Month: May 2018

Anger Management:  People who cannot control their tempers can ruin their career and the career of others.  How do some people manage anger to create success for themselves and their organization?

Anger protects us against danger. However, acting out of anger clutters our thinking and undermines our success.
~ www.jaywren.com

Four Steps to Anger Management

Here are four areas of anger management that can help you be more successful in building great relationships in stressful situations.

Pause Before Acting

When you first feel anger, pause and wait for your emotions to become less intense.  If possible, step away to process your emotions.

Avoid saying things when you are angry. Rational thinking can evaporate when our feelings hijack our reasoning.

Certainly, don’t say things or send angry letters or emails that you may regret later.

Seek Mentoring

A mentor might be anyone who can help you work through your feelings and take constructive actions.

Discussing our feelings with a person who is not involved can help us process our anger. Furthermore, just writing about our feelings can help remove the sting of our experience.  Once we have those feelings on paper, we can use our notes for our discussion with our mentor.

Let Go of Unproductive Emotions

If people have offended us, we feel sore.  A common response is to hold onto our anger.  Resentments are dangerous.  They can damage our health and our relationships.  When we feel angry for past wrongs, focusing on our breathing can help us get out of our head and into the present moment.

Set Boundaries

Negative, angry people cause us stress and damage our performance. They create anger in the people around them.

It is not always easy to avoid negative people. Likewise, changing the behavior of other people is difficult. However, speaking out to set boundaries on behavior that you will not tolerant is often all that we need to do.  Where possible, seek alliances with other people to help protect your boundaries.  Report abusive behavior.

Business Meeting Tools:  Meeting preparation is important.  Equally important is having the right tools.  What should you bring to a meeting?

Cutting a diamond starts with having the right skills and the right tools. Likewise, for business meeting success we need the right tools to support our skills. ~ www.jaywren.com

Business Meeting Tools

What you bring to a business meeting is as important as the things you say or do in a business meeting.  Getting to a business meeting to discover that you do not have the things you need is not only embarrassing, it is often a business-meeting killer.  I recommend that you buy a portfolio case or a briefcase that you use just for meetings.  Keep the case stocked with the materials that you will take to every meeting.

When organizing your meeting case, make sure you bring the following items.

Bring several copies of presentations.

You should have a copy for your own use and a copy for each person on the meeting schedule.  Take extra copies for people who are not on the schedule but who might come into the meeting unannounced.  Sometimes having unexpected people join the meeting is a sign that the people are interested in what you have to say or show.

Bring a list of the attendees.

Having this list will help you organize your notes about questions people have.  The list can also help you remember people’s names and the role of the people in the meeting.

Bring a list of recommendations.

Having a list of recommendations adds power to your professional credibility and creates excitement about the quality of your work.

A Word of Caution: In an interview, be careful about leaving a copy of your recommendations with the hiring company.  Companies should not be contacting your references without your approval.

Bring a brag book or portfolio.

This book has samples of your work so that people can see the range of your success.

Bring your laptop.

If you have powerhouse presentations that you can show more examples of your work, you can use your laptop as a dynamic tool.

Bring business cards.

Some people see business cards to verify employment and job title.  The cards show people that you are who you say you are.

Bring a notepad.

You need to keep track of contact and company information that you learn during your meetings.  A notepad is an effective way to make notes without distracting people the way using a smartphone or laptop might distract people when you are taking notes.

Bring three or four pens.

The extra pens help you relax that you have a pen that works.  In addition, it is wise to make sure you can help an attendee who does not have a pen for taking notes.

Respect: What do people do to gain respect from others?  Here are 10 things that will help you build relationships and increase the respect that others have for you.

Life is much easier when people respect us to the point that they want to give us their support. ~ www.jaywren.com

Relationships and Respect

The quality of our personal and work relationships is the result of the respect other people give us and the respect that we give to other people.

Although what other people do is beyond our control, the most powerful people know how to influence the response of the people around them. You can as well.

Give Credit

People gain respect when they give credit to the correct person.  Giving credit is a compliment with substance.

On the other hand, people who claim credit for the work of other people lose respect.   People who know that these people are undeserving of that credit will resent the dishonesty.

If you give credit, you will gain respect among your friends and among people who can affect your career.

Admit Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes.  Successful people admit them and do not repeat them.  People will respect you if you correct your mistakes and move on.

Don’t make excuses for failing to do your work.  Be honest.  You just did not do the work.  You regret it.  When you admit your mistakes and not repeat them, you will get respect.

Do Your Job

Get a copy of your job description.  Read it with your boss.  Discuss what you are doing with your boss.  When you are uncertain about what you are doing, ask your boss for information.

And don’t just do your job. Be conscientious about the way you do your job.

Everyone will respect you for knowing and doing what you are supposed to do.

Let Other People Do Their Job

First, don’t let people take advantage of you.  Being a team player and helping other people occasionally is one thing.  Having people use you to do their work is not the way to get respect at work.

