Mindset of Success: The Science of Personal Leadership Development

Recent Personal Development Lessons on Maximizing Strengths and Overcoming Weaknesses

As a new mother of a 5-week old, I'm having some profound personal development lessons. In addition to the overwhelming feelings of love and responsibility for this adorable little person, I'm learning a lot about myself.

Patience has never been my virtue.  My strength, on the other hand, is action. I love to get things done. Our strengths often also illuminate our weaknesses.

The flipside of my action and achievement orientation strength is impatience. It's always been hard for me to not do something when my energy is flowing in that direction. This is why I keep my schedule fairly flexible (rather than booked solid with clients), so I can follow what I'm driven to do in the moment.

Well, obviously with a newborn, I'm on his schedule, and I can't always do things when I'd like to (like eat and shower!). I found this change to be challenging at first. I've actually been surprised that I do have patience when I focus on it. My lesson has been that overcoming a weakness takes attention and incentive. My incentive has been a clear one (the baby), but they aren't always so clear, sometimes we need to think about hidden incentives.

I've been working on reframing my views of action and productivity so that I continue to maximize my strengths while working on my weakness (impatience). It's interesting how sometimes a subtle mindset shift makes such a difference. It's helped me to focus on the important things I am doing, rather than the things I'm not able to do.

How have you learned to reframe a situation to leverage your strengths and overcome a weakness?

P.S. See baby photos on my facebook profile and read my updates on Twitter

10 Ways to Assertively Lead Up and Influence Authority Figures

What do you do if you have a boss or other authority figures who are making your life miserable? Are you destined to discomfort? Not really. Before giving up, try the skill of “leading up.”

“Leading up” is an assertiveness skill that allows you to influence your boss or any authority figure who needs to make some changes. Here are some tips on how to do this:

1)     State the priorities. For example, “I understand that project A is a priority and that it is due on Friday. In order to get the results we need on that one, I cannot take on project B this week. If there’s still a need for work on project B next week, I’d be happy to lead it.”

 

2)     Be direct and do not over-explain. If you start explaining too much you’ll reduce your credibility and appear to be defensive and offering excuses.

 

 

3)     Refer to your track record. For example, “You and I have both been pleased with my performance to date. You know that I’m not a slacker and my saying no is because I’m working on being strategic and not taking on more than I can successfully accomplish.”

 

4)     Ask for your boss’s support. This sounds strange, but it is of the “If you can’t beat them join them” approach. Say, “With increasing demands on my time, I’m concerned that the quality could decrease. How do you suggest we handle this?” Saying “we” is critical. This approach is very effective because your boss co-creates the solution and will, therefore, need to support it ongoing.

 

5)     Calmly state your position referring to evidence. You don’t want your boss thinking that you’re simply emotional or unable to handle stress. It is crucial that you remain calm and highlight specific objective examples.

 

6)     Be aware of your body language. Even if your boss is intimidating, look her in the eyes, sit or stand up straight, and maintain a serious facial expression while making your request. This will enable her to take you seriously and respect your assertion.

 

7)     Take responsibility. Do not say “You give me too much work,” because saying “you” will put her on the defensive. Instead take responsibility for your response and request.

 

8)     Express empathy for your boss’s position. Empathy is the most important characteristic in your ability to influence others. Your boss will best understand you if you express understanding for her. This will also allow you to collaboratively come to solutions.

 

9)     Don’t back down from the boundary you established. For example, if you told your boss, “I will be taking a personal lunch today for 45 minutes and won’t be accessible except in a true emergency,” and midway through your lunch your boss calls your cell, don’t answer it. Let her leave a message. If it is truly urgent, call her back and if not, touch base when you get back to the office.

 

10) Benefit your boss. Go out of your way to find opportunities to make your boss or other authority figure’s life easier. They will appreciate this and reciprocate.

 

 

 

It may take some time and practice to start to see changes. The key is that you are consistent in your efforts and that you project confidence, empathy, and self-assurance.

 

 

 

10 Ways to Motivate Employees in a Tight Economy (without Financial Incentives)

Study after study has shown that what motivates employees is not money. Money can make employees unhappy if they are not sufficiently compensated, but it has not been shown to lead to motivation, satisfaction or performance.

 

Fortunately, in a tight economy, what motivates employees most are free things, such as:

 

1.      A manager who expresses caring and compassion for employees.

 

2.      Clear job expectations and feedback.

 

3.      Being on high-performing work-teams with inspiring coworkers.

 

4.      Being praised at least once per week. Specific praise is better than general praise.

 

5.      Providing opportunities for training, growth, and development.

 

6.      Allowing employees to specialize and do what they do best.

 

7.      Providing employees with opportunities to take on challenges. The optimal challenge level for intrinsic motivation is 4 out of 5.

 

8.      The way that goals are formed—Goals framed as performance-mastery or performance approach are best. These are goals that are framed around improving or selecting the best. The least effective goals are framed as performance-avoidance, which means that the worst performance will be selected (the goal is framed around what to avoid).

 

9.      Framing goals around the type of motivation individual employees have. The most common three types of motivation are affiliation (seeking stronger relationships), power (seeking leadership), and achievement (seeking knowledge).

 

10.  Conveying a positive mood. The mood of leaders is contagious to others. Leaders who convey a cheerful mood have more positive, productive, and motivated employees.

Conflict Resolution and Mediation: How to Reduce Conflict Avoidance and Assertively Deal with Disputes

Workplace conflict and personal disputes are part of life. In fact, some of the most healthy growth opportunities and breakthroughs arise out of disagreements. The key is to how they are handled.

