Updated August 25/2010

Page 2

Index

Attitude Versus Aptitude  Aug 25/10

Balancing work and life  March 31/10

becoming an effective listener  Aug 25/10

Being busy does not equal being productive  April 291/0

Building a productive team  March 1/10

8-Step Change Model  Jan 7/10

Foundations for great achievement  Jan 27/10

Get a New Attitude  Aug 25/10

Get Motivated!  Jan 7/10

Goal Set, Goal Met! An Organized Approach to Reaching Goals  March 8/10

GROW Model  Feb 18/10

Healthy team and a healthy relationship  March 29/10

Hershey-Blanchard situational leadership theory  Feb 8/10

How good are  your management skills  Feb 8/10

How to be Patient  Aug 23/10

How to earn the respect of others  Jan 27/10

How to keep your cool when anger takes over  April 6/10

Learn to avoid guilt traps  March 3/10

Learn to Deal in Challenges  Aug 25/10

Managing Presentation Nerves  April 16/10

Mentoring: An Essential Leadership Skill  Jan 22/10

Much confidence Little competence  Jan 14/10

Multitasking...Can It Help You Get More Done  Aug 25/10

Performance Appraisals  Jan 22/10

Positive Approach to Negative People  Aug 9/10

Productivity Doesn't Happen By Itself  Aug 9/10

Restrict and Evict the Idea of Conflict  March 31/10

Secrets of successful leadership  March 3/10

Sense of humor-your natural coping mechanism  Jan 7/10

7 Cs of Communication  April 14/10

Six Musts for achieving your goals  April 14/10

Small Scale Planning  Aug 25/10

Steps to Achieve Goals  March 29/10

Successful Induction  March 29/10

Tannenbaum-Schmidt Leadership Continuum  April 29/10

Team Effectiveness Assessment  March 29/10

Time Management Tips for Solo Entrepreneurs  Aug 25/10

20 Ways To Say No  April 22/10

Using setback to propel your business forward  March 29/10

Vital key to success  Feb 3/10

What is Leadership  Aug 25/10

What's a leader  Jan 20/10

Writing Meeting Notes  March 29/10

You don't have to be a born leader to be a great leader  Feb 16/10

Your guide to maximum productivity Jan 7/10

Guidelines To Becoming An Effective Listener

^{I had the ‘pleasure’ of working with a neurologist who reminded me of the famous T.V doctor ‘House’ – he seemed to know what he was doing, but when I tried to ask a question, he curtly cut me off and quickly rushed me out of his office after writing some notes on my chart.  I felt hopeless and angry.  The second neurologist I visited asked me a list of questions to understand exactly what I was going through before he attempted to perform any medical testing. He offered to answer any questions that I had and only when he had listened to everything I had to say, did he offer his opinion or give medical advice.  This is probably why he came well recommended and why it took me 3 months to get an appointment with this very successful doctor.}

^{We all demonstrate active listening skills when the need arises. Whether it’s on a date with someone you are trying to impress or with a boss that we wish to be recognized by. Whatever the case may be, there have been times when we wanted to listen and we did. As managers, we know the basic rules; nod your head a few times and total silence is not an appropriate response. We have the skills to keep the conversation going and to give the other person the freedom to openly discuss what they think is important.}

^{Managers will find the guidelines below invaluable:}

^{1. Show genuine interest: You may be in the middle of doing something, but in order to encourage the other person to continue speaking, they should know that you have their undivided attention and are genuinely interested in what they have to say.  Stop your mind from wondering and focus on the subject being discussed.
2. Suggest another time if need be: At times it may not be possible to devote time to the conversation at that specific moment. Let the other person know that you have something you need to finish and suggest another time and place that you can meet at which will be more convenient for you. This kind of honesty shows that you regard whatever the person has to say as important and you want to be able to focus on them and only them when you are speaking. Avoid distractions
3. Drop any emotions, opinion or bias: Acknowledge that you may have your own views on the subject matter, and then let them go until the other person is done talking.  This will allow you to listen to the other person without offering your own viewpoint.  
4. Get rid of all distractions: You can turn away from your monitor or turn it off, silence your phone or close your door slightly.  These small gestures indicate that the speaker is the most important person to you at that specific time and you want to hear what they have to say.
5. Use your senses to listen: Nonverbal behavior has been known to constitute approximately 65-80% of all communication.  To show that you are actively listening, make your body face the other person and, if you are sitting down, you may want to lean forward a little. Maintain eye contact without staring, and relax your hand in such a way that you appear welcoming and not bored.  Nod your head to show agreement or understanding, and make sounds such as “mmm’ or say “I’m with you..” to show interest.
6. Hear what the other person is NOT saying: Does the speaker have red puffy eyes? This could indicate that they were crying before they decided to speak to you. Are their hands resting on their hip? This could mean that they are angry.  The speakers’ tone of voice will help you to determine if they are excited or upset. It will give you an idea of the motive behind the talk.
7. Respond with questions: When something is said that you do not understand or if you need further clarification, ask questions. You may even paraphrase what the other person said by saying “what I hear you say is..” This will allow the speaker to correct you if you are wrong and will give them an opening to continue talking or explain further.  Be careful not to sound condescending.
8. Be honest and open: This involves remembering the golden rule ‘treat others the way you would want to be treated’.  Openness, frankness and genuineness on your part and to yourself, will allow you to decide how best to handle the situation at hand.}

^{If you want someone to open up and develop trust in you, actively listen to what they have to say.  It is the best way to resolve conflict and avoid misunderstandings.}

^{http://www.organizedleader.com/guidelines-to-becoming-an-effective-listener.html}

^{Time Management Tips for Solo Entrepreneurs}

^{Plan today for tomorrow. That's a big-picture - and little-picture - philosophy that serves soloists well. Try it: You'll see the results.}

^{Does it seem like everyone and everything is vying for your attention all at once? It can be hard for solo entrepreneurs to know what to do first, let alone try to find the time to get caught up. Here are some time management tips that will help you to stay on top of it all:}

^{1. Put your to-do list in writing and prioritize it. Studies show that people who write their lists down are 90% more likely to complete their list than those who do not.}

^{2. Be realistic about how long it takes to get things done. Block out a reasonable amount of time on your planner, especially if it's an appointment where there's driving time to consider.}

^{3. Schedule time with yourself, without interruptions. If that means closing your office door and letting your voicemail take phone messages, then that's what you need to do. Do this at your most productive time of the day. Are you a morning person? Start your day out with some quiet time by yourself, when you're the most productive and focused.}

^{4. Don't multi-task. That's right! These days, people have found that they're much more productive when they're allowed to focus on one task at a time, rather than constantly juggling a dozen different projects at once. Think about it - don't you feel like you've actually accomplished something when you can cross things off your list?}

^{5. Are you a "yes" person? Learn to say no. Sometimes adding just one more thing to your to-do list means staying at work an extra hour. Ask yourself if you really have the time and energy to handle one more task. Don't guilt yourself into it, especially if you'll feel resentful later, for having done it.}

^{6. Do you work at home? Don't let common distractions sidetrack you. That basket of laundry will still be there at the end of the day.}

^{7. Try to combine like tasks. If you have lots of phone calls to make and emails to respond to, make all of the phone calls first, then tackle the emails.}

^{8. Keep all your contacts in one place, within easy reach. Do whatever works for you, whether you keep an address book in your day planner, in Outlook, or in your Palm. You need to have fast and easy access to phone numbers and email addresses.}

^{9. Use waiting time productively. When waiting for an appointment or traveling, catch up on reading trade magazines, writing correspondence, or jotting down creative ideas for marketing your business.}

^{10. At the end of each day, plan for the next day. Write down tomorrow's to-do list, prioritize it, and then clean off your desk.}

^{Jean Hanson is a Certified Professional Virtual Assistant. Discover how partnering with a virtual assistant will give
you more time to do the things you love to do! Visit her at http://www.vaofficesolution.com . Jean is also the author of the eBook, Virtualize Your Business - http://www.virtualizeyourbiz.com.}

^{Action Plans}

^{Small Scale Planning}

^{So, you know that you need to produce a newsletter, organize a team-building session, put together a bid for a new piece of work, or organize moving Jenny's team up to the second floor. Exactly what do you need to do to achieve this?}

^{None of these are major projects. In fact, you can probably think of all the steps in your head right now. But how do you ensure that you really have covered everything? Would anyone else know where you'd got to with the work if you were unexpectedly off sick for a few days? And are you quite clear about when you need to start if everything is to be done and dusted by the deadline?}

^{An Action Plan is a simple list of all of the tasks that you need to carry out to achieve an objective. It differs from a To Do List in that it focuses on the achievement of a single goal.}

^{How to Use the Tool:}

^{Wherever you want to achieve something significant, draw up an Action Plan. This helps you think about what you need to do to achieve that thing, so that you can get help where you need it and monitor your progress.}

^{To draw up an Action Plan, simply list the tasks that you need to carry out to achieve your goal, in the order that you need to complete them. This is very simple, but is still very useful!}

^{Keep the Action Plan by you as you carry out the work and update it as you go along with any additional activities that come up.}

^{If you think you'll be trying to achieve a similar goal again, revise your Action Plan after the work is complete, by changing anything that could have gone better. Perhaps you could have avoided a last-minute panic if you'd alerted a supplier in advance about when and approximately what size of order you would be placing. Or maybe colleagues would have been able to follow up on the impact of your newsletter on clients if you have communicated with them about when it would be hitting clients' desks. (If you're doing the job often, it can be incredibly powerful to turn your Action Plan into an Aide Memoire.)}

^{Key points:}

^{An Action Plan is a list of things that you need to do to achieve a goal. To use it, simply carry out each task in the list!}

^{Many more tools like this are explained in Make Time For Success!, our downloadable personal effectiveness and time management e-book. Click here to learn more.}

^{MindTools.com - Join Our Community!}

^{In the next article we look at To Do Lists. Effective use of these is fundamental to good time management. To read this, click 'Next article' below. Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Where to go from here" list underneath.}

^{Attitude Versus Aptitude
 
Overcome A Major Fear...
A major source of stress in your life is the "fear of
rejection" or "fear of criticism." This fear of rejection
manifests itself in an over-concern for the approval or
disapproval of your boss or other people.
 
The fear of rejection is often learned in early childhood as
the result of a parent giving the child what psychologists
call "conditional love."
 
Rise Above the Need For Approval...
Many parents made the mistake of giving love and approval to
their children only when their children did something that
they wanted them to do.
 
A child who has grown up with this kind of conditional love
tends to seek for unconditional approval from others all his
or her life.
 
When the child becomes an adult, this need for approval from
the parent is transferred to the workplace and onto the
boss. The adult employee can then become preoccupied with
the opinion of the boss.
 
This preoccupation can lead to an obsession to perform to
some undetermined high standard.
 
Avoid Type A Behavior...
Doctors Rosenman and Friedman, two San Francisco heart
specialists, have defined this obsession for performance as
"Type A behavior."
 
Experts have concluded that approximately 60% of men and as
many as 30% of women are people with Type A behavior.
 
Don't Burn Yourself Out...
This Type A behavior can vary from mild forms to extreme
cases. People who are what they call "true Type A's" usually
put so much pressure on themselves to perform in order to
please their bosses that they burn themselves out.
 
They often die of heart attacks before the age of 55. This
Type A behavior, triggered by conditional love in childhood,
is a very serious stress-related phenomenon in the American
workplace.
 
Action Exercises:
Here are two things you can do immediately to deal with the
fear of rejection, criticism and disapproval.
 
First, realize and accept that the opinions of others are
not important enough for you to feel stressed, unhappy or
over concerned about them.
 
Even if they dislike you entirely, it has nothing to do with
your own personal worth and value as a person.
 
Second, refuse to be over concerned about what you think
people are thinking about you. The fact is that most people
are not thinking about you at all. Relax and get on with
your life.
_____________
Brian Tracy is one of the world's leading authorities on
personal and business success. His fast-moving talks and
seminars are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and
strategies that you can apply immediately to get better
results in every area. Visit him at
http://www.getmotivation.com/briantracy/}

Get a New Attitude
 
One of the first and foremost things to do to change your
life is to change your attitude. Attitude is fundamental to
the success or failure that we experience in our life.
 
Are you less successful than you would like to be? Do you
have the money you want? Do you have the family you want? Do
you have the job that you want?
 
If you answered "no" to any of the questions above, then you
may want to take a look at your attitude, because so much
depends on it!
 
"Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you
take it," says Irving Berlin. It is true. Now don't get me
wrong, that 10 percent is M-A-J-O-R, but even bigger than
that is what your attitude is. So, do everything that you
can -- action wise -- to make your life an absolute success.
 
But when you are done acting, you will only have what you
have. It may be big and it may be little. But it is what you
have to live with. Now the biggest key will be what your
attitude is toward what your actions have brought to you.
 
One person will work and be happy with it. Another will
work, achieve the same thing, and have a terrible attitude
about it. Who will achieve the most successful life? My bet
is on the one with the best attitude.
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "To different minds, the same
world is a hell, and a heaven." It is all in what value you
give to it! You see, you may look at one thing and say
"That's terrible," while another person may say, "That's
great!"
 
A simple example would be a half a ham sandwich. Now, if you
are used to filet mignon, you are going to think, "A measly
old ham sandwich? Is that it?" But a starving person would
have a very different viewpoint! They would think, "I won
the lunch lottery!"
 
Another reason to keep in mind that our attitude is so very
important is because oftentimes the attitude we demonstrate
is exactly what we will get back. The great Earl Nightingale
said, "Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude
toward us." Think about it. You walk into a store and say to
the clerk, "Hey lady, do you think you could get off your
duff and tell me where I can find the milk?"
 
What kind of attitude do you think you will get back?
Instead, we should go in and say, "Excuse me, but would you
be so kind as to tell me where I could find the milk?" You
will get a good attitude back from that! The same is true in
every area of our lives.
 
Do you find that others have a bad attitude toward you? Then
maybe you have a bad attitude toward them. The old saying is
true that you reap what you sow; if you are reaping bad
attitudes, you are probably sowing bad attitudes. Take a
closer look, and you may find the key to turning your life around.
 
"There is little difference in people, but that little
difference makes a big difference. That little difference is
attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or
negative." - W. Clement Stone
 
Let's face it; there is little difference in people
physically or intellectually. But what does make the
difference is the attitude. You can take two people of
similar background, education, skill and intelligence and
find that one is the kind of person you are looking for
because of a positive attitude, while the other is a
complete dud -- the eternal pessimist! Your attitude is the
big difference.
 
What is your attitude? Is it positive or negative? Are you
an optimist or a pessimist? I guarantee you, no matter what
your attitude is, it is affecting you -- and your success.
 
Take this test: Purposefully upgrade your attitude for 90
days and see if life doesn't begin to change for you! Pick a
few areas where you can make a change. For example, begin to
trust people and believe the best in them and see if your
relationships begin to change!
 
If you're stuck or if you just want to go to the next level
of success, it's time to "Get a New Attitude!"
_____________
Chris Widener is a popular speaker and writer as well as the
President of Made for Success, a company helping individuals
and organizations turn their potential into performance, and
succeed in every area of their lives and achieve their
dreams. You can learn more about Chris at
http://www.getmotivation.com/qk.cgi/chriswidener

What is Leadership?

·                         An army officer, charging forward to meet the enemy.

·                         An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his party to follow.

·                         An executive, developing her company's strategy to remain ahead of the competition.

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to "win" as a team or an organization. Leadership is dynamic, vibrant, and inspiring.

Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their team to the right destination in a smooth and efficient way.

In this article, we'll focus on the process of leadership. In particular, we'll discuss the "transformational leadership" model. This model highlights visionary thinking and bringing about change, instead of management processes that are only designed to maintain current performance.

Leadership: A Definition

According to the idea of transformational leadership, an effective leader is a person who does the following:

1. Creates an inspiring vision of the future.
2. Encourages and motivates people to engage with that vision.
3. Manages delivery of the vision.
4. Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision.

To become an effective leader, you need to learn the skills needed to do these things. We'll look at each element in more detail.

1. Creating an Inspiring Vision of the Future
   
   In business, a vision is a realistic, convincing and attractive "best case" depiction of where you want to be in the future. With a clear vision, you can provide direction, set priorities, and establish targets, so that you can tell that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve.
   
   To create a vision, leaders focus on an organization's strengths by using tools such as Porter's Five Forces, PEST Analysis, USP Analysis, Core Competence Analysis and SWOT Analysis to analyze their current situation. They think about how their industry is likely to evolve, and how their competitors are likely to behave. They look at how they can innovate successfully (Club members), and shape their businesses and their strategies to succeed in future marketplaces. And they test their visions with appropriate market research, and by assessing key risks using techniques such as Scenario Analysis (Club members).
   
   Therefore, leadership is proactive - problem solving, looking ahead, and not being satisfied with things as they are.
   
   Once they have developed their visions, leaders must make them compelling and convincing. A compelling vision is one that people can see in their minds, feel, understand, and embrace. As such, effective leaders provide a rich picture of what the future will look like when their visions have been realized. They tell powerful stories, and they explain their visions in ways that everyone can relate to.
   
   Here, leaders combine the analytical side of vision creation with the passion that comes from emotional engagement and shared values, creating something that is really meaningful to the people being led.
2. Motivating and Inspiring People
   
   A compelling vision provides the foundation for leadership. But it's a leader's ability to motivate and inspire people that will help him or her deliver that vision.
   
   For example, when you start a new project, you will probably have lots of enthusiasm for it, so it's usually easy to support the project's leader at the beginning. However, it can be difficult to find ways to keep the vision alive and inspirational, after the initial enthusiasm fades, especially if the team or organization needs to make significant changes in the way that they do things. Leaders recognize this, and they work hard on an ongoing basis to connect their vision with people's individual needs, goals, and aspirations.
   
