refused to spend more than 30 minutes a day between email and administration overhead.  That day marked the start of my pursuit to find the best ways to handle and organize information.  While my motivation helped, it’s actually finding and creating effective techniques that really made the difference.

Here are ten of my favorite ways to manage information:

1. Factor reference from action.   Carve out action items, To Dos, and tasks from your incoming streams of information.  if it’s not an action, it’s reference.  I first learned this practice when I was dealing with information overload as a support engineer.  I ended up cementing the idea while working on our Microsoft Knowledge Base.  The Knowledge Base is a vast collection of information, where each article tends to be optimized around either action or reference.
2. Create lists.  Make a new To Do list each day and use it to organize your key action items for the day.  Create checklists for your common routines.
3. Create collections.  Put things into collections or think in terms of collections.  Consolidate your notes into a single collection that you access quickly, such as in a personal notebook, a Word document or etc.  Consolidate your thoughts or ideas into a single collection.  Consolidate reference examples of your heroes or stories you can use for inspiration.  Consolidate your “ah-has” into a single collection.  Note that by single collection, I don’t mean you have it all in a single document, although you can.  Instead, I’m thinking of collections of items, much like a photo album music collection.  By stashing things of a similar type, such as “idea” or “note” … etc., you can determine the best way to arrange that collection.  Maybe it’s a simple A -Z list or maybe you arrange it by time.  For example, when I keep a journal of my insights, and each time I get an “ah ha”, I write it down under the current date.  This way I can easily flip back through days and see my insights in chronological order.  While I could arrange them A – Z, I like having my most recent ideas or inspirations bubbled to the top, since chances are I’m finding ways to act on them.
4. Put things where you look for them.  Where ever you look for it, that’s where it should be.  If you keep looking for something in a certain place, either just put it there when you find it or add some sort of pointer to the actual location.   While you might logically think something belongs in a certain place, the real test is where you intuitively look for it.
5. Keep things flat.  Out of sight, out of mind holds true for information.  Avoid nesting information.  Keep it flat and simple where you can.  Think in terms of iTunes or a playlist.  A well organized playlist is easy to jump to what you need.
6. Organize long lists or folders using A-Z.    When you have long lists or big collections, then listing things A-Z tends to be a simple way to store things and to look things up fast.   Once a list gets long, A-Z or a numbered list is the way to go.
7. Archive old things.   When information is no longer useful for you, consider archiving it to get it out of your way.  This usually means having a separate location.  I’m a pack rat and I have a hard time letting things go, so I tend to archive instead.  It let’s me get things out of the way, and then eventually get rid of them if I need to.  Archiving has really helped me get a ton of information out of my way, since I know I can easily rehydrate it if I need to.
8. Bubble up key things to the top.  When you have a lot of information, rather than worry about organizing all of it, bubble up things to the top.  You can effectively have a quick, simple list or key things up top, followed by more information.  Keep the things up front simple.  This way you get the benefits of both exhaustive or complete, as well as simple.  Whenever you have a large body of information, just add a simple entry point or key take aways or summary up front.
9. Know whether you’re optimizing for storing or retrieving.  Distinguish whether you are storing something because you will need to look it up or refer to it a lot, or if you are simply storing it because you might need it in the future.  For information that I need to look up a lot, I create a view or I make it easy to get to the information fast.  For example, I might use a sticky note since I can quickly put it wherever I need to.  For a lot of information, you simply need a quick way to store it.  What you don’t want to do is have to work to hard, each time you need to file a piece of information.  This I is where having a place for things, using lists, and organizing information in a meaningful way comes in handy.  For most of my reference information, I organize it either by A-Z or by time.  This way I don’t have to think too hard.  I don’t create a bunch of folders for my email.  Instead, I just store it all flat so it’s easy to search or browse or sort.  For example, if I need to find an email from somebody, I simply sort my email by their name.  Just by asking the question whether you’re optimizing for fast filing or for fast lookup will get you improving your information management in the right direction.
10. Create views.  Create views for the information that you need to frequently access.  For example, you might put sticky notes of information that consolidate just the key things.  As an analogy, think of your music store versus your playlists.  You store might be a large collection organized A-Z, but your playlists are views that are more focused or have themes.  You can apply this metaphor to any of your information collections.

