Month: July 2017

Composure: How to Overcome Meeting Anxiety

Composure: Whether they make mistakes or simply must deal with intimidating people, everyone has stressful moments in meetings. How can you stay composed?

Composure creates poise under pressure. ~ www.jaywren.com

Composure: How to Overcome Meeting Anxiety

Anxiety in meetings can be a problem for anyone.  However, whether you have natural poise or suffer social anxiety, you can stay composed for success.

Breathe

You don’t have to stop for a 20-minute mindfulness meditation to use breathing to gather composure.  Anxiety can suppress our breathing.  A lack of oxygen creates even more anxiety.  However, replenishing oxygen with a breath can reduce anxiety.

Breath in slowly and quietly.  Mentally focus on your breath.  The process will give your body the oxygen to burn the adrenaline from anxiety.  Furthermore, focusing on your breathing redirects your thinking from your anxiety to a calming breath and allows you to become spontaneous.  You will appear poised and gain composure.

Listen with a Purpose

Focus on what people are saying.  Ask yourself why they are saying those things.  Think of how the contributions of other people is useful to you.  Seeing the benefits in another person’s message takes your focus off your insecurities and creates positive feelings about what you are learning.

Practice Intelligent Silence

Intelligent silence is powerful.

Attending meetings and never speaking decreases your value to the meeting.  However, people who listen and speak when they have something meaningful to say strengthen the power of their contributions.

Additionally, allowing yourself to be silent and think before you speak will increase your composure.

Bring an Agenda

Come to meetings with a list of things that you want to know and things you want to say.  This approach is especially helpful when you are attending a job interview.

Become the Facilitator

Giving your support to other meeting attendees takes your focus off your insecurities and makes you valuable to the success of the meeting.

Developing the skills of a facilitator helps you as a public speaker, helps you in building professional relationships, and helps you in becoming a better friend or family member.  Furthermore, becoming the facilitator gives you leadership power in a meeting.

Great Leaders: 7 Steps to Creating Greatness in Others

Great Leaders: Some leaders are not only great themselves, but also inspire others to become great.  What do they do differently?

Great leaders do more than achieve success. They create greatness in others. ~ www.jaywren.com

Great Leaders: 7 Steps to Creating Greatness in Others

Some leaders have command presence.  Colin Powell is an example of a person whose outward behavior or bearing commanded respect.  Other leaders have charisma.  President John Kennedy had the magnetic ability to draw attention by merely entering a room.  Then there are leaders like Winston Churchill who can shape the language to persuade and inspire nations.

These leaders in their own ways achieved personal and professional greatness.  But what are the traits that of leaders who inspire greatness in others?  

1. Give Credit

Leaders who have the humility to give credit gain support from their people.  They allow others to take the center stage.
They step back from the urge to say, “I did this.”  They step up to say when the team or a member of the team created success.

Furthermore, they encourage positive behavior with positive reinforcement.  Inspirational leaders are not afraid to say, “You did an excellent job.”

Giving credit increases bonds and reduces turnover.

2. Use Criticism to Train

It is easy to criticize people.  However. great leaders do more than find fault.  They give solutions.  Furthermore, they train their people the correct way to do things in the future.

3. Build the Skills and Knowledge of the Team.

It takes time and patience to train team members.  Leaders who invest this time to show team members new and better ways of doing things increase the success of the individual members of the team and increase the success of the entire team.

4. Delegate Authority as Well as Responsibility.

As soon as he was given the proper support and appropriate work for his strengths, he grew less apathetic and at least gave a good day’s effort. Teaching people their responsibilities is one thing.  Giving people the authority to make decisions on their responsibilities is another.  Great leaders delegate authority as well as responsibility.

Delegating authority empowers people to make the team more powerful.  Furthermore, it engages the team to be more effective.

Lastly, it creates ownership and builds the self-esteem of team members.

5. Focus on the Big Picture

Great leaders don’t let small frustrations to become major distractions.  They adjust.  At times of distraction, that refocus themselves and the team on the goal.  However, they don’t let these frustrations waste their time.

6. Practice Integrity and Honesty

Successful leaders keep commitments.  Their people can trust them in every area.  They make meetings on time.  They deliver on promotions and pay raises.

