Category: Success

I have a choice today to paint my day and the day of the people I meet by choosing words that go down or words that go up.

I have a stellar idea. I am going to take the path of great teachers who only say things they want students to remember. I am only going to use words that I want people to associate with me.

How am I doing? If I were any better I would be in the circus. How am I doing? Tickled to be able to live in a safe place with great people and work with people who are intelligent, patient, and kind.

How as my weekend? It was wonderful. I got so many personal things accomplished that I feel like a new person!

That shirt looks nice on you.

You always know the right thing to say.

I keep great hearing things about the work you are doing.

Thank you. You did a great job.

We are so fortunate to be able to call people who can help us with our decisions.

So what am I doing with these words? I am painting my day and the day of the people around me with mood-lifting words.

Whether I am writing resumes, business letters, emails to friends, speaking with other people, or just talking to yourself, I can change the mood from dreary to bright, and I have much better vision when the direction I am going is bright.

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

ANGLO-SAXON WORDS 
The basic principles for business writing and public speaking is to get accurate information to reading or listening audience.   The best communicators select words that will ensure that their message is easy to understand. For business and public speaking, the power of their material is in the subject matter.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Simple sentences are the easiest to understand.  These types of sentences express the action of one person, animal, or object creating one action or more actions.  The cat meowed. The dog barked and howled.

Compound sentences have two subjects performing two separate actions.  The cat meowed, and the dog barked.

In a complex sentence, the communicator is using a phrase to describe the action in the sentence.  Complex sentences help the writers and speakers express time and location.  After sundown, the cat meowed.  When the cat meowed, the dog barked.

Adjective clauses enable a writer to define or describe the subject of the sentence.  The dog that barked is a small.

The more complicated the writer or speaker makes a sentence, the more risk the person  makes brings to making the information to understand.  Example:  As Mary approached Jim on the left and the lion eased into view just over the horizon on the right and Jim’s arms began to tire from the heavy load of the four water pails, Jim breathed deeply, trembling and straining to find his focus and maintain faith that any action at all, however quick on his part, to reach the gun was worthwhile, and he called to Mary to leave immediately, so that he could deal independently  and with total focus on frightening the lion through shouting or move to grab the gun and in doing so move away from the lion and yet reduce the likelihood that he could intimidate the lion and frighten the lion away.

Simple, factual adjectives can be helpful in writing.  The red books are encyclopedias.
However, there are many adjectives that just waste space in business writing.  In business writing and speaking, select adjectives for the following purposes.

1. Effectiveness
2. Simplicity
3. Accuracy
4. Honesty
5. Relevance
6. Conciseness
7. Professionalism
8. Courteous tone
9. Completeness

TALK HAPPY

I worked with a great guy who was always fun to see. He is the only man who ever called me “Sunshine.”

This name was not even a man crush kind of thing.  My buddy just greeted all people with a smile and some enthusiastic greeting or another.  For me the greeting was “Good morning, Sunshine.”

My buddy always had fantastic days.  Along the way, he enjoyed tremendous success over equally and even more capable people.  The reason for his success to me was very simple.  Given the option of the people available to join a team, especially a team in a stressful, challenging, long-term project, managers would obviously choose the person with all the skills to do a great job.

In a very simple way, every business day can go better by my greeting people with the most positive yet appropriate greeting possible.

MAKE GRATITUDE LISTS

Happiness is an inside job.

I have seen people develop lifetime habits for the sole purpose of staying mentally healthy.  I know of one mental health professional who, for his own sake, writes down one thing a day for which he is grateful.

At the end of the week, he compiles a list from the seven words.  Once a month, he picks the top five things from his gratitude list and puts these words on another gratitude list for the month.

Once a year, he goes over what is now a list of 60 things for which he is grateful and picks the top five things for which he is happy every year.  He has gone through this process for years.

He treats the human mind the way a physical therapist works with a human limb.

My glass is always full.  It always has been.  I am the one who is responsible for filling my own glass.  I have held that responsibility since I was three years old.  If I do not like the level in my glass, I fill it.

Mentally it is my job to keep my glass full as well.

However, what I am talking about is a celebration.

