Book review - Nonviolent Communication

This time I got quite different type of book to myself to read. Marshall B. Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life was really interesting book about communication. It is one of those books that hopefully changes the way I communicate with others.

Basics of nonviolent communication is observing clearly, understanding the feeling, recognizing the needs and making clear request. I explained it myself even more simply, try to, without judgment, understand what other is saying and why, then make sure you are understood as well. As easy and basics it might sound, I believe no one can always communicate that clearly and honestly.

The book explains with lots of good examples from quite normal and really extraordinary situations how communication can be the key to progress in many situations. M.B Rosenberg has seen really difficult situations, but seems to have handled those well with nonviolent communication methods.

Understanding these methods is not hard. On the other hand learning to use these in everyday communication can take years or decades. We are so learned to use judgments on our communication that communicating with open heart and mind can be difficult. We are so built to seek for acceptance, that we can't understand the true needs behind the things we say and do.

This book is easy to read, but it requires courage to digest. It requires a journey to one's inner feelings and needs. As much of I would like to recommend this to anyone, I feel that to get the benefits of this, one needs to be open enough for the softer values of live. If you've read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and liked it, this might be a good book for you.

I hope that I would learn to communicate with rules of nonviolent communication in the future. I'm especially keen on trying to use these methods with my daughters. As a parent it is so easy to use authority and judgment to get through wishes. I do know that it requires more than one book to understand and start using this methodology effectively. I added other books of nonviolent communication to my reading list to come to the subject later on also. Now it's the time to start practicing.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

No one is irreplaceable because of their knowledge

There are people in organizations that seem irreplaceable. Of course no one is really irreplaceable, but they can be important for organization to keep running efficiently. The fun thing is that often it is thought that these irreplaceable people are so knowledgeable about some subjects that it makes them so important. But that's not the case.

In information age, knowledge is available for everyone. Information about basically any subject is only few googles away. The same is true with organizations, information is available for most who are eager enough to find it.

The true value of the people is how they use and process the information they receive. Mapping information together and ignoring irrelevant information are highly necessary skills of todays organizations. Reacting to correct information and knowing how and with whom to process the information is the key what makes some people so effective.

People should concentrate more on putting information and sources of information to the context than trying to gain information to themselves whenever they can. I bet everyone knows these people who try to be involved in everything, but they don't actually give any valuable input to anything. Then at the same time, there can be people who are not involved in many things, but once asked they somehow always seem to give valuable input.

Information about where and how to find information, is more important than knowing yourself. That's what irreplaceable people are made of.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Can't Swim, Can't Ride, Can't Run: From Common Man to Ironman

I got as a Christmas present from my sister and her husband a book about common guy turning to an ironman. This book Can't Swim, Can't Ride, Can't Run: From Common Man to Ironman from Andy Holgate was their interpretation of my current triathlon enthuasism. I guess they hit it quite close.

This book is a journey without any technical jargon about training. It's a motivational story about ones life and how triathlon bug can hit hard. Andy Holgate turns from quite normal, bit overweight, librarian to an endurance maniac.

Andy Holgate had first written a blog and based on that he decided to turn it into a book. Book surely is written in enjoyable way. It was easy to get in to moods of Andy's by his writings. He also introduces lots of his training friends and describes them well. It really is a sneak peak to quite a normal life, filled with endurance sports.

What I like in this book, is that Andy surely teaches everybody to appreciate endurance sports. He himself went all the way to be an Ironman, but still he seems to cheer everyone for all the different endurance sports.

Andy Holgate is living proof that everyone can do triathlons if they wish. It's a mindset thing, not anything else. That's the best part of the book.

It's an entertaining book, which suits well for vacation times. I can happily recommend it to everyone. It a fun thing to read. This might give an extra push to take a endurance challenge. This book is not a how to train for ironman book, it's a book that motivates you to take the challenge.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Most popular and my favorite blog posts of the year 2012

As I mentioned in the previous post, I wasn't as active blogger this year that I was hoping to be. This is my 52nd post for the year, so it makes it one per week. Last year I blogged twice per week, so the drop is quite big. Still people kept visiting and reading my blog and the visitor amount raised steadily with the rate of about 100 more readers per month.
  
Five most popular blog posts this year

Here's a list of my most read blog posts for the year 2012. There's one from 2011, but that was read mainly during this year.

1. Book review - Swim Smooth: The Complete Coaching System for Swimmers and Triathletes
2. Good multitasking skills means good single tasking 
3. Book review: Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel
4. Book review: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
5. Cultural differences can make culture's diverge (from 2011)

Book reviews played the big part on my blog attractiveness. That's normal due to the fact that most of the posts were about book reviews. Luckily there's two other blog posts in the top list to prove to myself that people are interested on other things as well.

The blog post, cultural differences can make culture's diverge, was actually written long time ago already in August 2011. At that time, it got the normal interest of less than hundred reads. Just lately, it for some reason got attention again. Within latest couple of months people started to read and share it again. That's the reason it got to the list.

My own favorite blog posts this year

These are posts that I think has a good point and are written quite ok, but they didn't get the attention I would have wanted. That happens quite often, the posts that I think are interesting are not read a lot and then vice versa.  Here are the posts that I appreciate and want to raise from this year for another change.

• Don't trust Future you
• Experience can't be counted in years
• Why there is so much Business Jargon?
• What's the good intention other has in mind?
• Who would pay for the news paywall?

Go check some of these out and leave comments if you think those are important or good ones.

Where does my readers come from?

I haven't opened this up ever before, but I think it's a time to do this also. In the very first year of this blog, my readers came naturally from Finland. Now that I have blogged regularly about three years, situation has changed. There's wide variety of people from many different countries visiting. I really appreciate that one.

Here's the list of countries where visitors come to my blog with percentages of visits

1. USA (about 40%)
2. Finland (15%)
3. Ukraine (< 10%)
4. Russia (< 10%)
5. UK (< 10%)
6. Germany (< 5%)
7. China (< 5%)
8. France (1-2%)
9. Canada (1-2%)
10. India (1-2%)

Thanks for everyone who has visited and read some of my posts this year.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Wordle 2012 - Visualization of topics covered in my blog 2012

This year has been different. Due to my Triathlon enthusiasm and new job I haven't blogged as much I would have wished for. Here's a visualization (Wordle) of most common words used this year in my blog to give a picture what I have blogged about. I have removed the most common English words to give a better view to actual subjects:

It's quite easy to see books have been the main blogging interest of the year. I'm bit surprised that people raises as such a high word in my writings. I 'm happy that that there are so many positive words which are used often: goog, interesting, easy and believe.

Without the word "book"

Because book seemed to play such a big part of my writing, I did a wordle without the word book also to show the other words better. Here's the one without the word book:

This tells it even more clearly, I have been able to stay positive in my writings. I've tried to keep sports out of this blog, but at least swimming has sneaked in. Business and companies are there also. I would have thought that I've written more about experiences, but that's smaller that business for example. Design, which I do like a lot, is not even on the list. That needs to change for the next year.

Want to create you own?

If you want to create your own Wordle about your blogging, the most reliable way I have found to do it with blogger is this. First get all feed items for this year with this: [blogname]/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false&max-results=[here the amount of blog post this year]. Then select all text there and paste it to you text editor. Then you can remove something before pasting it to wordle.

My previous years wordle's can be found from here: Wordle 2010 & Wordle 2011.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen