What do you do when you’re confronted with something you’re not good at?

Some people get discouraged and quit. Others keep doggedly working to get better at it, and in the process become more “well-rounded” human beings.

Conventional wisdom says that the second response is the healthy one. But the empirical evidence suggests that it’s people who specialize in an area of aptitude who are successful and happy, not those who focus their energies on becoming “well rounded.”

As a psychologist, I was trained to assess and treat what was wrong in peoples’ lives, to help people accomplish this business of “self-improvement.” But something changed in me about thirty years ago. I grew very weary of working on what was wrong with people and became more interested in what was right with them (i.e., their strengths).

It was this change that ultimately led me to working with Lynda-Ross Vega to develop Your Talent Advantage (YTA), a sophisticated psychological assessment that accurately assesses a person’s strengths and forms the basis of a roadmap for developing them in their lives.

Many times after I have given presentations about YTA, and even after I have just delivered a person’s assessment results, I have been met with, “Okay. That’s interesting, but so what?” As in, “Now that I know this about myself, of what practical use is it?” I am convinced that this response is because the results are focused on their strengths, rather than on their weaknesses and deficiencies.

If the YTA assessment results were like school report cards and employee performance reviews that highlight areas “in need of improvement,” I suspect that the question “so what?” would never arise. The questions would be about what you could do to improve or where you could find classes for remediation. People would be jumping in, raring to get to work on improving themselves.

Perhaps this is because people don’t think there’s any work involved in making the most of their talents and abilities. After all, these are the things they’re already good at, right? So where’s the room to move?

But here’s an analogy – if you had a mining claim somewhere, with a few different veins of gold running through it, wouldn’t you want to know which vein lay closest to the surface? It’s not that digging up that gold wouldn’t still be work. It would just be the kind of work most likely to yield results.

Still, so many people love working on what they don’t do well that they’re baffled about how to take advantage of information about their natural skills and abilities. Why? Because:

1. We get so little feedback about or gifts, skills, and talents in life that we don’t understand what it takes to further develop them. (Interested in this? Take a look at a skill or talent you have, then look at a leader who exemplifies that skill or talent. What would it take to close the gap between your level of mastery and theirs?)

2. Our gifts and talents are so chronically underdeveloped that we are unaware of what they are and cannot recognize their value or practical expression. (Do you know how to lean on your natural skills and abilities during a crisis? In leading a team? In everyday problem-solving? If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘no’.)

3. There is an endless supply of what we don’t do naturally well, but only a finite list of our gifts and talents. Somehow, we believe that if we focus on the positive, we will run out of “areas to improve.”

 4. We see others doing things we struggle with and buy into the idea that we are somehow “less than” they are because we can’t do everything.

5. We grossly undervalue the worth of our own innate abilities, falsely believing that if it is easy for us then it is easy for everyone. (Not true!)

6. We have bought into the belief that we must be “well-rounded” rather than specialists, despite all the empirical evidence demonstrating that those who specialize are more successful and happy.

7. We are conditioned to focus on “bad news” (newspapers, television and radio news, etc.) rather than “good news.”

8. We suffer from “pleasure anxiety” and distrust both positive feedback and feeling good about ourselves.

9. We somehow feel “wrong” focusing on our own positive qualities. As my mother used to say derisively, “Boy, you sure are tooting your own horn!”

Do you see yourself in any of these statements? (I know I do.) If so, it’s time to break out of the pack and do something extraordinary: discover the depth, unique qualities, and nuanced expression of skills and talents you are naturally gifted with.

About the Author:

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

What do you do when you’re confronted with something you’re not good at?

Some people get discouraged and quit. Others keep doggedly working to get better at it, and in the process become more “well-rounded” human beings.

Conventional wisdom says that the second response is the healthy one. But the empirical evidence suggests that it’s people who specialize in an area of aptitude who are successful and happy, not those who focus their energies on becoming “well rounded.”

As a psychologist, I was trained to assess and treat what was wrong in peoples’ lives, to help people accomplish this business of “self-improvement.” But something changed in me about thirty years ago. I grew very weary of working on what was wrong with people and became more interested in what was right with them (i.e., their strengths).

It was this change that ultimately led me to working with Lynda-Ross Vega to develop Your Talent Advantage (YTA), a sophisticated psychological assessment that accurately assesses a person’s strengths and forms the basis of a roadmap for developing them in their lives.  

Many times after I have given presentations about YTA, and even after I have just delivered a person’s assessment results, I have been met with, “Okay. That’s interesting, but so what?” As in, “Now that I know this about myself, of what practical use is it?” I am convinced that this response is because the results are focused on their strengths, rather than on their weaknesses and deficiencies.

If the YTA assessment results were like school report cards and employee performance reviews that highlight areas “in need of improvement,” I suspect that the question “so what?” would never arise. The questions would be about what you could do to improve or where you could find classes for remediation. People would be jumping in, raring to get to work on improving themselves.

Perhaps this is because people don’t think there’s any work involved in making the most of their talents and abilities. After all, these are the things they’re already good at, right? So where’s the room to move?

But here’s an analogy – if you had a mining claim somewhere, with a few different veins of gold running through it, wouldn’t you want to know which vein lay closest to the surface? It’s not that digging up that gold wouldn’t still be work. It would just be the kind of work most likely to yield results.

Still, so many people love working on what they don’t do well that they’re baffled about how to take advantage of information about their natural skills and abilities. Why? Because:

1. We get so little feedback about or gifts, skills, and talents in life that we don’t understand what it takes to further develop them. (Interested in this? Take a look at a skill or talent you have, then look at a leader who exemplifies that skill or talent. What would it take to close the gap between your level of mastery and theirs?)

2. Our gifts and talents are so chronically underdeveloped that we are unaware of what they are and cannot recognize their value or practical expression. (Do you know how to lean on your natural skills and abilities during a crisis? In leading a team? In everyday problem-solving? If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘no’.)

3. There is an endless supply of what we don’t do naturally well, but only a finite list of our gifts and talents. Somehow, we believe that if we focus on the positive, we will run out of “areas to improve.”

4. We see others doing things we struggle with and buy into the idea that we are somehow “less than” they are because we can’t do everything.

5. We grossly undervalue the worth of our own innate abilities, falsely believing that if it is easy for us then it is easy for everyone. (Not true!)

6. We have bought into the belief that we must be “well-rounded” rather than specialists, despite all the empirical evidence demonstrating that those who specialize are more successful and happy.

7. We are conditioned to focus on “bad news” (newspapers, television and radio news, etc.) rather than “good news.”

8. We suffer from “pleasure anxiety” and distrust both positive feedback and feeling good about ourselves.

9. We somehow feel “wrong” focusing on our own positive qualities. As my mother used to say derisively, “Boy, you sure are tooting your own horn!”

Do you see yourself in any of these statements? (I know I do.) If so, it’s time to break out of the pack and do something extraordinary: discover the depth, unique qualities, and nuanced expression of skills and talents you are naturally gifted with.  

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

I receive a lot of interesting and entertaining emails from friends of mine. Some I delete, and others I pass along. Every now and then, I get one that contains important public service information that should be passed along to everyone.

One such email I received contained the following video of the latest on CPR from the American Heart Association. It seems that people were reluctant to perform the “mouth-to-mouth resuscitation” of classic CPR, and someone discovered that the chest compressions alone—if performed vigorously—were enough to engage the lungs and the heart. How fast is vigorously? Watch the corny video for yourself on YouTube and find out! (Just search for “Ken Jeong – American Heart Association – “Staying Alive” – Hands-Only CPR video)..

(I forwarded the email and video to my broadcast list, and I hope that you will watch it and do the same!)

The day after I sent it out, I received a response from a friend of mine, a physician who has spent many years in a hospital Emergency Room:

“A funny story about this: two years ago at one of my son’s baseball tournaments, a coach collapsed, and they called me over to the field. Now, I haven’t had any updated CPR training in about five years. I go over there and the guy has no pulse and no respiration, and some lady is doing CPR chest compressions really fast. I opened the guy’s airway etc., and the whole time the lady doing the compressions is singing ‘staying alive, staying alive, aah, aah, aah, aah, staying alive’, and I am thinking, ‘What a sick woman. This guy is dead and she’s singing Bee Gees’ songs.’ The guy made it to the hospital, got a pacemaker, and is fine. When I started telling other medical people about the sicko singing “Staying Alive” during CPR, they told me that it’s the tempo for the compressions. Thank God I didn’t open my big mouth during the CPR.”

How powerfully perception changes our view of a situation! With a little information, a shift of perception occurred that completely altered how my friend viewed the efforts of the woman involved. One piece of knowledge moved her from ‘sicko’ to courageous, well-informed helper.

In every context—whether we realize it or not—our view of an event is limited by what we perceive, and what we perceive is never the full story. Our perception is limited not only by our personal Perceptual Style, but also by the context of a situation, the history leading up to it, and the length and closeness of our involvement with it.

Too often, like my friend, we react with knowledge of only a small slice of the whole and end up drawing conclusions that are inaccurate at best and detrimental at worst. It is true that we cannot know everything about a situation before we must act, but we can give others the benefit of the doubt when their actions seem out of line. Because, as the old saying goes, “Things are not always what they seem.”

Understanding the role of perception in our lives takes conscious awareness and effort, but that effort offers rewards in the form of strong relationships, trust, and clear communication. Without it, we risk charging into a situation uninformed and ill-prepared. So much in our lives, loves, and businesses rests on accurate perception of a situation and our ability to communicate with others—being too quick to judge the actions of others can very quickly backfire.

Of course, understanding the role that perceptual differences play won’t always make our interactions with others “smooth sailing.” Some differences are simply too large to overcome. But in the vast majority of cases, a simple twist in perception—often due to more complete information—will allow you to see the world from another person’s point of view, and change the way you view their actions.

About the Author:

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit http://www.YourTalentAdvantage.com .

“Adjust your approach.” As a coach, you’re probably familiar with this concept, as different clients need different tools – and different types of communication – to achieve the results they’re looking for. But most often, these adjustments are based purely on intuition; sometimes they make a difference in the client relationship, and sometimes they don’t.

Just as problematic is the fact that coaches often don’t adjust their approach until the first approach has clearly failed to produce results, eroding client confidence and straining the coach/client relationship, sometimes to the breaking point. In this case, such adjustments are a classic case of “too little, too late.”

The Perceptual Style Theory offers a reliable means of avoiding this by giving you, the coach, a clear picture of who the client is before you begin working together. By making use of an assessment that reveals the client’s psychological type at the outset of the coaching relationship, it’s possible to make those important adjustments right away.

The power of this is hard to overstate, as it gives the client an immediate sense of being deeply understood. As the coaching relationship progresses, it also gives the coach a clear picture of what kind of language will speak to the client, and what kind of language won’t.

When you honor and connect with a client’s Perceptual Style (PS), you interact with them in a way that reflects their actual experience of the world. Based on your knowledge of your client’s PS and your understanding of your own PS, you can adjust your approach to ensure that your client gets the most out of the coaching experience.

To clarify, when we talk about adjusting your approach, we’re talking about fine tuning the words you use, as well as the manner in which you interact with them, including intensity, speed, emotional variability, and energy level. Each PS has its own comfort zone, sources of motivation and inspiration, and immediate turn-offs. Knowledge of all of these things can be crucial in catalyzing the kind of results the client is looking for.

Knowledge of the client’s PS can help you to interact in ways that will promote clear communication and avoid stylistic conflict. It is, in effect, meeting your client halfway –

so that even though you do not see the world the way they do, you have the tools to acknowledge and respect their worldview as valid.

By learning to adjust your approach to accommodate each of the six innate Perceptual Styles, you’ll see your effectiveness as a coach grow exponentially. It is, after all, simply human nature to respond to those who speak our language, and interact in the ways we’re most comfortable, even when we’re seeking significant change in our lives, be it professionally or personally.

About the Author: 

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

Why did you get into coaching? One of the most likely reasons is that you wanted to have a real, positive and lasting impact on the lives of your clients.

Unfortunately, many of the approaches that coaches currently use in their work don’t have this kind of lasting effect, for the simple reason that they focus on what clients currently don’t do well, as opposed to what they do.

It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? After all, the client has come to you, the coach, because they have an issue in their life (or a host of issues) they want to change. Change, by definition, calls for something new. Surely there can’t be any harm in helping clients figure out new skills that can help them change their circumstances.

Well, yes and no.

A coaching approach based on the usual method of trying to strengthen these acquired skills – i.e., things that don’t come naturally to them – may have an impact on a client’s life, but it is likely to be short lived and superficial. (It’s also, quite honestly, the kind of stuff you find in self-help books and magazines that want to help you, essentially “become someone else.”)

Clients come to us as coaches most often because they don’t know what to do to change and often cannot articulate why what they are trying to do isn’t working. Over the past 30 years of coaching, my business partner and I have found that real results come when we help our clients discover what it is they already do well, and put it to greater use in their lives. We call this strengths-based coaching.

Using their natural gifts consciously in their lives not only tends to help a client blow through whatever blocks they might be facing, it’s more fun for the client. After all, who doesn’t enjoy doing what they do well? It’s a winning combination that inevitably leads to a real, lasting impact.

Of course, a total focus on a client’s strengths isn’t always an option – sometimes, in order to overcome a block, a client really does need to acquire new skills. But even so, we do our best to focus on those new skills in a way that honors who the client is by taking advantage of their natural capacities. When letting go of roles that require acquired capacities is not an option – such as job, for example, that doesn’t really satisfy the client, but which they can’t quit for the time being – then coaching should explore how the client can keep the end objectives (to keep the job) but modify the means used to achieve it so that they use their natural skills and abilities as much as possible.

In the end, it’s all about making room for your client’s brilliance, and how that person can put it to work in overcoming their challenges. Ultimately, the client needs to accomplish his or her personal objectives and goals by using their own natural strengths.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit http://www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

Article Contributed by Gary Jordan

What does it take for 800 people to work together on a project with minimum friction? Back in 1983, that’s exactly what my partner Lynda-Ross and I aimed to figure out.

When I fist met Lynda-Ross, she was managing a very large multi-year systems development project for a major corporation, and she was searching for tools to help the people working on the project stay motivated, reduce conflict, and perform to the best of their capabilities.

Through my years of college and graduate school, I had been fascinated by theories about psychological styles—such as those posited by Carl Jung—but none of the theories I studied fit my personal experience. Beginning with my doctoral dissertation and continuing through 18 years in private practice, I had worked to create a practical, useable psychological styles theory that integrated internal experience with observable behavior.

Lynda-Ross brought me in as a consultant to the project to help the management staff learn tools and techniques to improve teamwork and optimize the talents of the existing staff.  The more we observed and worked with people, the more we discovered.

One of the things we learned was that, not only do people who perceive the world similarly get along better, but they also had many of the same skills and abilities. As we thought about it, it made sense to us that people who perceived things similarly would possess similar skills. It was the next logical step to realize that the skill and ability similarities we observed were based on a similar style of perception, and that each of the six Perceptual Styles had an innate set of natural capacities.

Together we developed processes and training that used the Perceptual Styles Theory to help build teams, diffuse unnecessary conflict, and help people to understand that seeing things differently is not wrong, just different.

More than thirty years later, the same things we observed on that first project have held true, and they remain the basis of our work as coaches. Why? Because what it took for that huge team to succeed is what it takes for any team to succeed. Here are the four main components:

1. It takes people with different Perceptual Styles filling different positions on the team. After all, skills and abilities are directly tied to the ways that we perceive the world as individuals. The person who excels at accounting is generally not the same type of person who thrives in customer service.

2. It takes all of those people learning how to communicate effectively with one another, despite the differences in their Perceptual Styles. Simple adjustments in language and message delivery can eliminate 90 percent of all communication conflicts.

3. It takes all of those people feeling motivated, even though the differences in their Perceptual Styles means that they will be motivated in different ways. A range of incentives are required for optimum momentum on a project.

4. It takes leadership based on the team leader’s actual skills and abilities. There are many different ways to lead, but the only right way for any given person is the one that fits their innate Perceptual Style.

At every level of development, psychological styles are a huge factor in the success or failure of a business—because no matter what it is or what it does, people are what make your business tick.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

Recently, I delivered a keynote presentation about business growth, “Fence Posts to Trees,” to the top forty emerging leaders of a U.K.-based pharmaceutical company. I ate with one of their five senior VPs during the meal that preceded. He lives in Scotland, commutes to London weekly, and travels to other countries.

We talked about his travel schedule a bit and I asked, “How much do you employ technology to conduct virtual meetings?”

To my surprise he answered, “More than I like. When we’re doing business in other countries, it’s difficult to virtually communicate some things.”

As we talked more, here’s what I heard him saying. Think of them as three reasons to do business face-to-face.

A face-to-face meeting:

Powers business

Let’s face it—there are a lot of companies out there that you can do business with.  What separates the companies you choose from the companies you don’t select is about the business transaction, but it’s more than that.  There is the human connection.

There are some aspects of the human connection that don’t communicate well even if you use video. The myopic view of the camera misses gestures, body language, some vocal intonations, and the je ne sais quoi of human interaction. It takes the total package of the human experience to transform a business transaction into a business experience. Such experiences break the ice in a different direction that captures our interest and imagination. It’s the most important “why” of closing a deal.

Builds trust

As my senior VP friend talked about communicating corporate core values internationally and how they take expression in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, I realized he was talking about trust.

Getting in front of a manufacturing partner meant he could insure that the high standards by which his company produces viable health solutions is more likely to happen. By meeting face-to-face, he could validate the necessary protocols and procedures were followed, therefore building trust in the relationship.

Exchanges idea more effectively

Doing business in the global village means there are certain cultural assumptions we all make based on our background. Those assumptions don’t translate without explicit statements.

On site, my friend could not only impart knowledge, but receive ideas from the new partner. These ideas are more effectively exchanged person-to-person; looking someone in the eye, listening carefully for vocal nuances, and experiencing the total communication process. By meeting face-to-face, he was in a better position to give and receive information that improved the business relationship.

While technology certainly empowers us to do business in markets and manners previously unavailable, the desire for human interaction still exists deep within us.

To Conceive a Work Positive lifestyle and greatly improve your productivity and profitability, be sure to meet face-to-face whenever possible.

About the Author:

Dr. Joey Faucette is the founder of Listen to Life, a business-coaching and speaking firm, and creator of “7 Weeks to Work Positive” and the “Work Positive Master Coaching Program.” His latest #1 Amazon best-seller is Work Positive in a Negative World.

Article Contributed by Jenna White

There are so many places to find sources of information for your new business. Friends and family can be a wealth of advice, and online articles and other sites can give you a lot of information. However, having a mentor could mean that you will have the opportunity to receive wisdom frequently and for a long period of time from an experienced professional in your field.

What should a mentor do?

As you start your business, you may find the process confusing. You may also have a lot of questions specific to your business, but the answers are hard or impossible to find on your own. If you try facing this process on your own, you will be more likely to fail, so finding someone who can steer you in the right direction is very important.

Your mentor should be someone with more experience in entrepreneurial business than you. They are there to provide trusted advice over an extended period of time, and they usually provide this service at no expense to the mentee. This is because many business professionals who offer to be mentors want to give back to their community while developing their skills as a teacher, manager, or consultant. Through the process of mentoring, they should be able to learn just as much from you as you learn from them.

Benefits of having a mentor

There is a very long list of benefits that may come about while working with a mentor. Here are just a few:
• Someone to turn to – You are now the boss of your own business, so there isn’t a manager or anyone else more important to turn to when you have a question or are in need of critical advice. At this important time in your life, and in the life of your business, you don’t have to be alone. Sometimes, a second opinion and emotional support can be just as important as the money you make.
• Learn from experience – You can learn from the mistakes and successes of your mentor. From there, you will be able to use their strategies as a guideline for your business.
• Free service – Most of the time, mentors will offer to be a guide for your business with no expense to you, while other consultants may come at a price. This can be a great option if you are on a tight budget.
• Networking – Your mentor could also help you expand your social network with the contacts they have added to their social network over the years. These contacts with other business professionals could help you gain access to important people who could help your business grow.
• Build a relationship – A paid consultant usually has one thing on his or her mind: money. A true mentor has no ulterior motive, and should want to help you in any way they can. This creates a foundation of trust and friendship that will grow stronger during the years you will work together.

Important factors in a mentor relationship

When you are looking for a mentor, it is important to remember the following traits a decent mentor relationship should have.
• Teaching and advising – The mentor is only there to advise you in a time of need. They should not try to interfere with decisions made by you or anyone else in your company. You should feel comfortable seeking advice, but just as comfortable when you decide not to accept that advice.
• Confidentiality – Both the mentor and the mentee should be confident that all discussions between them will remain completely confidential.
• Know the limits – There should be a boundary set from the beginning as to what lines can and cannot be crossed.
• Communication – Know from the start of your mentor relationship exactly how you will communicate. Whether it’s through scheduled, face to face meetings, telephone conversations, or through email, you should make your preference known.
• Time limits and commitments – Find out how long the mentor plans to be available for you, and how much time they are willing to give you each week, month, or year until that time is up. Setting a schedule could help avoid misunderstandings later.
• Openness and respect – Both parties in this mentoring relationship should be completely honest with one another, yet respectful at the same time. Withholding important information could be very damaging to either party, and even the most devastating information should be reviled with courtesy and received with an open mind.
• Professional – The mentor relationship should always remain professional and not personal.

Jenna White is an author who works for a company promoting educational services for personal finance. They specifically want to help small business owners learn about credit cards.

I have several friends who send me interesting emails. You know the type, You Tube videos, jokes, stories – you probably get a few of these, too. Recently, I received one that got me to thinking about its message, which was “Change your words. Change your world.” It’s a message that really hit home for me, especially within the context of human Perceptual Styles.

How you perceive the world – how you make meaning out of what your senses experience – really does determine your world. This means that the words you choose to create meaning and share your experiences with others have a powerful impact on your life.

We’ve all experienced the positive effect of a few well-chosen words – the smile you get in return for a simple “Thank You”… the glow that accompanies a compliment.

But we’ve all also experienced a complete disconnect with one or more people over words that seem out of context, harsh, or “unnecessary.” The fascinating thing to me is that the value and impact of a word changes based on our view of the world, not just on our understanding of the word itself.

For example, I know what the words ‘always’ and ‘never’ actually mean – in fact, I doubt there’s much argument out there over the meanings of these two words. But I rarely use either of them and neither do most other people with the Vision Perceptual Style.

Why? Because to us, those words feel limiting, and people of the Vision style experience the world as a series of endless possibilities. In fact, Vision folks tend to find comments like “you never….” or “you always……” insulting or challenging when applied to them. That’s because they know that they don’t “never” or “always” anything – they respond to life as it unfolds before them, improvising as necessary to take advantage of opportunities.

But for people with the Methods Perceptual Style, “always” and “never” are simple statements of fact based on what is known from an individual’s past behavior – no future application is considered or implied. So from a Methods perspective, Vision people really overreact to a simple fact!

There are a million other examples of differences between Perceptual Styles when it comes to the ways we use language. Those differences have a profound impact on many aspects of our daily lives – such as what marketing appeals to us and what kind turns us away, and which leaders motivate us and which leave us shaking our heads- not to mention our relationships. As a coach with 30+ years of experience, let me assure you that a key source of conflict in our personal and work relationships is the disconnections that result from the words we use (in guidelines or memos, for example, or at home, during conflicts and arguments) and what they mean to all parties involved.

So the next time you get a reaction from someone over something you’ve said that surprises you, stop to ask what it might mean to them before you react. You’ll be amazed at the differences you’ll uncover and the conflicts you’ll avoid! When you change your words you really can you change your world.

About the Author:

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.ACIforCoaches.com and www.ACIforEntrepreneurs.com.

Article by Skip Weisman

Two startling facts regarding issues absolutely impacting the bottom line of manufacturing companies in today’s challenging economy:

1. The Gallup organization, an international research company with a division that focuses on employee engagement and motivation, estimates $300 billion is wasted every year in lost productivity at U.S. companies due to un-motivated, dis-engaged employees.

2. Another research firm, Sirota Survey Intelligence, reported in 2005 that in 85% of Fortune 1000 companies, employee motivation and morale “declined significantly” within the first six months of employment and continued to go down after that.

Those statistics are startling with regard to the potential impact on bottom line results of companies today. But, it is also not surprising.

Research I recently conducted of over 3,000 subscribers to the Workplace Communication Expert blog (www.WorkplaceCommunicationExpert.com) showed 44% of business leaders are unhappy with employee performance.

When you look around your workplace and evaluate the productivity, motivation and morale of your people, how much might your organization be contributing to that $300 billion?

And, in evaluating the cost of hiring, on-boarding and training new employees, if not being done effectively, could this be another place where company profits are stealthily slipping off the financial statement?

Here are three specific strategies manufacturers can apply to develop, maintain or recapture employee motivation, morale and engagement so that your employees are truly assets bringing high value to the work environment:

1) Define your “Championship Game”
From the first day of training camp everyone that is part of an athletic team at any level from little league through the professional ranks knows the ultimate objective and vision for their team (organization) is to reach the Championship Game (for baseball it’s the World Series, football The Super Bowl, soccer it’s the World Cup, etc).

It is the inspiring vision to win the championship that keeps everyone focused, doing the right things for the right reasons so they can contribute to the team’s success, while also being able to reap the well-defined, and not so-well defined, individual and collective rewards and opportunities that come with their contribution.

The same type of culture can be created inside any business. It takes strong, visionary leadership and consistent communication to make it successful.

2) Jointly create an agreed upon set of core organizational communication and behavioral values

Many organizations have their “values” hanging on posters in the hallways while managers and leaders both engage in, and enable others, in behaviors inconsistent with those values.

With no one holding anyone accountable to the values on the walls, performance and behaviors deteriorate and subsequently default to what is witnessed and experienced in the halls.

This, too, is a strategy that is both easy to create, plus easy to maintain when two processes are applied:

1. Bring your team(s) together to jointly create the organizational communication and behavioral values and commit to a “team agreement” that everyone, literally, signs on to.
2. Leaders, managers and teammates agree to address violations of the values and team agreement immediately (or, at the earliest possible opportunity after a documented and witnessed behavior).

NOTE: One client that recently concluded this process reported employees were self-regulating themselves and their teammates six months after installation of the above strategy.

3) Create a communication “Forum” that includes a “feedback loop”
Communication is always among the top three issues or problems identified by employees in organizations. The challenge with this generic, vanilla statement is that there are too many aspects of communication to fix the problems.

It must be more clearly defined.

In a recent client project three different teams in one focus group identified communication as an organizational problem. Yet, each defined it differently from a completely different context.

One simple way to resolve this issue is to create a formal forum for communication that includes a two-way feedback loop.

This sounds much more complicated than it really is. It simply means that regular, structured meetings are facilitated to bring issues, problems, ideas and suggestions to the fore for company leaders to address and respond to.

There are four key steps for doing this successfully:
1) Schedule meetings at regular and consistent times
2) Invite a cross section of participants representing the various departments, divisions, etc.
3) Collect ideas, chunk them into related categories and prioritize
4) Create a system through which company leaders can respond to every item in a reasonably timely manner.

Often company leaders are leery of developing this type of communication process for fear of the meetings devolving into gripe sessions. These fears are valid and can be eliminated by doing these three things:
1) Setting clear guidelines at the outset,
2) Ensure that all ideas and suggestions are articulated in a positive, constructive manner, and
3) Following through with prompt feedback on all ideas so that those contributing feel as if their contributions were taken under consideration and were valued (it is perfectly okay to say “no” to an idea as long as it comes with a credible reason).