When I behave like I am happy, I become happy.  Sunshine, exercise, and a healthy diet make me smile. Clapping my hands and dancing energize me.  I do not have to wait until I am at some special event to have a party.  I can have one without disturbing other people nearly any time I want.

EXERCISE WITH JOY

I used to see the happy runner.  He was an interesting, colorful guy.  I am not sure how many hours he ran a day.  I saw him more than once on a street where I did not regularly go, so I conclude he must have been out there running a great deal.

He wore bright shorts, tank tops, shoes, and waved at the motorist.   He was always smiling and having his own party as he ran down the side walk of a local major thoroughfare.

He was happy.  He was like my friend who used to call me “Sunshine.”  He created his own celebration.  He was like so many people, you included, in that he was extraordinary at creating his own celebration.

The Benefits of Creating Your Own Career Plan

A CAREER PLAN CREATES DIRECTION.
In a sense, everyone has a career plan.  Some people just do not know what it is or where that plan leads.

When entering kindergarten or first grade, children begin to participate in a career plan.  The school system laid out the plan.  The result is that students with no further plans of their own often find themselves dropping out of school or finishing school to take whatever job is available.

The specifics of your career plan are relative to where you are in your career.  If you are entering college, your career plan will include the subjects you need to study to enable you to get a job in a particular field.

If you have business experience, you may have already worked with different types of business plans.  A career plan provides the same value as a business plan.  You will identify who these things:

1. Who you are as a brand
2. Your career mission
3. An understanding of what you need to do to achieve your career goals.
4. Ways to present your plan to other people so that you will get the meetings you need for success.

Students and professionals who have who have developed and follow their own career plan have a greater likelihood of success, simply because they know which steps to take for success.

A CAREER PLAN GIVES YOU A SENSE OF PURPOSE.
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting, working on a project, or in any situation where the question came to mind, “What am I doing here?” or “Why am I doing this?”

Have you noticed that associated with those questions is an unpleasant feeling that you are wasting your time?

You have no sense of purpose.

Going to work every day with a sense of purpose is a lot more fun than going to work every day and wondering why you are doing what you are doing.

Also, it seems logical that going to work everyday with a sense of purpose increases your likelihood of being more successful.

1. You will take an interest in your work.
2. You will be focused on your work.
3. You will be more willing to invest energy and time in your work.

Having a career plan gives you a greater sense of purpose.

A CAREER PLAN CREATES A CHECK-OFF LIST OF WHAT YOU NEED.
Part of creating a career plan includes writing a check-off list.  Through this check-off list, you will create focus and direction.  Your intuition can emerge to see options that might somehow never have come to you.

You might consider including the following things:

2. Your education now
3. Your plan for your on-going education
4. The job you are in now
5. The jobs you want to do
6. People you want to help
7. People you will need to help you
8. Things you want to achieve
9. Places you want to go
10. People you want to meet
11. Products you want to create
12. The amount of money you want to make
13. Your physical goals and diet and exercise plan.

A CAREER PLAN IS A LIVING DOCUMENT.
As much as possible, allow yourself to be feel confident that you are on a quest to create a vision of your life the way that you would really want to live it.

As you create your first draft, allow yourself to write down whatever ideas come to mind.  Your career plan is a living document that you will refer to and change as you learn and grow as a professional.  Put aside the limitations of writing structure and just write.  Write what you want to be and what you want to do.  This material is not permanent.  Allow your intuition to become a powerful tool that guides you from map view and street view and back to map view as your proceed.  Give your intuition free reign to see solutions to life events you had only seen as obstacles.

Take breaks and relax as you go through the process of creating your first draft of your career plan. Allow yourself time to create this plan.  As your plan emerges and you get stuck, begin to work on other projects and come back to creating your plan.

What you may find is that the process of creating the plan gives you many more ideas and tools you can develop and ways you can begin to reach out to people you want to help or who can help you.

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A CAREER PLAN CREATES THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE
The psychological advantage is that you are making everything easier for your mind to perform for your success.  Knowing the details of where you want to go and knowing the details of the things you plan to do, your mind will have greater spontaneity and confidence.  The spontaneity and confidence will create greater clarity.