Well, there you have it.  Those are my top 10 favorite techniques for organizing information.  I’ve had the privilege of learning and modeling from many great colleagues and mentors.  The beauty is, I get to practice my information management skills every day while hacking my way through the information jungle.  These skills save me a ton of time whether I’m reading books, taking notes, learning something new, or just about any time I’m dealing with information.  It’s deliberate practice with immediate results.

Two More Ways to Improve Your Information Management
As a bonus, I’m including two additional techniques that significantly changed my game:

1. Periodically sweep things.   No matter how well you organize things, you’ll need to periodically sweep.  Sweeping simply means cleaning things up after the fact.  Periodically, allocating a block of time to go back through and clean up some of your messes.   Things will always get out of disorder over time.  Time also changes what’s important.  When you revisit things, after the fact, you also gain the benefit of hind sight.  Make the time now and then to make a pass through your collections.  Get rid of what you don’t need.  Archive things that you don’t currently need.  Restructure your information to support your usage scenarios.  This is one of those vital practices that really makes the difference if you actually do it.
2. Reduce friction.   Whenever you find that you’re working too hard to either find, organize, or use your information, pay attention to the friction.  Work to reduce the friction.   This might mean getting more information out of your way.  It might mean bubbling more things up to where you can find them quickly.  The key is to make it easy to use your information, and don’t let it become a burden.

How do we “know” something? … I think you’ll like this as a simple model to help answer the question – how do you know something to be true?  There are 3 main ways:
1.    Experiential (empirical)
2.    Cognitive (Rational)
3.    Constructed (Creational)

With experiential, you know something because you’ve “experienced” it – basically through your five senses (site, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.)  With cognitive, you know something because you’ve thought your way through it, argued it, or rationalized it.  With constructed, you know something because you created it – and it may be subjective instead of objective and it may be based on convention or perception.

Because of my day job of finding and sharing best practices, I depend heavily on “experiential.”  By testing and reproducing success patterns, it helps me separate fact from fiction, good theories from good results, and turn insight into action.  Experiential has been my most reliable source of knowledge – I can test it and reproduce it.  I find that my cognitive and constructed tend to be more malleable, and sometimes less dependable.

As you continue to learn throughout your life, you can challenge yourself – do you know this because you’re “experienced’ it, simply argued your way through it, or constructed it.

For more information, check out Epistemology – the theory of knowledge (Wikipedia.)

Photo by accent on eclectic.

Some books and authors change how we think.

I was catching up with an old friend and I was distilling some of my favorite books into one-liners to show the contributions of various authors.  He suggested I share them as a post, so here it is …

1. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell  teaches us that thin slices of data tell us a lot.
2. In Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst Dr. Rick Brinkman and Dr. Rick Kirschner teach us that difficult behaviors stem from 4 intents: get the task done, get it right, get along with people, or get appreciation.
3. In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance Marcus Buckingham  teaches us to give our best, where we have our best to give.
4. In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life Martin E. P. Seligman  teaches us that optimism is not about thinking positive.  It’s simply not thinking negative and avoiding explaining bad events as permanent, personal, and pervasive.
5. In Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More John Eliot  teaches us to use stress to be our best.
6. In Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles teach us to create a vision of perfection, centered on the customer.
7. In Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions ,  Gary Klein  teaches us to fill our heads with patterns and experience to make better decisions.
8. In Stumbling on Happiness Dan Gilbert  teaches us we can’t predict our happiness.  We can make our own happiness and it’s just as real (synthetic happiness.)
9. In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You John C. Maxwell  teaches us that leadership is influence.
10. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service Into a World-Class Brand Al Ries and Laura Ries  teach us that to dominate a category, narrow our focus.
11. In The 8th Habit Personal Workbook: Strategies to Take You from Effectiveness to Greatness ,  Stephen Covey  teaches us to find our voice, and help others find theirs.
12. In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Taleb  teaches us that If you miss the train, don’t chase it.  Catch the next one. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.
13. In The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) Seth Godin  teaches us to quit the right things and pick the right dips to lean into.
14. In The Likeability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s DreamsTim Sanders teaches us that likability is a skill.
15. In The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles Steven Pressfield  teaches us that resistance is the enemy within.

