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Those damned resolutions

Everyone makes resolutions, yet it’s always the same, forgotten like last year’s trends? Not anymore. Commit to monthly self-reviews, set delivery dates, and tie rewards to achievements. It’s time for discipline to meet ambition.

I have talked about it before, you have heard it too many times, nobody cares about it again. Yes, new year resolutions. We all made a few and like the years before; we have probably forgotten them by now.

We made resolutions knowing we weren’t as good as we wanted to be. Careers are stalled, bad habits run rings around our sensibilities, some want to be better dads, wives, husbands, parents, whatever! So we made tons of good-intentioned resolutions and without malice, forgot them as quickly as Donald Trump could fire a tweet.

For me, I’ve decided that this year would be different. At least, even if I don’t get to achieve all the items on the short list, it won’t be because I forgot them. Some are proving to be hard enough because of the additional shots of vodka in my cocktail when I wrote the list.

Nevertheless, I honestly believe that resolution items can be achieved, and even surpassed. I don’t even think it requires so much apart from a set of few tricks.

The methods are simple – I’ve people and myself, holding me accountable for the items on those lists and I’m committed to reviewing my progress every month. Also, there are things I would do/or not do, as a means of self-flagellation, if I don’t achieve specific results.

What self-review does
For those who have been unfortunate to work in banking, you would know the circus bankers do each month where sales guys and gals are grilled or sometimes pulped. That excruciatingly painful experience is called Monthly Performance Review. Many at times, there would be carnage and people never make it to the office the next day. Bankers gave it a bad name, but a regular review of performance is important for every organization, and if you run your life the way you run your job, it is something you must do if you want to succeed.

Commit, either to yourself or with someone you look up to, to review your 2017 resolutions each month. Maybe the first Saturday of the month? Be honest, assess your performance and ask tough questions about if you are getting nearer or not. If you are, give yourself a nice pat on the back. And if you aren’t, you have work to do. Do it.

Set Delivery Dates
By the way, I assume your resolutions have delivery dates. That you would repaint your living room without putting a specific time to do it is as good as not writing it down in the first instance.
We know that a pregnancy lasts for nine months and even without setting a delivery date or preparing for it, the baby would compulsory pop out, all things being equal. Your dreams are a special type of pregnancies, though, if you don’t set an EDD, they will die in your womb.

Goodbye Devialet Phantom Gold
I have been lusting after Phantom Gold for about few months, and I promised myself one this year. As much as I love to have that audiophile’s dream machine, I would never get one unless certain items on my resolution list are knocked off as done.

For example, if you don’t fix your CV, making it look like Bill Gate wrote it, you shouldn’t allow yourself get any Coldstone ice cream or Shawarma from Ebeano. If you don’t start that small side business to augment your salary, you can’t travel for summer (in this economy?). If you don’t save 50% of your salary each month (assuming the economy hasn’t wiped you out), you shouldn’t allow yourself to visit Hard Rock Café.
It sounds pretty silly, but it works. After all, who are you helping if not yourself?

A Moment to Reflect
There isn’t a better time to review a year than just at the start. January is gone already and February is already on its way. Trust me, before you can say, Jack Robinson, the year is done. Success isn’t usually some dramatic thing that happens in a bang but a series of normal things that stack up down the line.

Wouldn’t it be extremely sad if you procrastinate through the whole of 2017, when the economy is bad, Donald Trump is president, students are joining gangs, etc. and then reach 2018 to regret 2017? Meanwhile, your boss would continue, every month, to harass you about meeting set performance threshold. You will work your sorry ass out to achieve your team or company’s targets, your boss would get a fantastic bonus, probably go to Harvard/Stanford/INSEAD for a random executive course (which probably looks good on her CV but does no one any good) while you have nothing to write about.

Think. Act. Be disciplined.

Run your life like you run your job

As you jot down your resolutions, it’s worth pondering why it’s easier to achieve corporate goals than personal ones. Here’s a thought-provoking take on how to run your life like you do your deliverables at work.

I spent all of yesterday doing up my new year resolutions. Yeah, I know new year’s resolutions don’t work for most of us, and by the end of January, I probably wouldn’t remember where I wrote them down. Just like my resolutions, you probably have yours penned down, and year after year, nothing comes out of them.

