Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse working in palliative care, recorded people’s regrets as they were dying and has shared the top five.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Well. That shakes me up. How about you?

“Coaching is available to all of us
and is not a profession but a way
of being with each other.”
~ Peter Block

I’ll admit it right away. I’m a Peter Block fanboy. His books – from Flawless Consulting to The Answer to How Is Yes - are deeply influential on my work. (Community even made me cry a little. And yes, it’s a business book.)

So when Peter wrote these words as a blurb for my first book Get Unstuck & Get Going on the stuff that matters, it was a little like Mozart saying to someone, “that’s an OK piece of music.”

Very very thrilling.

And what’s so wonderful about the words above is that they speak to what I think of as the need to democratize coaching. Because I do think that coaching can feel like something of a gated community. If you’re rich enough or lucky enough, you get to be coached. If you’re touchy-feely enough or looking for the post-career career, you get to be a coach.

And the rest of us miss out.

And I say No to that. I want everyone to understand that coaching is just another word for having a type of conversation that goes a little deeper and makes a little bit more of a difference.

And it’s a conversation that anyone can participate in, both as a receiver and as a giver.

February 5th to 11th is International Coaching Week. Throughout the month I’m going to share some of the practical and sometimes counter-intuitive tools and insights we teach in our practical coaching programs, programs that are designed to serve the too-busy manager.

Do stick around for the ride….

You can listen in here http://www.blogtalkradio.com/writenow.

There are 93 things I’d like to talk to Michael about, but we narrow it down and discuss:

•  The secret to getting attention (and book sales) in our noisy, over-communicated world
• How to create a “home base” in cyberspace that you own and control
• The ingredients needed to create your distinctive voice as a writer
• Some super-practical tips for starting your own successful blog
• How to write blog posts while you sleep

Check out Michael’s blog at www.michaelhyatt.com.

Listen to my interview with Michael Hyatt

Every manager is trying to get themselves and their team to be more productive. It’s one of the Great Measures of our corporate lives, isn’t it?

The slippery slope is that it’s easy to muddle up “productive” with “busy” or “efficient”, as if busy were some sort of useful marker and as if efficiency was all that matters.

I know you know that intellectually, but let me give you a little test.

You walk past one cubicle and you see someone looking intently at their computer and typing with purpose.

You walk past another, and the person is sitting back, feet on desk and staring up at the ceiling.

 What are the judgments you make about that situation?

I know EXACTLY where I go. One’s working hard. And one’s slacking off.

But productivity is all about working smartly on the right stuff. And as you well know, our organizations are too full of people working inefficiently on the wrong stuff.

Or to put it differently, how do you work on the perfect mix of Good Work and Great Work?

So let me suggest some approaches that might increase your productivity as a manager.

Escape the routine

1. Dodge busy

Every morning you hear it, don’t you?

The call of your inbox.

“Come here…”

“Answer me…”

“Of course doing email is priority work…”

And before you know it, you’re sucked into the vortex.

It’s all too easy to be chained to your laptop, tied to your desk, locked into meetings and imprisoned within your business unit.

These are comfortable handcuffs we put on ourselves – what William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles”.

Productivity is doing some things regularly and efficiently, that much is absolutely true. But productivity also requires you to see where busy-work has snuck in and taken the place of your Good Work and your Great Work.

Routine can serve you and it can crush you.

If you were to do one thing differently, I’d suggest you stop checking email as your first action. Not only does it lock you into Good Work mode, but it uses up precious neo-cortex brain energy that you could and should be using on different things.

Spend the first hour of your work doing 10 minutes planning of the day ahead and 50 minutes thinking-work time, whatever that might be for you. (And I promise you, it’s not ripping through email.)

The question that will help you: “Of all the things I could do right now, what would best move me towards my goal?”

2. Infect others

Managers are used to thinking up (“What do my bosses want?”) and down (“What does my team need?”).

Those are useful questions to ask, but at times it can feel like those are the only two places to look. But try moving horizontally rather than vertically.

Go visit your colleagues and peers.

Go see what’s happening in the less obvious places.

Build relationships with some of the unusual suspects.

Cool stuff happens when you start heading off at a different angle.

You get to build influence, uncover new resources, see in advance political traps and find out the cool stuff that’s happening in all the nooks and crannies.

Go with the intention of cross-fertilizing, sharing not just what you know about you, but what you know about what others have to offer. You’re like this awesome dating service, just without the cheesy ads.

The question that will help you: “Hey X – what’s the coolest thing you’re working on right now?”

