The Home Gym: Why Doing Things Yourself is Good for Your Self-Esteem, Your Confidence, and Your Health.

Going through a career change or any life change can bring feelings of uncertainty, inadequacy, and uselessness. You may also feel that have less energy and less interest in life in general.

Home projects during these periods can be hard to start. All the feelings and loss of energy during challenging life changes can reduce your motivation and make you feel physically restrained from taking physical action on anything.

Yet finishing a home project provides immediate, visual results.  You can see what you have you have accomplished.  These visual results can create energy and rebuild your self-esteem,

If you have not seen the movie Karate Kid, the following discussion will be a bit of a movie spoiler.

Kesuke Miyagi, a martial arts master,  agrees to help a bullied kid learn karate. When the student shows up for his first day of martial arts training, the student is surprised that, instead of doing martial arts moves, the karate master assigns the kid a long list of exhausting chores at the home of the karate master: sanding floors, painting a fence, waxing cars, painting the house. After days of long hours of chores, the frustrated student rebels against the karate master’s use of the kid’s time to work on for free instead of following through on the commitment to teach the student karate.

As you may recall if you saw the movie, Mr. Miyagi was using do-it-yourself projects (cleaning, painting, waxing cars, hand sanding) to train karate techniques to the kid, build strength, and develop muscles memory to prepare the kid for competition.

Fitness training offers many benefits: cardiovascular conditioning, flexibility, strength building, and body shaping.

However, for an understanding of how exercising for fitness compares to plan old DIY, I did a comparison of calories burned for an hour of various activities.  Here are the estimates.

Washing a car – 300 Calories
Painting/carpentry – 350 Calories
Yardwork – 500 Calories
Mopping floors – 330 Calories
Pool cleaning – 400 Calories
Playing with kids  – 330
Walking – 330 Calories
Weight lifting – 400 Calories
Stationary Bike – 330 Calories
Spinning – 400 Calories

I enjoy being a do-it-yourself kind of guy.  I had installed my own sprinkler systems in the front and backyard.  I had built the wooden deck in my backyard.  When my wife and I had a pool built in the backyard, I reinstalled the sprinklers in the backyard.

As my business grew and my kids got older, I felt challenged but not overwhelmed to continue the do-it-yourself projects.

Not because of affluence, but because of the type of development in the area where I live, there are gardeners in this area every week.  The monthly costs are negligible, especially in light of the fact that employing a gardner eliminates the cost of gas to drive to a gas station to buy gas for my own equipment.

So for years, I had a gardener for my yard and eventually added pool attendant to service my pool.  I took my car to the drive-thru car wash.  I often ate meals purchased at the drive-thru restaurant and ate them in my car:  Eyes on the road, left hand on the wheel, and hamburger in the righthand.  Cup holders were designed for people who eat while driving, right?

The following figures are disappointing to realize. During this time, I drove to a health club, where I burned 300-400 calories per session for a total of 1500 to 2000 calories per week.

A few years ago, I reduced the number of services I used.  My kids were grown.  I was no longer involved in coaching their sports teams, participating in parent organizations, and hanging out with them in public or around the house.

I realized that in using the gardener I had lost sight of the condition of my yard.  The shrubs had become trees and the once beautiful blue grass was full of crab grass.  The deck I built had built had begun to crumble with aging.

One afternoon, I decided to wash the family SUV that my wife and I had used to for years to haul kids to college and family trips through the Sierra snow.

I had to find the sponges and solutions I had used years before.  As I washed the car, I became aware that I was not as fit as I thought I was.  In reeling out the hose, I discovered that the 100-foot rubber hose was not that easy to handle in the tight spaces along the walkway to the car.  During the squatting and the standing,  the bending and the reaching, and the physical aspects washing the car with the sponge, I began to realize that washing a car can take a bit of exertion.

I brought out a ladder and washed the top of the car.  Once I had washed the car and toweled it dry, I realized that I had been through every bit of a good workout at the gym.

I looked at the car and I felt good.   I had rediscovered what I had lost through the years of drive-thru service.  There is a sense of pride, a sense of the accomplishment, in doing things yourself.

Somewhat sadly I released the gardner.  He usually arrived early and had become a person I greeted for years.  Less personally I released the pool service that simply dumped chemicals in my pool and left the cleaning to the pool sweep.

I rebuilt my deck.  My fantastic wife and I garden again.  I wash my own car, which in California is not necessary very often.

So if you are going through a career transition or any other stressful change in your life and have perhaps become a drive-thru addict, you might find that DIY can be terrific therapy and excellent source of physical conditioning.

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The Power of an Agenda

The Power of an Agenda for Your Job Interview

During lunch with a field sales manager of a major consumer goods company, I heard again the importance of preparing an agenda before each call.  He told me about a day in the field he had recently spent with the Chairman and CEO of his company.  At the end of the day, the Chairman pointed out to the field sales manager that throughout the day the Chairman had maintained control of the discussions. The reason he said is that sales manager had not prepared an agenda for the day.

The first sales call I made with my supervisor’s supervisor at Procter & Gamble, he asked me, “What is your objective for this call?”  Fortunately, perhaps out of nervous anticipation, I had made scripted a call sheet for each place I planned to go that day.

When I entered the recruiting industry, I went to work for a search firm that had a former Pfizer executive for a CEO.  The only thing that the CEO asked of us recruiters is that we sit down at the beginning of every day and go over a single sheet that contained a list of search assignments and prospects and that we update that sheet every day.

So began a practice of having a plan written out on a sheet of paper, reviewed daily, updated as the day progressed and then created anew or further updated as the passed into the next day.  Managing my business became a process of following an agenda.