While you are doing your resolutions, your evil boss (bosses are usually evil in January) is also writing up your deliverables for the year. Despite the daydream of sending a hit squad after her, by March, you have already fallen in love with the goals and all pumped up to achieve your corporate objectives. Guess what, come December 2017, you are probably done with 70% of the madness lined up for you at work. Unfortunately, you won’t be getting a bonus unless you do more than 100%. That itself is a big if!

Wait, hold up!

Come to think of it; you find it hard to do things that would make your life better and successful yet you can easily, even with your worst performance, hit a sizeable level of achievement of things that would make your boss richer at the end of the year? Ironic!

A question that keeps me awake at night – what if I can run my life just the way I do my deliverables at work?

After ruminating about this for a while, I figured out the reason why: immediate and delayed repercussions.

Immediate repercussions

We are all geared to respond to positive and negative stimuli like overworked Pavlovian dogs. If you touched a life wire, you get shocked. If you cross the road without checking properly, the Danfo driver who drank adulterated paraga would run you down. Everyone knows of the immediate consequences of bad behaviors, so we simply avoid them.

The same happens at work, if you don’t deliver on the targets or KPIs set by your boss, you probably going to get a one-way ticket to HR and your ass would be out of work. If you are consistently late to work, one day you would do it one more time too often; You will most likely be scouring LinkedIn for openings the week after. Don’t even think about getting drunk at work or slapping someone; that kills you faster than a speeding bullet. No wonder nobody fights in the office!

The average professional does reasonably well at work and a miserable job of his career.

Delayed repercussions

So what happens when you don’t do that certification you, the world and I know is going to give your career a boost? Because your punishment is chilling in the future and you probably can’t hear it whistling.
You promised yourself a change of job, but the efforts to tidy up your CV and start networking is proving too hard. Of course, a new job won’t come, and with the economy taking a tumble faster than a beached whale, you can be sure that your life would be more miserable by December 2017.
If you don’t quit smoking as you have promised your wife or girlfriend for the past five years, one more cigarette won’t have your lungs give up immediately. But like a nicely marinated croaker fish, it takes a while, but once your lungs are nicely roasted, nobody has been able to invent a means to un-roast it.

You find it hard to save for your mortgage down payment, but you could easily find extra cash to rock the clubs Friday nights and hit the Bahamas with your homies for the summer. You pay more than your EMI in rent. Nevertheless, you are the one who is driving a cost-cutting proposal for your company and saved $10M last year by canceling some office perks, downgrading everyone from 4 to 3-star hotels while on travel, and discovered that nixing the free coffee and buns won’t kill employee morale. You didn’t get a dime in bonus for that; you were freaking doing your job! By the time you are fifty, your rented apartment would have appreciated in value, but none of that comes to you.

The Key

So I figured out that if an immediate repercussion could be tied to the fantastical new year resolutions, maybe there could be an impetus for one to achieve them.

Have achievable resolutions

Have goals that are reasonable and achievable. I mean you are smart; you know what I mean. If you try to swallow something too big, you are probably going choke and die. Same for goals too audacious for your good.

Don’t have too many resolutions

Too many cooks upturn the pot, scattering the evening dinner all over the kitchen floor. Too many resolutions mean you would be scared of the daunting tasks after the enthusiasm of January 1 has gone. At best, don’t have more than 5.

Be answerable to someone

Share your goals with someone you admire and respect. Not wanting to disappoint them is a strong incentive to achieve. I mean, who wants to look like a wimp to her boyfriend? Well, unless your boyfriend is also a wimp. If so, maybe your first resolution would be to get rid of him.

Move with the right crowd

Psychologists have studied peer pressure for as long as humanity. They weren’t called psychologists then, though. Most of the bad habits I have today I got from my friends (don’t ask me what they are but I can tell you who they are). Fortunately, my grades in school turned for the better when I started hanging out with the right crowd. If your friends are loafers, you would be one. If you want to have a superlative career, start being friends with those whose lives you admire. In trying to copy them, you could end up even better than them.

Run from negative people who never see anything good in life, they are like a prick to your enthusiasm balloon. Instead of floating to the sky, they make you fall like a lead.