   One of the key ways they do this is through Expectancy Theory (Club members). Effective leaders link together two different expectations:
   1. The expectation that hard work leads to good results.
   2. The expectation that good results lead to attractive rewards or incentives.

This motivates people to work hard to achieve success, because they expect to enjoy rewards - both intrinsic and extrinsic - as a result.

Other approaches include restating the vision in terms of the benefits it will bring to the team's customers, and taking frequent opportunities to communicate the vision in an attractive and engaging way.

What's particularly helpful here is where leaders have expert power. People admire and believe in these leaders because they are expert in what they do. They have credibility, and they've earned the right to ask people to listen to them, and follow them. This makes it much easier for these leaders to motivate and inspire the people they lead.

Leaders can also motivate and influence people through their natural charisma and appeal, and through other sources of power, such as the power to pay bonuses or assign tasks to people. However, good leaders don't rely on these types of power to motivate and inspire others.

3. Managing Delivery of the Vision
   
   This is the area of leadership that relates to management (Club members). According to the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Model, there is a time to tell, a time to sell, a time to participate, and a time to delegate. Knowing which approach you need to use, and when you need it, is key to effective leadership.
   
   Leaders must ensure that the work required to deliver the vision is properly managed - either by themselves, or by a dedicated manager or team of managers to whom the leader delegates this responsibility - and they need to ensure that their vision is delivered successfully.
   
   To do this, team members need performance goals that are linked to the team's overall vision. Our article on Performance Management and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) (Club members) explains one way of doing this, and our Project Management section explains another. And, for day-to-day management of delivering the vision, the Management By Wandering Around (Club members) approach will help to ensure that what should happen, really happens.
   
   Leaders also need to make sure they manage change (Club members) effectively. This will ensure that any changes required to deliver the vision are implemented smoothly and thoroughly, with support and full backing from the majority of people affected.
4. Coaching and Building a Team to Achieve the Vision
   
   Individual and team development are important activities carried out by transformational leaders. To develop a team, leaders must first understand team dynamics. Several well-established and popular models describe this, such as Belbin's Team Roles approach, and Bruce Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing theory.
   
   A leader will then ensure that team members have the necessary skills and abilities to do their job and achieve the vision. They do this by giving and receiving feedback (Club members) regularly, and by training and coaching people to improve individual and team performance.
   
   Leadership also includes looking for leadership potential (Club members) in others. By developing leadership skills within your team, you create an environment where you can continue success in the long term. And that's a true measure of great leadership.

Key Points

Leadership can be hard to define and it means different things to different people.

In the transformational leadership model, leaders set direction and help themselves and others to do the right thing to move forward. To do this they create an inspiring vision, and then motivate and inspire others to reach that vision. They also manage delivery of the vision, either directly or indirectly, and build and coach their teams to make them ever stronger.

It takes time and hard work to develop the skills needed to be an effective leader. However the returns - whether in terms of physical reward or of personal satisfaction - are enormous. Enjoy the leadership journey!

Vision creation, motivation, vision delivery and team building are all skill-sets that you can learn within the Career Excellence Club. Join now, and get the help, training and support you need to become a highly effective leader in your workplace.

Learn to Deal in Challenges
 
To really help people in extraordinary ways, learn to deal
in challenges. That is what sports is all about:
challenges. That is what music is all about. The challenge
to play so well, someone is inspired.
 
The challenge to say it so well, someone gets it. The
challenge to be so gifted in language that someone sees it.
Insight is unbelievable; only human beings can do this.
 
The man closes his eyes and puts his hands over his eyes
and says, "I see it." You say, "No, you don't; you've got
your eyes closed." No. There is more than one way to see.
 
And all someone has to do is to see an answer that they can
start on immediately, and within six months, their life
could start to multiply and change. Within one year, the
difference will be extraordinary, and a person who was lost
now becomes a person of influence -- just because someone
helped them to see for the moment what was wrong and the
possibility to change it. And then the challenge to go do
it and do it well.
 
Now, here is the best challenge of all: "Let's go do it."
Don't always say, "You go do it. You change." But rather,
"Let's get healthy. Let's go change the world. Let's build
an enterprise. Let's work on this together." See, I always
respond better to "let's."
 
Sometimes it is hard to lift yourself out. It's hard to be
self-inspired at first. And if someone says, "Come on, let's
start a new program." "Come on, let's do exercises." "Come
on, let's get healthy." "Come on, let's start something.
I'll be there, you be there, and you bring a guest and I'll
bring a guest -- let's start something."
 
That is so inspiring to have somebody say "let's." "Let's do
it." "Let's build a team." "Let's win the championship."
"Let's walk off with the trophy."
 
"Let's." Wow, there is something about that that can keep
you awake at nights. There is something about that that
turns on the juices. There is something about that that
reaches deep in the soul.
 
For a person could do extraordinary things when somebody
says "let's." "Let's do it." "I've got two with me already;
if you'll be the next one, we can conquer the world." You
say, "Whoa, together nobody is a match for us." By
yourself, you're vulnerable; but with us, nobody is a
match. You say, "Wow! I want to belong to that team." So
figure out ways to say "let's."
_____________
Announcing The Jim Rohn One-Year Success Plan! One of the
most comprehensive resource and success plans ever created
for you to reach all of your goals in the next 12 months!
For details go to http://www.getmotivation.com/qk.cgi/jr-successplan

 

How to be Patient

Learning to Stay Calm

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it open. 
– Arnold Glasgow, American humorist

Here's the problem: You're waiting for someone to finish compiling a report that you need for a meeting. Because of an issue that came up, you're already 15 minutes late.

You can feel your body getting tense, and you're getting quite cross. You start sweating, and suddenly you yell at the person for being slow and putting you behind schedule. You can tell she's hurt, but you can't help it. She's making you late!

Does this sound familiar?

Many of us are impatient at times. Losing control of our patience hurts not only us, but those around us. Impatience raises our stress level and can even cause physical harm to our bodies. Being impatient can also damage relationships.

In this article, we'll examine strategies that you can use to be more patient.

Why Practice Patience?

Others often see impatient people as arrogant, insensitive, and impulsive. They can be viewed as poor decision makers, because they make quick judgments or interrupt people. Some people will even avoid impatient people, because of their poor people skills and bad tempers.

People with these personality traits are unlikely to be at the top of the list for promotions to leadership positions. Impatience can even affect relationships at home.

The more patient you are with others, the likelier you are to be viewed positively by your peers and your managers, not to mention your family and friends.

Signs of Impatience

How do you know when you're being impatient? You will probably experience one of more of the following symptoms:

• Shallow breathing (short breaths).
• Muscle tension.
• Hand clenching/tightening.
• Jiggling/restless feet.
• Irritability/anger.
• Anxiety/nervousness. 
• Rushing.
• Snap/quick decisions.

Finding Your Causes

If you experience the symptoms of impatience, your next step is to discover the true cause. Many of us have "triggers." These could be people, phrases, or specific situations (like rush-hour traffic) that regularly cause us to enter an impatient frame of mind.

Make a list of things that cause you to become impatient. If you're having trouble identifying your triggers, use these tips:

• Stop and think about the last time you were impatient. What caused it? You can narrow this down to the root cause by using the 5 Whystechnique.
• Ask your family, friends, and co-workers about your impatience. Chances are that they know what gets you "wound up".
• Many people become impatient due to physical factors such as hunger, dehydration, or fatigue. Analyze your body the next time you start to feel impatient. A simple remedy might be a snack and a glass of water!
• Keep a journal with you to record when you start to feel impatient. Write down what the situation is, and why you're getting frustrated.

Identifying your triggers helps because it forces you to examine your actions and uncover why you're doing what you're doing. This knowledge also helps you devise strategies to avoid becoming impatient.

Of course, it would be great if you could avoid the triggers that make you impatient. But for most of us, that's just not possible. So you have to learn to manage impatience instead.

Managing the Symptoms

When you feel impatient, it's important to get out of this frame of mind as quickly as possible. Try these strategies:

• Take deep, slow breaths, and count to 10. Doing this helps slow your heart rate, relaxes your body, and distances you emotionally from the situation. If you're feeling really impatient, you might need to do a longer count, or do this several times.
• Impatience can cause you to tense your muscles involuntarily. So, consciously focus on relaxing your body. Again, take slow, deep breaths. Relax your muscles, from your toes up to the top of your head. 
• Learn to manage your emotions. Remember, you have a choice in how you react in every situation. You can choose to be patient, or choose not to be: it's all up to you.
• Force yourself to slow down. Make yourself speak and move more slowly. It will appear to others as if you're calm – and, by "acting" patient, you can often "feel" more patient. 
• Practice active listening and empathic listening. Make sure you give other people your full attention, and patiently plan your response to what they say.
• Remind yourself that your impatience rarely gets others to move faster – in fact, it can interfere with other people's ability to perform complex or highly-skilled work. All you're doing is creating more stress, which is completely unproductive.
• Try to talk yourself out of your impatient frame of mind. Remind yourself how silly it is that you're reacting this way. People often don't mind if a meeting is delayed, just as long as you let them know that you're running late in advance.
• If your impatience causes you to react in anger toward others, useanger management techniques to calm down.
• Some people become impatient because they're perfectionists. However, in addition to causing impatience, perfectionism can actually slow productivity and increase stress. Learn how to stop being a perfectionist with our Coaching Clinic I'm a Perfectionist!

Remember that, although many people are naturally patient, the rest of us need to practice patience for it to become a habit. Becoming more patient won't happen overnight, but do persist – it's so important!

Key Points

Many of us struggle with impatience. But if we want healthy work relationships and a successful career, then we need to spend time making patience a habit.

Start by identifying your triggers. Often a specific person or situation can immediately cause you to become impatient. When you identify the specific causes, you're better able to discover why it's happening. You can then use strategies to overcome your impatience.

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_78.htm#nopopups

Productivity Doesn't Happen By Itself

There are three things that have to happen in order to define our work and be maximally productive about it. And these three things don't happen by themselves. We have to train ourselves to do all three, and until we establish them as automatic, habitual behaviors, we have to exert a conscious redirection of our focus to get them done.

We have to:

(1) Make decisions about what we are going to do with our "stuff" and the next actions required to do it (what would "doing" look like?) "Stuff" is un-actionable until we've decided the outcome and the next step to move toward that result. Things on lists and in stacks and in email generally repel instead of attract us to get involved, until we decide what exactly our intention is about them and whether the next step is a call, draft a response, buy nails, set a meeting with someone to discuss it..., etc.

(2) Put those outcomes and actions down in written form, if we don't do them in the moment we think of them. Even if we decide what we need to do about something, if it's filed in our "psychic RAM" we run serious risk of losing sight of the option and (worse) we create instant failure and unnecessary stress. That part of our psyche seems to have no sense of past and future, and it acts as if we should be doing everything it's holding on to all at once.

(3) Look at the reminders (when we can effectively use them and move on them). Even if you have decided the next step is a phone call you need to make, and even if you have written that down somewhere, if you don't look at the reminder when you are at a phone and have discretionary time, you risk missing an opportunity to move something forward when it might be the best thing to do, given all the variables. When you are in a certain context, you need to reflect on all the things that could be done in those contexts, to be the most efficient. And you need to know what it's OK not to be doing, even if you could do it there. If you don't, something in your core knows that you're not optimally handling your agreements with yourself.

These three behaviors combined are a master skill set for knowledge work. Yet virtually everyone I encounter could significantly improve the consistency with which he or she does these three critical productivity activities.

We were not taught these practices growing up. The workaday world of our parents did not require these critical behaviors of knowledge work. People just showed up, and did what obviously needed doing—they could see it in front of them. Few people work in that kind of world any more. These days, just showing up and expecting to work on what's visibly been put in front of them, is hoping for a retro world that doesn't exist, and is likely to be experiencing mounting stress that is not going to get any better.

"The ancestor of every action is a thought."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness."

-Jean de La Bruysre

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A Positive Approach to Negative People

I recently read an article telling managers that they should "get rid of" people whose negative attitudes are adversely affecting productivity and morale within their organizations.

I agree that is a manager's ultimate responsibility, but emphasize the word "ultimate." In far too many cases, managers go from looking the other way to swinging the axe, with the excuse that you can't make people change their attitudes.

"Getting rid of" someone should be a last resort, taken if and only if efforts to induce a more positive workplace environment and the corresponding attitudes of individuals who work there are not successful.

In that spirit, I share some of the most important lessons I've learned about taking a positive approach to negative people in my years with Values Coach. These principles apply not only to management - replace the words "organization" and "manager" with "family" and "parent" and you can take them home with you.

One: Recognize that toxic emotional negativity is always an outward projection of some inner pain (anxiety, envy, low self-esteem, etc.), and that helping people be more positive at work often means helping them achieve a higher level of self-mastery in their personal lives. To say that's not your responsibility is to sell short your organization, your employees, and the people you serve.

Two: Toxic emotional negativity is like the big smelly elephant in the middle of the living room. Everyone knows it's there, but no one wants to talk about it. Expectations regarding how attitudes are reflected in behaviors should be clear in orientation, performance appraisals, staff meetings, informal coaching, and every other possible venue. Instead of complaining about someone's negative attitude, managers should have the courage to confront it in a constructive way.

Three: Attitudes are not genetic qualities; they are habits that are directly influenced by organizational culture, the behaviors of peers, and expectations of managers. As with all efforts to change inappropriate or self-destructive habits, fostering a more positive workplace is best achieved with gentle pressure relentlessly applied.

Four: Be clear and specific about the link between values and behaviors. For example, I do not know of an organization or an individual that does not claim to hold Integrity as an important value. Yet I do not know of an organization that does not have a rumor mill, and I know very few individuals who do not at least on occasion participate.

As Lori Palatnik and Bob Burg point out in their book on the subject, gossip always violates integrity; seen in that light, managers have a higher obligation to eliminate it from the workplace.

Five: Teach people practical skills for confronting toxic emotional negativity. In our leadership retreats, we sometimes break out into small groups and ask people to create skits demonstrating how they would confront inappropriate attitudes.

Most people are very uncomfortable with it, and not very good at it. These are important management skills, and should be taught, role-played, and critiqued (books like Crucial Confrontations, Fierce Conversations and The Coward's Guide to Conflict can help). Likewise, there are very effective techniques for confronting gossip and other inappropriate behaviors.

Six: Give people tools to depersonalize the confrontation. One of the most powerful tools in the quest for a smoke-free world was the simple No Smoking sign. Instead of confronting someone lighting a cigarette, we were able to point to the sign and achieve the desired result with minimal risk of conflict. The Pickle Challenge that our Spark Plug groups use to foster a more positive workplace includes cute signs, pickle jars, and The Pickle Pledge as visual prompts to reinforce positive attitudes.

Seven: Be a positive example. It's remarkable how frequently we hear managers whine and complain about how tired they are of hearing their people whine and complain. This is an easy trap to fall into. As a manager (or as a parent), you must assume that you are always on stage, and set an example of a positive and optimistic attitude for those who look to you for direction.

____________

Joe Tye is president of Paradox 21 Inc., which provicorporate training and culture change initiatives based on a proprietary curriculum of The Twelve Core Action Values of Personal Leadership Effectiveness. He is also the author of several books and audio programs on personal, career, and business success, and a popular motivational speaker. Visit http://www.joetye.com

The Tannenbaum-Schmidt Leadership Continuum

Balancing control with your team's need for freedom

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_42.htm#nopopups

Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. Some are authoritarian and prefer to tell their teams exactly what to do. Others use a much more participative style. And, of course, leaders may use a style anywhere between these two extremes.

These differences suggest a continuum of leadership behavior – with leaders being able to choose the style they use.

So how do you choose the leadership style that's right for you? One popular approach to leadership, the "contingency" approach, argues that your choice should be based on the situation, and not on your personal preferences (here, "contingency" means that your approach is dependent on/contingent upon the situation).

In 1958, contingency theorists Robert Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt identified a continuum of seven distinct leadership styles, which they published in the Harvard Business Review. By understanding this continuum, you can see some of the options available to you, which helps you think about which leadership style is most appropriate in a given situation.

Understanding the Tannenbaum-Schmidt Continuum

The Tannenbaum-Schmidt Continuum shows where a manager's approach lies on a continuum, running from the manager exerting rigid authority through to the team having full freedom to act and make decisions. This is shown in Figure 1.

The model highlights seven leadership styles that occur across the continuum:

1. Tells – The leader makes the decision and expects the team to follow; and the team has very little involvement in decision-making. This type of style is often used early in team formation, before trust is established, or with very inexperienced team members. Continued use of this style can be very frustrating for team members and can break down trust, so leaders must be careful to use this style only when absolutely necessary.
2. Sells – The leader makes the decision, but provides a rationale. Team buy-in is important. Although the decision won't be changed, the team is allowed to ask questions and feel that its needs are being considered.
3. Suggests – The leader outlines the decision, includes a rationale, and asks if there are any questions. While the decision is already made, this style helps the team understand why, so team members don't feel as though the decision is forced on them. Because people have the opportunity to discuss the decision, they feel that they have participated in it, and they accept it more readily. This helps build trust, and it's a great strategy to use when you're trying to figure out what the team is capable of on its own.
4. Consults – The leader proposes a decision and then invites input and discussion to ensure that the decision is the right one. The team has the ability to influence the final outcome, and make changes to the decision. By using this style, the leader acknowledges that the team has valuable insight into the problem. This shows that the leader trusts the team members and wants them to participate actively in problem solving and decision making. This leadership style can build cohesiveness, and provide much-needed motivation to a team.
5. Joins – The leader presents the problem and then asks the team for suggestions and options to consider. Through the discussion that follows, the team helps the leader decide. So, while the leader ultimately makes the decision, it's a very collaborative process, and the team feels valued and trusted. This style is often used when the team has specific knowledge and expertise that the leader needs to make the best decision.
6. Delegates – The leader outlines the problem; provides decision parameters; and allows the team to find solutions and make a final decision. The leader remains accountable for the outcome, and he or she controls risks by setting limits and defining criteria that the final decision must meet. To delegate this much authority, the leader needs to trust the team and ensure that it has the support and resources necessary to make a solid decision.
7. Abdicates – The leader asks the team to define the problem, develop options, and make a decision. The team is free to do what's necessary to solve a problem while still working under reasonable limits, given organizational needs and objectives. Although the level of freedom is very high, the leader is still accountable for the decision and therefore must make sure the team is ready for this level of responsibility and self-control.

