Posts Tagged ‘Dennis Rodman’
How to Close Your Believability Gap
Is Your Message Mind-Ready?
- North Korea threatens to turn Washington and Seoul each into a “sea of flames” with “lighter and smaller nukes.”
- Dennis Rodman says Kim Jong Un is a “great guy.”
Sometimes our words create a believability gap. You can see the believability gap between words spoken and the possible results. You can also see the believability gap between the words spoken and the credibility of the speaker. The two bulleted statements above both suffer results- and credibility-deficits, so we don’t believe.
Personally and corporately, we know that we have to speak and communicate in ways that build credibility. That usually means not over-promising. And it means delivering on the few promises we do make. Most of us understand this, even if we don’t always practice it perfectly.
Closing the believability gap involves looking inside (again, personally and corporately) to identify those skills, motivations and insights that can support the results we want our friends, clients and customers to know us for. Sometimes that look inside shows us we’ve been emphasizing the wrong things to the wrong people. It takes courage to step away from a wrong-headed direction, especially when that wrong-way seems to work, for the moment.
Making our messages mind-ready means making sure we have the skills, values, motivations, insights and practices to carry out what we say. Mind-ready messages are credible and result-oriented. People see through bluff and bluster.
But that doesn’t mean we should take threats from North Korea lightly. I guess we’re back to pouring food into their corrupt system again. And Rodman? Let’s make sure he always negotiates when traveling with the Harlem Globetrotters.
###
Image credit: Ali Gulec (Turkey) via 2headedsnake
BFF Rodman & Kim Jong Un. Let’s Not Mention “Tyrant”
“I Declare” and Other Tool Tools
Dennis Rodman can declare Kim Jong Un a great guy, but that doesn’t make it so. Sadly, Rodman’s declaration will change our perceptions, if ever so slightly. Is Kim Jong Un a great guy? Well here’s what we know for sure since the third-generation has taken the reigns:
- North Koreans remain mostly hungry, so when Rodman spoke of Kim Jong Un’s “epic feast,” we started counting how many hundreds of North Koreans went without food as a result. That’s not a big logical leap: North Koreans often go without food. The Un’s great feast is just another reason.
- Prison camps are growing, not shrinking according to The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
- North Korea continues testing nuclear technology even as the US and China agree to new sanctions
- North Korea threatens to scrap the armistice that forms the truce with South Korea
Our administration takes Rodman as a joke or a tool, which seems reasonable. Perhaps the whole odd friendship is a publicity stunt, though it is unclear who won this stunt. My hunch is the winner is not Rodman.
But…is Kim Jong Un a great guy? Maybe if you overlook how he continues to starve, beat and abuse his population into submission. Maybe if you overlook how he and his family have turned the entire country into their personal economic engine. Maybe if you overlook how he seems OK with generations of injustice that perch his family at the top.
Maybe then you can see Kim Jong Un as a great guy.
###
Image credit: Time
conversation is an engine 