Get strategic

 3. Get inside your boss’s head

“Would it be useful,” he asks rhetorically, “if you really knew what you boss cared about?”

That’s not to say you have to necessarily do exactly what you think matters to your boss. After all, a healthy percentage of them are insane.

But you do at least want to be mindful as to what they’re thinking about, so you can be clear on the choices you’re making.

And I would suggest that most of us are basing a lot of what we do on misinformation and assumption.

Sometimes you’re running “old tapes” and what you think matters is out of date

Sometimes you’re doing CSI badly, and creating poor hypotheses based on limited evidence.

Sometimes you’re believing that what they say matters is actually the thing that matters.

Sometimes you think (and they think) that a list of 100 things is a prioritized list

Sometimes they don’t have a clue what matters to them, so you’re operating in a vacuum.

In short, it’s a tricky business to get to what some call “The vital few rather than the trivial many”.

 The question that will help you: “Can I just check – is this the most valuable thing I can be working on right now?”

4. Fire bullets

I’ve just finished reading Jim Collins’ latest book, Great by Choice. As ever, he’s a master at metaphor – and attaching common sense to hard data.

One of the things he uncovers about his “10x-ers” (those business leader who create extraordinary results) is that they’re LESS innovative than their competitors. Not they’re not innovative, far from it. But that they have a different approach to innovating.

Rather than seeing what the think is the big opportunity and going “all in”, they “fire bullets” – they prototype rapidly and try out small experiments to figure out what might actually work – before they “fire cannonballs” – commit fully to the idea.

Do some smart dabbling.

Tell as few people about it as possible.

Don’t do an official launch.

Spin some plates, knowing that you’re going to let a few break.

Until you commit. And then, commit.

The question that will help you: “What would a pilot look like?”

Find time

5. Skip meetings

Life-sucking, time-crushing, energy-depleting vampires.

And these are just the meetings you run.

Meetings are so often the default answer to whatever the question is.

And am I right in thinking that your calendar is set to accept every meeting invitation you’re offered?

What if your default answer to any meeting request was No instead of Yes?

And as a bridge to No…

Can you do it by email?

Can you send someone else?

Can you get the minutes?

Can you attend just part of it?

The question that will help you: “What’s the better alternative to holding this meeting?”

But sometimes, you’ve just got to go, and if you do…

6. Make meetings awesome

As a manager, you can’t skip every meeting. And not all meetings are bad.

So which meetings must you go to? And how do you make them AWESOME?

Start by figuring out which meetings you actually look forward to. Who does good meeting that you know of? And what do you think the secret of their success might be?

Then get to the heart of what’s essential for this meeting. What’s the non-negotiable in terms of outcomes you need.

(Might be worth checking you still need a meeting at this point.)

Finally, rock the basics.

Have to have an agenda.

Have to show up prepared.

Have to have a good reason for being there.

Insist on decisions.

Record the actions agreed.

Make the call when any of the above isn’t happening.

The question that will help you: “What drains the energy in this meeting?”

I’m sure there’s more…

So what would you add that works for you in the quest to be productive?

This Practical Coaching Series will help. It’s going to be running through much of February in celebration of the International Coaching Week.

Why you need to get clear

“Albert Einstein once said, ‘If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.’  And I find in most organizations people are running around spending sixty minutes finding solutions to problems that don’t matter.” ~ Stephen Shapiro

We’re in so much of a rush to get things done, find the answer and create an action plan, that we so often go haring off in the wrong direction.

But an elegant solution to the wrong problem is not an elegant solution.

It’s a simple, powerful and rare discipline to take just a little more time at the front end to figure out what the real challenge might be.

Try this seven-step process to help you get yourself and others clear on what matters.

1. Slow down just a bit

Realize that it’s your impatience as much as anyone else’s that’s got your rushing to the solution.

I know there are emails to answer, meetings to go to, plates to keep spinning and people and projects calling out your name…

Regardless, take a breath and decide you’re going to give yourself three or four minutes just to be curious about what’s at the heart of the challenge.

You can spare just a few minutes to figure out what matters, can’t you?

2. Don’t be seduced by the presenting challenge

When someone’s coming to you for a conversation, they may have done a brilliant job at perfectly seeing and articulating the essential challenge with which they’re wrestling.

But you’d be unwise to bet on it.

The first thing that comes out of someone’s mouth is rarely the real thing. It’s often a best guess, or a smokescreen, or even a solution to the unarticulated challenge.

And by “someone” I’m talking as much about you as I am about a person you might be talking to.

Stay on the path, just for another few minutes, to see if there might be something else at play.

3. Turn off your finely-tuned advice-giving machine

I know you – you just love to help.

