Desk Jockeys and Exercise

It can be very challenging for people who work long hours at a desk to get enough exercise to stay trim, condition their heart, vessels, arteries, and lungs, maintain muscularity, and avoid spinal deterioration.

The effects of daily sitting at a desk over prolonged periods of time can be debilitating.

Beyond a regular exercise program and a healthy program of diet and exercise, I try to do a number of things that help me build my career and still get exercise.

  • I stand up every thirty minutes and walk around for five or ten minutes to get loose, reduce the pressure on my vertebrae, and increase my blood flow.
  • I use dynamic tension (simple muscle flexing) when standing around or sitting at my desk.
  • I go for walks as work breaks.
  • Outside of my work day, I do yard work, car washing, and household chores at a brisk pace.

There are some excellent motivational gems that help me remember how little I have to do to get benefits from exercise:

  • A 30-minute workout is only 2% of your day.
  • The hardest movement of any workout is walking out the front door.
  • If I had started exercising when I first thought about exercising, I would be done now.

Here’s to your health!

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Webcast Your Updates and Discussions from LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook/Facebook Page.

There are third-party applications that will post your online updates to your accounts at membership sites.

However, you can easily connect your membership accounts without sharing your information with third party applications.  Using just the three largest sites will give you a great deal of exposure.

To navigate through these steps, open a second browser page.

The order of connecting these sites is important.  Twitter will not post to your LinkedIn profile.

LINKEDIN TO TWITTER
Sign in to LinkedIn.
In the top right-hand corner of the page, you will see your picture or a blank avatar.
Put your mouse pointer over this picture.
You will see a dropdown menu.
Click on the link “Privacy and Settings.”
Click on the link “Manage Your Twitter Settings.” (Right-side, bottom-half of the page)
Add your Twitter account, select option to show on you account, click “Save changes.”

THE OPTION TO TWEET
When you post updates to your profile and when you make comments in group discussion, you can select whether you want the updates to post to Twitter.  A word of caution: in Group discussions, if you select to have the discussion posted on Twitter and the discussion is very popular, you may be getting a torrent of discussion going from LinkedIn through Twitter to Facebook, and what people say in discussions may not necessarily be what you want posted on Facebook.

TWITTER TO FACEBOOK/FACEBOOK PAGE
Sign in to Twitter.
Click on the gear icon in the top right of the page.
Click on “Profile.”
Scroll to the bottom and click “Sign into Facebook.”
You will be given these options:

Allow Twitter to:
post retweets to Facebook
post to my Facebook profile
post to my Facebook page

Select the options you prefer.

Now you have connected your updates on the three most popular membership sites on the web.

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

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Be the Difference Maker in Your Workplace.

Have five things laid out for the day that you can do that will help your team, supervisor, and company be more effective. You can be the difference maker in your office.

Each morning before you walk in the office door, stand up straight, put your shoulders back, and walk with your head up.  Put a pleasant look on your face.  Use open, welcoming gestures, and say good morning to each person you see.

Set the tone in the office that everyone is important.  Offer solutions wherever possible.  Offer to assist in anyway you can.

THERE IS A REASON THAT THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS MORE THAN ONE MEMBER.

I have read a lot about lately about not asking for the opinions of other people.  That advice runs counter to every common sense business practice I have ever heard.  Google prides itself on team mentality and respect for the opinion of everyone on the team.  If you believe that your thinking alone makes you smarter than the combined intelligence of everyone in the room on everyone occasion, you are deluding yourself.  It is easy for all of us to believe our own bologna, because we have always heard it.  Ask for the opinion of other people and incorporate their thinking into your own thinking.

Get to know your boss.  Learn these things about your boss:

  • What is the name of your boss spouse and your bosses’ children?
  • What hobbies does your boss have?
  • What interests your boss?
  • What are your boss’s ideas about priorities in the company?
  • See yourself as an asset to your supervisor and your company and look for ways that you can contribute to the creation of solutions.

From my basic training at Procter and Gamble, I learned that I was the expert in my industry.  To be the expert, I needed to read the trade journals, internal company publications, and look for news about my industry.  You can do the same thing in your job.  You are the expert at your workplace.  Being the expert means that you will need to know everything useful about your industry, your company, and how you can play a role in your company’s success.

Become solution-minded.  Recognize the problem. Develop strategies to turn those problems into money-making ideas for your company.

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Learn to Love Your Job.

Until you get the job you love, learn to love the job you have. ~ www.jaywren.com

Learn to love your job. If you have a job, any job, you can learn to love your job until you move on to the place you want to go.  If you are a manager, the more pleasure you can find in your job will affect how much enthusiasm, energy, and focus you are able to generate to your team of workers.

A few years ago, I worked out of a beautiful office on a local lake.  There were beautiful trees that blossomed in the spring and that kept beautiful purple leaves year-round.

Mallard ducks and Canada geese few in every year and swam on the lake. There was a strip mall next door with an espresso shop and grocery store.  There were five restaurants and a take-out-Chinese restaurant within walking distance.

I met all kinds of people in that office complex.  Some of them seemed to like to work in this building.  Other people were not so crazy about it.