Using the Continuum

The continuum's seven leadership styles broadly correspond to a team's level of development. As trust and competency grow within a team, so does the amount of freedom that team members want and that leaders can feel comfortable providing. Tannenbaum and Schmidt felt that there were three key elements to consider when deciding on the style that's most appropriate for a particular situation:

1. The team members – How independent and experienced are they? Do they have the necessary level of competence for the level of freedom you're considering? Do they understand the goals of the team and the organization sufficiently to make good decisions?
2. The situation – Do you have enough time to allow the team to become involved in the decision-making process? Does the team operate well enough together to make an effective decision in a reasonable amount of time? Does the team have the knowledge and experience necessary to make a good decision? Are the consequences of getting the decision wrong significant? And does the culture of the organization support team decision-making?
3. The leader – Do you believe in your team's ability to deliver? Are you willing and able to accept accountability for your team's decision? And are you able to delegate tasks and decisions effectively?

In 1973, Tannenbaum and Schmidt published an update to their theory, in which they recommended that managers consider the interrelationships between the above three factors – along with factors outside the team and the organization. For example:

• If a manager trusts team members to make decisions, and the manager considers any mistakes made to be "learning experiences," then the team members' ability to make good decisions will improve.
• If an organization has a strong culture of respect for its people, then using a "tell" or "sell" style may be less acceptable than it would be in another organization, even with an inexperienced team.
• Consumers may boycott a company where managers are excessively authoritarian toward their people.

Until then have a great two weeks!

Written and Posted by Remez Sasson in Time Management

http://www.successconsciousness.com/blog/time-management/being-busy-does-not-equal-being-productive/

Being Busy Does Not Equal Being Productive
Article written by Gary Simpson

Being “busy” can destroy your ability to get things done.

How many people do you know who are so busy being busy that they never seem to get anything worthwhile done? Does that describe you, maybe even just a little bit?
 
Being busy all the time, through necessity, is a curse. Being busy all the time, for the sake of it, is madness.

Continual busy-ness eventually leads to stress, particularly if results are minimal. You see, it will get to a point where something has to give way. It’s like filling a balloon with air. Eventually no more air will fit inside the balloon and it will do the only thing it can. It will burst.

It’s OK to have busy periods through each day, each week, each month and each year. However, you also need time to relax. Time to re-charge the batteries.

People who are continuously busy over long periods suffer from two main problems:

1.      - they have difficulty saying “no” to anyone

2.      - they have difficulty delegating tasks to others

Let’s look at each in turn.

First, those who cannot say “no.” I have a saying: “You can’t save the entire world.” No matter how good your intentions are, you cannot be everything to everyone.

Make a list of those who need and deserve your time. They are the one’s you should give priority to. Anyone else comes next – if you have the time to spare.

A wise man once said, “work always expands to fit available time.” It’s true. But it is only true if you allow it to happen.

You can always do the odd favor for someone on the odd occasion. Learn to say no in a nice way. Here is one such way: “If I get all my own work done, I will consider your request.” What does that really say? It says your work is important. If you get it done you will help. Naturally, if you cannot get it done you cannot help. It’s a soft way of saying no. Usually the asker will then go and find another person to ask.

By saying no you actually help other people to grow. Imagine if you always said yes to tying up your daughter’s shoe laces. If you never said no she would still be asking you to do it at twenty years of age. By saying no you make her learn to do it for herself. Remember the old saying about giving a hungry person a fish to eat versus teaching the hungry person how to catch their own fish to eat?

By saying no we can free up more time for ourselves and those who need or deserve our time the most. Do not become a slave.

Turning to the second problem, delegation – learn to enlist others to perform tasks that they are better equipped, or have more time, to do.

If you run all over the place attempting to do everything yourself you will never have sufficient time to do anything properly. Delegation is the art of a true leader. The secret to successful delegation is to build the importance of the task into the mind of the person you are delegating it to. Then, when they do it, thank them and praise them sincerely for the things they did well.

Don’t ever think you are irreplaceable, particularly at your employment. Somebody gave me a definition once of irreplaceability in the workforce. It went something like this: “Get a bucket of water, roll up your sleeve and thrust your arm into the water. Now pull your arm out. The time it takes for the water to settle back into position will be about the same time it will take to replace you!”

Learning to say no and being able to delegate will allow you to perform the tasks you really want to do and really need to do yourself at a much higher level of proficiency.

AL Williams wrote a book called “All You Can Do is All You Can Do But All You Can Do is Enough!” (ISBN: 0-8041-0499-9). Catchy title, isn’t it?

In his book, Williams says: “Don’t worry about things you can’t change. Focus on making your part of the world better, because when they click your lights out for the last time, you can’t have any regrets.”

Like I said earlier – you can’t save the whole world. Don’t even try.

If you want to be more productive, try to re-organize the way you plan your time. You can do this by:

1.      - making a list of things requiring your attention

2.      - prioritizing the list

3.      - doing essential things first, non-essential things last

4.      - after every third task, rewarding yourself in some small way

5.      - continue to work your way through the list in sets of three

At the end of the day review your list. This is important because it will allow you to see how much you have done and achieved. Achievement will drive you forward to more achievement.

So, now you don’t have to be busy, busy, busy and get little done. You can just be busy achieving what you want.

The Author
Gary Simpson is a 7th Dan karate master who teaches self defense, motivation, self help and wealth building to students around the world through home study courses.
Visit his web site MotivationSelfEsteem.com

20 Ways To Say No

By Ramona Creel

I am in the middle of several projects

·  Let people know when you have accepted other responsibilities

·  No need to make excuses if you don't have any free time

·  No one will fault you for having already filled your plate

I am not comfortable with that

·  You might be uncomfortable with any of a number of issues

·  The people involved, the type of work, the morale implications, etc.

·  This is a very respectful way to avoid a sticky situation

I am not taking on any new responsibilities

·  You aren't saying that you will never help out again

·  Lust that you feel your schedule is as full as you would like now

·  Understanding your limits is a talent to be expected

I am not the most qualified person for the job

·  If you don't feel that you have adequate skills, that's okay

·  It's better to admit your limitations up front

·  The best way to avoid feeling overwhelmed down the road

I do not enjoy that kind of work

·  Life isn't about drudgery -- if you don't enjoy it, why do it?

·  Don't be afraid to let someone know you just don't want to

·  Someone else is bound to enjoy the work you don't

I do not have any more room in my calendar

·  Be honest if your schedule is filled

·  "Filled" doesn't have to mean really filled

·  Know when you are scheduled as much as you are willing and stop

I hate to split my attention among projects

·  Let people know that you want to do a good job for them

·  But you can't when your focus is too divided or splintered

·  You will be more effective if you focus on one project at a time

I have another commitment

·  It doesn't matter what the commitment is

·  It can even simply be time to yourself or with friends or family

·  You don't have to justify -- you simply aren't available

I have no experience with that

·  Volunteering shouldn't mean learning an entirely new set of skills

·  Suggest that they find someone who has experience in that area

·  Offer to help out with something that you already know how to do

I know you will do a wonderful job yourself

·  People often ask for help because they doubt their own abilities

·  Let them know that you have confidence they will succeed

·  You are actually doing them a favor in the long run

I need to focus more on my personal life

·  Don't be ashamed of wanting to spend time with your family

·  Having a strong family is an important priority in and of itself

·  Be willing to put your personal needs first

I need to focus on my career right now

·  Often, you have to focus your energies on a work-related task

·  You may have to give up some civic or community duties

·  If you don't do it, someone else will take on the task

I need to leave some free time for myself

·  It's okay to be selfish -- in a good way!

·  Treat your personal time like any other appointment

·  Block off time in your calendar and guard it with your life

I would rather decline than do a mediocre job

·  Know when you aren't going to be able to deliver a quality product

·  The reason doesn't matter -- not enough time, wrong skills, etc.

·  Whatever the reason is enough for turning a request down

I would rather help out with another task

·  Saying no doesn't mean that you can't help at all

·  If someone asks you to do something you really despise, refuse

·  Then offer to help with something you find more enjoyable

Let me hook you up with someone who can do it

·  If you aren't available to help out, offer another qualified resource

·  Helping to connect people is a valuable service to offer

·  Make sure the person you refer will represent you well

No

·  Sometimes it's okay to just say no!

·  Just say it in a way that expresses respect and courtesy

·  Leave the door open for good relations

Not right now, but i can do it later

·  If you really want to help but don't have time, say so

·  Offer to help at a later time or date

·  If they can't wait for you, they'll find someone else

Some things have come up that need my attention

·  Unexpected things happen that throw your schedule off

·  Accept that you may need to make a few adjustments

·  It is temporary and you will have more time when life stabilizes

This really is not my strong suit

·  It's okay to admit your limitations

·  Knowing what you can handle and what you can't is a skill

·  Your time will be more efficiently spent on something you do well

Copyright 2000-2009 Ramona Creel

Ramona creel is a modern renaissance woman and guru of simplicity -- traveling the country as a full-time rver, sharing her story of radically downsizing, and inspiring others to regain control of their own lives. As a professional organizer and accountability coach, ramona will help you create the time and space to focus on your true priorities -- clearing away the clutter other obstacles and standing in the way of that life you've always wanted to be living. As a professional photographer, ramona captures powerful images of places and people as she travels. And as a travel writer, social commentator, and blogger, she shares her experiences and insights about the world as we know it. You can see all these sides of ramona -- read her articles, browse through her photographs, and even hire her to help get your life in order -- at www.Ramonacreel.Com. And be sure to follow her on twitter and on facebook.

Content provided by Onlineorganizing.Com, offering "a world of organizing solutions!" Visit www.Onlineorganizing.Com for organizing products, free tips, a speakers bureau, get a referral for a professional organizer near you, or get some help starting and running your own organizing business.

Managing Presentation Nerves

Coping with the Fear Within

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/PresentationNerves.htm

By Dianna Podmoroff, with thanks to members of the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club for sharing their experience and tips for overcoming presentation nerves

Your stomach is queasy, your palms are sweaty, and your mind has gone blank about your opening lines. What will you be like when you've been introduced and the room goes quiet? Are you doomed to presentation panic or paralysis, or can you overcome that debilitating nervousness and deliver a speech that wows the audience? (Or at least leaves them feeling satisfied)?

If you are like most people, then public speaking or presenting is one of your major fears. Yet these skills are often called upon. It might not be to an audience of hundreds, but giving presentations to staff or even team members is a common enough occurrence. You owe it to yourself to develop some strategies and techniques to manage your nerves so you can concentrate on delivering an effective and engaging presentation.

Notice I didn't say to get rid of your nervousness. This is because presenting is not a natural activity; even the most practiced presenters get a bit nervous. The point is this: your nervous energy can be used to your advantage. When you are in a heightened state from the adrenaline that is being pumped into your body, you can use that energy to communicate enthusiastically, convincingly, and passionately. The key is to decrease your level of nervousness so you can use your energy on these positive activities, not on trying to control your nerves.

So, to harness your nervousness and bring it under control, there are six key tips to remember. These tips are all designed to help you focus on your audience and their needs rather than on yourself and how you are feeling. They all stem from one truism:

The more uncertain you are, the more nervous you will be.

The more you can control the uncertainty, the less nervousness you will experience and the more residual energy you will have to devote to the presentation itself.

Six Steps to Conquering Your Presentation Nerves

Know Your Audience
Consult your audience before your presentation. The more confident you are that you are presenting them with useful and interesting material for them, the less nervous you will be overall. You really don't want your presentation to be a surprise. If it is, you lose complete control over the audience's reaction and that is a large factor in nervousness. So:

• Define who your target audience is;
• Ask people who are representative of the audience what they expect from the presentation;
• Run your agenda by a few people to see if they think something is missing or is overkill;
• Consider contacting participants by email beforehand and asking them a few questions about what they expect;
• Greet audience members at the door and do a quick survey of why they are there and what they expect.

Know Your Material
Nothing is worse for nerves than trying to give a presentation on a topic you are not well prepared for. This doesn't mean you have to be an expert beforehand, but you'd better know it backwards on presentation day. And making sure you've understood your audience and their needs properly will help you ensure that your material is on target to meet their needs.

Another important point to remember is that you can't possibly cover everything you know in your presentation. That would probably be long and boring. So select the most pertinent points from your subject base and then supplement with other material if time allows.

Structure Your Presentation
A common technique for trying to calm nervousness is memorizing what you intend to say. But all this does is make your delivery sound like it is coming from a robot. If you miss a word or draw a blank, your whole presentation is thrown off and then your nervousness compounds itself with every remaining second. It is far better to structure your presentation so that you give yourself clues to what is coming next.

• Have a set of key phrases listed on a cue card;
• Refer to these phrases to trigger your mind as to what is coming up next;
• If you're using slides, use these key phrases in your transitions.

This approach helps you control your own uncertainty about whether you will remember what you want to say and the order you want to say it.

Practice, Practice, Practice
Although you should avoid memorizing your presentation, you do want to be very comfortable with your delivery. Familiarity brings confidence, and practice helps you to deliver the words naturally. This means they will be coming more from your heart and mind, rather than from a piece of paper.

• Learn the organization and order of your presentation;
• If you do feel the need to memorize, limit it to your opening. This will help you get off to a smooth start;
• Try videotaping yourself. You will see what you look like to others and then you can make a plan to change the things that need changing;
• Use audiotape to listen to how you speak, your tone and your speed, and adjust appropriately;
• Prepare for large speaking events by practicing with a smaller audience first; for example, by inviting colleagues to listen to a dry run during their lunch hour.

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
Once you know what you are going to say, you need to prepare yourself for the actual delivery.

• Decide what you are going to wear - make it comfortable and appropriate;
• Arrive early and get your equipment set up;
• Anticipate problems and have backups and contingencies in place in case something doesn't work, you forget something, etc;
• If possible, give everything one last run through in the real environment;
• Prepare responses to anticipated questions. Try to think like that one person in the front row who always tries to trip the presenter up.

Calm Yourself from the Inside
Nervousness causes physiological reactions which are mostly attributed to the increase of adrenaline in your system. You can counteract these effects with a few simple techniques:

• Practice deep breathing - adrenalin causes you to breath shallowly. By breathing deeply your brain will get the oxygen it needs and the slower pace will trick your body into believing you are calmer. It also helps with voice quivers, which can occur when your breathing is irregular;
• Drink water - adrenalin can cause a dry mouth, which in turn leads to getting tongue-tied. Have a glass of water handy. Take sips occasionally, especially when you want to emphasize a point;
• Smile - this is a natural relaxant that sends positive chemicals through your body;
• Use visualization techniques - imagine that you are delivering your presentation to an audience that is interested, enthused, smiling, and reacting positively. Cement this positive image in your mind and recall it right before you are ready to go on;
• Press and massage your forehead to bring to energize the front of the brain and speech center;
• Just before you start talking, pause, make eye contact, and smile. This last moment of peace is very relaxing and gives you time to adjust to being the centre of attention;
• Speak more slowly than you would in a conversation, and leave longer pauses between sentences. This slower pace will calm you down, and it will also make you easier to hear, especially at the back of a large room;
• Move around during your presentation. This will expend some of your nervous energy;
• STAY or Stop Thinking About Yourself. Remember that the audience is there there to get some information and it is your job to put it across to them.

Key Points

When it comes to presenting, nerves are inevitable. Letting them get the better of you is not. You need to develop a strategy for taking the focus off your nervousness and putting that energy to positive use. By controlling as much of the uncertainly as you can, you increase your confidence in your ability to deliver an excellent presentation. This confidence then counteracts your nerves and you create a positive cycle for yourself.

Nerves are not your enemy and you don't have to fear public speaking. For your next presentation, be knowledgeable, be well practiced and prepared, try out some physical relaxation techniques. Amaze yourself and impress your audience with your calm and cool delivery of a great presentation.

