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After 6 weeks of deliberate practice using the foundation – Give credit when due. I have some learnings. I have listed my predictions, my actual findings, then my learnings.
I’ll need to be specific, so the person realises why I’m giving them credit. 5 to 6 times from nearly 30 times providing credit I was met with a blank look. Although I feel the person appreciated the credit, I was still too vague about what exactly I was giving credit for. An example was I gave a leader credit about a ‘well run review’. Although they said thanks, after I had walked away (after giving credit) I realised I wasn’t concise enough about the ‘thing’. It was the fact that they had come prepared, had the facts, thus the review flowed well. I later went back and saw them and then gave them these additional facts. My learning is – be VERY specific.
It’ll need to be timely. (If I give credit as close to the event as possible my feedback will be more meaningful). I think I did this well. Giving the credit still didn’t come naturally (I still had to try to remember) but I feel my timing was good. My learning is – timing is critical, it makes or breaks the intent of the credit.
I feel (because it’s front and centre) that I’ll start hot and may actually overdo it and I also feel the credit giving may waver with time. Yes, it started hot. In the first 2 weeks I had given and recorded 18 of the 30 pieces of credit. I then found I started to not record the credit, then when I ‘had the time’ I couldn’t recall all the examples. Gut feel is my credit giving didn’t drop off, but my records did. My learning is – if you want to record ‘something’ it’s best to do it whilst it’s ‘hot’ (as soon after the event as possible) and it somehow must be meaningful to the person doing the recording (it has to be worth their investment in time).
I’m going to make a calendar note each day to practice, and I’ll also record when I’ve ‘done’ it, what the credit was for and the response. Yes, I made a calendar note (a task in MS Outlook). I then moved this daily. As per the above I found I gave it high priority at the start, then started ‘seeing’ it but not actively doing anything about it … just moving it to the next day without recording the results. My learning (as above) is – discipline is the key. I ‘thought’ that if I made it a task, it would assist, perhaps it did, but I still found it too easy to ignore the task or record keeping and re-scheduling this for another day.
In summary I did give credit when due. I was vague, particularly at the start of the experiment, but I feel I got ‘better’ than I was at the start. I feel I got fewer blank looks! My discipline wavered in recording the examples which surprised me the most, as I feel giving credit when it’s due is worth the effort.