Bad habits can be good

Trust me, pure envy and jealousy can be a game-changer if it drives you in the right direction. Have you ever gone to the mall and you see your old school buddy more successful than you, who tortured you by introducing his trophy wife and his Bentley Bentayga? You probably burned with jealousy but instead of having schadenfreude, why don’t you prove that you are better than him? Just drive yourself insane to achieve your resolutions, and you can have much more. Be careful of getting a trophy wife, though, you can lose all that money faster than you made them.

Time to go

I’m going to try all these methods on myself this year, and I hope they work. If they don’t, we can review other methods by 2018.

With all seriousness, you owe yourself a good life. Fortunately, you have all it takes to succeed, after all, you are a star at work. Apply the same skills you use to balance budgets, deliver projects, learn new skills, take care of customers, etc. to your life and you would see amazing results.

Happy New Year everyone!

5 mistakes I made mentoring

Everyone needs a mentor, but being one isn’t always easy. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way, and here are five that have taught me invaluable lessons.

There is no greater joy, for me, than helping others achieve their career potentials. I’ve few things that really make me happy; mentoring is right there at the top. Followed by beans cooked in red oil. And then èbà with èfó rirò.

Just like my mentees, the mentoring journey has taught me quite a number of interesting things which I think would be nice to share with others who may want to annoy their younger friends and colleagues in the name of mentoring.

The joy of coaching others doesn’t mean it comes easy to me and those I mentor. In fact, I could be very exasperating while trying to help others: I’ve heard phrases like “Na by force?”, “Na fight?”, “E don do!”

I’ve made a gazillion mistakes helping others achieve their dreams but the following 5 stand out remarkably.

My aspiration is not yours
When I was younger I wanted to be everything – from piloting a plane, to going to the moon and every random career in between. I finally found myself studying engineering in the university, which I barely excelled at, and eventually ended up a banker.

Guess what? I wanted all my mentees to work in banks. I extolled how banking is a nice career, how you could move up and own half of Banana Island.
Utter rubbish!

Luckily, I learned quickly that as a mentor, my job is to help my mentees achieve or exceed their life’s goals and aspirations. Instead of shoehorning my own myopic career ideas into their already jaded brains, I started listening to them, discussing their ambitions and helping them move towards that.

Professional career is everything
I used to look down on people who wanted to do things that don’t fit into my narrow view of professional careers. How stupid I was!

Luckily nobody has been hurt yet as I never had the chance to force people talented in non-professional inclination into suits and ties. Imagine the damage I could have done to Usain Bolt if his mum was my cousin? He would probably be slaving his backside at some law firm now.

I’ve since understood that success comes in different flavors and at the beginning those who don’t want to be professionals may look different from me but it doesn’t mean they don’t know what they want to do.

Careers and family are zero sum
A colleague told a friend of mine that she thought I was cold to her because she wanted to get married. That wasn’t the reason but it showed how bad my view about family and career used to be.

To have an outstanding career, something has to give, but mine was on the extreme side.

It took a long time for me to come around to the fact that you can have a good family life and an outstanding career. It is going to be tough but tough things are what successful people do.

Competing with mentees
Sometimes I set goals for my mentees and I to achieve and most times I beat them hands down. It never had the right effect.

Mentees look up to me for strength not as competition and when they lose it had demoralizing effect on them.

I’ve since learned to coach, support, encourage and sometimes give a little kick to the back side but I would never again compete with my mentees. Next time I should take on competition of my own size.

Giving up easily
There is nothing as annoying as giving your time and effort to move a mentee ahead and he’s not measuring up: He’s taking time to slack off or doesn’t appreciate the effort. The natural thing for me was to think they weren’t serious or deserving of my time so I promptly bumped them off.

How wrong of me! Yes, it is still annoying, but I’ve since learned that Rome wasn’t built in a day. No kid growing up has ever stopped walking just because of occasional tumbles. So, I’ve learned to chill a bit and give as many second chances as I can muster. After all I used to be annoying too and others took second bets on me.

The upside to mistakes
Knowing nobody is perfect is the biggest step towards Nirvana and this has helped me more in life than anything else. Instead of killing myself from doing the wrong thing, I simply learned from it and moved on.

Making the same mistakes over and over again is a different story entirely – you may need a trip to Yaba Left to find out why your gear is stuck at 2. Like my old boss, Joshy, would say – mistakes are allowed, errors are unforgivable – whatever that means!

The Body Count Conundrum

Everyone seeks experienced candidates who’ll stay, but too many job changes raise red flags. Think before resigning and spin your diverse experience positively during interviews to ease recruiter concerns.