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The 7 Cs of Communication A Checklist for Clear Communication   Think of how often you communicate with people during your day. You write emails, facilitate meetings, participate in conference calls, create reports, devise presentations, debate with your colleagues... the list goes on. We can spend almost our entire day communicating. So, how can we provide a huge boost to our productivity? We can make sure that we communicate in the clearest, most effective way possible. This is why we need to know about the 7 Cs of Communication. The 7 Cs provide a checklist for making sure that your meetings, emails, conference calls, reports and presentations are well constructed and clear - so your audience gets your message.   Messages must always be CLEAR. ©iStockphoto/horrocks According to the 7 Cs, communication needs to be:   Clear. Concise. Concrete. Correct. Coherent. Complete. Courteous. In this article, we look at each of the 7 Cs of Communication, and we'll illustrate each element with both good and bad examples. 1. Clear When writing or speaking to someone, be clear about your goal or message. What is your purpose in communicating with this person? If you're not sure, then your audience won't be sure either. To be clear, try to minimize the number of ideas in each sentence. Make sure that it's easy for your reader to understand your meaning. People shouldn't have to "read between the lines" to understand what you're trying to say. Bad Example Hi John, I wanted to write you a quick note about Daniel, who's working in your department. He's a great asset, and I'd like to talk to you more about him when you have time. Best, Skip   What is this email about? Well, we're not sure. First, if there are multiple Daniels in John's department, John won't know who Skip is talking about. Next, what is Daniel doing, specifically, that's so great? We don't know that either. It's so vague that John will definitely have to write back for more information. Last, what is the purpose of this email? Does Skip simply want to have an idle chat about Daniel, or is there some more specific goal here? There's no sense of purpose to this message, so it's quite confusing. Good Example Let's see how we could change this email to make it clear.   Hi John, I wanted to write you a quick note about Daniel Kedar, who's working in your department. In recent weeks, he's helped the IT department through several pressing deadlines on his own time. We've got a tough upgrade project due to run over the next three weeks, and his knowledge and skills would prove invaluable. Could we please have his help with this work? I'd appreciate speaking with you about this. When is it best to call you to discuss this further? Best wishes, Skip This second message is much clearer, because the reader has the information he needs to take action. 2. Concise When you're concise in your communication, you stick to the point and keep it brief. Your audience doesn't want to read six sentences when you could communicate your message in three.   Are there any adjectives or "filler words" that you can delete? You can often eliminate words like "for instance," "you see," "definitely," "kind of," "literally," "basically," or "I mean."   Are there any unnecessary sentences?   Have you repeated the point several times, in different ways? Bad Example   Hi Matt, I wanted to touch base with you about the email marketing campaign we kind of sketched out last Thursday. I really think that our target market is definitely going to want to see the company's philanthropic efforts. I think that could make a big impact, and it would stay in their minds longer than a sales pitch. For instance, if we talk about the company's efforts to become sustainable, as well as the charity work we're doing in local schools, then the people that we want to attract are going to remember our message longer. The impact will just be greater. What do you think? Jessica This email is too long! There's repetition, and there's plenty of "filler" taking up space. Good Example Watch what happens when we're concise and take out the filler words:   Hi Matt, I wanted to quickly discuss the email marketing campaign that we analyzed last Thursday. Our target market will want to know about the company's philanthropic efforts, especially our goals to become sustainable and help local schools. This would make a far greater impact, and it would stay in their minds longer than a traditional sales pitch. What do you think? Jessica   3. Concrete When your message is concrete, then your audience has a clear picture of what you're telling them. There are details (but not too many!) and vivid facts, and there's laserlike focus. Bad Example Consider this advertising copy:   The Lunchbox Wizard will save you time every day. A statement like this probably won't sell many of these products. There's no passion, no vivid detail, nothing that creates emotion, and nothing that tells people in the audience why they should care. This message isn't concrete enough to make a difference. Good Example   How much time do you spend every day packing your kids' lunches? No more! Just take a complete Lunchbox Wizard from your refrigerator each day to give your kids a healthy lunch AND have more time to play or read with them! This copy is better because there are vivid images. The audience can picture spending quality time with their kids - and what parent could argue with that? And mentioning that the product is stored in the refrigerator explains how the idea is practical. The message has come alive through these details. 4. Correct When your communication is correct, it fits your audience's needs. And correct communication is also error-free communication.   Do the technical terms that you use fit your audience's level of education and knowledge?   Have you checked your writing for grammatical errors? Remember, spell checkers won't catch everything.   Are all names and titles spelled correctly? Bad Example   Hi Daniel, Thanks so much for meeting me at lunch today! I enjoyed our conservation, and I'm looking forward to moving ahead on our project. I'm sure that the two-weak deadline won't be an issue. Thanks again, and I'll speak to you soon! Best, Jack Miller If you read that example fast, then you might not have caught any errors. But on closer inspection, you'll find two. Can you see them? The first mistake is that the writer accidentally typed "conservation" instead of "conversation". This common error can happen when you're typing too fast. The other error is using "weak" instead of "week". Again, spell checkers won't catch word errors like this, which is why it's so important to proofread everything! 5. Coherent When your communication is coherent, it's logical. All points are connected to the main topic, and the tone and flow of the text is consistent. Bad Example   Traci, I wanted to write you a quick note about the report you finished last week. I gave it to Michelle to proof, and she wanted to make sure you knew about the department meeting we're having this Friday. We'll be creating an outline for the new employee handbook. Thanks, Michelle As you can see, this email doesn't communicate its point very well. Where is Michelle's feedback on Traci's report? She started to mention it, but then she changed the topic to talk about Friday's meeting. Good Example   I wanted to write you a quick note about the report you finished last week. I gave it to Michelle to proof, and she let me know that there are a few changes that you'll need to make. She'll email you her detailed comments later this afternoon. Thanks, Michelle Notice that in the good example, Michelle does not mention Friday's meeting. This is because the meeting reminder should be in an entirely separate email. This way, Traci can delete the report feedback email after she makes her changes, but save the email about the meeting as her reminder to attend. Each email has only one main topic. 6. Complete In a complete message, the audience has everything they need to be informed and, if applicable, take action.   Does your message include a "call to action", so that your audience clearly knows what you want them to do?   Have you included all relevant information - contact names, dates, times, locations, and so on? Bad Example   Hi everyone, I just wanted to send you all a reminder about the meeting we're having tomorrow! See you then, Chris This message is not complete, for obvious reasons. What meeting? When is it? Where? Chris has left his team without the necessary information. Good Example   Hi everyone, I just wanted to remind you about tomorrow's meeting on the new telecommuting policies. The meeting will be at 10:00 a.m. in the second-level conference room. Please let me know if you can't attend. See you then, Chris   7. Courteous Courteous communication is friendly, open, and honest. There are no hidden insults or passive-aggressive tones. You keep your reader's viewpoint in mind, and you're empathetic to their needs. Bad Example   Jeff, I wanted to let you know that I don't appreciate how your team always monopolizes the discussion at our weekly meetings. I have a lot of projects, and I really need time to get my team's progress discussed as well. So far, thanks to your department, I haven't been able to do that. Can you make sure they make time for me and my team next week? Thanks, Phil Well, that's hardly courteous! Messages like this can start officewide feuds. And this email does nothing but create bad feelings, and lower productivity and morale. A little bit of courtesy, even in difficult situations, can go a long way. Good Example   Hi Jeff, I wanted to write you a quick note to ask a favor. During our weekly meetings, your people do an excellent job of highlighting their progress. But this uses some of the time available for my team to highlight theirs. I'd really appreciate it if you could give my team a little extra time each week to cover their progress reports. Thanks so much, and please let me know if there's anything I can do for you! Best, Phil What a difference! This email is courteous and friendly, and it has little chance of spreading bad feelings around the office.   Variations There are a few variations of the 7 Cs of Communication:   Credible - Does your message improve or highlight your credibility? This is especially important when communicating with an audience that doesn't know much about you.   Creative - Does your message communicate creatively? Creative communication helps keep your audience engaged. Key Points Most of us communicate every day. The better we communicate, the more credibility we'll have with our clients, our bosses, and our colleagues. Use the 7 Cs of Communication as a checklist each time you communicate. By doing this, you'll stay clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, and courteous.

A Final Note from James Whatever work you're involved in today, remember those 7Cs: clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, and courteous. With a little help from today's article and the other communications tools here at Mind Tools, you'll soon be impressing everyone with the quality of your communications! We'll be back in two weeks with a tool that helps you deliver training that everyone will understand, and with tools and techniques that help you lead and delegate more effectively. Until then, have an excellent two weeks!   James Manktelow email us Mind Tools Essential Skills for an Excellent Career! Privacy Policy: Mind Tools will treat your email address with complete respect and will not circulate it to any third party. If you are not already a subscriber to this newsletter and you would like to be one, you can sign up at http://www.mindtools.com/subscribe.htm

Six Musts for Achieving Your Goals

By John Assaraf

We've all been through it at least once in our lives. We decide to make a change: Make more money, lose weight, quit smoking, start exercising, whatever. We set goals and work toward them. And for a while, there is progress.

Then we start to slip, and before we know it we are back where we started. This happens all the time. The source of the backsliding isn't that people lack self-motivation or willpower. The primary reason that so many people don't achieve their objectives is that they have no idea how to create workable goals and maintain the forward motion necessary to make them happen.

Successful people are masters at setting and reaching goals. If you interact with people who have "made it," you will see patterns that anyone can apply. Here are seven goal-achieving "musts" from the "success masters":

1. Balance your goals to balance your life.
   Develop goals in six areas of life: relationships, spiritual, contribution, financial, health and business. By pursuing goals in each area, you will create a more balanced and integrated life.
2. Aim high.
   As the now-cliched saying goes: Shoot for the stars, if you miss you'll still be on the moon. Get out of your comfort zone. Make your goals slightly unreasonable; in other words, don't allow your (perceived) limitations to get in the way. Don't allow your old conditioning to stop you from going after what you really want.
3. Write out goals in detail.
   Just the act of writing down goals sets the process in motion, so be specific. Instead of writing, say, "A new home," write "A 4,500-square-foot ranch home on five acres of lakefront property with vaulted ceilings, 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, and a private boat dock." The more information you include, the more probable the final result will be. By being as accurate as possible you invoke some of the natural laws of the universe in your favor as well as getting your brain to work for you in the most efficient way possible.
4. Make your goals consistent with your values.
   Most people don't do what they value first and therefore find themselves stressed and out of alignment. Create a list of your highest values and then create your goals around them. This will give you a sense of being on purpose consistently. Every goal must have two things: 1) A detailed plan to achieve it and 2) the right beliefs and mindset. You can kiss your goals goodbye without these two items. So, what do you have to believe and what can you start to do immediately to move you towards your goals and dreams?
5. Review your goals daily.
   This is an important part of achieving success and must become routine. Review your list of goals each morning when you wake up. Visualize your completed goals and how your life looks and feels as a result. Each night before you go to bed, repeat the process. This is a great way to train your brain to expect your goals to materialize.
6. Finally, don't get discouraged.
   You will either achieve your goal, or you will gain insight into whatever is in the way of its achievement. This is not a setback; rather, it is part of your forward progress. Stay focused on what you want to achieve and you will find ways to solve difficulties or break through barriers.

Celebrate every success and contextualize your accomplishments within the framework of your goals. Before you know it, you'll have to make a whole new list for "next level achievement!"

John Assaraf helps small business owners to grow their companies, increase revenues and become great leaders. John's articles can be found at the OneCoach blog.

How to Keep Your Cool When Anger Takes Over

By Margie Warrell

I recently read that 60% of Americans lose their temper at least once per week. I'd like to tell you I wasn't in that number but alas, my kids would tell you otherwise.

Of course losing our temper is what happens when we fail to keep our anger in check. Something (or someone) pushes our buttons and, unable to contain our anger, we explode. The result is never pretty. Last week I was asked to talk about anger on Better TV. Despite my occasional outbursts at my kids I wouldn't say I am a particularly angry person. Which got me thinking, why are some people constantly angry while others seem perpetually serene and calm? And for the majority of us who fall somewhere in the middle, how can we process the emotion of anger in more constructive ways?

First let me repeat what I wrote in my book Find Your Courage. Anger, on its own, is neither good nor bad. Rather it's a natural emotion that arises when we perceive an injustice to ourselves or others. The problem does not arise when we have anger. It arises when anger has us. It's how we respond to it that determines whether it is helpful to our relationships (by addressing valid issues that threaten to undermine them) and good for society (by working to end injustice) - or damaging to our relationships, destructive to our circumstances and plain old bad for our health (think heart disease, depression, ulcers... I'd go on but it doesn't get better!). In other words, our response to anger ultimately creates more suffering for us and others, or less. It all hinges on how we process and express it.

Learning to manage anger isn't easy. It takes a heightened level of self-awareness, a good dose of discipline and a robust commitment to honoring the dignity of others and our own. Below are a few strategies that will help you the next time you find yourself feeling as mad as a hatter.

• Label it. If you don't own your anger, it will own you. Naming the emotion you feel enables you to process it. So if you can, step back and try to observe what's going on -- around you and within you. Verbalizing aloud, "I am feeling angry" helps you detach from it. Anger isn't you. It's just the emotion that has risen up in you.
• Identify the fear fueling it. Underneath our anger is fear... fear of loss of property, relationship, security, reputation or control; fear of us or someone we love being hurt; fear that the crazy driver who just cut in front of you may damage your car. Clarifying why you feel angry helps you respond to it constructively.
• Give yourself time out. The stress hormones anger triggers literally impair the oxygen flow to the brain. So it takes time for those hormones to level out and rational thinking to return. As cliché as it sounds, counting slowly to 10 before reacting can help defuse your temper. Better still, take a break from the person you're angry with until your frustrations subside a bit. Go for a walk, run or bike ride, listen to music, take a bath, do some gardening, etc. I've found jumping on the trampoline with my kids highly therapeutic!
• Consciously choose your response. Being able to consciously choose how you will respond is what anger management is all about. What is the most constructive response to this predicament? What is the outcome you most want to achieve that is good for you and others? What conversation do you need to have, with whom and about what? What changes need to happen?
• Don't bottle it up. While some people are quick to fire off in anger (damaging trust in their relationships in the process) others tend to bottle it up and stew on it. But issues that aren't talked out get acted out. Denying or repressing anger is no better than lashing out with it. Resentments left to fester slowly build up... and up... and up... driving a wedge in your relationships and impeding your productivity until it gets very ugly.
• Create daily rituals for staying centered. Managing anger begins with self-awareness. Mindfulness is something you do, not something you have. Regularly taking time to reflect on how you are feeling, identify the concerns that underlie it, become present to the impact your behavior is having on others, and re-center yourself emotionally are habits you can begin to develop right now.

We human beings are emotional beings. Forever evolving, forever wrestling with those uncomfortable emotions like anger, forever on a quest to rise above them and be firmly in control. The reality is that living life to the fullest requires us to experience the full spectrum of emotions. They all serve a purpose and yet they can all hijack our happiness if we aren't honest enough with ourselves to own the primal fears that drive them.... of looking foolish, of injustice to ourselves or others, of being inadequate and insignificant, of being unlovable or rejected, of being vulnerable and hurt, of losing those we love, of losing control, of being mortal.

In the end, there is no magic bullet to remaining forever calm, contained and cool when something or someone has really pushed your buttons and frustration, resentment, anger and outright fury begin to well up in you. Learning to regulate our emotions is a lifelong pursuit. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. So just as I will work to forgive myself for not always being a patient and calm mum, I encourage you to forgive yourself for the many times you have failed to control your temper. Forgive yourself for not managing your anger, rising above your fear, overcoming your insecurities and responding calmly and bravely to your challenges. And while you are at it, forgive those around you who've done the same. After all, the greatest remedy for everything that weighs your heart is forgiveness.

Margie Warrell is an internationally Certified Professional & Life Coach, acclaimed Speaker and Best Selling Author who helps people Think Bigger & Live Bolder to achieve outstanding success in all areas of their life. To learn more about her award winning book Find Your Courage (McGraw-Hill), a range of powerful programs, and to receive her free monthly eNewsletter please visit Margie Warrell.com.

Balancing Work and Life

By Karel Murray, CSP

As a woman entrepreneur who travels a lot for work, I know it's hard to balance work and life. Because I travel so much, I constantly find myself watching the behavior of other people. The variety of personalities always astounds me. During a recent two week stint where I spoke at five different engagements in 4 different states, I couldn't help but zero in on individuals who couldn't sit still.

Cell phone and impassioned discussions with work counterparts fill the air as the talkers stride down the airport halls. I've heard individuals have cell phone conversations in bathroom stalls, along the street and during their grocery shopping excursions. I swear competitions will evolve around who has the fastest draw off the belt in answering that urgent ring.

Here are my two important questions for you to answer:

1. Do we really have to be that available?
2. What happened to "down" time?

During the fourteen day tour of bookings, other work surfaced. Now faced with handling the keynote and training sessions as well as those business items piling up at home, stress continued to mount. How did I know I was stressed? I woke up at 3:00 AM five nights in a row to make sure I hadn't over slept the 6 AM wake-up call. No peaceful rest for me... there was business to attend to!

Is Your Desire to Succeed Harming Your Health?
Our need to succeed and be perceived as competent, efficient and effective often interferes with our duty to take care of our bodies, minds and families. In fact, Fast Company's magazine recently cited research indication that only 1 out of 10 people would actually change their lifestyle if they knew they were going to die without the making the necessary changes.

For example, a good friend of mine, Jake, recently suffered a severe heart attack. He was healthy one moment and in the hospital the next. When the physician told him to take six weeks off work, Jake's immediate response was "I can't! The backlog of work will be too much and probably give me another heart attack from the stress of playing catch up!" The physician, with obvious misgivings, shortened the recovery period to two weeks and included strict dietary instructions.

He was making the conscious choice to put his work over his own health. Now what are you committed to?

Here Are 8 Commitments To Help You Achieve A Positive Lifestyle Today:

1. Take inventory of what makes you genuinely happy. As you list each item, evaluate what you do every day to ensure that joy remains solidly in your life. Also list things you do that jeopardize your ability to be happy. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies and don't even know it.
2. Be accountable for the decisions you make. Every time you say "just a minute while I finish these e-mails" and you end up missing dinner with your spouse, understand you chose to stay "plugged in" to the business. It doesn't control you...you control your choices.
3. Learn to turn off the phone. Voice mail was created for a reason. Use it wisely.
4. Laugh at the absurdities that otherwise contribute to your stress level. A young lady in shorts, sitting next to me at the airport terminal, was the recent victim of a walk-by sneezing. Another passenger inadvertently spit on her leg in his convulsion. He ambled on oblivious. She, however, quietly dug in her purse and pulled out a tissue. She wiped her leg, careful to shield her actions from others... Except I caught her eye and we both howled with laughter. Bless her heart, she showed class in an awkward situation and exemplified the statement "Stuff happens...deal with it!"
5. Learn to say "NO" with love and affection. Only you know what your priorities and life goals are. Evaluate what others ask you to do, and then determine your response in terms of how it interfaces with your plans.
6. Find out how your behaviors affect the ones you love most. Sometimes a mirror held up before us can tell us more than what our mind eye chooses to rationalize. It may not be pretty, but at least you will have an honest starting point on which to make your lifestyle decisions.
7. Handle your business tasks correctly the first time you deal with them. Quite frequently I consult with clients who feel like the rats in the race are winning. They are overwhelmed by the volume of work they deal with so they do the same tasks over and over again. My advice is simple - slow down and check twice. Not a bad motto to live by.
8. Balance your high-tech and low-tech mentality. Using email exclusively only broadens the distance between us and our clients. Find ways to make your contact personal. A warm voice over the phone or a quick face to face visit can go a long way to cement a relationship. I've learned that it's the eyes, body language, and tone of voice that speaks volumes imparting information that e-mail could never provide.

