Category Archives: retroalimentacion

Sintonízate.

autoconciencia, empoderamiento, empoderamiento profesional, liderazgo, retroalimentacion,

tune inEmpezando ahora mismo, te invito a que por una semana manejes al trabajo con el radio apagado, hagas ejercicio sin iPod, y te acuestes a dormir con el televisor apagado.  Mas que buscar reducir la polución de ruido, busco reducir tus estímulos externos y así ayudarte a sintonizarte a tu vocecita interna.  A que escuches y entiendas esa conversación constante que llevas en tu cabeza.

Y si eso de ponerte en contacto con tu vocecita interna te huele a incienso – y te parece que es solo para los alternativos – considera lo siguiente: 

  1. Escuchando el contenido de esa conversación interna, prestando atención al tono que usas y a la intención de lo que dices, lograras entender la causa de tus acciones.  Y esto te dará poder para cambiar aquellos comportamientos que no te favorecen y a repetir aquellos que si.
  2. Prestando atención a tu dialogo interno lograras identificar que te lleva a espichar el gatillo y reaccionar explosivamente ante ciertas situaciones.  ¿Por qué, por ejemplo, hay veces que sientes rabia cuando tu jefe te pide un favor y otras veces la ayudas con gusto? 
  3. Familiarizándote con tu vocecita, entenderás que más que la perfección, es la búsqueda de la excelencia lo que te llevara a alcanzar tus metas.  ¿Por qué, por ejemplo, antes de tomar una decisión en tu trabajo sobre analizas tanto la situación que terminas paralizada en inacción?  ¿Estas buscando alcanzar resultados o evitar el fracaso? 
  4. Entendiendo tu dialogo interno sabrás porque evades por completo ciertas tareas en tu trabajo, otras las dejas para ultimo momento, y sin embargo hay otras que asumes con gusto y casi de inmediato.    

Ahora si, ¿te le mides a un poco mas de silencio?

 

Gracias por la foto Cafe Central.

¿Te suena familiar?

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Dead endEs a diario que me tropiezo con personas que sueñan en grande – y ahí se quedan.  Es decir, sus acciones ni filosofías soportan sus aspiraciones.  Mas bien viven guiados por sus miedos, flojeras e inhibiciones. 

Aquí comparto contigo las filosofías más populares con que me tropiezo – al hacerlo aspiro a que tú, diferente a ellos, no le metas auto goles a tu carrera – a que tu desarrolles una carrera guiada por tus ambiciones:

  1. Respeta la ley del menor esfuerzo.  Por ahí he escuchado que si estas trabajando muy duro, estas haciendo algo mal.  Con esa idea en mente, proyéctate a 10 años en el futuro.  Han pasado 10 años en tu carrera – de ir día a día al trabajo para buscar formas de hacer el menor esfuerzo sin ser descubierto. ¿Se te ha ocurrido como progresaría tu carrera si tú no le metes esfuerzo?  Ahora proyéctate 10 años en el futuro después de pasar día a día trabajando con intención, visión y compromiso. ¿Que tendrías al final de los 10 años? Es obvio ah?  Si tú no le metes la chancleta a tu carrera, tal como un carro – no ira a ningún lado.  Si se la metes, por medio de tener metas claras, buscar oportunidades, arriesgar, aprender y demás, pues andará divinamente.  Inténtalo y veras. (y me cuentas)
  2. Aprende lo menos posible.  Eso me lo recomendó un mesero en uno de los hoteles donde trabaje como aprendiz de pastelería.  Con toda certeza, el mesero me explico que entre mas supiera hacer, pues más me iban a poner a hacer.  Y que yo para que quería eso.  Eso hace 15 años.  El verano pasado vi a ese mesero en el mismo puesto, en el mismo hotel. 
  3. Haz solo lo que esperan de ti.  Parecería que aquellos empleados que constantemente sobrepasan expectativas son aquellos que son demasiado temerosos para exigir respeto de sus jefes.  Aun así, es un hecho que aquellos empleados que van mas allá de lo esperado son a los que le ofrecen oportunidades para progresar en sus carreras.  Sin duda, ir mas allá de lo esperado es una inversión en tu carrera.
  4. Ojos que no ven… Más y más de nosotros trabajamos desde la casa o afuera de una oficina – sin un jefe que respire encima de nosotros.  Siendo así, es muy fácil dejarse llevar – y no trabajar.  Pero en realidad ¿es necesario que un jefe nos supervise para que trabajemos?  Acaso ¿trabamos para el jefe – o para nosotros?
  5. Piensa que trabajas para vivir – no que vives para trabajar.  Claro que la vida esta compuesta de más dimensiones que el trabajo – y una carrera.  También es un hecho que pasamos una gran parte de nuestras vidas trabajando. Entonces quieras o no, el trabajo es una dimensión importante en tu vida. Tal como lo son tu familia, tus finanzas, tu comunidad y tu espiritualidad.  Tan cuanto aceptes esa realidad – y pares de resistirla – mas pronto encontraras un trabajo que te llene. Y más pronto encontraras el punto de sostenibilidad en tu vida.