Everyone wants someone who’s got experience and can do a lot of amazing things, but then we don’t want someone who’s been around everywhere and will probably leave in a jiffy, stomping out into the late evening. To find that perfect balance is more of an art than anything else.

Wait, what do you think I was talking about?
Recently I helped a friend review a resume for a vacancy. It was quite impressive; and having spoken to the candidate previously, I was half assured of the quality. But, the resume said a bit more than the exciting background – candidate has worked at five different companies but never spent more than 2 years at any of them.

The person recruiting wanted a solid performer. But most importantly someone he could build a team around – someone who would stay for a decent number of years. For those of us out there who know the pain of building a good team, stability is as important as skills.
My friend never followed up on the lead as he was very concerned about the candidate’s stability on the job. I have seen this play out many times over.
Is it right to judge someone based on the number of places they have worked.

Experience is key but too much of everything is bad
When recruiting experienced hires, recruiters welcome diversity as we believe, sometimes erroneously though, that if you have been around, you probably have learned a number of important contexts which should bring the richness of your experience to bear.
However, if you have worked in too many places and it seems you frequently change jobs, then we are very worried you won’t stay long in the new role, fracturing the team and making a mess, especially if you are senior and lead a large team.

Think before you resign
Forget what you read on the Internet, including this one – every job will be annoying at one time or the other. The grass is greener on the other side, until you scale the fence and discover it was just an optical illusion.
Careers, just like relationships, aren’t inconsequential to get into – the history stays with you for a very long time.

Therefore, don’t leave your job on a whim or because your boss pissed you off, or because you missed that promotion. Unless there is a threat to your life, stay until you find a solid career move worth the hassle and increase in body count.
When you leave a job too fast or too soon, your resume stops talking about your experience but about your person. Recruiters and others start to think you have a commitment phobia, can’t work in a team, get bored easily like a teenager or some other random problems. We are probably wrong about you, but the bad part is we won’t even discuss it with you; we just form a bias in our little minds and move on.

Don’t hate us, we have a mountain of resumes and LinkedIn profiles to wade through with not enough time pull a Sherlock Holmes.

Spin out the positives
When you finally get to have a chat about a new role and you have a career record longer than a street whore, you can still spin a positive tale around it.
Always have a good story to say about each place you have worked. When you say nice things about others, it makes people think highly of you, feel you are a team player and a grateful soul. Even if you aren’t any of this, stick to the script.
There is a limit to this though, if your ex-company was involved in salacious things, just say you had a good time but would rather not discuss what happened as many of the things you know are confidential. When you don’t run your mouth at interviews, we believe that you will keep our own secrets if you are brought on board.

Talk about the diversity of experience and how it has made you a more rounded person with a world-view…whatever that means. After all an interview is more like a solo theatrics performance.
Talk about other areas of your life that has been stable so nobody thinks you are a rocket on a mission. For example, you could talk about how you have been using the same dry cleaners for 150 years or that you love your old perfume.
Okay, so now that I’ve told you about why you should stay loyal, what’s your body count?

So You Want to Be Respected?

I’m always amazed when I reminisce on the many stupid things I’ve done just to appear cool. I remember when I was a teenager I used to iron the back of my school uniform shirts in a certain way just to have that swagger. Boy, looking back now, that must have been one hell of madness, really!

But when you compare all I did to look cool (I still didn’t look cool, sad!) to what others did or are doing, you will pat me on the back for keeping most of the screws holding my sanity together. Em, you can’t blame me for losing a few.
So which begs the question: why do we desperately want to appear cool? Or what do we want to achieve when we do very outrageous things…to be respected by others?

You want to know what some of us do just to be respected? Here are some:
Lie about who we are

My mum owns the National Theatre or I’m the CEO of Somewhere Limited with interests in oil and gas, properties, etc. I’m also into forwarding and backwarding.

Drop names like it’s hot
Bihari and my dad play draught every weekend and if I don’t call Osinbajo every other day he’s going to throw tantrums, crawl into a little room in Aso Rock and bawl like a child.

Buy things we can’t afford on credit
Social media is replete with car dealers chasing celebrities around on cars not paid for. I know a couple of guys who get first class tickets on credit and then dodge the hapless travel agents for months. Enough said.

