The reason was a dialogue lecture ”Miracle of Learning” from two famous Finnish professors Kirsti Lonka (Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Helsinki) and Esa Saarinen (Philosopher, Professor, Aalto University). This lecture was a birthday present for 375-year-old University of Helsinki (organized by the Teachers' Academy at the University of Helsinki).

These two astonishingly skillful, intelligent and sympathetic professors gave dose of ideas and models to apply for any part of private or business life: sales, marketing, workplace development, managing, service experience improvement, relationship. Just name it. The lecture was so good that I haven’t recovered from the miracle yet. In fact I wish I never recover. I just want more of it. There were so many excellent themes to learn. I’m sure I’ll write more of those other topics later on.

The lecture can be found from here in Finnish. Yes it’s really good reason for you to start learning Finnish:) In the meantime you can try for example this one in English from E. Saarinen http://www.esasaarinen.com/en/lectures 

Analysis of a good day

Professor Lonka described how you can create and duplicate success easily into your (work)life. In the evening, you might find yourself thinking about the day you had like this:

You have a good feeling and it’s nice to go to bed in good mood.

STOP! NO NO NO!

This is precisely the place where you should think about the elements of a good day. If you let the idea and yourself go to sleep, your good day will remain as an exception.

Therefore:

1. Once you detect and you are aware that you happened to had a rare good day at the office, a successful negotiation, good meeting, brilliant customer service situation or a nice date with someone

2. Identify and analyze the good: from which parts the good was built on?

3. Go through the day, event or experience in your mind and list or speak aloud all good ingredients it had. 

Even just thinking and discovering the good parts of your good experience, your mind is starting to do it’s magic, slowly but nicely. Most importantly you will be able to systematically produce more of these good things. You can make another good day, another good customer meeting, another great presentation, more good hours, more good weeks and more good months.

Of course, All of this will not happen overnight and usually there will be some X-factors and steps backwards but when you detect and analyze the formula of good, that’s a step in the right direction. 

Lonka presented also a technique of small steps in this context: When you start to increase one good ingredient to your actions, adding the next one when the previous one has started to work nicely, then adding the next one etc. You'll find that all of the good parts have been transferred to the systematic part of your daily actions. A good day; a good performance has not came just by a chance, it’s become a norm.

Now, if I’m thinking about my good customer service experience and all good parts of it, the production formula has made of ingredients like:

So what happens there from a perspective of educational psychology? When you are aware of things and you change your actions, following thing is that your interaction is changing which leads to new better feeds from others and the final result is that your mental models, mindset and behavior have changed. So you've learned, created new practices and new knowledge. You have learned to work, like for example, the top salesperson, so you have become the top salesperson!

Structures can be moved

After a good day formula next thing could be to try out a fun model of Professor Saarinen:

So when you find a good idea or approach, in a totally different environment or purpose, why not analyze the ingredients of it and reconsider to apply that to your own action. I do not mean copying a competitor's idea, I’m meaning applying a completely new idea from completely different industry for example. It’s worth to try if your own existing idea sucks nowadays. Structures can be moved, A well-functioning idea has at least a potential to be successful also when moved to another context. Many times the only obstacle is to leave from the familiar and safe structures. Saarinen said that in the business life it’s common to ask from him out of the box-thinking but when the time comes to really start thinking ”out of the box”, performance should still stay at inside the box-level i.e. in the familiar structures.

Just be yourself. Always.

I’ve had the pleasure to get to know Kirsti better ever since she guided my master thesis last spring. E. Saarinen told during this lecture that he once said to Kirsti, who was still finding her own professional way in a new working environment:

What a beautiful way to encourage a friend!  

I think that one thing to success and popularity of Professor Kirsti Lonka is that gentle solicitation from a friend years ago. Kirsti is just herself no matter what. That’s one of the most important lessons to learn.

I recommend to try these methods in your daily business and life, because like Esa Saarinen quotes Matti Nykänen (who is one of the most legendary ski jumpers in the world)