  • They did not care for the ducks and geese that could be messy.
  • They exterior single-story exposure and the glass walls made them uncomfortable.
  • Although locked for privacy to the tenants, the restrooms exited into an open breezeway.  To walk back from your office to the restroom you had to go outside and face the elements.
  • Because of the open construction of the buildings, people who were not tenants would occasionally sit on the deck on the lake.
  • Occasionally skate boarders would invade the parking lot and could be a little annoying with their noise, but they always came later in the day when everyone had gone home.  I left them alone, and I think that they would easily get bored with the parking lot that did not offer many ramp challenges left the parking lot vacant for skating boarding.

I could easily name a half a dozen reasons to be grateful to be in that office:

  • It was convenient to my home. I could walk to work.
  • I could walk out to a deck and sit quietly to clear my mind.
  • The strip mall was a terrific place to take a break.
  • There were so many great food options.
  • The shop owners were friendly and became great neighbors.
  • When people came to my office, I was very comfortable see where I worked.

Now, carry my situation forward to your workplace.  You can learn to love the work you do and the place where you work.  The way you choose to view your work will play a daily role in how you feel about your job.

The way to start to love your work is to make a list of the things that you find rewarding about your work.

Learn to Love Your Job

Here is a comparison table to show you what I have in mind.  Do you see your job for the things about which you or about which you can feel grateful?

Gripe List vs Gratitude List
Things that Gripe Me Things for Which I am Grateful
Hot work space The new fans are great!
Low wages I have food on the table.
No benefits
Boss is angry Encourage boss
Long commute Love the radio talk shows: better work than no work
Long commute Love the radio talk shows
Stupid Co-workers I can help the team
Boring work I can bring creativity
Noisy place I will have better tomorrows
Work if unfulfilling The work is far better work than no work
Dead-end job I will have better tomorrows

Say Nice Things About Yourself.

Say Nice Things About Yourself.

In an earlier post about effective communications, I discussed the importance of positive direction.  Only tell people what you want them to do.

People remember what you tell them.  When speaking about yourself, if you can not say anything nice, it is probably better to say nothing at all.

The most common example of keeping comments about yourself positive is the advice on handling the interview question regarding your greatest weakness.  The conventional advice is to give a positive that you may need to reign in a bit.  For example, when someone says that is your greatest weakness, you might say you can get a little impatient with people who are giving less than 100 percent of their effort.   Then you can go on to say that you have learned to use that trait as a management tool to provide direction to under performers.

Also, begin to see yourself as a person who is interested in continually extending your skills and knowledge.  Keep a self-improvement program in progress and discuss this program with people who share your interests.

When I worked at Procter & Gamble, I joined a local Toastmasters group that met for breakfast once a week.  Each week a couple of the members would speak.

I signed up for the Toastmasters meetings just out of curiosity, but the fact that I was participating in a self-improvement program got a lot of play within Procter & Gamble.

Some of the things that I have more read recently include the following, more challenging books and manuals.

  • James Joyce: Ulysses
  • Homer: The Odyssey
  • Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • Alan Roth: The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
  • Lisa Sabin-Wilson, et al: WordPress 8 Books in 1
  • Thomas Cahill: How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe
  • Steven M. Schafer: HTML, XHTML, and CSS
  • William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, and others

During a period when I spent a lot of time on an exercise bike, I found that audio tapes were great for learning new ideas and concepts.  I completed following audio series and others:

  • Forty-eight-hour diplomatic series for French studies
  • Zig Ziglar:  See You at the Top and Secrets of Closing the Sale
  • Tony Robbins series Personal Power

Podcasts are easy to find and many are free.  NPR has a nice library of podcasts including The Ted Hour.  There are countless other podcasts.  I have also found do it yourself training very helpful.

I began studying website development on W3Schools.com and still find that website handy for website development reference help.  I completed the New Boston series on Javascript and have completed around sixty of the New Boston series on PHP.  You can find the series on YouTube.com.

There is new group of writers I follow.  The philosophy of these writers is that less is more through nutrition and better life choices:  Mark Sisson, Leo Babauta, Tim Ferris, and others.

It is better to discuss areas of self-improvement as attempts to become more effective than examples of your overcoming your shortcomings.  Any mention of your shortcomings may work against you in the future.

During an interview for a promotion at Polaroid Corporation, the supervisor conducting the interview asked if I had any weaknesses.  I told him that I conscientiously had to focus in on conversations when people were telling me things that I already knew.

I received the promotion.

About a year later, the One Step Camera™ sales had begun to falter through a worldwide inventory glut, and this manager was under a lot of pressure.  During a conversation on sales in my area, he asked me if my inability to concentrate might be contributing to the sales progress of my team.

The manager had drawn on what I thought was an incidental comment I made about how I dealt with long, boring conversations to bore in on issues with my team’s performance that were in reality consistent with the company’s worldwide performance.

I told my manager that I certainly remembered making that comment, but that I was paying attention to him now.  Then I laid out for him my strategies going forward.

So say nice things about yourself.  You do not need to brag.  Just keep it positive.

Prepare for Interview Questions!

The more difficult interview questions are also the more common questions interviewers ask.

Preparing for these questions can help you in a number of ways.

  • Make you more comfortable when interviewers ask the questions
  • Help you anticipate what you need to know and perhaps need to  research further
  • Enable you to review your career highlights and your career challenges from an interviewer’s point of view

During my sales training at Procter & Gamble, I learned to anticipate a buyer’s objections and research and prepare my answers.  Preparing for interview questions works much the same way.

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

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