Their people can trust them to manage confidential discussions discretely and to tell them.  On the other hand, great leaders are transparent to ensure integrity.

Through integrity and honesty, great leaders inspire commitment from the people they lead.

7. Avoid Leadership Resentment

For leaders to develop respect from their people, leaders can’t tell their people to be frugal while the leaders are extravagant.  Successful leaders can’t press their people to work hard when the leaders themselves are out the door early for personal activities.

Telling people to act one way while the leader abuses authority to act another, creates resentment towards leadership and towards the leaders themselves.  Great leaders avoid leadership resentment through their own example.

No Job Plan: Why Long-Term Career Plans Fail

No Job Plan: To increase your income, do you plan to change jobs every three years?  On the other hand, do you plan a career at the same company?

No Job Plan: Why Long-Term Career Plans Fail

Are you basing your career on changing jobs every three years to increase your income?  On the other hand, do you plan to build a long-term career with the same company.  Plans are great.  You can’t know how to reach a destination without knowing where you are going.

But the world changes.  Industries change.  Career opportunities and options change.  What should you really be doing in a world of career uncertainty?

Are You Risk Averse?

If you are risk averse, setting up a job plan to reduce risks is smart.  You find a company that has stability.  The company has guidelines that reduce the uncertainty of your job requirements.  You love what you are doing.  Furthermore, you feel safe.

What Are the Risk of Playing It Safe?

However, playing it safe can also lead down blind alleys.  For example, you develop a specific set of skills for a job with a well-established company.  Then, another company buys your company and outsources your work to another country.

You will find that playing it safe has created anything but safety.  Playing it safe can leave you with a limited set of marketable skills in a world where job skills change often.

What Are the Dangers of Job Hopping for Income?

Frequently, I read articles that highlight the income advantages of changing jobs every two or three years.  The idea is that you get a larger pay raise through a job change than you get through merit raises with the same employer.

There are several problems with this theory.  One, you are giving up increasing benefits that come to long-term employees.  Furthermore, you are creating a resume that shows that you are less reliable than people with career stability.

No Job Plan

Everybody has a plan.  Sports team have a plan to play against other teams.  Consumer companies have marketing plans to compete in the market place.

To quote Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

What the “no job plan” means is the flexibility to make changes to your career as conditions change.  If you have stability at your current job and continue to learn new skills that make you more marketable over the long-term, changing jobs for a pay raise is a mistake.

Furthermore, if you find that you are in a job where you are overqualified, you can begin to explore new jobs that match your skills and pay you for those skills.

The important thing is to remember that career assessment is an ongoing process.  You don’t focus on a plan.  Rather, focus on the changes conditions and adjust to make the most of the conditions that will help you throughout your career.

Winning Teams: 5 Traits that Lead to Team Success

Winning Teams: How is it that some teams continue to win while other teams continue to lose?  What are the things that winning teams do differently? Here are some traits for team success.

The power of winning teams exceeds the power of the individual members. ~ www.jaywren.com

Winning Teams: 5 Traits that Lead to Team Success

All teams must have a common purpose or a mission.  Furthermore, even though team members have diverse skills, great team members have common traits.

1. Team Members Own Their Mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes.  On winning teams, the members admit them and do not repeat them.

Additionally, members of winning teams quickly correct their mistakes and move the team along successfully.

2. Winning Team Members Know Their Job Description.

Members of winning teams know their job description.  They read it with their team leader.  They discuss the goals and responsibilities of their jobs openly with each other to collaborate effectively.

Furthermore, they are conscientious.  They know how to do their job, and they do it correctly.

3. On Winning Teams, Each Member Allows Others to Do Their Own Job.

Being a team player and helping other people occasionally is one thing.  However, on winning teams, each team member must let other members do their assigned work.  Like a team of horses, team members empower the team by allowing everyone to do their job.

4. The Most Talented Team Members Know When to Lighten Up.

Learning how to lighten up about the efforts of the team boosts morale.  Not everything that a team does is perfect.  Team members make mistakes.  Team efforts don’t’ always meet expectations.

Talented team members know to lighten up and not take team frustrations personally.

5. Winning Team Members Give Credit to the Team.

Team members deserve credit for their effort.  However, team members bond and become more powerful when they celebrate as a team.

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