Author: Mike Balof

A retired Air Force Master Sergeant, Mike used to lay in bed at night and worry about what would happen if his plant closed or found himself without a job. One day his plant closed. Rather than panic and hysteria (OK, maybe a little) Mike found himself carried away on the adventure of his life. Mike started with the best job he ever had working at Home Depot. He spent 8 years working with job seekers at a local workforce center, helping them to find employment. He then started his own company developing courses, writing books and urging others to follow their own paths into the future. Mike holds a Master of Arts in Adult Education and Training and a Bachelor of Business Management, earned through the University of Phoenix and an AAS degree in Electronics Systems Technology from the Community College of the Air Force. Mike is a member of the Delta Mu Delta Business Honor Society.

How Do You Know

How do you know what you think is right or not? Did someone tell you? Were they correct, were they wrong? Did you hear it somewhere on the street or see it in a television program? Is the idea you have been told a fact or a feeling? Is this thought universal, or only on the local street corner? To borrow a line from NPR, inquiring minds would like to know.

How many people have you seen start off on excellent intentions with some terrible information? It happens more than you think, and all the reported cases that you see in the news or read about in articles are only the tip of an enormous iceberg. To keep your flotilla of ideas from crashing on the sea of life, a first step is to verify the facts. Some find out what is out there, and others just keep on crashing into ice.

This week we are going to look at ways we can do some research and plot a course around obstacles that have the tendency to get in our way. In this day and age, between cell phones, tablets, and computers, we have better access to the correct information than any other time in history. Those who want to know, check it out.

I will bet some did not finish the last sentence before objections rose that everything on the Internet is fake. Well, you are partly right. If you draw all your conclusions from gossip and rumor sites, the integrity of that data is probably in question. If you research on reputable websites, the chances of authentic information are much higher. Even on the best of research sites, if somebody is citing a study or research, and if you really need to know how accurate it is, you must find out who funded the research. Data sometimes gets skewed by who pays the bill.

The mere idea that you have taken the time and energy to find information puts you on a better road towards your future.  Also, check with mentors and supporters who you trust. To walk a long trail on the statement of only one person shows you must trust them very much.  Walk wisely.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Free

I am told that if I build something and put it on the market for free, no one will use it. Customers and clients would believe that anything given freely is worthless. Even those who pick up a free item will let it sit on the shelf and never use it because they don’t have anything invested. Anything with no cost attached will never be used because it’s looked at as being inferior and worthless.

I think that’s hogwash used by some people to justify their charging of overpriced goods. I worry that if I do charge a price for specific classes, the people I wrote the course for would never be able to afford them. What good is it to write classes and then charge more than the intended user could comfortably pay.

Well, I guess I’m about to find out. Although I have a book on Kindle, and in print through Amazon, and a course on the same subject on Thinkific, I worry that the price of these will deter some needy students from what I have built specifically for them. Therefore, I’ve taken the same information and developed a five-day minicourse that can be enjoyed for free on Facebook messenger. It has a chatbot (no talking, you read what the bot is saying.) And the chatbot guides you through the course.

The course will send you a section every day for five days. Each day’s chapter will take about 20 minutes to go through, and then there’ll be some homework or research to accomplish. The course will help you to define who you are, what you want to do, and develop a roadmap to get from here to there.

At the end of the course, you should understand and have a basic plan of where you are and where you’re going. Hopefully, you have fun working with each chapter along the way. And probably you’ll learn some new things and can look at other ideas in new ways.

We are testing the course in a beta release right now. If you’re interested in taking it, please send me your email and name, and I’ll see that you get enrolled.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Putting It All Together

Thank you for being with me this week as we look at alternative ways to learn when time is in short supply. I just want to remind you of the old saying about getting something done. If you wish to do something, people will help you to find a thousand reasons why you can’t do it. All you need do is find one reason why you can.

The Wright brothers didn’t build an airplane by starting off with figuring out how a jet engine works. They looked at nature, watching those things that fly. They communicated with others who were working along the same lines and did so without an iPhone nor messenger to help them out. They came up with ideas and theories of what should work, and then they tested those theories to find which ones really worked. And their first working craft looked nothing like a Boeing 747.

Learning often means paying dues. This does not mean you have to pay them all at once. Sometimes the best knowledge is learned by sharing, asking questions, providing ideas, and yes, a lot of research. Those who want to do this can find their way by utilizing the time that runs through their fingers. Time playing games, time watching uninteresting television shows, and time staring into space are just three items that could easily be traded for knowledge.

