Use communication to impact people

# communication is a tool
Do you know that achieving goals is possible only in one way - with people.
And all of us have one tool to impact other people; it is a communication.
The main idea is achieving results with people.
Sometimes, it would be your goals, and sometimes you will be responsible for goals of others, let's say if you are a manager in a company, you will be responsible for many goals, set by someone else.

# with manual for use
It is believed that one with proper communication can achieve very best results.
One with great talent but without communication skills won't succeed.

# and this tool is used for specific tasks
If you are a person who leads other people, all around you have expectations from you, like: i) achieve results, ii) customers' satisfaction, iii) a good relationship with people, iv) efficient business operations.

# but before starting to use, take some safety equipment with you
Believe in yourself and show it by attitude.
Believe in other people and communicate so.
Believe in purpose and inspire others.
Don't avoid leadership and management roles.
Don't passively indicate mistakes, errors or omissions (key is passive into active).

# it is very important who is using a tool
We all have biological defect - being right is more important to us than achieve a goal.
When we must sacrifice our ego, we don't let him easily, even if that means failure in goal completion.
If we only could be little humble.

# don't presume that tool won't work
When we face some problem, or need to communicate with another person, we presume many things.
We presume; they will attack me, they won't understand me.
In fact, 90% of our thoughts about future never come true.

# your tool have 4 modes, use them accordingly to have effective impact
We can group people in four categories.
Differentiation is made in two areas: focus and emotions: focus on result versus people, and showing versus hiding emotions.
So, there are four colors of people: red, yellow, blue, and green.
And people in such categories behaves in predictable ways: impulsive (yellow), analytically (blue), aggressive (red) or calmly (green).
Different people see world (or are blind on some things) in a way that is most suitable to their way of thinking and behaving (ie. color).

# fine tune a tool
Every person sees a world in her/his unique way, with all experiences, beliefs, fears, and expectations.
And that's the reason why people misunderstand each other.
Next time, when you say something, and see that other person react unexpected (from your point of view), remember that this person differ from you - they have different education, beliefs, knowledge, experience etc., and that reaction is accordingly such a one.

# manage effects of tool
When people feel threat, they respond by one of three emotions: anger, fear or sadness.
Most of the time, person operates on pilot and least of the time is creative.
Threat switches pilot to creative state.
When fear is the cause, aggression is the result.
Being angry gives illusion of control over fear.
Being insecure, apologize very often or being quiet are behaviors lead by our fear from rejection and fear from disappointing others.
Person who give ironical comments, or shows herself as a victim is a person afraid of responsibility.

# use a tool with positive attitude
Use body language (~50%), voice properties (~40%) and words (~10%) to build an attitude.
If your role is a leader in a company, behave with constructive, respectful, secure, positive, motivational, clear and open attitude.
Are you conscious about your posture, your voice, your words - what other see, what impression do I have on them.

# use tool to connect with a person
Meet another person, and build a relationship with them.
We like people who are like us, and other people like people who are like them.
Give another person warmth and respect, and they will be interested to hear our opinion and will trust us.
Connect with another person using attitude, syncronized movements, similar words, experiences, in one word build a rapport.

# use a tool to encourage another person
Have an eye contact, focus on a person, smile, nod, paraphrase what you have heard, listen.
Ask open questions to find specifics, look for essence.
Abandon using Why questions, instead use How come.

# with this tool you can tell your opinion too
Be clear, propose solution, don't attack others.
Set framework and prepare a person on what will be told.
Use construction: when you behave like ... I feel like ... because your behaviour ... and I would like that ... happens.
Give feedbacks.

# use communication and impact world around you
Talk, write, behave and make impact on others.

Conceptual cookbook for start-up (value of doing)

Think about what you can do to make other’s life easier

Research shows that a single person is happy if he makes other people happy. Making money is not strong enough reason, because when get hard, you will find out that there is plenty other ways where you can earn more than in start-up, and quit.

But if your reason is to do something right, you will not quit so easy. Elon Musk used to say that it doesn’t matter if it is hard, expensive, or no probable to succeed, if it is right and must be done to improve humanity, do it.

Write a story

Before written word, knowledge was shared via spoken stories. You can do the same, or write it down. It is good to have a starting point. Something structured, where you present yourself the idea.

Did you have experience, that you solved some problem, just by talking to someone, or by writing it down in e-mail to ask for help, and then throw e-mail because you found the solution?
By speaking, and writing we organize our thoughts. Maybe is a good thing to have a starting point, something that is product of organized thoughts.

But I think more freely and creative, structuring makes me slower and boxed in words. OK, use spoken words, but pretend that you present to someone, and then it will stick in your mind.

Just start

Fear is the biggest enemy of human being. It is triggered by unknown, variable, without pattern. It can be easily avoided, you just do need to do nothing, wait for perfect circumstances, wait forever.

All before is not important as start executing. You can be completely wrong in all previous steps, but will find out when start executing. But I am not sure, if it is right. You will not know it until you start doing real things.

Only ensure reasonable losses i.e. some pilot project, if completely wrong, that don’t lose too much money. But without this step you can’t get pass. You won’t know so important details, and won’t face any problem until get into it.

Expect to be wrong

It is reasonable to expect that some actions will be with good consequences, some with bad. On average, keep going, and repeat the steps.

To conclude, help to some person, organize thoughts, start doing and have attitude that being wrong meaning getting feedback.

One of ingredient of start-up to succeed (know how to build a product)

I wondered, if you have two start-ups, building the same product, which one would you rate as more promising. What criteria would you use to separate them? 

My thoughts are on founder's knowledge to build a product from scratch by itself. 

I used to see start-up being very promising, with great idea, founder was high caliber manager and sales person, starting funding was good, and which failed after a five years. Business started well, capital was raised very fast, revenue grew rapidly, clients were interested to come, new product prototypes were often presented. 
 
Profit was not seemed to be important in these early days. 

And then came the days after the early days, prototypes were great, but customers expected to see, as promised, more quality and more features. There were no responses from the start-up. 

Employees at start-up tried, but faced with problems in execution and didn't succeed, so asked for helping hand, but leader who started the wheels, wasn't the tech guy, who can build the product. He knew all around the product: its future functionalities and capabilities, but not in technical detail how to build it to become so featured and enhanced. 

Start-up is all about the product. 

In very early days of start-up, person with the highest level of energy, motivation, failure and stress resistance is the founder, and it could not be expected from employee to have such capabilities and solve the hardest problems, the founder is the one. 

If founder lack knowledge on how to build a product from scratch, the start-up is weak, and rate of failure is for sure higher. 

To conclude, being founder, manager or sales person in early start-up is not enough, the one should know how to build a product, and then he might succeed.