The same practices can apply to any business, including the business of managing your career. The following outline is the agenda that my daughter Heather used for her interviews with a National Basketball Team (NBA).  She got the job. Using this type of outline to prepare for an interview, helps a person anticipate and practice how to manage many of the questions and the direction of the discussions in a job interview.

Interview Agenda Summary

Why I am interested in working for your company?

  1. The reputation of the company as a customer-based marketer
  2. The long history of success of your company
  3. The opportunity to work in an environment that enables me to use the promotional and marketing tools I have developed for my career
  4. The commitment to respecting and honoring all employees for their service
  5. The opportunity to work in the field of my choice: sports promotion and marketing

What I bring to your company

  1. Team skills with work with other people in all departments
  2. Experience in creating promotional marketing programs to target community customers
  3. A successful history of developing marketing strategies that include customer service, pricing, product choice, graphic design, and product presentation at retail and in the media

My thoughts on marketing and sales promotion

  1. Does it present value to the customer?
  2. Does it create the correct brand image?
  3. Does it reach your target customer base?
  4. Does it make a buyer out of your customer?
  5. Does it create repeat customers?

Ways that I can make sure that you reach your goals.

  1. Identify the target customer
  2. Identify the message that will reach and draw that customer
  3. Create a consistent brand image that will build customer loyalty

Create your own agenda.  Prepare for the interview with research and outline your research results in an agenda that you take the interview.  Show interviewers that you have an interest in their company through the agenda you bring to the interview.

CloudTop – Your Desktop for the Internet

A group of MIT students in a project competition created an application that enables you to manage data across multiple sites from any computer and altered the way you and I manage and store files forever.  This application is not another multiple website integration application.  This is an application that will put ever file you have any place into one browser and instead of uploading files, you will be able you to drag and drop files from your personal computer onto your social network or your other computers or any other place a computer is connected to the Internet. For a clearer understanding of this new software see MIT News.

Network, Even When There is no Apparent Reward

Network, Even When There is no Apparent Reward

He had been unemployed for over a year. He told me that he had not had one interview in over a year, because there was nothing worth his time.  When I pressed him as to what he meant by things that were worth his time, he explained that he had been an executive vice president and the jobs he was seeing were two or three levels lower.

I suggested that he might consider just getting out and meeting people. Be more open about taking interviews. Just suit up and get out to see if he might have some ideas for helping companies build their business.

In this case, the networking paid off.  He received a call regarding a company that had managed to make its sales goals but was struggling to make money.  He suggested that perhaps he could come in as a sort of sales manager on special assignment or contract employee.  In six weeks, he called me to tell me that he was the executive vice president of sales of a Midwest food company.

All he had to do was get out and meet some people.

Working with Recruiters: The Different Types and What They Do

Working with Recruiters: The Different Types and What They Do

If you are working with recruiters, you will find it helpful to understand the relationship between the recruiter and the hiring company and the relationship between a recruiter and a potential employee.

Recruiter or Placement Agency

The companies that use recruiters to fill a position pay recruiters for their services. Hiring companies do not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters. Therefore, all recruiters are working under contract, and they work on behalf of the hiring company. If you are a working with recruiter, you are valuable to that recruiter. The recruiter will not charge you a fee.

There is a different type of staffing firm called a placement agency. These agencies work on behalf of job seekers and may charge job seekers a fee for finding them a job. The distinction between a placement agency and a recruiter is that placement agencies find jobs for people, and recruiters find people for jobs.

Contingency Recruiter or Retained Recruiter
Sometimes, people try to explain the difference between contingency recruiters and retained recruiters in terms of the compensation. There was even a benchmark set at $100,000-a-year for a point where a person would rise above contingency recruiters and pass into the realm of retained recruiters. At that time, I had contracts for retained work under $100,000 a year and contracts for contingency work above $100,000 a year. My relationship to the applicant did not change based on these contracts. I had jobs to fill and needed people to fill them. At times, a recruiter may have some contracts that pay them a non-refundable advance payment (a retainer) for their services and have contracts for payment after the job has been filled.  More recently, retained firms have also done contingency work (The Directory of Executive and Professional Recruiters).

In practice, how hiring companies pay a recruiter is not important to you as a potential employee. The contacts the recruiter has in relation to the type of contacts you need to further your career is important. Since contingency recruiters and retained recruiters both work under a contract and given that financial benchmarks are not that useful in the changing landscape of compensation, the best way to work with a recruiter is to help the recruiter understand your experience and the type of job you are seeking. If the recruiter has jobs that fit your experience, he has a network that is valuable to you. Typically, the sterling silver of retained search firms are conducting searches where the level of contact is with the board of directors and the level of search is for “C” level managers, that is, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Revenue Officers, and so forth. When people at that level of experience contact me, I refer them to Tom Snyder, who hired people from me when he was an executive in the CPG industry. Tom has placed over 50 C-level executives. The Chicago office of Spencer Stuart, where Tom works, is the most effective consumer goods executive staffing practice in the country.

You and the Recruiter

Recruiters hunt for people: they are, figuratively, headhunters. They get on the phone and call people. They email people. They research for prospects. They are looking for fits like ring sizes. Hiring companies pay recruiters for their skills in finding those fits. Applicants as a potential employees have value. They are the diamond ring. The hiring company is the ring buyer, the customer. The recruiter is the jeweler. He takes a measure of what will fit the hiring company. If recruiters do not have a fit in their jewelry case, they hunt for one by calling people in their network. They often look for rings that are not yet on the market. Therefore, whether the applicants are rings in the jewelry display case or ones who are not yet on the market, the applicants and the hiring companies have value to a recruiter. If recruiters have the network to fit the needs of the hiring companies and the experiences of the applicant, the recruiters have value to both based on that network.

 

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