Archive for September, 2008

I spent the most pleasant evening tonight with a wonderful group of women who gathered for the Flourish book club meeting to discuss my book, Inner Architect. Flourish is the vision of Anne Marie Engel, whose mission is to support women in navigating the challenges of balancing career and life.

Pursuing your passions in your work was a thread that weaved throughout our discussions. These accomplished, well-educated women shared their thoughts about leaving a secure, established career to pursue their passions. When you have built a level of success in a profession, letting go comes with its share of angst.

• What will other people think about my decision?
• How do I let go of being one role to move into another?
• How will I survive the early times of making a lot less money?

Having done so myself three years ago, I could relate to these questions they shared. Looking back now, I can see that the answers didn’t come until I took steps forward. And the good news is that dealing with these questions has been so much easier than I anticipated.

Lesson: We tend to give more power to our fears than they deserve.

Put your toe in the water. Take tiny steps towards the career you want and see what happens. Chances are the very things you worry about the most turn out to be more manageable that you would have thought possible.

Listening is an often ignored skill with equally ignored strategies of engagement. The first step to understanding the best listening strategies to employ during a conversation is understanding the goals behind having the conversation. In “Listening Is A Skill That Requires A Strategy” we provided the first step to finding your strategy by identifying the four types of conversations:

1. Information exchanges
2. Building working relationships
3. Feeling good
4. Making someone feel good

According to Mindtools.com’s article Active Listening: Hear What People Are Really Saying: “. . . we remember a dismal 25-50% of what we hear.” So understanding how to listen and the best strategies to listening comprehension are very important.

The next step in the process is understanding the set of choices you face when holding a conversation; the most basic choice is whether to talk or listen. As explained in Bruce Wilson’s great article Strategies for Business Listeners: “Your mission is to identify, and support, your goals for having this particular conversation in the first place.”

Choices in Conversation

The most basic choice is whether you talk or you listen. Beyond that basic choice are three more choices: Do you focus? Do you clarify? Do you listen attentively? Let’s examine each one.

1. When You Talk: Focus

a.) No Focus: This simply means you say what comes to mind without any plan or prior thought. The results of this behavior can be a free flow of information but at a cost. The cost is often severe if the speaker says something inaccurate, offensive, or monipolizes conversation time.

b.) Yes Focus: Plan what you are going to say. Understand the appropriate amount of detail to include. Deliver your message in a succinct brief summary in order to make the point without wasted effort.

2. When You Talk: Clarify

a.) No Clarification: You are guessing what is important to your partner in conversation. There are two problems here. First you may be wasting your partner’s time and yours. Second you may ramble on and begin to monopolize the time in the conversation.

b.) Yes Clarification: Before launching into unknown territory, ask permission of your conversation partner.

Do You Listen Attentively ?

Yes: You give your full attention by removing any distractions. In addition you should provide body language, eye contact, and gestures of affirmation in order to let your partner know you are listening.

No: If you answered “no”, you can do one of two things:

Partial listening: This is a bad choice because you often end up understanding half the message, possibly offending your partner, or you miss a vital piece of their message creating a misunderstanding of the message.

Ask Permission: Ask to reschedule your conversation to a time when you will be able to focus your full attention on the conversation.

Listening is defined by Princeton.edu as the “act of hearing attentively.” BizJobs.com supports a business glossary definition that states that Listening is “a key selling skill, in that without good listening skills the process of questioning is rendered totally pointless.” From these definitions come the need to recognize one factor that is so often ignored it leads to a breakdown in the process of conversation: listening requires a strategy. Before you can choose a strategy, you must first understand your goals in a conversation.

Strategy #1 Define Your Goals

Often times before we enter a conversation we understand, due to the setting or people involved, the purpose of conversation we are about to engage in. Due to this advanced knowledge, it is best to define your goal(s) in having the conversation. This recognition will help you choose the best listening strategy for the situation.

4 Purposeful Types of Conversations

The following purposes for having a conversation were outlined by Bruce Wilson editor of businesslistening.com:

1. Exchange Information: these conversations are about discovering what a person “needs, or is offering.” You may be probing in order to understand whether you have synergy, “complementary offerings or needs.” As Bruce states “part of the exchange of information is often about whether someone accurately understood what they heard.”
2. Building Working Relationships: developing and maintaining a positive business connection or positive personal relationship can be a very important factor of an ongoing business relationship. Examples of these instances are “customer-supplier conversations, employer-employee conversations, networking conversations, and team communications.
3. Feeling Good: this is simply the act of conversing with someone in a productive and/or enjoyable exchange. As Bruce notes, these purposeful conversations “can be a key component of having a good day or even a good job.”
4. Make Someone Feel Good: whether you have a vested interest in a friend or business associates’ “state of mind”, good conversations can have a positive effect on others around you, bring them joy and solidify your position as a valued connection.

Like many people, I am guilty of procrastination. While I can be uncommonly disciplined in some areas of my life, I wait until the last possible moment to address others. This weekend it hit me that I have kept one of my most important business projects on the back burner for well over a year. I got up close and personal with myself trying to understand what was holding me back and what I needed to do to get beyond it. I want to share my process in a way that I hope you can benefit from.

How to Stop Procrastinating on Something Important:

1. Identify an important project or situation that you no longer want to keep putting off.
2. Get clear on the excuses and obstacles that hold you back. Write them down.
3. Look at each obstacle and ask yourself what you need to do to get beyond it. Write down what additional work, learning or change of mindset will overcome the obstacle. Consider these ideas as your action plan.
4. Review your action plan and recognize that it can be incorporated into your current life if you make the commitment.
5. Take responsibility for your action plan by breaking it down into small steps you can take. Assign these small steps to your calendar for this week.
6. Repeat step 5 until you have totally executed your action plan.

Honesty check: Are you allowing yourself to believe that you can stop procrastinating on this important thing? How willing are you to hold yourself responsible for taking the necessary steps?

The credit crisis in America has taken a toll on the availability of student loan products as more lenders drop out of the business. According to Net Worth’s Kathleen Pender “More than two dozen non bank lenders have stopped making college loans and last week, three large banks followed suit.”

The fact that college tuition is spiraling upward with no end in sight, adds to the ever growing importance of a student’s career path decision making process.

3 Pitfalls To Avoid

1. Lost Money: Finding the “right” career path is more important than ever before as even the slightest delays or u-turns can cost students and their families thousands of dollars in lost tuition.
   
2. Lost Time: Without a clear definite path based on passionate interest, a student can begin an ill fated career which can account for years of lost time and lost wages in pursuit of something that does not fit.
   
3. Misguided Deciding Factors: When students and parents look at job markets, financial compensation, and job availability as the only factors in choosing a career path they are setting themselves and their children up for disappointing results.
   

3 Tips For A Successful Career:

Before you consult the traditional counselors, career and interest surveys, and company representatives recruiting on campus consider the following:

• Awareness: You will graduate to the workforce via corporate America or as an entrepreneur with a work life history that averages 40+ years.

• Interest: The career path you pursue should be one that holds your interest. It is imperative that you identify all their interests. Make a detailed list of the things, activities, and rituals you enjoy. This should help to heighten your awareness about what direction to explore.

• Passion: After identifying your interests, which interests are your passions? Which activity, subject, or ritual do you lose time in? Make a list of these passion interests and consider them your priority list moving forward.