Month: July 2019

Winning Performance: How to Build on Your Skills for Success

Winning Performance is not only about how hard you work or how many skills you have. It’s, also, about having the soft skills for working effectively. Day in, day out, equally talented people give different levels of winning performance. Likewise, equally talented people can have widely different career success. Here are seven steps that will help you accomplish more with your time.

  1. Seeking Advice for Winning Performance.

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 have better results when I get ideas and solutions from other people. I better understand my circumstances by discussing them with someone else.

  1. Getting the Greatest Results – Yards After Catch

Get the greatest results from each activity. The National Football League wide receiver Jerry Rice holds 23 NFL records. One of the more important records is the greater distance he gained after he caught the pass. From my observation, Jerry Rice trained harder and more skillfully than other athletes. Jerry Rice brought winning performance to every game he played.

  1. Listen and Learn

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 every else does and achieve greater results than anyone else, often because of their getting input from people around them. These people develop a team mentality that tells them when to act or when to set a finished product aside 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.

  1. 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 or leave early. By starting and completing one more task on these days, you will find that your production can 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.

  1. 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.

  1. See Solutions Not Problems

Everyone has problems. Everyone encounters obstacles. It is easy to give up or procrastinate instead of acting on these obstacles. In creating solutions, you can develop effective, often new ways of dealing with these obstacles.

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.

  1. Build Your Network

Continue to build your network of friends and mentors.  One of the more interesting qualities of my son is that he 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. He has traveled to Sweden, Peru, and Thailand to meet with friends he has met over the years. You may also find that having new circles of friends can help you develop new and valuable career ideas and solutions for Winning Performance.

  1. Set Goals

Continue to set goals. Goal setting can have a subconscious power to drive your actions even when you are not working directly from a daily plan. Additionally, having goals can give you a sense of purpose and a feeling of a richer quality of life.  Rather than focusing on the ruts of your life, you can focus on your goals and how to move toward them.  Goals lead to Winning Performance.

Anger Prevention: How Small Steps Can Help You Decompress

Anger Prevention: Anger is a normal feeling when we have experiences that threaten our beliefs or possessions. We can learn skills that give us a choice in the way we respond to that feeling.

Anger Prevention: Different Triggers for Different People

We all have individual triggers.  I say individual triggers, because different things create different feelings and different responses in different people.

For example, heights frighten some people. For other people, heights are thrilling.  Furthermore, the amount that people feel fearful or thrilled varies from person to person.

In the case of bungy jumping, some people are fearful of leaping off a high place to the extent that they cannot even walk out to point where other people jump with glee.  Between these extremes are people who have more intense or less intense feelings about jumping off high places.

How Powerful are Triggers?

When triggered, we experience the impulse to act.

Emotions are not thoughts.  And, under some circumstances, our emotions can fire faster than our ability to think before acting. For example, two people see a person fall.  One laughs.  Another one winces.

Neither person thought about how they would respond to what they are seeing.  Instead, they are experiencing feeling in their unconscious mind.

Becoming Smart to Avoid Triggers

The first step in anger management is recognizing sources that create patterns in the emotions governing our thoughts.  These patterns are circumstances that increase the likelihood that we will respond emotionally rather than mentally. However, we can become smart to avoid triggers.

When we recognize these patterns, we can make changes in our behavior that affect our ability to deal with stress.

For example, in rush-hour traffic on the freeways, there are miles of cars.  The way that each driver experiences the drive varies from calm awareness to rage.

Rage can lead to dangerous actions.  If we recognize the patterns of behavior that precede the rage, we can change that pattern.  For example, caffeine, hunger, fatigue, and starting late increase anxiety before we even get on the road.

Additionally, anxiety can press us to try to drive faster than the flow of traffic.  When we become frustrated with drivers who slow us down, our anxiety increases further.

The solution is to eliminate or change our emotions before we get on the road. Before dashing out the door, we take a break to relax.  In other cases, such as making appointments, we can leave early.  Additionally, we can eliminate caffeine or eat a light snack to reduce intense feelings that come from pressures of being on the highway. 

Once we start our drive, we can decide to be part of the flow of traffic and not an intimidating threat to our own safety and the safety of others.

Conclusion

It is not always easy to overcome anger.  However, it is smart to take action to prevent the anger in the first place.

Stress Reduction for a Clear and Productive Mind

Stress reduction: Life’s challenges create pressure. I can’t always eliminate these challenges, but I can reduce the pressure by being smart about how I respond to them.

Action

I feel stress when I put things off.

To overcome procrastination, I simply agree to do one small thing. A common example is to go for a walk, I lace up my shoes. To do odd jobs around the house, I lay out my tools. Often, this one thing sets in motion my completing small tasks.  To reduce stress, I break projects down into multiple, simple steps.

When I am stuck with writing an article, for example, I write a statement. From there I write the information to explain the statement. I might write one paragraph.  I save what I have written as a draft.  Over a few hours, I may stop several times. However, by coming back a new information through the day, I complete the article.

Write Things Down.

When something is bothering me, I can write it down.  Writing takes the sting out of stress. Further writing helps me process anxiety. Moreover, the further writing often leads to solutions to solving problems that bother me.

From there, I have a plan of action that gives me the confidence to be more productive. I have a sense of accomplishment.  I feel less stress.

Eat Healthy Food First

When hunger makes me anxious between meals, a snack cuts my anxiety until mealtime.

Sugar snacks make me hungrier.  The sugar demands insulin to burn the sugar. Somewhere in the lack of balance between sugar and insulin, I feel anxious.

Therefore, I try to keep more satisfying snacks handy.  Cheese, nuts, peanut butter are calorically dense, but reduce cravings and quiet the anxious voices in my head.

Take Breaks

Being tired clutters my mind. I become less productive. My cluttered mind focuses on problems.

For me, a power nap or a walk help me recover from the fatigue of working on most projects.  Simply walking for a few minutes reduces my anxiety.

To remind myself to move each hour, I have notifications on my calendar to leave my desk and move around.

Get Plenty of Sleep

Not only do I take breaks. I try to get plenty of sleep.  Allowing my brain to rest enables me to make better decisions. Better decisions increase success and cut stress.

Lack of rest is one of the steps to burnout.  We reach a point where overdoing our job cripples us in ways that we can’t perform at work.

Keep It Real

It is so easy for me to want to control national or international events.  Thinking that I can control these things is completely fruitless and painfully stressful.

People in forums say things that annoy me.  Correcting them is pointless.  I can’t police the Internet!

Likewise, I can easily believe that I can change other people.  There are things that I can do that affect how other people react.  However, just changing my own behavior is not always easy.  Believing that I can change other people is often impractical.

Frustration over the things I can’t change creates stress.  I try to keep it real about the things that I can change and not change.

Talk with Friends

Just having friends helps me beat stress.  Talking to friends gets me out of my own head and into the present moment.  Furthermore, in talking with friends, I get practical information on dealing with challenges in my life, thereby increasing success and stress reduction.

Stress Reduction

Reducing stress clears our mind and increases our long-term success. The steps to stress reduction include steps to increase our health.

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