Please think of these ideas the next time you really want to learn something and just feel trapped by all the things you already hold on your plate. They say that a busy person is the one you ask to get something done. And everything being equal this is true. Because a busy person doesn’t have time to waste on something and will do it just to get it out of the way.  Are you or could you be that busy person?

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Each Step Adds Up

Learning is like climbing a flight of stairs. If you want to learn one particular task, it’s like taking a step up. If you want a college degree, your climbing the Empire State building. Each thing you learn is founded on what you learned before, and how well that knowledge was grounded. A solid foundation can allow you to climb as far as you want. A muddy or sandy foundation is going to give you problems as you reach higher.

We talked about how difficult it sometimes is, to find time to learn new things. If you wanted to learn how to tie fishing flies, you could start off with a few YouTube segments. YouTube has many videos on fly tying that are well under 15 minutes. You can learn all about the fly tying tools needed in 11 minutes. Fly tying for beginners is only 14 minutes. And you can even make an Olive Woolly Bugger in seven minutes and 24 seconds.

After you watch the YouTube videos, you might want to get a small tie flying kit. You can find them in fishing stores or online, and I have seen some for between $25 and $35. Remember, if you haven’t done something before, do your research, start small and then build up as the need arises.

Budget your time. Maybe you could tie in the evening, or after watching the videos, break up the fly tying into segments. I know some people who write by getting up an hour earlier in the morning to do so. I don’t know if early morning fly tying is a good thing or not. But if you really want to learn it, and don’t have the time to just go to a class on the weekend, this is an alternative that could work.

So what do you do with the flys after you’ve tied them all? The first thing to do is to go fishing and see if they actually work. Once you know their catching fish, it’s time to start letting people know you got flies that can catch fish. The second thing you want to let them know is you’d be glad to tie some for them. The rest is just price points and marketing.

Oh, wait a minute, I’m the one who always wanted to learn and tie flies. Our question here is what do you want to learn? Well, I’ll make you a deal. Figure out what you want to learn. If you can’t break it down into segments, write to me, and I’ll help you do so. And at the same time, I’m going to start watching tie flying video’s on YouTube, and I will post a picture on my blog the first time I catch a fish with a fly that I tied.

Doing anything is just one step at a time. Each step we take becomes the foundation for the next step that we are about to take. Taking a step barely takes a moment, climbing to somewhere new takes determination. And yet, you can get there. Just take one step at a time.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Fifteen Is The Magic Number

I used to be a process engineer and a training instructor for a contract manufacturing facility. We built computers and other electronics for many major brands. Often, it was nearly impossible to free up students for necessary training.

When training people whom management did not want to let go from the build-line to start with, you have to be fast and accurate. I worked my system down to a point where I could train between four and 20 people in 15 minutes on a straightforward task. All training is done on the line where the workers will perform the task.  Any less time and the majority of people would not understand the detail of the lesson. Any more, and they ran the risk of them being dragged back to the lines without the proper training. So we walked the narrow edge.

When you can only spend an absolute minimum of time training someone, you need to work out a few critical issues.  Along with these issues, you have to worry about exactly how the student will retain the information. Students who were not reinforced with correct information regularly will tend to lose those memories. The majority of forklifts accidents do not happen in the first couple of weeks after training. Those accidents will show up six weeks to three months after training when the driver grows complacent with the safety rules.

The most people I ever taught one time were 195 people who I had to instruct on how to sit in a chair. This was required by our management because one of our employees fell out of a chair in our cafeteria during lunch and sued us. I developed a two-page flyer for each person, which included mounting and dismounting a chair. I also added not to sleep in the chair, and to ensure all four legs of the chair were on the ground at all times. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and they understood why we were doing the training. My oldest son, who is a college professor out in Walla Walla, wanted to know when I was going to teach a class in how to breathe.

Teaching people how to use an air vacuum lift or how to measure a newly built, computer unit for shorts to ground, I still hold to the 15-minute rule for on the line spot classes, I just limit the students being trained to either 2 or 4.  This way, I have more control and less interruption with each student.  When training, safety is paramount. Safety gets harder, and the unknowns grow larger as you add more novices to the mix.

The point I’m trying to pass on is, if you want to learn something in 15 minutes, you can. You probably have a library card, get the book. Way too busy to read, go to YouTube, and find a how-to for the skill. Or even better, figure out who you work with who really knows how to do what you want to learn, and ask them to show you. Don’t waste their time, take good notes, and let the trainer know that you appreciate them helping you.