What you are doing is the same mental process that takes place in any performance practice.  Through repetition prior to the actual time of performance, you can respond intuitively when the pressure in on and you must perform in front of other people. Athletes, musicians, actors, and other performers who give all of their focus during practice experience greater ease during actual performance.

Give yourself the opportunity to create a larger, happier, more successful view of your life than you have ever had.

As you take advantage of creating a career plan, you will have more mental freedom and feel less stress whether you are working in front of other people or working alone at your desk.  You will have practiced, rehearsed, over and over how to get where you want to go, gathering the tools you need to get there, and how to meet the people who are important to your career.

In summary, you will have the following psychological benefits from your career plan.

1. Increased creativity and confidence
2. Clear direction
3. Less stress through the simplicity of a planned process
4. Great habits for success
5. The great feelings of a sense of purpose
6. Spontaneity in handling the inevitable turns and redirections
7. Creating a vision for success

Most importantly, you will have enabled your mind to be able to contribute for your success.

As school students, educators had laid out the plan for us to follow to complete certain studies to qualify us for a diploma.

Work breaks are important to your health and to your work performance.

If you are unemployed and in a career search, keeping yourself healthy while experiencing the added stress of looking for a job is critical to keeping up your self-confidence and maintaining a strong self-image.

Even if you workout before or after work and then work at a desk, you may find that your desk job can reduce the fitness gains from those workouts.

The Department of Labor provides a list of minimum paid rest periods by state for every four hours of work.  Most states require companies to give employees a paid 10-minute break for each four hours of work.

If you are a desk worker, taking 10 minutes every four hours is probably less physical activity than you need to receive the physical benefits your body needs from sitting for several hours.

Here are some ideas that can help you refresh your mind, get a little exercise during the day, and stay within your company guidelines for the time you are allowed to take breaks:

1. When you are rearranging things on your desktop, stand up.
2. When you are talking on the phone, stand up.
3. When you are returning or retrieving things from your desktop to your desk drawers, stand up.
4. While you are working at your desk, tighten your stomach, leg, chest, shoulder, ankles, feet and neck. Roll your ankles. Arch your back. Stretch your arms.
5. As you pause from typing or when you are on the phone, roll your neck.
6. When typing, stand up, keep your back straight, and type standing or do a little squat and type squatting.

Some of these suggestions may seem to you as odd at first.  Yet, if you think about it, cashiers work with keypads while standing.  Retail buyers walk aisles with keypad ordering systems.  Some companies provide motorized desks that workers raise and lower during the day.  Typing while standing is not that unique of an idea.

For those paid breaks away from your desk, leave the screens at your desk.  Give your mind a chance to rest completely.  Take a walk.  Join a co-worker, even if that meeting is a standing session outside the office doors.

What ideas do you use to help yourself become more effective and healthy at work?

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

Developing your online profile is as important to your career as developing as your reputation at work or developing your resume for your career change.

The information you post online may also be more in-depth and broader than the information you put in your resume.  On LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, you will find that you are including information that you might not put on your resume.  You might include some of the following information:

1. Recommendations
2. Endorsements
3. Pictures
4. Group Memberships
5. Companies you follow
6. Your clients
7. People who have viewed your profile (on LinkedIn)
8. Statements of your interests, likes, and perhaps dislikes
9. Aspects of your personality

This information provides search engines with keywords that can enable potential clients or hiring companies to find you.

To select the most powerful keywords, go to http://www.google.com/trends.  This website ranks keywords words for search frequency.

After going through a lengthy project that may take several days, I find that the project required so much attention and had such a long list of things to get done, that I get away from preparing a schedule for the day’s activities.

This morning was one of those days for me.  What happens on a day without scheduled events is that I am not very productive.  I check my email.  I check my online network accounts for messages.  I click around a couple of groups to see what might be going on to stimulate my thinking for new projects.  By midday I have very little done and reach a point where I have nothing else to do for the day.

The best way to avoid this loss of productivity is to remember that even on the days on which the work seems to come at me much more quickly than I can manage it, I still need to create an agenda for the day.  Busy days are better directed and slow days become more productive when I have a list of projects in front of me.

The agenda needs to have two aspects to it.

First there is the aspect of the things to get done.

Second is the aspect of the goal of each thing I am doing.