We have to define how far we are willing to push ourselves before we damage the positive aspects of our lives that give us true satisfaction and joy.

It's my choice. It's your choice... business as usual or live your life like you mean it. Choose well.

Karel Murray is a Certified Speaking Professional, author of Hitting Our Stride: Women, Work and What Matters and business trainer who helps women entrepreneurs and executives resolve interpersonal issues and balance their work/personal lives. Now, you can listen to her exciting, free interviews that will help you maintain and sustain a healthy business and a healthy lifestyle at JustForAMomentPodcast.com

Restrict and Evict the Idea of Conflict

By Ewa Schwarz, of OnlineCounseling.org

What is Conflict?
So many people have a fear of conflict. They will do just about anything to "keep the peace." Yet you cannot avoid these types of encounters, it is just not possible. But rather than be afraid of conflict as you know it or if you just simply don't like it, there are other ways to deal with it.

Conflict is not what you think it is. Like anything else, that which we don't understand we fear, and what we fear we negatively judge. So lets look at what the current definition of conflict is:

1. Fight, battle, war
2. Mental struggles resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes or internal demands; competitive or opposing action of incompatibles; antagonistic state or action
3. The opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction
4. To come into collision or disagreement, be contradictory, at variance, or in opposition; clash
5. Discord of action, feeling, or effect; antagonism or opposition, as of interests or principles

It doesn't sound too good, does it? In outward appearances, some people seem to even thrive on conflict. Conflict is actually a complicated issue that needs to be looked at far more closely to understand why it happens and what is really happening for the people engaged in it.

Wherever there is conflict, there is always misunderstanding and assumptions. People will always have a difference of opinion about many things. We are actually trained from childhood that conflict is a normal part of life and of most societies. But have you ever really thought to question the status quo about conflict? Have you ever considered the possibility that conflict is not required and does not have to be part of your life? That conflict, like most of our other emotional reactions can become a choice?

Before any naysayers start throwing "evidence" to the contrary my way, hear me out and be open to alternatives. You do not learn anything if you instantly decide in advance that somebody is wrong before you hear anything else. Think about it. Isn't that the kind of attitude that typically leads to conflict...?

Misunderstanding and Conflict
When conflict occurs, what is really happening is that both parties feel misunderstood and they progressively escalate their attempts to prove their point or show that their position is right. This happens on both sides. It takes two people to enter into conflict. If one person believes there is a conflict and the other person does not share that same belief, then there is no conflict.

Let me explain this further. Conflict arises when a person first misunderstands the intentions of another person and then makes assumptions not only about the intention, but also about the meaning of the words they hear. Or it happens for the other person first. It doesn't matter where the misunderstanding originates. The fact is that it exists on both sides.

What also happens as soon as misunderstanding and assumptions are made is that the fight or flight response is also triggered. It seems that in most of my writings I end up talking about this response. Yet it is so important that we become more aware of just how incredibly often this is triggered in our day-to-day life so that we can do something to change it.

The whole point of this article is to raise your awareness of yourself and others so that you can stop emotionally reacting and make different choices instead. As long as you remain unaware of your triggers, you remain powerless to change them. It is only through becoming more aware of yourself that you regain the power of choice. Now lets get back to understanding conflict.

Looking at Conflict More Deeply
When we first think we perceive conflict, what is happening is that we have made an assumption that something that the other person has said is personal to us. That is our mistake. Even if you feel that you can concretely prove that the other person has verbally assaulted you, you are really only telling me that you see the tip of the iceberg. You are not looking at the massive part that you cannot see under the water.

Whatever comes out of a person's mouth has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the way their brain has processed information. The subconscious mind is that vast subterranean part of the iceberg that you cannot see. Only the tip of it is what you are experiencing. I am encouraging you to look down into the water to see that it exists. You don't have to change anything other than the direction in which you direct your eyes and your focus.

A person who goes into conflict has made a mistake. They have interpreted something in their external environment as being unsafe or potentially threatening. In this process, their fight or flight response is triggered. They feel the need to defend themselves against a perceived threat, whether it is there or not. If you believe in the idea of conflict, you will also react in the same way to their reaction.

One of the most interesting aspects of conflict is that because the fears in your mind are perennially looking for potentially unsafe situations to protect you from, your mind looks from within a very narrowed perspective. This sentinel of your mind instantaneously alerts you to potential threats. In that microsecond, your mind jumps into tunnel vision, tunnel hearing, and tunnel understanding. The probability of misinterpreting an event skyrockets.

Identifying the Potential for Conflict
The alternative to conflict has a few steps, the first of which is to recognize that the other person feels somehow unsafe and/or threatened. Instead of responding to their mistaken beliefs and assumptions, you instead search for and deal with the real reason for reacting, which has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with the misunderstanding that they are unaware of.

You can tell when a person shifts into even a mild form of fight or flight, which can be subtle or overt, but when you train yourself, becomes more obvious. We generally have not developed our power of observation in this way, so we tend to miss the clues and/or misunderstand them.

First of all you will feel slightly confused or put off by their response. You need to become aware of this because this is the juncture where you can easily fall into fight or flight yourself. You sense that something is off for the other person and your subconscious mind instantly interprets that as being potentially unsafe, triggering a defensive mechanism.

It is just at or before this point that you can learn to choose a different response. Choose instead to use your power of observation to look even more closely at what is happening with this person. Look at their body language. Have they stiffened up, muscles tensed, facial expressions suddenly changed? What has happened to their tone of voice? Does it occur to you that you or something else has just been misunderstood?

These are all the things that you can train yourself to look for. Even if you have already been triggered into feeling defensive, you can still take different action in this way. By distracting your mind and giving it a different focus, you are also working at minimizing your own fight or flight response. Insist to your own mind that the other person has made a mistake, contrary to what it is telling you.

Disarming Conflict With Different Choices
Now that you have interrupted your own subconscious response you need to know what to do next to avoid stepping into conflict. You have to come to the conclusion in your own mind that you are safe, that there is nothing to defend yourself against. This is of primary importance that there is nothing happening to you, but there is something going on for that other person.

This other person has experienced a trigger of a deep subconscious response within themselves and the way out potential conflict is to help them become more conscious of what just happened for them before they escalate. This is how you can disarm and avoid conflict.

When you see a person being triggered and heading into conflict, first calm your own mind and look for and remove your assumptions, and possible misunderstandings. If you feel a deep need to be right or defensive, you have already been triggered into fight or flight and you need to backtrack. The best solution is to find out the real issue for the other person.

How do you do this? By asking questions. First repeat back to the other person what you just thought you heard them say and then ask, "when you said this, did you think that ..." to clarify the meaning. Ask them how they reached their conclusion. Where did that belief come from?

Never tell them that they are wrong or what they need to think or you will escalate the feeling of conflict further. They will react with an attack in their attempt to defend themselves against what they see as you attacking them by telling them that they are wrong in some way. Instead, help them look for the assumption that they have made that is causing them to get defensive. Something has made them feel unsafe. Become a detective in finding out what that could be.

Each situation is unique. There is no magic solution where one suggestion will work for all situations. You will have to be creative and adapt the suggestions and try different combinations and variations to see what will work. Personal growth is an evolution that is cyclical and multilayered, requiring a multidimensional approach. When something doesn't work, you use that experience to learn from it to see what you want to do differently the next time.

If either person has been drinking alcohol, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to implement these strategies. Alcohol chemically produces the same stress response as in fight or flight by stimulating the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Your body goes into this response without specific triggers for you to intellectually and logically work through.

Learning From Conflict; Not Reinforcing it!
An important part of this process is to not be judgmental of the other person. If you are frustrated, angry, annoyed, etc., it will be communicated to the other person, causing them to feel even more unsafe and to feel even a stronger need to defend themselves. If you feel any of these feelings you have made mistaken assumptions yourself and you are reacting in turn.

Of course the ideal situation is where you can make the choice at that very important juncture before you go into fight or flight. But what do you do if you are triggered as well, get defensive, go into fight or flight and end up in that conflict that you are wanting to and trying to avoid?

This is where hindsight can actually be of value to you. Observe your own behaviors and responses without judging yourself. It is only fear that insists that you or the other person are right or wrong or good or bad. Going into that place of judgment is completely pointless and very harmful. It prevents you from looking at the situation clearly so that you can make different choices in the future.

Remind yourself that what happened was the best that both of you could do in that moment. When fear kicks in, the subconscious mind will look for what it knows from the past to try to keep a person safe. We already know that the mind needs some new tricks and some new tools! Getting mad, frustrated, or angry at yourself (or the other person) just contributes to that feeling of lack of safety within you. Stop that part of the cycle.

To teach your brain new responses it must be done from a space of relative safety. Review what happened in this most recent conflict and look for and identify the assumptions that both of you just made. Look for and identify the additional meaning that was placed on the situation. Train yourself to clearly see how both your responses escalated. Watch what your mind did to try to protect you and see how the other person's mind tried to protect them. Notice how this type of "protection" does not work.

By familiarizing yourself with this patterned process, it gives you knowledge, awareness, and a little more power. Then the next time you see the potential for conflict arising, when you see a person has misunderstood something and has gone into fight or flight, you know that you have different options available to you. Sometimes you will be able to take them and sometimes not.

The Results of All Your Hard Work!
There will be the first time that you try this approach and succeed. It will feel wonderful. Then there will be a number of times that you don't. Fight the tendency to feel bad about it and study the behaviors more. You will succeed again. And then again. The more you practice this the better you will get at it. You will slowly start to feel safer. The safer you feel the better you get at this.

With time, persistence, and practice you start to realize that there is less conflict in your life. You are learning how to handle people's reactions so that you can defuse conflict before it switches from that moment of misunderstanding into fight or flight. You help the other person defuse and deactivate their fight or flight. You don't need to avoid conflict; you disarm it instead.

Congratulations, in this process you create incredible value for yourself. Even if you have only just started and haven't even practiced this yet, the seed has been planted. Practice this in any and all environments. Each experience has value to you from the perspective of putting you in the position to be able to learn through observation. Watch how others go into conflict so that you become familiar with how it evolves in yourself.

This is the ultimate in peacemaking. You will eventually learn that there is nothing to avoid or be afraid of. There is great personal power in learning these tools and applying them. It might take you months or years before you really get good at it. How long it takes doesn't matter. You are changing an elemental and deeply recessed part of yourself.

Trust the process of growth and the gifts it will inevitably bring you. Whatever your unique path looks like, understand that it is right for you and perfect for where you are now. It is your learning curve and not anyone else's. Learn to question everything and you will find your own path to peace of mind, free of conflict.

If you want help with Emotional States or with any other issue, contact me to get The Help You Need. Right Here. Right Now.

Ewa Schwarz helps clients from all over the world to grow emotionally and spiritually. We all feel lost, uncertain, scattered, and even frightened at times. We talk to friends, family, clergy or even strangers, yet no one seems to have a real answer. As a counselor, life coach and teacher with over 20 years of experience, Ewa can help you solve whatever is hindering your growth or burdening your spirit. Visit OnlineCounseling.org

A Healthy Team and a Healthy Relationship

By Dr. Alan Zimmerman

"The natural course, if untended, is to drift apart and become the proverbial two ships passing in the night." --Patrick Morely

Over the last three decades, marriage specialists have researched the ingredients of a happy marriage. As a result, we know more about building a successful marriage today than ever before.

The cool thing is ... team building experts have researched the ingredients of an effective team for about the same amount of time. And their findings are quite similar. What makes a happy marriage tends to make an effective team and vice versa.

When I worked in sales, occasionally I'd hear a fellow salesperson say, "Selling wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the customers." And when I taught at the university, occasionally I'd hear another professor say, "I really enjoy teaching. It's the students I can't stand."

What they didn't understand was RELATIONSHIP ... the importance of relationship and the process of relationship. And the same thing could be said about a marriage relationship or a team relationship. There are 10 things you've got to know and got to do if you're going to make it all work...

1. Get a realistic understanding of what a relationship can and cannot do.
   As marriage therapists Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott say, "Marriage is, in actual fact, just a way of living. Before marriage, we don't expect life to be all sunshine and roses, but we seem to expect marriage to be that way." And, "Debunking the myth of eternal romance will do more than just about anything to help you build a lifelong, happy marriage."

I agree. I'm reminded of an attorney who handles many divorce cases who told me that the number one reason two people split up is that they "refuse to accept the fact that they are married to a human being." The belief in a "happily-ever-after marriage" is one of the most widely held and destructive marriage myths today.

Likewise, corporate teams would be well off to get a realistic understanding of a team relationship. Teams are just another way of working. And there WILL be problems ... that WILL require some patience and skill to get to the outcomes you want.

2. Get a realistic perception of the other person.
   The most dramatic loss experienced in a new marriage is the idealized image the two partners have of one another. Sooner or later, reality will hit the two people squarely in the face: that they did not marry the person they thought they did.

That's why author John Fisher advises, "The success of a marriage comes not in finding the 'right' person, but in the ability of both partners to adjust to the real person they inevitably realize they married." Similarly, if you're on a team at work, take some time to get to know each other. The more you understand each other's strengths, use those strengths, and work around their weaknesses, the stronger your team will be.

3. Engage in meaningful communication.
   According to Gary Smalley, the author of several books on marital communication, "Many couples, thinking they know each other intimately, have actually lived on a superficial level for years. Unfortunately, marriages of this type are the norm rather than the exception." In essence, they have failed to communicate. Oh, they may talk, but that's quite different than real communication. Talking is sharing facts, such as "I'll be home at five ... and ... Let's have spaghetti for dinner." Communication is spending quality time together ... sharing who you really are, what you think, and how you feel.

But many adults are afraid of sharing their feelings ... or are "too busy" for any in-depth communication with their spouse. As a result, these people find themselves ten years into a marriage and still very lonely. They discover that their loneliness has nothing to do with their proximity to the other person. It comes from a lack of deeper, ongoing communication.

As Patrick Morely points out, "The natural course, if untended, is to drift apart and become the proverbial two ships passing in the night." That's why I wrote my book on "Brave Questions: Building Stronger Relationships By Asking All The Right Questions." It's a powerful tool for any relationship on and off the job. As certified personal trainer Jimi Varner writes: "Dr. Zimmerman, around 4 months ago, I purchased your incredible, thought-provoking book on 'Brave Questions,' and have seen the miraculous effects it's had my relationship with my soon-to-be fiancé. Although practical and simple, we have found it extremely beneficial to all of our relationships and highly recommend it to anybody in need of urgent or not-yet-so urgent relationship repair!"

Just so you're clear. All of this talk about "meaningful communication" applies to work teams as well. The team that takes time to ask questions, to listen, to build the relationships amongst the team members, does better than the team that always keeps its nose to the grindstone, focusing on the "business" every waking moment.

4. Stay focused on your goal.
   It's what distinguishes two people who are "merely" living together and two people who are "truly" married. Truly married people have a common goal they are pursuing. It's what distinguishes a group of people from a team as well. The group may work near each other or around each other, but a team has a common goal they all are trying to accomplish. And when you can't see your goal, you're going to have problems.

That became clear to me through the presentation of another speaker at a Low Alpine sales meeting, an outdoor equipment manufacturer. The speaker talked about climbing Mt. Everest ... the skills it took, the dangers that had to be handled, the people who made it to the top, and those who didn't.

But just before he finished his presentation, he asked the audience a question. He remarked, "There's a time when you're climbing when you almost feel depressed. You feel so low and down you're not sure you can continue. Do you know when that is?"

The audience shouted out their answers ... such things as ... when you first begin the climb, when you only have 100 yards left, when you reach the top, and when you begin your descent. No one was even close. He said, "Climbers get down when bad weather sets in." He went on to explain that when bad weather sets in you can't see the peak. You lose sight of your GOAL and become easily distracted and sometimes even depressed.

Of course, you might be wondering what this has to do with marriage or teamwork. There's a very clear correlation. Like a mountain climber who can't see the peak, marriages and teams who can't see their clearly defined goals are more susceptible to distractions and more likely to waste their time on the less important things in life. So ask yourself if your marriage has a clearly defined goal. If not, get one. And the same goes for your team. Get a goal and keep your eye on the goal.

5. Respect differences.
   In the initial stages of a relationship, differences tend to attract. We find them fascinating. But often times, those same differences can become a source of irritation later on in the relationship.

That's too bad, because differences are the source of power ... when they're acknowledged, respected, and utilized. Dr. Ernest Bormann, one of the world's leading researchers on team effectiveness and my Ph.D. advisor, found indisputable evidence that the best teams were always composed of a variety of people with a variety of skills. The variety of talent allowed these team mates to find the best solutions that combined the best of everyone's input.

So when it comes to your team ... or your relationship ... learn to celebrate the differences and learn to use each other's strengths. Don't waste your time trying to pound the differences out of the other person or make the other person just like you. It's self-defeating, and it won't work anyway.

For starters, Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott say, "You'll always find exceptions to the rule, but research and experience consistently point to a fundamental and powerful distinction between the sexes: Men focus on achievement; women focus on relationships. It sounds overly simplistic, and it probably is. But remembering this general rule can save every couple wear and tear on their marriage and strengthen their bond."

6. Maintain a positive attitude.
   Few things are more contagious and powerful than attitudes. And the attitude you bring to your marriage or your team will have a HUGE impact on the results you get.

As the world's leading authority on attitudes, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale declared, "There is a basic law that like attracts like. Negative thinking definitely attracts negative results. Conversely, if a person habitually thinks optimistically and hopefully, his positive thinking sets in motion creative forces, and success ...instead of eluding him ... flows toward him."