What book changed how you think?

Photo by Capture Queen.

One of the models that helps me cope with learning new skills is the 4 stages of competence.   It helps remind me of the progression from the early awkward stage to the competent stage.   According to the model, you move from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.  Here are the 4 stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence.  You don’t know what you don’t know.
2. Conscious incompetence.  You know what you don’t know.
3. Conscious competence.  You know how to do it, but you have to think your way through it.
4. Unconscious competence.  You can do it without thinking.  You just know what to do.

One of my favorite examples is learning how to drive.  When you first learn how to drive a stick shift, you very quickly learn that you don’t know how to do it (conscious incompetence).  As you practice you can start to think your way through it (the conscious competence stage).  As driving the stick shift becomes a habit for you, eventually you can drive without thinking, shifting gears effortlessly while you think about other things (unconscious competence.)

Another example I like is when I first learned to tie my shoes.  My aunt gave me an effective technique and I remember practicing it all day.  I built unconscious competence soon after and I could tie my shoes pretty quickly which helped when I raced out to play.

Photo by chefranden.

I’m a fan of using checklists to improve results.  Checklists are powerful tools for jogging your memory, reducing stress, and sharing know how.  Fighter pilots use checklist effectively to eliminate task saturation, take away workload, and avoid forgetting something critical.   Many businesses use checklists to train new hires as well as run everyday operations.

In the book Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of America’s Fighter Pilots to Perform at Your Peak and Win the Battles of the Business World , James D. Murphy writes about how fighter pilots use checklists to  get results.

Key Take Aways
Here are my key take aways:

• Checklists help reduce task saturation.  Task saturation is too much to do and not enough time.  Checklists help you reduce task saturation.
• Checklists lower stress.  Checklists minimize forgetting something. This relieves the stress of worrying about forgetting (especially when consequences are very bad).
• Checklists free the mind.  You don’t have to waste your prefrontal cortex on mundane things.  Basically, checklists free you up to worry about higher level issues.
• Normal procedures and emergency procedures.  Pilots have two types of checklists: normal procedures and emergency procedures.  The normal procedures are how to do everyday things.  The emergency procedures are for life threatening situations.  Pilots have very specific emergencies that are very well researched because lives depend on a fast and accurate response.  Emergency checklists seem unlikely to be useful to most people since you’ll either have time to think or the emergency happens so fast you won’t be pulling out a checklist.  It depends on the context.

Get Pilots Pointed in the Right Direction
Checklists turn experience into results.  Murphy writes:

I’m sure you’re familiar with checklists, but let me tell you how pilot’s configure theirs.  For them, a checklist is a condensed portion of the flight manual — the standard operating procedures.  It’s a memory jogger.  It’s based on training, people’s experience, and the standard operating procedure of our company.  It’s designed to get pilots pointed in the right direction by taking an action that pulls them through task saturation.

How To Do Everyday Things
Normal procedure checklists step you through everyday things.  Murphy writes:

The normal procedures checklist is pretty straightforward.  It’s how to do everyday things — how to start the engine, how to configure the aircraft for takeoff, the air-refueling checklist, the landing.  … No matter how many times they’ve landed, they go through the pre-landing checklists because it takes away a big hunk of the workload and saves them the stress of forgetting something critical.

Memory Joggers and Actions
Emergency procedures step you through life threatening situations.  Murphy writes:

The black-stripe pages are known as the emergency procedures section.  This is the checklist that comes into play when the problems are life threatening.  These are the one-liners that can be read in an instant.  Pilots go right to a page that fits the problem and they see memory joggers and actions to solve the problem quickly.

Checklists are an Absolute for Training
Checklists help you share best practices.  Murphy writes:

Training is an area where checklists are an absolute.  Do you incorporate a checklist in the training of a new hire?  When you’re training a new store associate, do you have them walk along with your favorite manager in the hope that they’ll pick up good habits?  But is that person really learning the operating procedures of your store, or is he or she picking up the good (and possibly bad) habits of that person they’re training with.

