Month: April 2008

Categories
Success Attitude

What is Your Internal Representation Made Of

excitment.jpgSeeing in their mind a picture of them self feeling good about the exciting endeavours they are to complete for the day, instantly they jump out of bed, energized and ready.

For another person, when the alarm clock rings in the morning, an internal voice is fired off, automatically going, “What time is it?” “Why must I wake up so early?” How much longer can I sleep? “Give me five more minutes.”

Picturing in their minds the people and things of their dislike, they enter a state of lethargy causing them to turn over and go back to sleep.

Being late for work….they start and stay in a frantic state for the entire day!
What mental program are you playing daily?

How do you habitually re-present things in your mind? If you have been playing a destructive program, you must begin to change it immediately.

Whatever we picture in our minds, the sounds we play, and what we say to ourselves affects the states we are in.

Some people have a pattern of constantly re-presenting things in such a way that makes them feel depressed. Others do the opposite.

For some people, the moment they experience a setback, they will create all the worst pictures & sounds in their mind! They will keep re-playing the internal movie of themselves failing and even picture themselves screwing up all future attempts.

They have an internal voice that goes, ‘why does this happen to me?’ ‘I always screw up!’ By re-presenting the experience this way, you put yourself in the worst possible state! You will probably feel frustrated, overwhelmed and scared that you will stop taking action.

The moment you start consciously directing the pictures and words in your head, you start getting control over your emotions and actions!

Instead of painting a scene of doom and gloom like most people do after experiencing a set-back, a temporary defeat, successful individuals picture all the possibilities of turning the situation around.

Picturing their final, successful outcome, they say to themselves, “What can I learn from this set-back?” How can I turn this around?’

Constantly being in a state of confidence and motivation, such individuals keep taking action until their desired final outcomes are met.

Categories
Starting Up

Why Working For a Startup Isn’t So Risky

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Monica O’Brien is a guest writer from Twenty Set, a blog about personal and professional development for millennials.
Young Go Getter: One of my friends graduated in June 2007 and was headhunted for a startup after posting his resume on CareerBuilder. He was 20 years-old and had a choice: do the startup or take the other, much safer offer at a larger company. He chose the startup and joined a team of nine employees who built robots for large firms – in the CEO’s father’s basement.
What I failed to mention is how I met my friend – we’ve been coworkers for the past four months. The startup company was doing great business by building the top robots in the industry – but went bankrupt five months after my friend started due to lawsuits from the CEO’s old company.
But my friend survived his first affair with a startup, and you can too – because startups aren’t that risky. Here are three reasons why…
You Can Find Another Job Easily
Startup goes under? Sure, it’s tough to see something you worked so hard at fail; but you’re awesome and you will find another job easily.
How do I know? Because if you’re not awesome and great at personal branding then you don’t get recruited for startups in the first place. So even if the startup goes under, you still have yourself and your fabulous skill set. Oh, and you have a startup under your belt, which makes for a pretty impressive resume builder.
So you can do one of two things:
* Get into another startup, which you already have the experience and connections for
* Reenter corporate where they are looking to recruit people with awesome resumes like yours (Hat Tip: Ryan)
Neither is better or worse. In fact, I have another friend who moved to Chicago from Silicon Valley last August. He worked for a few different startups, including this little one called Facebook, and now he’s an investment banker (of all things).
But that’s the great thing about careers these days – there is no clear-cut path to where you want to go. The playing field no longer looks like a game of Chutes and Ladders; it’s more like a football game, where there are lots of different plays that can score a touchdown.
Job Security Sucks These Days
The economy is not so good and companies are changing hands – this means that people can get laid off in a blink. This happens in the public sector when companies get acquired. This happens in the private sector when companies go under.
It doesn’t seem to matter where you work anymore; good people are let go from their jobs every day. It starts with a hiring freeze and progresses to layoffs, often around performance review time. Since job security in the traditional sense is nonexistent at most companies, you may as well work where you want and stop worrying. For many of us young go-getters, that’s a startup.
Working For a Startup is Like Starting a Business 101
I want to start a business someday, but pretty much every entrepreneur I know tells me I need to do a startup first. I’ll admit I thought this was dumb the first time I heard it; but 15-people-giving-me-the-exact-same-advice later? It would be foolish of me to think I know better.
So if you want to start a business someday, you have two choices:
* Stay in corporate America for awhile and then start a business with no entrepreneurship experience
* Do a startup (or a few), get experience starting businesses, then start your own business without repeating the same mistakes
Which one sounds riskier to you?
Why Working For a Startup Isn’t So Risky [Young Go Getter]

