The Career You'll Love

For years, time management experts have recommended that we first focus on the big, important things, and then squeeze the smaller tasks in between. It’s not a bad theory, but it’s not always the best approach to managing your relationships.

Let’s say that someone asks me to do something quite simple, perhaps to answer a question that will take me 30 seconds. But because I’m focusing on the Big Important Task, I’m going to let that slide until I have time – maybe next week.

Read more on my Workbloom blog»

Here’s a simple, but interesting concept I’d like to throw at you today.

How much time and energy do I spend worrying about the future? I might lose my job. That next appointment with the doctor might not go well. We don’t know how the new US Health Care law will impact us personally.

Read the rest of this on my Workbloom blog»

As a coach, I work with clients all the time who struggle to make tough career decisions. Here’s what’s interesting about this: usually they’re so focused on trying to find a solution that they don’t notice that they’re not sure what the real problem is.

Here’s an example. Joseph is struggling because he’s not happy with his job: the work isn’t interesting, his boss is a jerk, and the organization is overly political. The solution, clearly, is to find a new job which fixes these three problems.

Read more of my post on the WorkBloom bl0g>>

How do you convince people to like you and give you a break?

Here’s a core principle of human behavior, so simple:  When people receive something they value, they’re more inclined to give back in return.  Pretty obvious, right?  But it’s absolutely true, and is one of the reasons why those charities send you small gifts in the mail.  They’re hoping you’ll find some value in them, and give back in return.

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This has been an eventful week for me and my business – a key turning point.  This is the week I moved from planning to doing.

It’s scary, but it’s so wonderful to be doing what feels to be such useful activity.

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Well, we survived the first decade of the third millennium.  It’s been an amazing and ever-accelerating ride for me, and I hope that you can see your own sparks of potential which will help you build your own future success.

Now it’s time to look forward:

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When I was growing up as a child in the 1960s, I thought about the upcoming turn of the century – 2000 seemed so impossibly far away.  But here we are, ten years AFTER entering this new millennium, and it’s disappeared so quickly!

Ten years I was employed in Hewlett-Packard, just beginning to discover this new emerging field called coaching.  I was managing a team that was embroiled in the whole Y2K issue, worried that all our hard preparation might not have been enough to ward off customer problems on January 1st.  As it turns out, things went remarkably well.

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Sometimes it seems like I’m hard-wired to look for risks, for dangers.  Perhaps I am.  So here’s a powerful question that I use to help break me out of that mindset:

What’s the best that could happen?

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Nobody likes a braggart.  But there are times where you need to promote yourself – to your boss, to potential customers, to future employers.  How do you promote yourself in a way which doesn’t come across as shameless and inauthentic?

Here’s the trick:  You promote in a way which is well-founded, or where promotion isn’t the primary message.

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