Manufacturers that have implemented some, or all, of the three above suggestions have been able to generate dramatic results, such as:
. $900,000 in waste eliminated within 12 months of implementation
. 300% increase in pre-tax profits over a five-year period
. 100% increase in pre-tax profits within four months of implementation
. 65% permanent improvement in workflow processes and 22% waste reduction within 12 months.

With results like that no business leader in Western civilization can argue that they can’t invest the time, energy and resources to learn how to implement the three simple strategies outlined above.

Give it a try.

About the Author

Skip Weisman is The Leadership and Workplace Communication Expert based in Poughkeepsie, NY. Since 2001 he has partnered with business leaders and their teams to transform communication in workplaces in a way that offers dramatic increases in productivity, profit margins and the bottom line. His latest white paper report on which this article is based is 3 Simple Secrets to Increasing Your Bottom Line: How Maximizing Motivation, Trust and Commitment in Your Workplace Makes a Difference in Today’s Challenging Economy! The report is available free at www.TheEmployeeEngagementExpert.com. Skip can be reached at 845-463-3838 or by e-mail at Skip@WorkplaceCommunicationExpert.com

Article Contributed by Erin Ferree

Are you “marketing at” your precious potential clients or connecting with them? In other words, do your marketing efforts feel more like you’re shouting at them with a megaphone, or like you’re having a two-way conversation?

We all have a craving for connection and conversation – for that rich, recognition-filled two-way exchange of thoughts and information.

That goes for both YOU and your potential clients… in fact, the effect can be multiplied many times over for your clients.

Feel into how much you want to be in conversation with your potential clients. How much you’d like to be on the phone with them, or talking face-to-face.

Now, imagine how much they want to be in conversation with you. After all, they’re already listening to you. I suspect many of them are yearning to be heard, to have their questions answered and to really talk to you.

Here are two traits you can use to open the conversation in a refreshing way…

Curiosity:
Have you ever really stopped to wonder about, listen to and ask your potential clients about what’s going on for them?

This goes beyond a casual, “Hi, how are you?” at the beginning of your newsletter – where you’re not actually expecting an answer.

It’s time to think about who your potential clients are, ask about what they’re up to, and explore their thoughts and feelings.

Look at them as more than just a potential project. Open up a conversation with the full intent of simply learning more about them and getting to know them – not seeing how you could help them, or looking for a need.

What you can do – ask real, specific questions in your newsletter and assure people that you really do want to know the answer. Offer opportunities for your potential clients to speak with you on Q&A calls, during call-in “office hours” or even by appointment for a short, focused session – where you’re asking them questions.

Generosity:
When was the last time you gave your clients a truly free and fantastic gift?

People love presents – when they’re real, useful, desirable gifts. Too many “free gifts” in the internet marketing world are not really gifts at all, but thinly veiled sales pitches that people have to sign up for.

I realize this has become common practice… and there’s certainly a time and place for that in a marketing strategy… and, at the same time…

Why not give a valuable, amazing free gift that they really want, that they can use immediately and digest fully, and get deep value from? They’ll really notice and be impressed by a gift that fills a real need – that doesn’t simply open them up to a new need or shine the light on some gap or deficiency in their approach.

And, when was the last time that you gave something away that was really free? I mean that there’s no hoops to jump through and no forms to fill out. That you are giving to them with the true energy of gifting. Because you have created this gift especially for them, and you want them to have it – not because you want anything in return.

Try this – create a short and impactful free report. Tell your clients all about how to do one small, specific task. Give them resources or point them to tools. Package that gift lovingly. And then send it to all of your clients and invite them to send it to everyone they know. Include a two-line invitation to learn more at the end, plus a one-paragraph bio so that new people can get to know you. See what happens!

There is one final thought I’d love to leave you with – both of these traits need to be backed by genuine interest and attention, of course.

About the Author
Erin Ferree is a branding coach, design genius and strategic thinker. She loves connecting the dots between passion and profit, mixing strategy and inspiration and shaking things up. She’s branded over 450 small businesses in the last 10 years. Erin works with entrepreneurs who want to help more people and create an open, honest, inviting brand with integrity – instead of using icky, pushy, sleazy marketing tactics and trickery. Learn more at http://brandstyledesign.com