The Retrospector

Something I’ve noticed when people are sent into a room or conversation with an executive is that they’ll lock up or freeze. Some kind of nervousness takes over being around someone with the ability to declare your position unnecessary.

Today I’ve decided to reflect on why people do this, and what I’ve learned to avoid looking like a total idiot.

Understanding the fear

Here’s the reasons I think people naturally fear superiors:

1. They wonder if they’re unnecessary and don’t want the executive to wonder the same thing.
2. They know they’re unnecessary and don’t want the executive to think so too.
3. They’re just afraid they’ll say the wrong thing and leave a horrible impression.

My response to such thoughts? Relax, they’re just doing their job. If you’re worthless, they’ll find out eventually anyway. If you don’t have something of value to show, what are you doing talking to an executive anyway?

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I spent quite a bit of time reading through all the submissions from the project that Darren over at ProBlogger.net hosted. While I was reflecting what habits I could relate to and what habits I haven’t even thought of before, I began to wonder how many times I’d seen each habit repeat itself with each submission.

Focus on the habits

As noted in the final submissions post, Darren explained to us that he wasn’t going to have us vote on a winner. I’m glad he did this, because I think his project focus was more on the actual habits than who we thought was the most effective blogger around. So I wanted to focus more on the habits by reading through each and every post noting anything that was used toward effective blogging.

An idea comes to mind

So I made up a little project of my own. As I was reading through all of the submissions I kept track of each time one of the habits I had in my list showed up again, and added any new ones to the list that weren’t already there. This took a long time to do (a few hours), but the more I did it the more anxious I was to see the results.

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I stumbled onto an article in Ry Lowry’s blog that included a piece about his frustration with applying test driven development (TDD) to a commercial framework.

To summarize, he’s comparing TDD applied to an open source framework (Spring) with applying it to the commercial product. Spring was certainly designed for TDD and being in the open source community is very easily integrated with near any of the popular testing methods.

The commercial product he’s using doesn’t seem to have any easy way to be tested using many of the testing tools that are out there from a TDD perspective where you start with unit tests and work your way up to the different testing levels until you have near-end-user-like testing as well.

A couple of things come to mind that I think add value to the discussion:

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I’ve been looking for a good reason to change up my topic matter lately and it looks like Darren over at ProBlogger.net has inspired me to do that today. I’ve been hitting up a few technical topics that have struck my interest the last couple weeks, but being a site defined as giving a hindsight perspective on many aspects from my past, sharing some of my habits is a perfect fit and an excuse to make a new category on my blog.

Darren has requested some entries for lists of habits that people consider effective for blogging. I’ve seen some pretty good stuff coming from the sites people have submitted already. I also see a variety of people behind the posts. I think that’s awesome, because the diversity of people should surely bring out a good list of habits to read about.

“Why on earth are YOU writing this?”

Now, I’m new to blogging. You probably winced at the list in my archive section not really being a list when you got here. “How can this guy possibly be writing about effective blogging?” is probably what went through your mind. Well, I may be a blogging noob, but I consider myself effective in very similar circumstances where I’m speaking, chatting, messaging, or posting to large audiences.

I’ve moderated discussions and newsboards in a game environment for over 4 years, spoken to all levels of people in large and small corporate environments, and held thousands of conversations via email, messengers and newsboards. Doing all these have forced me to develop a set of habits to be effective in each medium that I find carries over to blogging quite well.

Ok, I’m probably boring you. “Get on with the habits! Is one of them to make me leave your site before you get to the point?!?!” Well, I try not to do that. I just wanted to give some sort of background so you don’t wonder what soapbox I’m coming from when I show my list.

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