You want to add value. Or better put, “add value”.

You want them to help you help them, like crazy Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire.

But if you’re giving them advice, you’re unlikely to be helping them get clear.

More questions. Less advice. That’s the mantra I want you to take away from this piece.

But what questions? You just need three…

4. Ask this question

Jump right in by asking this simple and powerful question:

What’s the real challenge here for you?

It does a near-perfect job at focusing the conversation, focusing the person and focusing you the coach on what might be going on.

“… the real challenge…” means they have to reflect, consider and prioritize.

“… for you …” means they can’t deflect it to “them” or “we” or “us”. It’s about their role in whatever’s going on.

5. Then ask this question. A lot.

But – remembering #2 – don’t stop there. After they’ve told you what the real challenge for them might be, ask them this:

And what else?

Truly, this is my favourite coaching question Of All Time.

Because the first answer they give you is not going to be the only one they have, and it may not even be the best one they have.

And more importantly, “And what else?” acts as a self-management tool to stop you jumping in to add your own point of view, offer the solution, move to action.

It keeps the spotlight on them rather than on you.

So see what the options are.

Ask, “and what else?” at least a few more times.

6. And finally

When they finally say, “There is nothing else!” (which, by the way, is a measure of success not failure) and they’ve got nothing left to share, step back, admire the great possibilities you have in front of you, and ask them to select the one that would be most useful to look at right now.

Here’s how that sounds:

“If you were to chose one of those to look at right now, which one would it be?”

I know you think you know what the answer is. But shut up and listen for just a bit. You’ll see that they know it too, and it’s so much better for everyone involved if they figure this out for themselves.

7. Repeat til done

You might stop here.

But try repeating steps 4 through 7 through another cycle or two.

Watch as the conversation drops down and get to the heart of what really matters.

And notice who’s doing the work and who’s learning here. For once, it’s not you figuring it out, it’s them.

Without anyone even really noticing it, you’re coaching…

Cool, eh?

Simple but difficult

When you try this, as I know you will, you’ll find a few things out.

Your doubts about this being too simplistic will be unfounded. It is simple, true, but it’s precise and powerful.

It’s difficult to keep things simple. You’ll certainly want to follow your hunch, start giving advice, take a different turn. It’s extraordinarily tricky to stick to a simple and elegant process.

Let me know how it goes on the comments here.

Jason is a champion of the psychology of productivity and workplace performance. In his new book  Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More he poses a crucial question – what do you want to be your best at?

Jason and I talk about:

• How his first job as an always-busy History and Spanish teacher sparked his interest in productivity
• Why it’s not possible to be great at 20 important things a day, and how to get focused
• The “stop doing list” and why it’s critical to know what you’re saying no to
• The trap of being non-productive in the search for the perfect productivity system

You can contact Jason at WomackCompany.com or on Twitter @JasonWomack.

Listen to my interview with Jason Womack

And five year plans for the busy manager or leader?

Ha! Think back to 2007, and try and imagine how deeply inadequate your five year plan would be in today’s world. Everything’s changed, hasn’t it?

I love this solution for Lea Belair, one of the Box of Crayons program leaders. She suggests that what you want is to go ride your bike…

Take a look at what she means.

You’ll know that we’re all about helping people and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. But how do we do that?

We launched our first program about five years ago and this has grown into our flagship Coaching for Great Work program.

With the launch of my book Do More Great Work in 2010 we launched the Great Work Kickstart program.

And last year we launched our two latest programs, The Coaching Habit and The Last Feedback Workshop You’ll Ever Need.

We’ve run the program successfully for our organizational clients in North America, Europe and the UK (for those who think it’s not part of Europe). You can see many of the clients we’ve served listed on each of the program pages.

In 2011 we had our most successful year, in no small part due to the talented faculty we have who market, sell and deliver the programs.

We’re thoughtfully expanding

We’re looking to expand our team with between four and eight new program leaders. I’d particularly like to increase the number of program leaders in the United States and into some new countries.

We’re looking for Awesome of course. It’s a mix of entrepreneurial gusto, corporate gravitas and facilitation elegance.

If you’re curious and want to learn more, it’s all laid out for you on this page.

(And please – feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested.)

For the too-busy manager, here are two alternative ways to say Yes.

1. Slowly

We say Yes too quickly.

Delay the moment, ask more questions and find out what you’re letting yourself in for.

What if the default answer was No until proven otherwise?

2. Completely

We say Yes too weakly.

If you’re clear that this is worth saying Yes to, say it with the intention of full and bold commitment.

What if the only way was All In?