Sucking up
Become a lap dog to senior management, celebrities, just to be relevant. They treat you like crap but you take it like blessing all because you want to be seen as part of the hip crowd. You even laugh at their stupid jokes!

Fake it like it’s real
This is pretty common! Buy fake designer bags, shoes and accessories just to look like you’re happening! I once followed a friend into a real Channel store, saw the price tags and left with a profound knowledge that all the Channel brooches I’ve seen in my office are fakes. Walahi!

Date an eye candy
Do all you can to date that super skinny yellow girl with a hip/waist ratio – that can make even a Cardinal lose his faith. It doesn’t matter that she’s emptier than a washed out barrel. Sometimes it is to stick up to the abusive super rich oil tycoon married boyfriend who pounds her with blows better than fufu.

There are many more ways to be a dick head just because we want to be known, seen, respected and be successful. If you think I’m talking about musicians, Nollywood starlets, OAPs, etc. you are so wrong! Their misbehaviors are part of the drama that life gives us as entertainment; their craziness is what defines them. I’m actually referring to the everyday me, you, my cousins and some of your colleagues at work.

Fundamentally somewhere in the deep recess of each of us (especially me) we want to be respected and everything we strive for is to achieve that – money, career, fame, girls, husbands, etc. Since the need to be respected can’t be cured or is innate to us, maybe we should focus our attention on how to be respected in a wholesome manner.

Let me break it down. The best way to be respected is to be good in what you do. No other sustainable way.

I can illustrate this better with two Nigerian women. Dame Patience Jonathan was a favorite punch bag for everyone with her numerous gaffes and poor grammar; she provided a good comic relief. Nothing beats this YouTube performance. Nike Davies Okundaye, on the other hand, represents some of the best things that ever came out of Nigeria. She grew up uneducated but despite that developed herself into a world renown artist.

Both are Nigerian women with poor grammar and don’t speak with phoney but while one is lampooned at every turn, the other is revered. Why? Because everyone knows Nike is good in what she does.

How to get real respect
Understand that the need to be respected isn’t bad. Like the need to get Coldstone Ice Cream or to Netflix, it’s part of every one of us.
Real and enduring respect comes from competence. When you are very good at what you do, and you are smart and consistent, trust me, even your haters will give you sadankata. I don’t like Cristiano Ronaldo and it’s from pure jealousy; he’s rich and I’m not. He has a six-pack but I’ve just a large one. He’s popular but nobody even knows me on my street. Beef aside though, I respect him because he’s good and not from luck; he’s good because he works hard at being good. How do you explain scoring more than 50 goals consistently for 6 straight seasons, na yam?

So put in real efforts into what you do and after a while, everyone will give you the required praise and attention you need. Don’t look for a shortcut, real competence takes a while to have.

Be yourself and don’t try to be others. After all you weren’t born a clone so why become one? You will be surprised that the fancy people you want to be like aren’t even half as good as you are!

Don’t buy what you can’t afford, fake your accent or wear stuff just because it’s the in-thing. Be comfortable in your own skin. By the way, this doesn’t give you liberty to dress like an idiot. Being cultured is part of competence.

Don’t suck up to politicians, celebrities, supervisors, the happening guys in your office, bla bla. It’s just a sad display and will definitely embarrass your kids in the future. You can’t imagine how much I cringe at the sickening display of loyalty in different offices – you call someone young enough to be your child oga or madam etc. just because you want to be relevant, seriously? Dude, do your job!

Understand the fact that being popular wouldn’t last forever so why kill for it? Even if you are the trending item on Twitter today or the most sought after speaker on the talk circuit, after a while everyone would be naturally bored and move on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean you ain’t respected, so don’t sweat it. Continue to do what you are good at. It will most certainly speak for you in the long run.

This brings me to talk about supervisors, managers and other random senior people in random offices. If you want your subordinates or colleagues to respect you, it won’t be by politics or being the boss from hell. Be a leader and be competent. Leadership means you provide your team with vision and you lead them on a mission of towards greatness. Of course discipline is needed and if butts need whopping, please apply whatever whopping is prescribed in the company handbook. But you need to be good and knowledgeable on the job to be respected so preaching leadership alone is – meh! When things are tough, they expect you to reach into your endless wealth of experience to solve whatever problem the team or your subordinate is facing at that time.

This article has also been published at www.bellanaija.com.