First, the latest issue of the T. T. Mitchell Consulting Newsletter, Office Relationships, is now available.

On Sunday I met with the members of my very tiny mastermind group, and this time we added a fourth person to the mix. One of the things we usually go over is seeing where we are with our goals for the year. Of course, though I have my goals for the year posted here, I didn't take them with me. Luckily, I remembered in general what my goals for the year were.

Essentially, I'm not on track for at least 4 of the goals. For one of them, the weight loss goal, I did change my eating patterns and do exercise more, and though I haven't lost any weight my glucose did drop dramatically, so I'll take that over the weight loss for the time being.

There was one, though, where I hit the goal, though not quite the way it was intended. I had a goal of writing a book this year on one of the topics that I'd already had in my mind. I did write a book, as indicated in the previous post, but not the book I had planned on writing. That particular book, which will be healthcare related, is thus far 15 pages in, but it's bogged down because I just have so much to say.

This is where the new person, Gerri, came into play. I was talking about this book and how I was still stuck in the early part of it, though following my outline, and she asked if I could encapsulate all of what I'd written into two pages, and then possibly mention some other stuff. My immediate thought was "poor woman, has no idea what I do". We all believe that everything we do is just the most complicated thing in the world, no matter the level we're at, and that no one else could ever understand what we do.

My next thought, especially after the other two chimed in, is that sometimes we get so insular in what we do that we forget that those we communicate with that don't do what we do aren't interested in all the nuts and bolts of it all. They just want to know what they need to know and then have you move on. I started to understand it as I related my own thoughts about one particular John Grisham novel, where he spent way too much time telling us all how cars were built so that later on in the book he could bring into play why one car in particular failed. I had thought at the time that all that build up was too much information, and when he got to the part where the background came into play, I still felt the same way.

So, the lesson is now clear, and I'm going back to look at this particular book again, hopefully in a new way. All of us are both customers and teachers of others, and we all need to communicate in the most effective ways. It's when we think we have to tell it all that things bog down; think of that the next time you're trying to teach a new concept to someone.