¿Y entonces que filosofías guían tu vida laboral? ¿Están sincronizadas con tus aspiraciones?

Rejoice! Strategic Job Hoppers

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For those of you who haven’t heard, last week was important for job hoppers around the world. UpMo, an online service with the tag line: GPS Your Career, turned 1!

Taken from their website:

“Your greatest risk during tough times is not unemployment; it’s the risk of losing career control and direction.”

As a self-proclaimed strategic job hopper, I’m an advocate of tools that empower people to manage their careers strategically.  For several reasons, UpMo achieves that.

It offers:

  1. Customized feedback that’s supported by actionable advice.  The “Network Readiness Evaluator” takes about ten minutes to complete.  As its name implies, it rates your networking readiness.  More important, it also offers personalized advice on the areas that you can improve upon. (Hint: answer honestly – as if no one’s watching)
  2. Benchmarking information.  The team at UpMo was not afraid to set the bar high.  They reverse engineered the careers of professionals earning upwards of $200,000.  That means that their advice is based on the habits of high achievers, offering you a unique opportunity to size up your career against theirs.
  3. A powerful tool to plan your career with the end in mind.  UpMo has a tool which lets you play forward your career decisions. For example, it will help you find out how an MBA will impact your longer-term goals. And what about taking time off?  All based on the paths of high achievers.
  4. Visually appealing tools.  For visual learners, UpMo will feel like candy for your brain.  For those who have trouble visualizing, the colorful graphs are likely to kick start your mental juices.
  5. Tools and templates for you to apply their feedback.  Almost from the get go you can start working on the areas of your career that need improvement.  UpMo offers several straightforward tools like “My Action Plan” which helps you track your immediate, weekly, monthly and longer term progress.

Indeed, UpMo set out on an ambitious mission.  For now it’s delivering on its promises by offering users a one-stop-shop career planner.

Careerists of the world, what are you waiting for to move up?

FREE career advice from Bill Gates

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(Post inspired by Bill Gate’s talk at TED 09.)

In his talk at TED this past week-end, one of the questions that Bill Gates explored was: 

How do you make a teacher great?

It is worth paying attention because our careers stand to benefit from his answer.

Monkey see, monkey improve.

As Bill explained, it’s not that easy to answer his question since there’s very little data to show what makes a teacher great. This is a critical issue for anyone aiming for greatness. Quite simply if we don’t know what greatness looks like, how do we know when we’ve found it? And, how can we learn and emulate it?.  The opposite of ‘monkey see, monkey do’ comes into play.

This is no secret to the world of sports. Tennis is a great example. Tennis aficionados out there (like me) know that by observing Rafael Nadal or any of the players on the professional circuit, we stand to improve our game.  More so, as part of their training, most elite athletes watch recordings of top performers.  Athletes know that when monkey sees, monkey improves. 

You and I can apply this to our careers by focusing on imitation-worthy people.  Bill Gates may be a good start. But you need not go that far. Look around you.  Do any of your colleagues, bosses or clients have traits that are worthy of imitation? The key is to be open to watching and learning.

See no evil + hear no evil = missed opportunity.