Second, do not interfere with other people by meddling in their job.  People do not always want your advice.  People certainly do not want you to do their job and take credit for what their work.

By respecting the space of other people to do their job, you will get respect.

Lighten Up

Don’t take yourself too seriously.  Insisting that your priorities are the only things that matter will create resentments.  If you come to work every day and load the workplace with pressure, you will create tension.

Be sincere.  Work hard.  Be straightforward with your supervisors, co-workers, and people you manage.  Take your work seriously.  However, don’t take everything so seriously that you can’t accept mistakes and adjustments in the daily routine.

Lighten up. People will enjoy working with you, and you will get respect.

Keep Your Word

Honor your commitments.  If you know that you can’t do something or that you will not do something, be honest about it.  Don’t make a commitment to do things that you can’t or will not do.  Keeping your word is basic to getting respect.

Be Punctual

If you are late all the time, people will quickly get weary of dealing with you.  Arrive at your appointments early.   Complete your work ahead of time.  Reduce the pressure on others having to worry about when your punctuality.

You will get respect when people know they can trust you to be at work on time and complete your work on time.

Avoid Gossip

A quick way to ruin relationships is to gossip.  Avoid people who gossip.  The only people who respect people who gossip are other people who gossip.

Protect Confidences

When someone tells you something personal or private, keep it to yourself.  Even if you do not make a commitment to keep the information private, respect the trust that people have given you. People do not respect people who break their confidences.

Peak performance is not only about how effective you are today, but how effective you are throughout your career. ~ www.jaywren.com

Here are 8 steps that will help you manage and build your skills to accomplish more.

Peak Performance

1. Seek Advice
2. Gain the Extra Yard
3. Do One More Task
4. Read
5. Focus on Solutions not Problems
6. Turn Your Solutions into Services
7. Build and Diversify Your Network
8. Set Goals

Seek Advice

Seek advice before acting on important decisions. It is so easy for me to go into difficult situations and make large decisions with the belief that I already have all the answers.  It is equally easy for me to overlook things that I should have considered before acting. I better understand my circumstances and find far greater solutions by discussing my decisions before acting,

Gain the Extra Yard

Get the greatest results from each activity. The National Football League wide receiver Jerry Rice holds 23 NFL records.  He caught long passes.  More importantly is the number of yards he gained after he caught the pass. It is those extra yards that enabled him to set so many of those records.

Business professionals can do a better job for their company by identifying those small details that turn mediocre projects into hugely successful projects. They do the same tasks everyone else does and achieve greater results than anyone else.  One example of how these people achieve excellence is that they set a finished product aside overnight and return to it when they have a fresh perspective.

These people build companies like Apple, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, and so on across the spectrum. What these companies have in common is they gain the extra yards to make their products exceed the quality of their competitors.

Do One More Task

When you finish your work before the end of the day, do at least one more task before leaving work.  It is easy to sit around at the end of the day. It may feel good to leave early.  By starting and completing one more task on the days when you have extra time, you will find that your production will rise dramatically.  If you add and complete one extra task per week, you will complete fifty more tasks over the course of the year.  Your company will benefit.  Your value to your company will grow.

For example, when I was a new sales rep at Procter & Gamble, I went from last in the district to first and held that position throughout my time at P&G.  What did I do to change my standings? After I finished my schedule for the day, I made an extra sales call. Sometimes these calls were just retail visits.  However, these small efforts added up to make a huge difference in my productivity.

Read

Regularly read articles and books about your job and your goals.  Nearly every job continues to evolve.  Many jobs disappear entirely. New information and tools become available to make job performance easier and make you more marketable.  Take advantage of this information to grow in professional value and for personal enrichment.

Focus on Solutions not Problems

Everyone has problems.  Everyone encounters obstacles.  It is easy to procrastinate or give up instead of acting on these obstacles.

However, by focusing on solutions, you can develop effective, often new ways of dealing with these obstacles.

Turn Your Solutions into Services

As you create solutions, look for ways to help other people use your solutions.  People have founded companies based on providing products and services to overcome common obstacles.   If you can sell the solutions you have developed in overcoming obstacles, you have a business.

Build and Diversify Your Network

Continue to expand your network of friends and mentors.  My son has multiple circles of friends.  The people in each of these circles are people he has met at different times and in different settings.  Some of these friends are from high school classes. Other friends come from his sports activities.  Additionally, he has friends from college and his career.

Since graduating from college, he has met these people from different circles to pick up new hobbies and to travel. Additionally, he has long-term relations with people in his career. These people are valuable assets to help with solutions in his career.

Set Goals

Continue to set goals.  Goal setting will help you focus on your daily plan. Furthermore, goal setting can have a subconscious power to drive your actions even when you are not working directly from a daily plan.

Having goals can give you a sense of purpose and a feeling of accomplishment.  Rather than focusing on the ruts of your life, you can focus on your goals and how to move toward them.  Goals lead to peak performance.