Your attitude will be one of the first things people notice about you.
In his book, "Attitude is Everything," Keith Harrell writes, "You may not be able to change your height or your body type, but you can change your attitude. A positive attitude is not only a product of genetics and heredity but, with proper trainng, an acquired trait."
Since productive work is all about getting things done with and through others, a negative attitude will cost you dearly in terms of ineffective team work, poorly functioning meetings, and ultimately significant time loss.
Choose an attitude of gratitude. Be recognized as someone who is positive rather than negative. Look to find opportunities where others see problems.
Accept responsibility for your internal dialogue. Recognize and put a stop to the stories we tell ourselves that are not based on fact.
Effective time management allows you to be more flexible, not less flexible. It facilitates you doing the things you really want to do and being the person you want to be.
When you put your newly adopted self-coaching tips into practice, everything that comes your way becomes organized. Your systematic decision-making results in clarity, productivity, accountablity and empowerment. You easily manage commitments and projects by defining critical objectives and implementation details. You and your team do what each of you does best, becoming highly productive while achieving desired outcomes and minimal stress and maximum result.
Do you make one or two New Year resolutions each year but have had little success in following through on them?
Here are five reasons why it is so difficult to achieve our New Year resolutions:
1. Powerful countervailing forces appear when we attempt to engineer positive change.
2. Our overbooked lives and strong immunity to change try to keep us from relearning deeply ingrained habits.
3. Most people don't respect their strong immunity to change and, therefore, don't develop the support systems necessary to overcome this powerful and dynamic equilibrium to stay the same.
4. We don't give our brain enough time and energy to relearn deeply ingrained habits by developing and following a goal-achieving plan through personal determination, practice, repetition and the support of others.
On demand, immediate learning in digestable bites allows for on-the-job application while fitting easily into action-packed schedules. Research indicates that people learn better, retain more and are positively motivated when supported by regular and frequent coaching.
As powerful and effective as professional coaching can be, it is only affordable to less than one percent of the workforce.
That is why self-coaching insights, easily retrieved from a mobile smartphone, tablet, e-reader or laptop, grabs managers’ attention with compelling content to make them feel a sense of urgency to act on what they learned.
In psychology, the term “thin slicing” refers to the brain’s ability to draw surprisingly accurate conclusions from very limited information. Applied to leadership development, thin slicing is about isolating thin slices of learning and delivering powerful insights from a single bite-size concept. Instead of starting big, it starts small. A short, incomplete slice of learning can deliver a powerful “Aha” moment and create behavior change more effectively than a longer learning module or conversation that tries to cover too much:
1) Workplace performance coaching should be delivered in short bursts – just six to 10 minutes at a time. Today’s multi-tasking workforce has neither the time nor the attention span for traditional lengthy training formats.
3) Performance coaching and self-coaching are most powerful when grounded in verifiable research. When managers see performance coaching and self-coaching as credible, they’re more likely to translate their learning into on-the-job behavior.
Albert Einstein once said, "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve."
For example, the background for our career women book series evolved from working with a succession of coaching clients. We realized that women do not automatically experience the same professional issues that men routinely face.
Instead, they stuggle to be all things to all people--and along the way they neglect themselves and their own priorities. What we discovered serves as the backbone for these books, and for their solutions, strategies and essential tools.
Our goal is help make their lives easier, richer, happier and saner.