Photo by Kenneth Hynek.

When you name something it’s powerful.  You have a way to reference it and share it with others.  Patterns are named problem and solution pairs.  They are a simple way to build and share a catalog of knowledge.  You can use patterns to efficiently share strategies or principles.  One good name is worth a 1000 words.  Practices are methods or techniques.   They are “how” you do something.   By leveraging patterns and practices, you can improve your ability to get results.  Basically, it’s a way to build a mental toolbox of insight and action to draw from.

Principles
You can think of a principle as a fundamental law or truth.  They can explain how things work or what to expect, such as the law of gravity.   You can also think of principles as internal motivation to do things (i.e. a matter of principle) vs. external rules that compel you and are enforced by threat or punishment.  You can also think in terms of guiding principles.  Guiding principles are strategies or guidelines or rules of thumb that guide your thinking or doing.   You can think of principles as strategies and rules as tactics.   Rather than have a rule or tactic for every situation, you can leverage guiding principles to help you find a solution or response.

The power of principles includes:

• Explaining how things work.
• Explaining what to expect.
• Naming and sharing fundamental laws or truths.
• Naming and sharing guidelines and rules of thumb.

Patterns
You can think of a pattern as a proposed model or a recurring event.  Patterns are all around us.   You can see patterns in nature, in people, and in the shapes of buildings.   You may be familiar with design patterns, behavior patterns, patterns of events, spending patterns, or thought patterns.   You can also think of patterns as a proposed model.  If you’re a dress maker, you might use design patterns as a template to start from.  In software, patterns have been especially effective for documenting and sharing collective knowledge in the field.   Each pattern is a problem and solution pair.  The chunk of advice is structured and includes key information such as the context so you know when to use it or where it applies.  Because patterns are rooted in practice, they are discovered versus created, and as general rule of thumb, it’s not a pattern unless you can point to three examples where the pattern is used in practice.

The power of patterns includes:

• Creating a shared vocabulary.
• Naming and sharing solutions to common problems.
• Sharing principles efficiently.
• Documenting knowledge in a field.

Practices
You can think of practices as methods or techniques.  In other words, it’s a way to do something.  You’ve probably heard the term “best practices.”  While “best” is subjective, the idea is to share the most effective techniques.  On the patterns & practices team, we adopted the term, “proven practices” since some customers didn’t like the term “best practices.”  In our case, proven simply meant we tested the practices we shared for specific scenarios.  At the end of the day, our goal is to find and share practices for customer success.

The power of practices includes:

• Creating a catalog of techniques in a given domain.
• Naming and sharing methods or techniques.
• Sharing expertise more effectively.

Examples of Principles, Patterns, and Practices
The following table shows some examples of principles, patterns, and practices:

Stephen Covey is also a good example in action.  He’s created a shared vocabulary by sharing a set of principles, patterns, and practices in the form of habits: habit 1 – be proactive, habit 2 – begin with the end in mind, habit 3 – put first things first, habit 4 – think win-win, habit 5 – seek first to understand and then to be understood, habit 6 – synergize, habit 7 – sharpen the saw, habit 8 – Find your voice, help others find theirs.

Photo by Bludgeoner86.

“3 take aways” is one of my favorite ways to chop information down to size.  I also use it to make the most of a meeting or training session.  All I do, is ask myself, "what are 3 take aways?"   Does it sound simple?  That’s the idea.  It helps you avoid becoming overwhelmed.  It also forces you to focus and prioritize.  It’s a great way to turn insight into action.

For example, from my Crucial Conversations training, my 3 take aways were:

• 1) Master my stories.
• 2) Learn to look.
• 3) Start with heart. 

From my Influencer training, my 3 take aways were;

• 1) Clarify meaningful results.
• 2) Focus on vital behaviors.
• 3) Analyze six sources of influence.

By using “3 take aways,” I remember to use these skills during crucial conversations, or when I’m analyzing an influence challenge.  You can apply the practice of “3 take aways” to just about anything: books, movies, mentoring, … you name it.  It’s another way to put the rule of 3 into practice.

Photo by zedzap.