He then moves on to highlight the importance of receiving feedback. According to Bill’s research (I trust he has done his homework) teachers in the US public system are receiving very little feedback about their performance. There tends to be a clause in teachers’ contracts that limits the amount of time the school’s principal can spend observing a teacher in real time.  Even when a principal is allowed to observe, the teacher must be notified ahead of time. Naturally that means that the teacher gets a chance to modify their teaching techniques and be on their best behavior while in the presence of the principal.  While this might accomplish a better review, (by faking it) the teacher misses an opportunity to learn what they’re doing well, and what could be improved or eliminated.

Most of us at work do not have the luxury of being observed. Even so we still stand to benefit from Bill’s ideas.  By being open to feedback and asking for it from our managers, colleagues and even clients.  Rather than seeing feedback from others as a personal attack or a threat, we could decide to welcome it as an opportunity to up our game.  The key then is to be open to feedback, to ask for it, to implement it and to track our progress.

Thanks Bill.

 

Photo by James Duncan Davidson/TED

Getting out of the (procrastination) rut

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It’s gotta be exam time in Australia because in the past few weeks I’ve received several emails from my Gen Y readers asking me if I have the cure for procrastination.

After my jaw dropped when I found that in Google there are 4,890,000 entries for procrastination, I decided to share with you what I’ve learned to do through the years to get myself out of the procrastination rut.

(I’m still wondering how often all those sites dedicated to procrastination get updated…)

Plan A: Schedule tasks I dread for first thing in the morning, between 8-11 am.  I find that tackling something I’ve been dreading first thing sets a really nice tone to my day.  Try it tomorrow morning.

If for some reason plan A doesn’t work, I bring out the big guns.

Plan B: I fill the task with meaning by following this simple visualization:

1. I close my eyes and start taking deep breaths. Then,

2. I ask myself: “Why do I want to accomplish this task?”  In other words, what will it mean to me when I’ve finished my board paper, expense report, promotional letter, or whatever it is that needs to get done. Then,

3. I try to imagine how will I feel when that paper, report or letter is done.  I try to add as many colors and emotions to my picture.

4. Slowly I open my eyes.

I usually find that doing this psyches me up and pulls me out of the rut and into action.

If plan B doesn’t do the trick, I do what a Buddhist monk taught me – I surrender and remind myself that everything is impermanent.  That surely doesn’t get the job done, but at least it makes me feel better about procrastinating. (Please don’t try this one at home…)

You become what you read

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In line with an earlier post where I talk about taking responsibility for outcomes in your career and striving to give work the best version of you, I believe that one of the best (and easiest) ways to self-actualize is through reading top-shelf publications, including books and journals – both on-line and off.

Reading – of the good kind – is perhaps one of the best things that I’ve done for my career.  That is why it irks me every time that I see a girl on the train, wearing what look like excruciatingly painful high-heels* and too much make- up for day light, holding a New Idea magazine (I prefer to call it No Idea – it’s Australia’s #1 gossip mag).   To me that train ride is a missed opportunity for her to learn something of value and do something with her life.  While I believe that a little brain candy is necessary to keep sane in life, it should by no means be something that a. one spends much time on or b. any money on.  You read right. 

My personal rule of thumb for keeping sane and staying actualized is 90/10. That means that I spend most of my life time reading worthy material and only 10% reading mind-numbing stuff.  If you’d like to stick to the infamous Pareto Principle, by all means shoot for 80/20 – or risk turning into a personality-less consumerist. 

I think I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve bought (with my own money) a beauty magazine.  (Okay, I admit that getting beauty and gossip magazines from doctors’ consulting rooms, was one of the perks of working as a medical sales representative)  However, I cannot keep track of the number of National Geographic, The Economist, Time, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, inc. and Entrepreneur that I’ve invested in. 

While I do believe that EVERY publication, whether top-shelf or not, has SOMETHING to offer, I don’t believe in looking too hard to find gold.  More so, statistics say (and don’t ask me how statisticians come up with this stuff) that you get an average of 10% from any book that you read.  So if you insist on reading crap, well, you do the math…

By far the book that has had the most positive impact on my career has been (drum roll please) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (http://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php). My intention is not to give you a summary here – my intention is to get you to get off your bum and read it if you haven’t.  I read it for the first time more than 10 years ago and some of the principles that Stephen writes about continue to guide me.  Sure, his writing can sound like a sermon at times – but for those of you looking to take your career seriously, this is the Bible. 