I couldn't agree with him more. I've seldom if ever seen a happy marriage or an effective team staffed with negative people. As author Tom Blandi puts it, "Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working 24 hours a day for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force."

Notice Blandi says you have to "harness and control this great force." In other words, your attitudes are changeable and controllable.

So don't cop out like so many negative people do ... saying they could be positive if they had a different job, lived in a better place, married a different person, or were teamed up with brighter colleagues. The truth is attitudes and happiness are not hinged upon better circumstances. A person with bad attitudes will still be a person with bad attitudes ... wherever and with whomever he or she lives and works ... unless he/she learns how to get and keep a better attitude.

And if you're in need of a better attitude, or if you know someone who needs an attitude adjustment, get a copy of my 7-pack audio CD album called "PIVOT: How One Turn In Attitude Can Lead To Success."

7. Spend some significant time together.
   The philosopher Paul Tournier got right to the point. He wrote, "To love is to give one's time. We never give the impression that we care when we are in a hurry."

In today's crazy busy world, there are few resources more precious than time. It's so much easier to give our partners things than time. And it's easier to give our team mates quick advice and walk off than spend time on discussion and decision making.

By contrast, one of my clients, AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, knows about the importance of spending time with others and on others. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans in August of 2005, most of the conventions pulled out of the city ... which only lead to further financial devastation. But not AstraZeneca. They came in a few months later with the biggest convention the city had seen since Katrina.

As Rick Reid told me, "After noticing some neighborhoods and buildings in disarray, I noticed the eyes of the local people. Many looked tired, and some seemed almost without hope. As I and my fellow coworkers began to work in their neighborhoods and struck up conversations with the locals, their faces changed from despair to glimmers of brightness."

Rick continued, "Attendees at the AstraZeneca meeting were given the chance to volunteer in community activities for a day in the middle of the week. Hundreds helped the local 'Katrina Krewe' to clear debris from city streets. A couple hundred worked with the local 'REX' organization to landscape a school's grounds, and plant trees. A couple dozen worked on the Dr. Seuss exhibit at the local children's museum in preparation for its reopening. Forty went and helped to prepare the University's Women's and Children's Clinic to reopen. I worked with 50 others to repaint a wing of exam rooms in the University's 100-year old building that housed its primary care clinic. If you want to know what color, I'll show you my shirt."

The key point Rick made was all about time. He finished his letter to me by saying, "Prior to arriving in New Orleans, I was thinking that the main solution to getting things back to normal there would be more money. And indeed, my company has donated over $5 million in cash and medicines. Then I realized all this money helps, but so very much more is needed. Many workers, waiters, housekeepers, and even musicians came up to individuals in our group and thanked us for coming. It was our presence there ... it was our time spent with them ... that seemed to signal the beginning of a return to normal."

Rick has a lesson for all of us. If you want your relationship to work, if you want your team to succeed, then there's no substitute for time. You've got to spend time with each other and on each other.

8. Build your friendship.
   I saw a sign a while ago that read, "Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me alone." Of course I chuckled, but I also thought how tragic if someone actually believed the sign.

The research says that happily married people seem to know that it takes more than roses and romance to make a relationship work. It takes friendship, even being best friends to one another.

After all, best friends don't leave when the going gets tough. They stick by you, giving you the kind of encouragement that comes from not only knowing you well, but loving you anyway. They don't give up when things look impossible. They hold you accountable without shaming you. They don't even mind if you tell the same story you've told them before, because they like to see you laugh.

And like any other quality relationship, a friendship is built. It doesn't just happen. That's what I talk about in my program on "The Relationship Recipe: Rapport, Respect, and Recognition." I show you the exact steps and skills that go into making work relationships work. The same is true of healthy, productive teams. The team members tend to be friends or at least friendly with one another. That's why meetings, conferences, and conventions are so critically important. In addition to learning new information and picking up some new strategies, team members get to know each other. And all things being equal, people tend to buy from and cooperate with people they know, like, and trust.

9. Have some fun together.
   As Bill and Lynne Hybels, long-time marriage counselors, say, "Even the best marriages take a tremendous amount of work. If there is no fun to balance out the work, even the most earnest spouses begin to lose motivation and energy. And the more challenging a marriage is, the more important fun is. We have learned that mutually enjoyable, fun experiences can help heal tender wounds and become a bridge across frustrating differences."

Absolutely! Have some fun together. And the less time you have for fun, the more you need it. As author William Feather (1889-1981) wrote, "Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it."

The same thing goes for teams on the job. They obviously get a lot of work done, but they tend to accomplish more if they make time to have some fun once in a while. As the saying goes, the team that plays together stays together.

10. Forgive each other.
    You see ... it doesn't take a very big person to carry a grudge. It takes a big person to say, "I'm sorry ... I was wrong ... Please forgive me" or "Of course, I forgive you."

In any relationship or in any team, there will be anger, conflict, disagreements, and disappointments. The secret is to forgive the people involved, learn from the mistakes, and do better next time. And if you can't do that, you're doomed.

As author Ed Wheat sees it, "Marriage becomes a series of surprises for most of us, and one of them is how frequently we need to forgive and be forgiven ... Even the best relationship cannot remain intact for long without forgiveness."

Of course, many of you will say, "I can't forgive him for how he hurt my feelings ... I'll never forgive her for how she sabotaged me at work ... and . I can't let that person off the hook after all he did."

If that sounds like you, you've got it all backwards. Forgiveness is not about letting the other person off the hook. It's about setting yourself free. As clergyman 'Tope Popoola says, "Bitterness and an unforgiving spirit can be likened to you taking poison and expecting that someone else would die from the effect. Forgiveness is about setting the prisoner in your heart free only to discover that all along, you had been the real prisoner."

Others of you may say you can't forgive yourself. You screwed up at home or at work and you know it. But as my good friend Dr. Bev Smallwood says in her book, "This Wasn't Supposed To Happen To Me," it won't help a bit to keep on berating yourself, punishing yourself, or hating yourself. She says, "In the goal of going forward more skillfully, ongoing self-condemnation makes it LESS likely that you will now live more productively and joyfully. Yes, you need to pause and consider what happened in order to learn from it. But that pause should not become a stalled lifestyle. Look at your past mistakes, but don't stare at them."

It's kind of like the rear-view mirror in your car. It's much smaller than the windshield for a good reason. Their size is in proportion to the amount of time you should spend looking at them. Yes, you need to glance at the rear view mirror to see what's coming up behind you or what you might hit when backing up. However, the majority of your driving time must be spent looking ahead, keeping your eyes on where you're headed - not where you've been. In a similar sense, learn to forgive yourself and others, learn from the setbacks, and then look forward.

Happy marriages and effective teams have these 10 things in common. And they have nothing to do with good luck or the right genetics. It's all about knowing the right things and using the right skills.

Actions:
Take some time to show respect to your fellow team mates in 3 different ways on 3 different occasions this week.

Which of the relationship and/or team skills listed above would bring the biggest payoff to your life or your career? Then focus on what you can do to get better in that area.

As a best-selling author and Hall of Fame professional speaker, Dr. Alan Zimmerman has taught more than one million people in 48 states and 22 countries how to keep a positive attitude on and off the job. In his book, PIVOT: How One Turn In Attitude Can Lead To Success, Dr. Zimmerman outlines the exact steps you must take to get the results you want in any situation. Go to Alan's site for a Free Sneak Preview.

10 Steps to Achieve Goals

http://www.successconsciousness.com/steps-to-achieve-goals.htm

1) Be specific about what you want to achieve
Most people don't know what they want to with their life, and even after thinking hard, they often don't come with something they really want to do. This is one of the main reasons that in spite of so many books on success, most people live an average life, not achieving some major success.

2) Draw up a plan of action
Devote as much time as you need to find a goal or goals, even minor goals are okay. Not everyone really desires great success and is willing to completely change his/her life. Not everyone desires to be a millionaire, or possesses the talent to make money.

After finding a goal that you really desire to achieve, draw up a plan or even several plans, and be as practical as possible.

3) Make a list of steps
List the steps you need to take, such as signing up for a course, studying, reading, developing the required skills, looking for a job, etc, and other steps you need to implement that will take you closer to achieving your goal.

4) Act, do not be passive
Take action and follow the steps on your list. Don't just wait for things to happen.

5) Read and listen to advice
Read books or articles about what you want to achieve. Meet people who can help you and listen to their advice, but use your common sense and reason before accepting anything.

6) Alternative plans
If a certain plan doesn't work, look for an alternative one.

7) Examine your goals periodically
Some goals aren't worth achieving. Circumstances and people change. Some goals lose their importance. It is a good idea to re-examine your goals regularly and weed out the worthless ones.

8) Repeat affirmations
Affirm with faith and feelings that your goal has already been achieved. If you don't undo your affirmations with doubts and lack of belief, they will be accepted by your subconscious mind, which will then provide you with more desire and motivation.

9) Visualize your goal
Visualization will also affect your subconscious mind, which will keep you motivated, focused on your goal, and more aware of ideas and opportunities.

10) Take action
Don't just affirm and visualize and do nothing. Take any action required to bring your goal into fruition. Follow your intuition, new ideas and opportunities that present themselves, and accept help from other people.

Using Setbacks to Propel Your Business Forward

By Rachel Clarkson

If you stood in a room with 500 business owners and asked that anyone who has had setbacks to raise their hands, you would likely see 500 hands raised. Everyone has experienced and can relate to a plan gone wrong, a dream unrealized, a vision that met a roadblock. Yet if you went back and asked those same people how they handled those setbacks, you would get a multitude of answers.

A setback is not a cue to stop moving forward. Setbacks allow you to review your plan, make the necessary revisions and continue moving forward. Some setbacks are minor: a seminar that did not draw the anticipated attendees, or a glitch in a marketing plan. Other setbacks may require a shift in a completely new direction, such as the loss of a job, or the loss of your company. Here are his tips for turning setbacks into a setup for a comeback:

• If you're willing, new opportunities await. Handling setbacks in a positive manner requires a positive mindset. You must have flexibility and a willingness to change and move quickly. Look past the setback for the new opportunity. You may find that tremendous success lies ahead because you were willing to adapt.
• Plan to be successful. The most successful organizations did not just happen, they planned it. Plan to be the best, see the possibilities and then consistently do the things that it will take to realize your plan. Make the necessary investments in your organization and your people and foster a can do culture. Everyone must not only work toward the plan, but believe in the plan. Belief will drive action and action will lead to success.
• Eighty percent of success is just showing up. Before you can be successful you have to show up. Perhaps you have not perfected your technique, or achieved your plan of being the best in your field, but if you don't show up you will not win. There are countless examples of people who were bold enough to show up where they did not belong and as a result of showing up they were successful. Do not hinder your success by being afraid to take a risk and show up.
• After you show up, stand up! You must continue working on yourself and your business. Do not become complacent in your success but determine each day that tomorrow you will be better than today. The secret to success is never ending self development.
• Step up and take your swing. As children we are taught that success is rewarded and failure is punished. This mindset has caused many people to be afraid to take a shot if they were not assured of succeeding. Yet in life, we fail much more often than we succeed. The failures are lessons which help us to learn how to succeed. If you fail to hit the ball the first time or even the 100th time, you learn to adjust your stance, your grip on the bat, even your coordination. The next time the ball comes you are better prepared because of your failure.

Failures and setbacks are a part of everyone's life but the response to these events is what separates winners and losers. It has been said that regret is worse than failure. If you are afraid to try for fear of failing you will never have the life or the success that you desire. You must be willing to do a thing bad until you can do it well. With determination and endurance you will develop the mindset of a champion and your life and business will reflect it.

Rachel Clarkson helps small business owners to grow their companies, increase revenues and become great leaders. Rachel's articles can be found at the OneCoach Blog.

Writing Meeting Notes

Creating effective, actionable records

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCS_84.htm

Have you ever attended a meeting where no one has done what they promised to do at the last one? Because no progress has been made since last time, there's little to discuss, and people soon lose interest. Before you know it, the group's momentum grinds to a halt.

It's a common enough scenario, and yet it's one that can often be avoided simply by making sure that adequate notes are circulated promptly after each meeting. That way, with the discussion still fresh in people's minds, everyone has a clear reminder of what they need to do.

In this article we'll show you how to take thorough, well-organized notes. We'll cover what to put in, and what you can leave out, as well as how to present your notes in a way which maximizes the chances of them being read and acted upon.

Of course, we're not going to pretend that note writing is a thrilling activity, or a particularly exciting aspect of your career. Yet, clearly written, comprehensive and organized notes can be very powerful. They can make the difference between those who attended the meeting going away and doing nothing, or actually doing what's needed in order to move a project forwards. And that progress could be a direct result of YOUR notes!

Before the Meeting

If you know beforehand that you'll be taking meeting notes, spend some time preparing (it will be well worth the effort!) Keep in mind the following:

• Meetings aren't like movies – you want to know the plot before you start! That means scrutinizing the agenda in advance. If you know what points are going to be discussed, you'll be better able to stay organized when you're writing information down.
• Like an artist, prepare your canvas in advance! Use the agenda to create a rough outline, leaving plenty of white space for notes. Consider setting up your notebook according to the Cornell System.
• If you're also going to be participating actively in the meeting, make sure you write out any points you want to make in advance. It may be hard to remember these when you're busy taking notes.

What to Include During the Meeting

So, what actually needs to go into all these notes?

• List who was invited but couldn't make it, as well as who actually attended. This will help you remember to whom the notes need to be sent.
• When an action is proposed and agreed on, write down who's going to be responsible for making it happen. If the chair omits to confirm who's going to take on a particular task, ask him or her who should be responsible.
• Unless you have top-notch shorthand skills, don't try to write down every word during the meeting, as you're likely to get behind. Taking meeting notes is not a transcription job – you need to think as you're scribbling. Select and summarize as you go along.

After the Meeting

• Your notes should have a title or heading that reflects the overall objective of the meeting. Make sure the date is clearly marked and, if you don't always gather in the same place, record the location as well. This helps people link the document they receive from you with the real-life event.
• When saving your notes, make the filename as specific as you can too. You want to make sure you can find the document easily. Including both the name of the meeting and the date will help keep you organized. Again going for a title like "Marketing Meeting January 17 2010.doc" might not seem very original, but it will mean it's easier to find the relevant document when people need to.
• How much detail do you need to include? This largely depends on what you're meeting about, and the group you're with. If in doubt, it's probably best to be concise, while ensuring that there's enough information for people who were not able to be present to understand what was agreed.
• Send your notes out promptly – preferably within 24 hours of the meeting. Not only does this maximize the amount of time people have to carry out their agreed tasks, but it takes advantage of whatever momentum and enthusiasm the meeting may have created, before it starts to fade.
• If you're serious about getting your notes read, do remember that when you circulate them, your email subject line needs to be as specific as your document title and file name. For more on this, see our article Writing Effective Emails.

Key Points

While taking meeting notes is not the most thrilling task you'll ever have to do, it does require some thought and organization. Do your preparation before the meeting by going over the agenda, and verifying who's going to be there.

Make sure your notes are easy to find and to use. Keep the title of the document, the file name, and related email subject headings as specific as possible. And make it easier to locate important "action" items by using symbols to highlight the text.

Also, don't delay in getting the notes circulated. Send them out as soon as possible after the meeting. With any luck, you'll be surprised at the next meeting by just how effective this approach has been in moving things forward!

Team Effectiveness Assessment

How well do you and your team work together?

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_84.htm

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Teamwork has a dramatic affect on organizational performance. An effective team can help an organization achieve incredible results. A team that is not working can cause unnecessary disruption, failed delivery and strategic failure.

Nowadays it is almost impossible to avoid being a member of team. If you're not on an official team at work, chances are you function within one in one way or another. So it's important for your personal and career development to know your teamworking strengths and weaknesses.

This assessment helps you uncover common teamworking problems that you might be experiencing. Once you've completed the assessment, we direct you towards team tools that will help you to improve and develop these important skills.

How good are you and your team at teamwork and team building?

Use the online test below, and click the 'Calculate my total' button at the foot of the test.

Instructions:

For each question, click the button in the column that most applies. Click the 'Calculate My Total' button to add up your score and check your result using the scoring table underneath.

© Mind Tools Ltd, 2007-2010.

Score Interpretation

Team Development (Questions 1, 11)

Teams do not become effective overnight. Team building is a process that requires due attention and care. If you try to skip over important development stages, you risk not forming the solid foundation needed when trouble or setbacks occur.

To build, lead, or participate in a team requires an understanding of the stages of team development. Through extensive research, it has been found that successful teams have certain aspects of their development paths in common. The one that most people are aware of is Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing model.

Two other factors that significantly increase a team's chances of being effective are having a well thought out team orientation process, and developing a clear team charter. Both of these help you establish clear guidelines and set clear expectations. When the individuals on a team all know what they are supposed to be doing and how they are to go about doing it, you give the team a good start on maximizing performance. To read more about these processes see the Mind Tools articles on Successful Induction and Team Charters.

Feedback (Questions 2, 13)

One of the best ways of improving people's performance is by providing information to team members about their individual performance, as well as the overall team performance. After all, how do you know what is working and what isn't if no one gives you an objective summary?

There are usually plenty of people around who are ready and willing to give you their opinions on this. Unfortunately, this information is often conveyed in a manner that causes resentment and animosity.

For feedback to be positive and growth-inspiring, it has to be delivered properly, with enough attention being paid to how the receiver is going to perceive and process it. To learn more on giving feedback, see our articles on Giving and Receiving Feedback, The GROW Model, and 360° Feedback.

Participation and Articulating Vision (Questions 3, 9, 10)

Articulating the team's vision is fundamental to developing a high performing team. It's the vision that motivates and directs a team to reach its goal.

The best teams invest a great deal of time and energy into exploring and understanding the overall purpose and vision of the team. From this vision, a set of goals and objectives emerges that helps the team stay focused and on track.