Categories
Operations

5 Top Tips for Managing Your Emails

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Technology is a wonderful thing – it allows us to work virtually, from anywhere in the world, and makes our lives easier. However, it can also hinder us, and this is particularly true in the case of emails.

Every day we are bombarded with hundreds of emails, only a small percentage of which are necessary. Spam filters are great at filtering most of the unwanted emails but a small amount do get through, adding to the number we have to sift through!

We can spend hours each day checking, sorting, and reading our emails only to find we haven’t the time left for actual work! Here are my top 5 tips for managing your emails and giving you back your much-needed time.

1. Emails aren’t urgent! Don’t feel you have to read and act upon your email the second it hits your inbox. You don’t! It isn’t urgent. If there was a real emergency then your client/colleague/friend would call you.

2. Are all those newsletters you subscribe to really necessary? Probably not! If this the case spend some time going through them and unsubscribing the ones you don’t really want or read.

3. Does your email play distracting alerts, i.e. a sound? If so, disable it. This is a distraction and you could quite easily stop what you’re working on to go and check your emails. It will then take you some time to get back on track again, not to mention the amount of time you’ve just lost stopping what you were doing, reading your emails, and actioning them.

4. Schedule set times to check your emails. Once or twice a day is enough, say first thing in the morning and again later in the day. If you subscribe to various industry groups save reading these emails until you take a break from your work – maybe at the end of the day when you’re winding down. You can easily get sidetracked reading all the different topics and replying to them, all of which is taking you away from your paid work.

5. Utilize email filtering tools. Set up folders and filters so that your email gets sent to the appropriate folder as soon as it arrives. Don’t know how to do this? Read my article Is Your Inbox Getting You Down? How to Avoid Inbox Overwhelm available on my website.

If you follow these 5 tips above, you will find you are spending less time worrying about and checking your emails, and more time on being productive! That has got to be better for your bottom line.

Categories
Communication Skills

If Confucius Is Your Public Speaking Coach, He Will Tell You This

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“I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.”
If you want your presentation to be memorable even after 90 days, I strongly encourage you to INVOLVE YOUR AUDIENCE…. through DOING. Couple of ideas for you to try out.
1. After teaching a concept, get your audience to split into groups. In their groups, discuss a scenario where they can APPLY the concept. Once that is done, have them send a representative to share what was discussed.
2. Before you wrap up a presentation, get your audience to WRITE down five things that they are doing to different based on what you have shared with them. Even better, get them to do one on the spot.
3. Create handouts for your audience and as you deliver your speech, have them FILL UP the blanks with key points or phrases that you want them to remember.
4. If you are going to show them a video, have them JOT DOWN three things they discover which relates to your speech topic.
5. At the end of your speech, get your audience to buddy up and CRYSTALLIZE five things that they have learnt in your speech that will make a difference to their work or life.
And the list goes on.
Bottomline – get your audience into action.
Now here’s one thing I want you to do:
Think back to your last speech/presentation, what could be ONE action that you can get your audience to participate which will help reinforce your points or message?
EricFengPhoto.jpgEric Feng is the go-to guy if you want to learn how to impress your investors and customers through public speaking. For more tips and tactics that you can use immediately in your next presentation, visit The Public Speaking Blog.