Jay Wren

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.

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”

How to Receive Job-Winning Reference Checks

Hiring companies will very likely check references as part of your employment process. You can help your references with information that will make them more comfortable, more positive, and be better prepared to take the call.

Provide them with the following information.

The name of the person who will be calling
The responsibility of the person who will be calling
Some background information on the reference checker
Information about the company to which you are applying
A description of the responsibilities of the job for which you will be applying
A review of the things you have accomplished that make you qualified for the job
An understanding of your sincere interest in getting this job

The person acting as your reference is doing you a favor. They are devoting their time and perhaps experiencing a bit of pressure in going through the process of discussing information about you with a third-party.

So make certain that you express your gratitude for the help your references are giving you. You might send your references a thank you note for agreeing to help you, even before they receive the call from the hiring company.

All of these things work to your advantage. With your help, your references who are likely to be enthusiastic, credible, and persuasive about your qualifications for and your interests in the job for which you are applying.

Has a Mouse Taken Over Your Career?

Compulsive mouse-clicking is a powerful, mood-altering method for avoiding work. Clicking around through business folders and business websites feels like work. The process may even resemble work. However, the process does not produce the results of starting and finishing one task at a time.

MY PERSONAL STORY OF COMPULSIVE MOUSE-CLICKING
On some days, I can find myself unable to complete any task.

These are the days when I have used mouse clicks to create a digital maze.

I click open my mailbox. In my email, I find a message that contains a link. I click on the link. I find data that needs to be put in my database.

I click open my database. My database calendar gives me a pop-up list of priorities.

Flash: I feel guilty. I realize that I have done none of those things yet and those things are my priorities!

So I take the first priority: This priority may require that I research information for a project with a fast-approaching deadline. The information is on a membership site. I click on a link to the membership site to gather information When I get on that site, I see that I have direct messages and updates from other members and from groups.

I click open the messages in separate windows so I do not lose track of which ones I have completed.

I begin to reply to the messages. Some of these messages are repetitive. I have form letters for those types of messages. So I click open the templates folder that contains form letters. But wait! Some of those templates do not quite match what I need. So I reword them a bit.

Other messages are in responses in groups. I click open those messages in a separate pages so that I do not lose track of my progress. Better stated, I open these messages in separate pages so that I do not lose track of my progression of clicks.

As I review those messages, I realize that I need to access another location for the records of access information for yet more resources. So I click open another folder to search for the access information: passwords, website links, and other TOP SECRET information known only to identity thieves, web hackers and me.

At this point, I basically am working in four applications:

Documents
Database
Email client
Web browser

These fundamental applications are necessary for most workers to proceed through the work day. I have read that a person should not have more than two applications open at a time. Yet to get through my email alone, I need access to those four applications to complete most tasks.

So what went wrong?

THE SOLUTION
For me the solution is to schedule five things to do each day and complete those five
things first.

Along the way in going through my mailbox and opening website and in taking phone calls, I am going to have new things come to my attention.

Those things must wait. If any new thing is important enough that it demands my attention over my five priorities, I must stop and pick one of those five priorities and reschedule it for tomorrow.

Communication that Works: All Do’s, No Don’ts

Communication that Works: All Do’s, No Don’ts

Tell people what you want them to do, not what you don’t want them to do.

A guest lecturer at one of my undergraduate classes put on note on the chalkboard and quickly erased the note and posted a different note.

She then explained her action. She said that she nearly broke the first rule of using a chalk board in teaching. If you do not want students to remember something, do not show the information to them in writing.

This same rule could apply to any direction given in any situation. Tell people what you want them to do.

Be to work on time.
Offer to help when you see the opportunity.
Begin your exercise program with a walk to the front door.

Simple, positive direction focuses the mind of the manager and the mind of the employees.

Where the confusion over direction begins is often from behavior that a manager is trying to correct. My first job as a legal, tax paying citizen was as a grocery clerk. The second day on the job, I was a couple of minutes late getting onto the floor to work. The manager stopped as soon as he saw me. He firmly told me that I was late for work. He said that he wanted me to be on the floor and working at the start of my work period. To make sure that I was there on time, he told me that each day I was to come to the store fifteen minutes before I began work and to go to the break room. A couple of minutes before my time to start work, I would then walk to my work station.

From a simple bit of position information, I understood exactly what I was supposed to do. I was at work on time from that day forward and found that I was fortunate to be able to work for that company during the rest of my high school years and in the summer after my first year in college.

Is Over Committing Killing Your Career?

I schedule five things to do each day. This habit is one I have used for years but got away from for a period of time as I was adjusting to computer-based scheduling.

I imagine most people who read this article are already using some type of electronic calendar. As we all know too well, these calendars are easy to use and have convenient scheduling features:

Things to do today
Things to do tomorrow or later
Recurring things to do

These calendars can also be shared and other people can, if we choose to allow them, add things for us to do on our own calendar.