Tomorrow, I will show you how to take a string of 15-minute quick learning sessions and turn them into the knowledge of a much larger, more extended class, just by stringing them together.  This should be interesting.  Join me and see if it can be done.

Thank you for being with me today.  I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Finding A Way That Works

Do you want to learn new things, yet there always seems to be no time to do so?  You cannot go to college at night. The demands of work are far too great to make time during the day. When you don’t have $3,000 to $5,000 to buy into somebodies E-course that will send you a hardwired training that may or may not cover what you really need to know and are trying to learn…

Sounds like I’ve been there and done that? Yep. I was a process engineer. Working at a computer manufacturing plant. I got so frustrated with people on the assembly line not being adequately trained in their jobs due to lack of time. It was so bad that I finally switched to training so I could at least make sure everybody knew what they were doing. Then I found the awful truth.

Management would not give the workers time for the training they needed. So, I had to go out and find ways of teaching by working around a very intense build schedule. This was easier than it looked. Working with a team of three other people, we developed computerized training for every course we had. This allowed workers to train on demand whenever the line was down. If machinery broke, parts did not come in, or there was a major software glitch on the line, the workers could go to the training lab and train until the problem was fixed. This earned me and three other people our six Sigma Greenbelt.

Computerized training is not enough. It does not answer all the questions, and some people can walk away with a misunderstanding of knowledge. To that end, I backed up the training by making sure I was on the shop floor regularly. I could act fast to answer questions, set things straight on the spot, and help with innovations. It worked, and after initiating it, the numbers began to improve.

There is one more thing that I learned that help me very much. I learned how to make a sharp impact to help people while training them on concise timelines. And how the students retain the knowledge was a very simple but very astonishing eye-opener to me.

Because I know that your time is also valuable, rather than writing a more extensive article for you to have to find your way through, I am using the blog this week to break down this training method in hopes it might help you. Each day I will impart a portion of this new training theory. Why it drove me to get my Master’s Degree in adult education and training. And how you could benefit from this.

Please check back each day this week, and I should have a new piece of the How-To-Learn written out for you.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Targets of Opportunity

Through all of our planning and research, our nose firmly planted on the grindstone, and working with the best of intentions, there are occasionally targets of opportunity that would be foolish to miss.  They seldom knock on your door and rarely disturb you if you are busy watching TV or playing a video game. Yet, please make no mistake, they are there.

One of the tricks to finding a target of opportunity is that you have to be where they are found. Targets of opportunity are usually found around other people. Because we do not live and work in a vacuum, the opportunity will often help you and another person with whom you are discussing the ideas. In business, good targets of opportunity are rarely one-sided. For serendipity to take its course, you have to be out and active where people, and opportunities are found.

The next part is a little hard for introverts, but I promise you will get used to it and, some of you may enjoy it. The next thing you need to do is mingle. Talk to people. Get to know them. Let them talk first and ask questions. Maybe nothing comes of it, and maybe you find out that the two of you have things in common. Perhaps, you have shared ideas,  and you can help each other. And possibly, you have a moment of serendipity which I call a target of opportunity.

The trick is not to rush things. Be interested, ask questions, share a few ideas from around the edges of the project, and be polite. Do some research so that you can know who the person is and if they’re on the level or not. And the most important thing you need to do, and this is big, follow up.

It is incredible how many great opportunities elude us. We miss them because we met an opening to do great things in a casual setting. We had a momentary lapse where we did not think of the business. Maybe the two or three of us were talking the same thing from different viewpoints with different knowledge bases. We don’t always know why something good happens and why it does not.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again soon.

What are You Showing Others

We all have many sides to ourselves.  There are sides of happiness and anger.  Sometimes we are goofy and other times we are dead serious. And it is also okay to have these sides, and many more. The personality that you would show your kids or your spouse would most likely be different than the individual your coworkers or management might see in you. So it’s not a wrong question to ask the person in the mirror, what personality traits are you showing others?

The way we handle ourselves around others is essential. Quite often whether or not we get a gig or a position depends on whether or not the person making that choice can see that we can do what they need to be done, and the way they want it done. And what they see in you depends on what you have shown them.

You don’t have to be deadpan serious all the time, nor do you have to march around making squared corners that your drill Sgt. would be proud to see. Be yourself, and at the same time, follow the lead of those you are trying to impress. Staying a little bit more formal is normal. You want to appear relaxed when speaking with others. Show that you take them seriously. And a little humor is good. Let them tell the joke, and you smile.