For example, I might have items like to the following.

Activity:  Sort email into these folders:  Delete, Read later, Inbox for high priority, Read.
Objective: Focus on opportunities that bring value to my clients and to me.
Activity:  Call people who are on my calendar for business calls.
Objective: Discuss the goal for each call.  For example, get advice for new project, follow-up on deadlines for submitting new material, and ask for the correct contact for a particular project.

There are several benefits to creating an agenda.

1. The process of creating the agenda stimulates my mind to become more creative
2. The process awakens my mind to more opportunities.
3. The process keeps me focused on what I need to do.
4. The process increases the likelihood that I will become more successful at achieving my goals.

So for me the outline for success is to have a schedule of activities for the day and to use that schedule.  As I complete tasks, I check them as completed and make a record of what I have accomplished for future reference.

What methods do you use for successful management of your schedule?

Medium is a community website that publishes articles from writers who collaborate to help each other create better material before publication.

The website is a great place for business people to get stimulating ideas from outside their community to refresh their business, career, and home life perspectives.  The theme of writers helping writers create better material is a good theme for success in any circumstance. Husbands and wives who can collaborate on family decisions can have more successful and healthier families. Companies where employees help each other with advice and ideas are more successful through collaboration. People who travel in groups are safer if each person minds their own safety as well as the safety of others.

The articles vary with the specialty of the writers and flow in a blog feed.

The writers are from all over the world and have a variety of skills and interests. Their point of view and information is very refreshing, especially in a world so dominated by a few sources such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and some cable channels.

Ev Williams created Medium (founder of Blogger and co-founder of Twitter).  He has attracted a lot of talented and in some cases widely published writers to publish by invitation on the new website.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

A lot of writers who publish on the web have no copy editor or in other cases may have editors whose focus in editing is on the publication’s point of view. The writers get no advice to stimulate their creativity or challenge their thinking before publishing their material. To quote Ev Williams, “People create better things together.”

Writing is a lonely task. Many writers work in silos. Their co-workers are keyboards, pencils, pens, and the blank page on which writers place words.

Even freelance writers who work as stringers for major publications write alone and often function more like students creating term papers. These writers create their material away from the central office and send the material to an editor. The editor may simply push the material aside or change the material to the publication’s point of view. Meanwhile the writer is in the silo creating more material.

Even writers who have friends who are writers may never connect on their work. Each one may write about different subjects. They come together to discuss getting away from work. They discuss sports, politics, or music, anything unrelated to work. Taking a break from work is the reason for meeting.

Robert M. Pirsig was a technical writer. He wrote in one of the deepest silos in literary history. Instead of editor support, he got rejection. He received 121 rejection letters before he found a publisher for his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

There are countless other writers who remain anonymous and put food on the table with freelance pieces, ghostwriting, technical pieces, words-between-the-numbers business publications, and other anonymous material created when a company needs someone to pull something together for publication.

Until now, these writers did not have a community of the quality and collaborative process that Medium.com offers.

I have written for decades. With tongue in cheek, I sign my material, “The World’s Most Noble Headhunter.”  Although I have published a monthly career and business newsletter for ten years, I am perhaps more often recognized as one of the best middle management corporate recruiters in the CPG industry. When placing recruiting calls to applicants, I have used the nickname “The World’s Most Noble Headhunter” as an icebreaker.

I first wrote published articles during the Vietnam War.  As part of my duties aboard an aircraft carrier, I wrote articles about air strikes.

I would interview Navy aviators as a collateral duty in between bridge watches. The stories that I wrote went to Saigon for clearance and declassification.  Then the military would these articles to the media.  The byline went to the reporters who published these articles as a finished product.

The public affairs office out of Saigon did recognize my writing as “outstanding.”   During one of my bridge watches, the commanding officer of my ship showed me the message he received from Saigon public affairs. “The Midway’s press releases have been consistently outstanding. Keep them coming.”

You know, I was tickled when I saw that message. I am a writer now. I did not get a byline, but I was a writer. A writer of much higher military rank than I took time to tell my commanding officer he was doing a great job. He got the credit, but I was the writer. With Medium.com, I now have a community of writers. People do create better things together.