IT IS EASY TO OVER COMMIT.
I have my calendar connected to a contact manager, so I can schedule activities right out of my database.

When I first began to use a calendar on my computer, I found that the new calendar worked about as well as the desktop paper calendar I had been using. Over time, however, I found that the calendar had so many things on it that it was almost worthless.

The things which I scheduled for today but did not accomplish would often just roll over into the next day. Eventually the things I had not got to would roll over into the future dated things to do. Included in future-dated items were recurring activities. As I scheduled more recurring things, I would think of recurring things to schedule. Then I had to add today’s activities to yesterday’s activities, yesterday’s and today’s future activities, and recurring activities on a task list that I honestly just quick checking. Just clearing the activities was a lot of work.

So I have simplified the process. I schedule my days the last hour of each day. If I already have five things scheduled from tasks I did not complete each day or from future-dated and recurring activities, I pick the ones that I will actually get done and delete the rest. I add additional activities that are important enough to be in my top five priorities for tomorrow and schedule those five things.

Am I only doing five things a day? Of course, I am doing much more. I will have a myriad of new things come in from professional networks, calls, and emails. I will be swamped. My schedule, however, is for the five things I consider priorities that I want to ensure that I accomplish.

Life is easy. I stick to my schedule of five things to do each do and get them done.

Build a Powerhouse Reference List As Part of Building Your Professional Network

It seems that most people think of creating a reference list when a hiring manager requests to see one.

Another approach is simply to mention to people with whom you seem to bond that at some point you, should you need a reference, you would appreciate the person helping you. At the same time, let the person know that you are available to assist them whenever needed. Then, when the time comes, you can feel very confident in having people who will speak very positively about your character and your work. Building a reference list becomes simply an element of building your professional network.

Since different hiring managers have different ideas as to the types of people they want to contact, you can find that you feel real pressure to tailor your list to a hiring manager’s request. Instead of being pressed and struggling to build out a list of references at the time that the hiring manager requests the list, you might have dozens of people you can easily contact through your established agreements.

When the time comes to submit your references, you simply open up the directory of professional network and select the people who will work best. Before submitting the reference’s name, simply draw from the contact information in your directory to contact that person, get up to speed with them and ways that you might be able to help them, and let them know that they may likely receive a call from a hiring company.
Do not send references (or a cover letter as an attachment) with your resume. You are burdening potential employers with the stress of managing extra documents they may feel they will never need.

Life is easy. A little planning can help make it even easier. Build your reference list as you make new connections.

Careers in Millennium 2: From Excess to Less is More

The philosophy towards careers and business has made a tremendous shift in Millennium 2.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, American business and economics looked very different from the way it looks now. The mentality of this time period was based more on the philosophy that there will always be more. Lifestyles were geared toward working to make as much money as you can. There will always be more. Live in excess, because you deserve it.

A mutual fund manager named Peter Lynch took a $20,000,000 mutual fund and built it into to a $13,000,0000 mutual fund from the 1700% returns that Lynch produced on investments and from the new investments drawn into the fund the Fidelity Investments Magellan Fund he managed from 1977 – 1990.

Some of Peter Lynch’s more famous quotes reflect his confidence in himself and express confidence to his investors. Furthermore, the quotes are reflective of the confidence that many people felt in general toward their lives: the mentality that there will always be more.

“Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they’re going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.”
“Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later, any idiot is probably going to run it.”
‘If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.”

Peter Lynch preached that financial success is simple, formulaic, and predictable.

The writers and speakers of the era were focused on attitude of you can have it all. The mentality was that anything is possible through goal setting and work.

“You can get everything in life you want as long as you can help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar, Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)

“If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you.” Jim Rohn.

Peter Lynch retired from his role as the Manager at Magellan Fund Fidelity investments in 1990. Since that time, there have been three recessions.

July 1990 – Mar 1991
March 2001–Nov 2001
Dec 2007 – June 2009

What Peter Lynch, Zig Ziglar, and Jim Rohn said and wrote are as inspiring and perhaps no less meaningful today. Yet there is a new mentality in American business, economics, and lifestyle. New writers and speakers have found success with practicing and preaching a minimalist, more-focused view of doing less of what you have to do and more of what you want to do when it is more effective.

Coincidental to these recessions has come the Internet, which enables us to click from place to place without getting real value out of any place we have gone. So with a knowledge that there may not always be more and more and the exhaustion and lack of production that has come from a flood of information slamming into our think banks, people in American business and in fact the public in general have looked for new thinking. The result these recessions and of the mental crush of technology is that Millennium 2 has found new philosophies and new philosophers.

“By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.” Tim Ferris

“Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.” Leo Babauta

“The ethic of more, bigger, faster generates value that is narrow, shallow and short-term.” Tony Schwartz

Paint Your Day with Brilliance Through Word Choices

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”