The key to using vision successfully is making the process of discovering it a participative one. You can tell a team what the vision is and team members may or may not agree that the cause is worth working hard for. If, however, you allow the team to explore the vision, to see how their specific roles fit into the big picture, and provide meaningful opportunities for team members to assist in the team's success, then you have the basis for a high performing team.

To learn more about tying vision to goals see Performance Management and KPIs, The Balanced Scorecard, and Management By Objectives. To learn where you sit on the participative management scale, see the article on the The Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid. The articles on Avoiding Micromanagement and Successful Delegation discuss why it is important to provide challenges to your team members and allow them to use their skills and abilities to the fullest.

Managing Conflict (Questions 4, 12, 14)

Conflict can be an inevitable consequence of working with other people. Opinions, values, styles, and a whole host of other differences provide more than enough grounds for disagreement. This disagreement is actually part of the reason why teams can be so effective - the more perspectives that go into a process, the better the end result. usually!

Allowing the differences to get out of hand, though, causes unnecessary disruption and leads to breakdowns in working relationships. Team members and leaders should take it upon themselves to understand the basics of conflict management and also learn more about different styles and ways of thinking and working.

For more information on effectively managing conflict, see Managing Conflict, Theory X. Theory Y and Role Playing.

Group Roles and Structure (Questions 6, 8, 14, 15)

The differences between how people work and view the world make for interesting conversations and dynamic teams. An effective team capitalizes on these natural differences and maximizes performance by putting the right people in the right roles.

The articles on RACI and Task Allocation discuss this exact issue and provide practical methods for getting the most out of your team.

Some research has also been done on the different types of roles people play within teams. While the jury is still out on the detail of this research, having insight into the types of roles that are taken on in teams can help you see which roles and behaviors are constructive and which ones aren't. Mind Tools has featured two such models of team roles: Belbin's Team Roles and Benne and Sheats' Team Roles.

Team Member Development (Questions 7, 12)

No matter what role a person plays in a team, or what tasks he or she has been assigned to, there is almost always room for personal improvement. When the individuals on a team are functioning at high capacity, the team can flourish as well.

This is a critical understanding in team performance. Although there is no "I" in "Team" you have to remember there is no team without individuals. You have to build and foster the skills in the individuals that are congruent with the needs of the team.

To do this, requires a solid understanding of training methods and ways of identifying the needs of the team members. The article on Successful Induction talks about setting out a training needs analysis from day one. The articles on Understanding Developmental Needs and Training Needs Assessment provide practical tips for identifying areas that need improvement.

Understanding and Collaboration (Questions 5, 14)

The last area of team functioning explored by this quiz covers how well you and your team are able to collaborate and understand the key issues facing the team. Again, this goes back to the idea of cohesion. Members of successful teams all head in the same direction, and work for the same purpose.

When priorities and goals diverge, tensions appear within the team, and the whole is often no longer greater than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental issue for high performing teams. Consensus, consistency and agreement are vital for effective teamwork.

Even if your test score didn't point to this aspect of teamwork, the articles on Concept Attainment and the Delphi Technique are highly recommended.

Key Points:

An effective team is much more than a bunch of people thrown together to accomplish a goal. Because teams are such an inherent part of how we work, it is easy to believe we know what makes a team perform well, however this is often not the case.

Using this test, you can uncover areas of improvement that will help you become a better overall team member and team builder.

If you are not already a subscriber to this newsletter and you would like to be one, you can sign up at http://www.mindtools.com/subscribe.htm

Successful Induction
Getting new team members off to a great start!

Bringing in new members of your team can be time-consuming and costly - so you want new people to start working productively as soon as possible. After all, if you had spent time sourcing and choosing an expensive new piece of machinery, you wouldn't leave it in its box when it was delivered. Nor would you just hope that it would start being productive of its own accord!

To get people "up and running" quickly, you need a well thought out induction process, that helps new team members feel comfortable in their new jobs and gets them working effectively in the minimum possible time.

 
©iStockphoto/horrocks

Sometimes, employee induction is looked at as the time needed to fill out personnel records, show new employees the washrooms, introduce them to coworkers, and wish them well. If they meet with anyone other than an HR representative, then that's a bonus.

This just isn't good enough. New team members expect and deserve more!

Common Complaints...

The most frequent complaints that new people have about their induction experiences are that they are overwhelmed, are bored, or are left to sink or swim on their own. The result is often a confused new employee who takes a long time to become productive, or who becomes frustrated and quickly leaves the organization.

An effective, carefully-planned orientation or on-boarding program will not only teach technical skills, but it will educate new team members about corporate values and the company's history; and help them learn "who is who" in the organization. Organizations that have good induction programs get new people up to speed faster, have better alignment between what new people do and what the organization needs them to do, have happier employees, and have lower rates of staff turnover.

When you know the "why" of employee induction, it is much easier to design an effective program that will welcome new employees with sincerity. When you take the time and make the effort to deliver an effective induction, you convey the message that you are committed to employee development and to providing the training and resources needed to do a great job right from the start. Here are some "hows" for doing just that.

Tips for New Employee Induction

Planning
There are some key questions to ask before implementing or revamping an induction program. Important ones are:

• What does the new employee need to know about this work environment to feel comfortable and confident?
• What impression do you want new employees to have on their first day?
• What policies and procedures should new employees learn about on the first day, or in the first month? This vital information must be included in the orientation process.
• How can new employees be introduced to their coworkers without feeling overwhelmed and intimidated?
• What special things (desk, work area, equipment, special instructions) can you provide to make new employees feel comfortable, welcome, and secure?
• How can you ensure that the new employee's supervisor is available to assist him or her on the first day; and provides enough time and attention so that he or she feels a valued new member of the work team?

Ask for feedback from recent hires. Find out how they perceived the orientation process, and make changes based on those recommendations.

Tip:
Once you have a list of areas to cover, divide them up according to when they should be covered in the induction process: before the new hire starts, on day one, in week one, or in the first month.

One of the most important things that you may need to do before day one is to get the new hire to complete a Training Needs Analysis document. This allows you to arrange training in advance and book it into the new person's schedule when they start. Doing this will reduce their anxiety about unfamiliar systems (usually IT, but also procedures and licenses to use certain equipment). And by being able to schedule training earlier, you'll have them up to speed and productive sooner.

Tip:
One of the main points of an effective induction program is to give the new member of your team a great first impression of your company. This begins during the recruitment process, and continues when the employment offer letter is sent. Make sure your letter sets out the expectations of the job, and provides an open avenue of communication for the period leading up to the employee's first day.

Execution
Once you have a good idea of what you want to cover with your program, you can start developing it. Here are some ideas for orientation:

Before they start

• Make sure the new employee's work area is ready and comfortable.
• Ensure that key co-workers know that the new employee is starting, and encourage them to come to say "hello" before orientation begins.
• By putting name cards on top of your computer monitors, you can help new people learn names in their own time. They are particularly useful if you all sit in an open plan office. Make one for the new starter, too!
• Assign a mentor or partner to show the new person around and make introductions. A mentor need not deliver all - or even any - of the training, but will be there to guide the new starter to training sessions.

On Day One

• Cover off all the essentials: forms, computer access, ID cards, parking, office supplies, etc. Don't do this all at once, though. Intersperse these housekeeping activities with other parts of the induction process that require greater levels of concentration.
• Start with the basics. Don't overwhelm the employee and don't cram everything they need to know into a one-hour session. People become productive sooner if they are firmly grounded in the basic knowledge they need to understand their job. Focus on the why, when, where, and how of the position before handing them any assignments or project.
• Provide an orientation packet that includes samples of forms, as well as the job description.
• Give the new starter a checklist of what they should have been told or shown by the end of day one, the end of week one and by the end of their first month, and who is responsible for covering this with them (HR, supervisor or mentor). This will help reduce their anxiety about "unknown unknowns".
• If you have a digital camera available, take photos of each team member, and other people too, and make up a sheet matching names to photos to give to new starters on their first day. Take a photo of the new starter on their first day, so you can update the sheet for the next person.
• Provide a list of FAQs with a contact person/department, and phone number or extension. This should always include the number of the IT helpdesk!
• Plan to take the new employee to lunch (or join him or her for lunch), and ask the supervisor and available coworkers to join you. There is nothing more uncomfortable than facing a lunchroom of strangers, or slinking out for a solitary lunch on your first day.

By the end of Month One

• Keep it fun: consider incorporating some ice breaker exercises at the start of the first group meeting after the new hire starts.
• Give the new person some responsibility for his or her own orientation. Offer opportunities for self-directed learning, under appropriate supervision.
• Ensure that the mentor has scheduled ongoing meetings with the new starter up until the end of their first month, to answer questions that they might prefer not to ask their line manager.

An effective induction program - or the lack of one - will make a significant difference in how quickly a new employee becomes productive and feels part of the team. Good orientation takes energy, time and commitment, however it usually pays off for the individual employee, the department, and the organization. Make sure your new employees feel that they are valued, and that they want to come back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Tip:
The quality of your induction process significantly affects the rate at which your company can grow. If you can train people quickly, and keep hold of them once they're on board, you can grow your company quickly. If it takes a long time for people to become productive, and you're continually losing new members of your team, you may find your business shrinking instead of growing. What's more, this will be an incredibly stressful, overworked time for those who are left!

Key Points

With an effective induction process, you can help new employees settle into their new jobs faster, and help them become productive sooner.

Employees who take on mentoring roles often find this rewarding, but should nevertheless have this work formally recognized in their annual appraisal. After all mentoring takes time that could otherwise be used to complete work.

Develop induction checklists or aides memoire for your department or team, and use these to save time in preparing for the induction of a new starter, and to ensure that everything is covered. Update these with feedback from new starters regularly.

This is just one of hundreds of leadership and team management articles and resources within the Career Excellence Club.

A Final Note from James

Since we launched the Mind Tools newsletter back in 2002, I've been delighted and gratified to hear from so many readers about how we've helped their career and lives. Celebrating readers' and members' achievements really makes my day! :-)

And it's these achievements, as well as milestones like today's 150th newsletter, that make me so hugely proud of the Mind Tools team. So a big, public THANK YOU to everyone - readers, members and team!

We hope to see you very soon in the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club. Remember that now is a really great time to join us and get your 150th newsletter Celebration Team Productivity Bonus Pack!

Next time in the Mind Tools newsletter, we'll be looking at how you can target your training more effectively, and we'll be learning the "7Cs of Communication".

Until then, my very best wishes!

James Manktelow

email us
Mind Tools
Essential Skills for an Excellent Career!

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Goal Set, Goal Met! An Organized Approach to Reaching Goals

Personal goals can help you accomplish an assortment of objectives and serve a variety of purposes. Goals may be short term and relatively easy to accomplish like cleaning the house or making a casserole for dinner before picking the kids up from school. Alternatively, your goals may be more long term or complex and involve multiple steps and processes such as shedding weight before a vacation or saving enough to retire by the age of 65. Whatever they may be, the goals you set for yourself will guide your daily actions and steer your life in a direction you deem satisfying.

Setting goals, especially long term goals, can be an intimidating process. After all, these objectives will determine what path you will take and directly affect your level of satisfaction with career, family, and life. An organized approach to goal setting will ensure your goals are appropriate, purposeful, and when achieved, will result in a satisfactory outcome. By taking an organized approach to setting goals, you can target your objective and achieve success with minimal stress and maximum fulfillment.

1) Know your purpose. Motivation is a key factor in successfully achieving goals. If you are not able to recognize the reason why you have set a goal, you may find it challenging work towards completion of that goal. If your goals include getting a promotion at work, remind yourself that the effort and hard work you exert to achieve that promotion may ultimately lead to an increase in pay, better hours, a nicer office, or other benefits.

2) Set a reasonable time frame. Rome wasn't built in a day and many goals cannot be accomplished in one either. Give yourself a specific start and end date for your goals and include benchmark dates along the way whenever appropriate. For most people, spring cleaning your home will take longer than one afternoon to accomplish. Ask yourself what a reasonable length of time would be to achieve your goal given your schedule. Break larger goals down into smaller, more manageable sections. Consider addressing bedrooms one day, bathrooms another, and common living areas on a third day.

3) Choose goals that are reachable. Setting goals that are impossible to attainable will only discourage you, resulting in a lack of motivation to achieve that goal and others as well. If your goal is to slim down, don't expect to lose a bunch of pounds in the first week. Instead, consult your physician to determine what a healthy goal weight would be and together you can establish a reasonable weekly target.

4) Be Specific. Do not set goals that are vague or unfocused. When setting goals, always ask who, what, where, why, and when. Do your goals include planting a garden this year? Before you begin, ask yourself, who will participate. Is this a family garden or just for mom? What will you plant--flowers or vegetables? Where will you plant it? Why do you want to plant a garden? Is it for stress relief, to save money, or possibly a hands-on science lesson for the kids? When is the appropriate time to prepare the garden and plant it? Answering these questions before your project begins will ensure it is a smooth process and promotes successful completion.


5) Base goals on your own actions. All goals you set should be based solely on your own actions and things that are within your control. We would all like our children to achieve perfect grades on their report cards, but a child's grades are not within your control and therefore should not be a personal goal for you. Instead, setting aside 30 minutes every evening to help your child with their homework is something you are able to control and can ultimately help your son or daughter achieve good grades.

6) Write goals down and review them often. Goals should guide your life on a daily basis and frequent reminders will help you remember what you are working towards. Once you have set your goals, write them down in a place you will see them regularly. A brightly colored post-it note on your agenda or calendar can catch your eye each time you glance at it and remind you of short term goals. Alternatively, if your long term goal is to retire by the age of 65, designate an annual date to review your progress with a spouse, personal financial planner, or accountant and make any necessary adjustments to ensure that you are able to achieve your goal.

7) Hold yourself accountable. Become your own critic and be critical of the progress you make in achieving your goals. Only you know what your best effort looks like and what you are capable of. If your goals are reasonable and there have been no unforeseen circumstances, you are the one responsible if goals are not met. If finishing the laundry today was your goal and you spent an hour chatting on the phone with a friend instead, you may need to skip your bedtime reading to complete the laundry.

8) Reward yourself! When you have completed your goals, give yourself a small reward for all of your hard work. Knowing there will be a worthwhile incentive in exchange for your efforts will motivate you to finish and inspire you to set more goals for yourself in the future. If you worked hard and saved up enough money for a family vacation, buy yourself a book to read on the airplane or schedule a spa service at your destination hotel.

Setting goals, whether they be short or long term, no longer needs to be a stressful or intimidating task. An organized approached to goal setting will greatly increase your chances of success and help you develop a positive attitude towards setting goals. When you take an organized approach, you minimize barriers such as disorganization, inefficiency, lack of motivation, and confusion thus clearing the way for you to accomplish whatever goal you set your mind to!

********************

Successful leaders are simple people who have big dreams, whose dreams eventually come true through commitment and perseverance. Often times, when they speak of their dreams, people call them crazy, completely disregard them or laugh at their naivety. However, when these dreams become a reality, suddenly these simple people start to get followers and their followers crown them with the title of- LEADER. How do these successful individuals attract followers?

Here are the 3 secret triggers to successful leadership:

1- Confidence- Let me tell you a little fable: there was once a terrible drought in a small  remote village, and everyone decided to gather around at an appointed place on an selected day to pray for rain. When everyone was gathered, they were surprised to see one simple little boy carrying an umbrella, when asked why he brought an umbrella, he replied, ‘because I believe that when I pray, it will rain’. It rained cats and dogs that day, and everybody else except that little boy, got completely soaked.  This is secret number one, confidence, better known as faith. 

2- Trust- Successful leaders completely surrender their vision to the “Invisible” hand, and know without a shadow of doubt that somehow they will be led to their destination. They act like a six month year old baby, who, when thrown in the air, laughs and giggles with the confidence that somehow, someone is going to catch them.That is the second secret- Trust. 

3- Hope- Successful leaders have strong conviction, that their dreams will come true, no matter what. Every night when we go to bed, we have no assurance that we will be alive the next morning, but still we have plans for the up- coming day. That’s Hope-secret number three.

So, if you want to inspire and influence others to follow you, have confidence in whatever you do, trust that it will be done and never lose hope. You too will be called a Leader.

The Vibrant Moment: Learn To Avoid Guilt Traps

By Dr. Doris Jeanette

Guilt is the worst experience known to humans. Guilt ties you up in knots and makes you feel unworthy and miserable. Nothing in the whole world stops vibrant living more than guilt. The energy of guilt is nasty, sticky, stagnant and extremely unhealthy to your body and energy field. 

You may be surprised to learn that guilt is not a real emotion. Authentic emotions are energy in motion and they keep you healthy and vital when you allow their colorful, clear energy to move through your physical and emotional body. You need all the rainbow colors of emotions to fuel a healthy, vital energy field. On the other hand the energy of guilt is grey, dark, black, brown, yuck.

Guilt is the end result of thoughts that are attacking you. Consequently, you think you have done something wrong. The reason you think that you have done something wrong is because you judge yourself or someone else judges you. A child does not "feel guilty" until someone tells her that she has offended someone or done something "wrong" or "bad." 

When judgmental energy attacks any child, the result is a learned, conditioned anxiety response in the nervous system and body of the child. Therefore, the experience of "feeling guilty" is a conditioned response, not a healthy, authentic emotion or feeling.

You need to say no to guilt and never let this unhealthy energy tie you in knots. Develop the skills to get out of "Guilt Traps" and stop "Guilt Tripping" others. Here are two great opportunities to do jut that...

