How to improve your fundraising performance

Interesting month August. Many of us taking holidays (mine was a real staycation - gardening, house painting and repairs but also some boating, walking, music and reading). It's the reading that can help your performance, if you use the opportunity!

I'm not talking specifically about fundraising texts, marketing tombs or even volumes on self improvement. No, just use that wonderful sense of curiousity that every good fundraiser must exercise. And if you don't then cultivate the skill. it's vitally important.

Whatever your holiday reading can be turned to your advantage and improve your capacity to operate effectively.

Think about what you would discuss with a mentor. Problems at work? Issues with colleagues? Opportunities to explore? Processes to improve? The advantages of having a mentor is that time given over to reflection. More often than not it's not what they might suggest but the space they help you to create in order to reflect on your options, redefine your priorities, sort the important out from the urgent and think more objectively about the effects of change upon colleagues.

You can create that same space without the mentor's intervention. Use the times you are deep in a thriller to stop and ponder - what the detective, heroine, adversary or whoever you are contemplating - might do if faced with similar issues. Again it's not what they might say but what you might be able to jump to given some time in the NOW.

If you don't get it yet try reading Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now). It's a great read or re-read for the holidays and will give you the opportunity to be in the now for a bit longer. That's the place to be when thinking the unthinkable and contemplating change. Try it.