You do not have to have the last word on everything. The best talks are remembered when somebody leaves the other person interested and possibly wanting to speak more at a future date. The other thing to remember is to keep formal talks positive, short, and to the point. Conversations are often remembered. Would you prefer to be remembered for being a knowledgeable person of a few words? Or, do you really want to be remembered as the person who told them everything about everything including the VIN number of your car? In these cases, less is really more (favorable.)

You want to relax when you’re speaking with others. If you’re not sure what to say, remember that everybody likes a compliment. A positive statement goes further than a negative comment. And although you’re hoping they do something good for you like hiring you, you are also doing something good for them. You are showing them what you can do and how you can do it. And you are doing so while understanding their need to use time wisely.

This is another item that you can’t just take my word on. You have to get out there and try it. If you’re nervous or scared to go up and talk with others, start slow with someone you know. And then push yourself to speak with someone new once a day.

Fear is usually caused by something unknown. The more you know about something, or the more often you are in a position to act and take affirmative action, the less fearful the task becomes. The more you know, the less there is to fear, and the only way to understand something is to go out and do that thing.

Thanks for being with me today.  I hope to be with you again tomorrow. 

Different Ways

One of the things that we do as a human is to find how we prefer to do things. We continue to do those particular tasks over and over again the same way. Hence the phrase, ‘set in one’s ways.’

Problems sometimes arise because once we get set in our ways, it is hard to change them. This causes us to accomplish the same tasks over and over again, our own certain way, while our community and the rest of the world continues to change around us. The longer we do something a certain way, the harder it is for us to change our actions. To this end, I would like to make a suggestion.

Every so often, you should do something different. Take a different route to go to the store. Go to a different movie theater just to see if you might like it better. Go to a different park, try different breakfast cereals, watch a different TV show.

If you’re stuck in one pattern all the time, you may be missing some of the beautiful things going on around you. I was used to often moving during my military career. I was amazed when I settled down and fell into my own routine. Because of that routine, there were areas in my town where I did not frequently go to.

One time when my kids came back, they wanted to see how the town had changed, so we took a drive. I was amazed just how much some areas had grown, and how much I had lost touch with some areas of the town that was my home. I privately felt embarrassed and vowed to do a better job of keeping up on the positive changes happening in my own community.

 We all change as we grow, even as we grow older.  We do not have to grow set in our ways, nor are we required to slow down, become forgetful, or lose our vitality.  Yet, the only person who can control how we change and how well we work is generally the person in the mirror.

Thanks for being with me today.  I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Needing to stay current

You need to keep learning. If you do not keep up with new technologies and ideas, you will be taken over by the tide of technology and time. This wave could quickly push you to the backwaters of change. If you do not continue to keep up with those changes, you might find yourself wondering why people are not writing to you. Today, regular mail is texting.  It is why you now have a phone that is with you all the time. And why everything is happening so fast these days.

I know many people, even some who do read and play with technology who permanently plant themselves in the mindset of 1965. Then they wonder why everybody else is so different and ask the question, “What is wrong with the world.” They are confused because they think everyone else is out of sync and needs to come back to conform to older and outdated ideals.

There’s nothing wrong with the world learning and growing, and expanding its abilities to communicate and collaborate. In the last hundred some years, look at the diseases that have been cured, life expectancies that have been extended, and the abilities we now have because of better communications and shorter travel times. These are great things. And sometimes, newer technology and values will trump older thoughts and patterns.

I almost believe that some of our older ways of dress, communications, entertainment, and philosophies on work are holdovers from the mass marketing done in those earlier eras when the messages were meant to drive both consumerism and the 8 to 5 office and factory mindset.

As we move forward, we might act differently, dress differently, and hold different mores compared to former eras.  It is mainly because of the changes we now have and how fast they happen.

The office is now on a tablet or even an iPhone. Eight to 5 is replaced by the 24/7 as more people work worldwide from a single location. I have personally worked for clients in the United States, Australia, and England all at the same time, from Colorado Springs. To do this, I had to balance schedules with the use of a world clock on my laptop. 

This does not give permission to today’s generation and workforce to write off older generations out of hand.  We need to remember that we would not have the tools, technology, and collaboration of today without those earlier generations leading the way in their era.  We owe everything we can do to those who fought to make our future ready for us to take it through the next 30 years.  We need to hope we can do as much for future generations to come.

Thank you for being with me today.  I hope to be with you again tomorrow.