If you are never involved in disagreements, you may be conflict avoidant. Conflict avoidance means that disagreements make you nervous and you seek to avoid any ill feelings or negative conversations, often at the expense of getting your feelings heard and exercising your assertiveness skills.

Conflict resolution and mediation is almost always easier if there is a third party, objective mediator involved. A trained mediator helps everyone to keep their emotions down so they do not take over the process and productive outcomes can be achieved.

Mediation strategies depend whether you are part of the conflict or an external mediator. In many forms of workplace conflict and personal disputes, there are not outside mediators involved, at least not at first, so we’ll discuss how to manage conflict when you are part of it.

Here are some tips to get you going:

1)    Start with the facts. People often get engaged with their emotions and forget to do their research and start with the objective data. When you begin on an emotional tone, people respond to the emotion rather than the data, so begin with a clear focus on the facts.

 

2)    Look for common ground. Establishing common overarching goals has been shown to solve many forms of personal and professional disputes. Even if the common ground is very, very small at the beginning, start there.

 

3)    Express empathy. If the other party does not feel that you’re listening and that you understand where they’re coming from, they will resist your influence. Before seeking to make your points, seek to understand and express what you understand the other party’s position to be.

 

4)    Mirror emotion. This goes along with how you express empathy. If the other party is visibly upset, you don’t want to respond in an upbeat or overly calm tone because they will just get more irate. Instead, as you express empathy use similar emotional language and tone to what they are using.

 

5)    Give and take (but give first).  The law of reciprocity is one of the most powerful strategies of influence. In all disputes, you seek to influence the others to your way of thinking. According to the law of reciprocity, when you give others naturally want to give to, so start with giving. 

 

6)    Get feedback—on yourself. Ask someone outside of the conflict who will tell you the truth if you are being stubborn or ridiculous in your position. It may give you the incentive to negotiate if you’re standing firm is unreasonable.

 

As a general rule, you want to pick your battles. There are times when conflict avoidance is a good thing—so you don’t overreact to every small disagreement. When you decide that it is a good time to confront a situation, use these dispute resolution skills and you’ll find reduced defensiveness and increased collaboration from the other party.

List-Building and Social Media Marketing: Keys to Branding Yourself Online

Not so long ago, the big question in the marketing world was, “How big is your mailing list?” Now, with the rapid advancement of social media marketing, the question has become, “How many Facebook friends do you have?” or “How many people are following you on Twitter?”

I’ve struggled with the temptation to get caught up in the numbers, and have chosen to go for quality over quantity. Here’s why:

·         Having people in your network who are nowhere near your target audience doesn’t really benefit you.

·         There’s a maximum number of connections that you can have in many social networking communities (such as Facebook) so you don’t want to “waste” valuable spots.

·         In reputation management, you can become guilty by association. If you accept friend requests (on Facebook) or follow (on Twitter) everyone under the sun, you may be associated with people who give off the wrong impression.

·         Your brand is not about the numbers. It’s about the perception that people have of you. If we spend more time focusing on that, we’ll attract the right people.

The argument for the flipside (casting a wide a net as possible) is the 6-degrees of separation theory—that you never know who knows someone who knows someone who’s a perfect match for your business.

I’ve taken an intermediary approach. Some rules I’ve created for myself for whose invitations (when I don’t really know the person) to accept are:

·         They must have a photo.

·         The photo must be professional and not racy or otherwise off-putting.

·         They must appear to be looking for business connections and networking (rather than dating or friends).

·         They must be or their networks must be in the countries in which I do business.

I have many friends and colleagues who quickly exceeded the number of connections they can have and now regret not being more selective. I also have friends and colleagues who found great business connections in unlikely places, so I’m trying this hybrid approach, and we’ll see what happens.

It will be interesting to see how the whole social media experiment (it is all so new and untested at this point that I call it an experiment) pans out.

Be mindful to boost workplace confidence

You walk into a networking event by yourself. You don’t know anyone but you know that there are some good contacts for you in the room. You felt uncomfortable about going but managed to get yourself there. Now what?

 

You notice yourself leaning against a wall and think, “How should I stand? I look awkward?” You see groups of people talking and think, “I should go over there, but what should I say?” You feel yourself getting nervous and you start to notice your heart pound and you feel short of breath.

 

As all of this is happening, what are you focused on?  Yourself.

 

When you focus on yourself, you become more self conscious. This makes you less comfortable and confident.

 

One powerful solution is to learn how to focus your attention outside of yourself. When you focus externally rather than internally, your worries subside and you get engaged in the situation.

 

This tool works great for interpersonal situations, but holds true for many things. It is a core tenet of mindfulness and it allows you to:

 

·         Be fully present in the moment

·         End the vicious cycle of worrying

·         Enjoy what’s happening around you

·         Be more focused and productive

 

So how do you focus externally?

 

One simple and tangible way is to use your five senses.

 

Practice taking in information from the world around you with your senses. At the networking event, you’re listening to what others are saying. You’re observing their facial expressions. You’re noticing the smell of the food and the temperature of the air.

 

You can practice this skill in everyday situations. If you go for a walk, observe the smells, sights, sounds, tastes, and feel of the air on your skin and ground under your feet.

 

The key is that you do all of this with a nonjudgmental attitude. This means that you don’t observe the facial expressions of others and think, “What are they thinking of me?”

 

You simply observe.

 

This is one of those things that is complicated in its simplicity. It will require practice, but the more you do it, the more you’ll be able to take control of your attention and turn it external when you need to.