1. "7 Ways to Avoid the Guilt Trap" - sign up for a free guilt-busting tele-seminar, scheduled for Tuesday, March 16 at 7:00 USA ET. Check the world clock for your time zone. Sign up right now and listen to the audio at any later time. Sponsored by two Australian Mums who own guiltfreebusinessmothers.com.
2. "Say No to Guilt and Judgment" - learn how judgment and guilt work together to create misery and get the skill set to say no to both. This one hour audio features Dr. Jeanette teaching people how to break free from guilt. As an added bonus for Cultivate Life! readers: receive an additional one hour audio, "Tame Your Thoughts," when you mention Cultivate Life! and place your order by midnight, Tuesday, March 2. Read more and order here.

Dr. Doris Jeanette is a licensed psychologist with 33 years of experience teaching people how to unlock and use their human potential. She is author of "Opening the Heart," "Overcoming Anxiety Naturally" and 14 other self help products. Her Holistic Psychology Mentoring program is for people interested in learning how to sense energy so they can lead the way to the future New Psychology. She is founder and director of Center for New Psychology and offers personal Energy Intensives when requested. Daily doses of Doris on twitter.

Building a productive team

Building a productive team calls for an incremental approach. Transforming an unproductive team into a productive team can not be achieved through a single bold and imaginative move or through some magical means.  Rather, it is necessary to do many small things over an extended period of time.  These are summarized in the following three guidelines that follow 

1. Decide on the type of team you are looking to build.  In the book "Game Plans", Robert Keidel makes interesting comparisons between organizational teams and sports teams.  He focuses on three different sports teams: baseball, football, and basketball and shows their counterparts in business and industry.

Keidel does not suggest that any particular sports team model is ideal, because any one of them might be appropriate under a given set of circumstances.

The point that is emphasized is to know exactly what game your organization or unit is playing (or should be playing) and then choose the appropriate model.

2. Communicate your vision.  We have stressed that one of the chief functions of leadership is to create a clear vision of the desired state of the organization.  This vision should be an exciting view of the future that will inspire the members of the team to put forth their best efforts.

The important thing is not to keep your vision a secret. Share it with your people and solicit their ideas on how best to embellish the vision and then convert it into reality.

3. Communicate your philosophy of management.  As a manager, you should have a basic philosophy of management: an elucidation of your concept of management and how the management function should be carried out.  Included in this philosophy of management should be a clear statement of values, goals, and strategies.

It is important that they be consistent and that they support and reinforce one another.  Do not keep your philosophy of management a secret. Share it with your people. They will then understand "where you are coming from." Most important, make certain that your day-to-day decisions and actions are a true echo of yourexpressed philosophy.

For more information and tips about self improvement, drop by the site today.

All the best!

_________________

Robin Skeen

Inspired Personal Growth - Transforming body, mind &  spirit to live your best life NOW!

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=7cCVG&m=1p204mNWYdZiqb&b=oxzFA9O1LRB.rkvFcq.A2w - My Blog!  - Updated often with my reflections on the many aspects of self development.

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken - Oscar Wilde

The GROW Model

Coaching team members to improve performance

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm

One key role of any leader is to coach team members to achieve their best. As "coach", you will typically help your team members to solve problems, make better decisions, learn new skills or otherwise progress in their role or career.

Whilst some leaders are fortunate enough to get formal training as coaches, many are not. They have to develop coaching skills for themselves.

Now this may sound daunting. But if you arm yourself with some of proven techniques, find opportunities to practice and learn to trust your instincts, you can become a better coach, and so enhance your team's performance.

One proven approach that helps with this it the GROW model. GROW is an acronym standing for Goal - Current Reality - Options - Will. The model is a simple yet powerful framework for structuring a coaching session.

A useful metaphor for the GROW model is the plan you might make for an important journey. First, you start with a the map: With this, you help your team member decide where they are going (their Goal) and establish where they currently are (their Current Reality). Then you explore various ways (the Options) of making the journey. In the final step, establishing the Will, you ensure your team member is committed to making the journey and is prepared for the conditions and obstacles they may meet on their way.

How to Use the Tool:

Use the following steps to structure a coaching session:

1. Establish the Goal:
   First, with your team member, you must define and agree the goal or outcome to be achieved. You should help your team member define a goal that is specific, measurable and realistic.
   
   In doing this, it is useful to ask questions like:

"How will you know that you have achieved that goal?"
"How will you know the problem is solved?"

2. Examine Current Reality:
   Next, ask your team member to describe their Current Reality. This is a very important step: Too often, people try to solve a problem without fully considering their starting point, and often they are missing some of the information they need to solve the problem effectively.
   
   As the team member tells you about his or her Current Reality, the solution may start to emerge.
   
   Useful coaching questions include:

"What is happening now?"
"What, who, when, how often"
"What is the effect or result of that?"

3. Explore the Options:
   Once you and your team member have explored the Current Reality, it's time to explore what is possible - meaning, all the many possible options you have for solving the problem. Help your team member generate as many good options as possible, and discuss these.
   
   By all means, offer your own suggestions. But let your team member offer his or hers first, and let him or her do most of the talking.
   
   Typical questions used to establish the options are:

"What else could you do?"
"What if this or that constraint were removed?
"What are the benefits and downsides of each option?"
"What factors will you use to weigh up the options?

4. Establish the Will:
   By examining Current Reality and exploring the Options, your team member will now have a good idea of how he or she can achieve their Goal. That's great - but in itself, this may not be enough! So your final step as coach is to get you team member to commit to specific action. In so doing, you will help the team member establish his or her will and motivation.
   
   Useful questions:

"So what will you do now . and when?
"What could stop you moving forward?"
"And how will you overcome it?"
"Will this address your goal?"
"How likely is this option to succeed?"
"What else will you do?"

The GROW model is just one of the techniques taught in "How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You", Mind Tools' leadership course. Click here to find out more about "How to Lead".

You Don't Have to Be a "Born" Leader to Be a Great Leader

By Dr. Alan Zimmerman

"Truly effective leaders in the years ahead will have personas determined by strong values and belief in the capacity of individuals to grow." --Richard Beckhard

Since the beginning of time, people have wondered if leaders are born or if leaders are made. Hundreds of books and hundreds of research studies have addressed this question as well. I know. I've read them.

So what is the RIGHT answer? I think I know ... and that is ... a few people are "born leaders." They're more "naturally inclined" to be leaders. But most leaders are "made." Somehow or other they learned how to be leaders. And I believe leadership is teachable and leadership skills are learnable.

If you do a few simple things, you will become a leader ... and a very effective one at that. You've got to ...

1. Show a brighter future
   Now that sounds pretty fancy and theoretical. But it's not. It's simply a matter of letting people know there's something out there that is better than what they have right now. Help them see it, feel it, smell it, taste it, and touch it. The more vividly they "see" a brighter future, the more excited they become in helping you make that future a reality.

In fact, you may have used this strategy and didn't even know you were doing it. If, for example, you were working lots of extra hours to complete a project, and if your spouse was having a hard time with your schedule, you may have reminded your spouse of the week's vacation that was coming right after the project was turned in. You were showing a brighter future.

Whether you use a brighter future to boost productivity, change behavior, or just plain encourage someone, it almost always works.

It's like the story of two men, both seriously ill, who occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room's only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back.

The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation.

Every afternoon, when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window. The man in the other bed began to live for those one-hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside.

The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every color, and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance.

As the man by the window described all this in exquisite detail, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine this picturesque scene. One warm afternoon, the man by the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man could not hear the band, he could see it in his mind's eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive words.

Days, weeks and months passed. One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths only to find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep. She was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away.

As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone. Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the real world outside. He strained to slowly turn and look out the window beside the bed. It faced a blank wall.

The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate to describe such wonderful things outside this window when there was nothing there. The nurse said she didn't know. She just knew the man was blind and could not even see the wall. "Perhaps," she said, "he just wanted to encourage you."

So your leadership begins by painting a picture of a brighter future, and then ...

2. Reinforce the brighter future over and over again
   It's one of the key things author Warren Bennis discovered when he interviewed 90 leaders. The effective leader does not offer some vision of the future a single time and leave it at that. No, he repeats it over and over again.

It's what the Captain of the Australian yacht team did to wrest the America's cup away from the United States ... a cup the U.S. held for 132 years. As silly as it sounds, the Captain got his team to visualize every night for 15 minutes for two years ... being out in front ... winning the cup. The more they visualized it, the more real their dream became. In fact, they finished many of their visualizations with their hearts racing and pulse pounding, and they finished the race ... out front and winning.

3. Emphasize the negativity of the alternative
   Consultant Michael Podolinsky gives several examples of that. For example, if you've got a second shift that keeps outperforming the first shift by 10%, you might say something like this to your crew, "If we can beat the second shift in the next quarter, I will give each of you an extra day off for your annual leave. If we miss the target and the second shift still outperforms us, we'll have to work weekends the following month until we equal their production." As Michael says, "It's a big incentive to win, a bigger incentive not to lose."

If you've got a child who is coasting in school and wearing a highly inappropriate hair style, you might try, "I'll make a deal with you. If you get your grades up to an 'A' level and keep them there until the end of the year, I'll get you a new iPod Nano and back off about your hair style. If you don't get your grades up, I get to say how your hair will look for the rest of the year." As Michael puts it, "If you lose the bet, you have an 'A' student with weird hair. If you win, you have a clean cut 'B' student. Seems like you win either way."

4. Empower people with choice
   Effective leaders aren't control freaks. They encourage and empower people to be co-creators of the brighter future. It gets them excited.

And as famed auto maker Walter P. Chrysler noted almost 100 years ago, "I feel sorry for the person who can't get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile."

One of the ways you get people excited is to empower them with choice. In other words, you don't simply shove your vision down their throats. You don't say, in effect, "Take it or leave it." You ask them for their input on shaping the future.

And this is critical!!! You don't ask how they would do it. That will only get you ONE answer, and they'll resent it if you don't accept and implement their ONE answer. Instead, ask for THREE RIGHT answers. That way, when you pick or incorporate some or all of their RIGHT answers, their commitment to implementation and follow-through goes through the roof.

So ask people for their input and choices and right answers, and then listen. And that's tough for a lot of leaders. As American author Alice Duer Miller noted, "People love to talk but hate to listen."

5. Turn mistakes into lessons
   If you're going to empower people to think more and do more without your direct supervision, they're going to make some mistakes. It's an inevitable part of the learning process.

But the research on effective leaders makes an interesting point. Effective leaders don't use the word "failure." Oh sure, they talk about mistakes, but they don't talk about "failure." That's a road leading to nowhere. As one leader said, "A mistake is just another way of doing things."

Effective leaders legitimize mistakes and illuminate mistakes. One leader did that by setting up a cannon-like device in the company. Every time someone made a mistake, they were to write down what they learned from that mistake and set off the cannon. The explosions could be heard throughout the plant throughout the day ... letting people know that mistakes are okay ... just as long as you learn from them. And finally ...

6. Acknowledge the contributions of others
   No one ever outgrows the need for acknowledgement, appreciation, and approval. And wise leaders know that. They know they can't expect people to be innovative, self-starting, peak performing, company-minded players if they, the leaders, aren't sincere and generous in their recognition and rewards.

IBM knew that a long time ago when they published their little 22-page book outlining "The IBM Way" where it encouraged people to share their suggestions on how the company could be improved. And between 1975 and 1984, IBM saved $300 million thanks to the suggestions of its employees ... and it gave $60 million to those employees who came up with the ideas. The employees soon learned that their ideas were expected and appreciated. Every suggestion was acknowledged, even if it wasn't used, no matter how ridiculous the suggestion might have seemed. No one was made to feel that his/her idea did not matter.

The School Board in Palo Alto got similarly amazing results when they acknowledged the contribution of others. As a major issue was facing the community, volunteers went door to door asking homeowners to place a large sign on their lawn indicating support for the issue. The sign was so large and so ugly that only 1 out of 100 agreed to have the sign placed on their lawn.

So the School Board tried another tactic. Knowing the issue was a positive one, the volunteers then went door to door asking homeowners if they would place a small 3" by 5" card in their window indicating support of the issue. Many people said "yes" to this trifling request.

But get this. Once the homeowner agreed to place the card in his window, the School Board sent the homeowner a letter ... thanking him for their support. In other words, the School Board acknowledged the homeowner's contribution to the campaign. Two weeks later, when another volunteer came to the homeowner's door, asking if the large sign could be placed in her yard, 95% said "yes."

The lesson was clear. Getting a small commitment started the process of followership. And the acknowledgement of that small commitment opened the door to more commitment and more cooperation.

Whether or not you're a "born" leader, you can do any and all of the 6 leadership behaviors I've just outlined. Now it's

your turn to do it.

Action:
Look at the 6 leadership behaviors outlined above. Rank order them from 1 to 6, 1 being the behavior you are best at and 6 being the one that needs the most improvement.

As a best-selling author and Hall of Fame professional speaker, Dr. Alan Zimmerman has taught more than one million people in 48 states and 22 countries how to keep a positive attitude on and off the job. In his book, PIVOT: How One Turn In Attitude Can Lead To Success, Dr. Zimmerman outlines the exact steps you must take to get the results you want in any situation. Go to Alan's site for a Free Sneak Preview.

 The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership® Theory

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_44.htm

Choosing the Right Leadership Style for the Right People

You've just finished training the newest member of your team. Now that he's ready to start working, you give him the data that you need him to enter into the company's database, and then you hurry off to a meeting.

When you return later that afternoon, you're disappointed to find that he hasn't done anything. He didn't know what to do, and he didn't have the confidence to ask for help. As a result, hours have been lost, and now you have to rush to enter the data on time. Although you may want to blame the worker, the truth is that you're as much to blame as he is.

How can you avoid situations like this?

Management experts Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard argue that these things happen because leaders don't match their style of leadership to the maturity of the person or group they're leading. When style and maturity aren't matched, failure is the result.

In this article, we'll review the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership® Theory, and we'll explain how it's used in different leadership situations.

Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory

The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory was created by Dr Paul Hersey, a professor and author of "The Situational Leader," and Ken Blanchard, author of the best selling "The One-Minute Manager," among others.

The theory states that instead of using just one style, successful leaders should change their leadership styles based on the maturity of the people they're leading and the details of the task. Using this theory, leaders should be able to place more or less emphasis on the task, and more or less emphasis on the relationships with the people they're leading, depending on what's needed to get the job done successfully.

Leadership Styles

According to Hersey and Blanchard, there are four main leadership styles:

• Telling (S1) – Leaders tell their people exactly what to do, and how to do it.
• Selling (S2) – Leaders still provide information and direction, but there's more communication with followers. Leaders "sell" their message to get the team on board.
• Participating (S3) – Leaders focus more on the relationship and less on direction. The leader works with the team, and shares decision-making responsibilities.
• Delegating (S4) – Leaders pass most of the responsibility onto the follower or group. The leaders still monitor progress, but they're less involved in decisions.

As you can see, styles S1 and S2 are focused on getting the task done. Styles S3 and S4 are more concerned with developing team members' abilities to work independently.

Maturity Levels

According to Hersey and Blanchard, knowing when to use each style is largely dependent on the maturity of the person or group you're leading. They break maturity down into four different levels:

• M1 – People at this level of maturity are at the bottom level of the scale. They lack the knowledge, skills, or confidence to work on their own, and they often need to be pushed to take the task on.
• M2 – at this level, followers might be willing to work on the task, but they still don't have the skills to do it successfully.
• M3 – Here, followers are ready and willing to help with the task. They have more skills than the M2 group, but they're still not confident in their abilities.
• M4 – These followers are able to work on their own. They have high confidence and strong skills, and they're committed to the task.

The Hersey-Blanchard model maps each leadership style to each maturity level, as shown below.

To use this model, reflect on the maturity of individuals within your team. The table above then shows which leadership style Hersey and Blanchard consider the most effective for people with that level of maturity.

Leadership Style Examples

1. You're about to leave for an extended holiday, and your tasks will be handled by an experienced colleague. He's very familiar with your responsibilities, and he's excited to do the job.
   
   Instead of trusting his knowledge and skills to do the work, you spend hours creating a detailed list of tasks for which he'll be responsible, and instructions on how to do them.
   
   The result? Your work gets done, but you've damaged the relationship with your colleague by your lack of trust. He was an M4 in maturity, and yet you used an S1 leadership style instead of an S4, which would have been more appropriate.
2. You've just been put in charge of leading a new team. It's your first time working with these people. As far as you can tell, they have some of the necessary skills to reach the department's goals, but not all of them. The good news is that they're excited and willing to do the work.
   
   You estimate they're at an M3 maturity level, so you use the matching S3 leadership style. You coach them through the project's goals, pushing and teaching where necessary, but largely leaving them to make their own decisions. As a result, their relationship with you is strengthened, and the team's efforts are a success.

Key Points

All teams, and all team members, aren't created equal. Hersey and Blanchard argue that leaders are more effective when they use a leadership style based on the individuals or groups they're leading.

Start by identifying whom you're leading. Are your followers knowledgeable about the task? Are they willing and excited to do the work? Rate them on the M1–M4 maturity scale, and then use the leadership style that's appropriate for that rating.

How Good Are Your Management Skills?

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In business, we often seem to focus less on management skills than the more glamorous and exciting work of leadership. However, while leaders may bring us vision, inspiration and challenge, these things need proper support and efficient implementation. That's what the practice of management is about.

Managers are responsible for making sure things are done right. Therefore, effective management is an essential complement to effective leadership - and is vital for organizational success.

And just as the importance of management is wide ranging, so is its scope. Managers must have an extensive set of skills - from planning and delegation to communication and motivation.

Because the skill set is so wide, it's tempting to build skills in the areas of management that you're already comfortable with. But, for your long-term success, it's wise to analyze your skills in all of the areas related to effective management - and then challenge yourself to make improvements in all areas.

This quiz helps you quickly identify areas of strength and weakness, so that you can capitalize on the former and manage the latter. We then direct you to resources that you can use to develop your skills still further.

How Good Are Your Management Skills?

Instructions: For each statement, click the button in the column that best describes you. Click the 'Calculate My Total' button to add up your score and check your result using the scoring table underneath.

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