(I know that my dear friend James Adonis – a very successful twentysomething, would agree. Check out his new venture: www.teamleaders.com.au)

3 of Stephen’s habits that remain on the top of my mind are:

1. Be proactive.  In my world, this has meant quite literally: ‘get off your bum and go get things done for yourself – cause no-one will make things happen for you’.  Maybe that’s the reason why I get up at 5:10am every day to meditate for 20 minutes, then I read for 20 minutes and then I go to the gym for an hour.  All this is to make sure that I give my work the best version of my self.  That includes a focused mind, an actualized self and an oxygenated brain & body. 

2. Begin with the end on mind.  I remember that when I finished reading that chapter, I took out a pen and paper and wrote down what I’d like my life to look like when I looked back on my 100th birthday.  Doing that exercise sure fired me up.  That was when I realized that it was up to me to make out of my life what I wanted my life to be.   It became clear to me that if I did not know where I was going, then I’d be leaving myself for the taking of those who did know.

3. Put first things first.  I’ve taken this habit to a more practical level. The time management matrix that he offers for separating the urgent from the important is probably the best model that I’ve seen for getting things done at work. Ever since the days when I was working as a pastry chef, almost 10 years ago, I’ve been following a time-management ritual.  I plan my weeks on Thursday afternoon and my days the night before.  Every Thursday I jot down everything that I’d like to get done the following week; my to-do list.  Then I go through the list and for each item I ask myself: ‘is this urgent? or is this important? or both?’  Then I mark the urgent and important with a letter A, the important with a letter B and the urgent with a letter C. Every night of the week, to get closure on my day and to get psyched up for the next day, I go through my to-do list and re-prioritize it based on what I’ve accomplished so far.  By doing this I’m making sure that I’m focusing on what’s most important in my life – not in someone else’s.

What have you done for your mind lately?

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*For the record, I believe in wearing stilettos at work. But please, if you need to walk on hard city pavement for more than two blocks, do me a favor.  Get yourself a nice-looking shoe bag so that you can keep your high-heels in your purse.  Then change to them in the elevator – feet binding is so passé ladies!

Note: I do not and will not get any remuneration from any provider if my readers – you – buy or use any of their services…I’m just sharing the wealth cause I care about you!

Does it matter if you’re a Baby Boomer, a Gen Xer or a Gen Yer?

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(Thanks Jane for your question)

When it comes to career ownership, in my book, it really does not matter if you’re 50, 40, 30 or 20. In an interconnected world, where we are all free agents we must be able to own our career and run it like a business. For that reason the advice that I give about career ownership in this blog (and in my upcoming book), has no generational boundaries. 

To not risk being dragged by someone else’s vision or risk working towards someone else’s dreams, you need to follow a set of principles and have strategies in place.  The fact is that it’s never too late or too early to be in the seat of power of your career.

To achieve that you need to:

  1. Work as an owner-employee.  In career-speak this simply means that as an employee you should work with an employer, not for them.  In my mind, continuing to see yourself as ‘someone who works for another’ (which by the way is the dictionary’s definition of employee) is a form of self-imposed slavery. In my book that makes for cog-employees.
  2. Take full responsibility for your career growth – and do something about it.  As the one responsible for the outcomes in your career, you need to be able to change behaviours that get in the way of your goals.  I’ve personally found that by applying to my work-life a combination of techniques from Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and Positive Psychology, I have been able to improve myself on an ongoing basis.  Doing so is what guarantees that I don’t get stuck in self-sabotaging patterns.
  3. Know your key assets.  Self-assessing your personality style, your skills (and strengths), your values and interests is what enables you to know what rewards motivate you and what you offer to an employer.  Aside from this information being crucial for your sense of self-worth, it’s also very powerful when negotiating your next pay-package.
  4. Have a strategic plan.  A strategic career plan is what will enable you to make sound decisions for your career.  I personally find that planning my career in 5-year chunks gives me enough vision forward yet leaves me flexibility to change my course.  Regardless of the time-frame that you use to plan your own career, what’s most important is that you set out working with the end in mind.
  5. Have systems and processes in place that support your day-to-day work.  Quite simply, having a formula for consistently delivering high quality results is what ensures that you add value to an employer.  In exchange for great work, you have the option to command more money and more benefits.

Business Lessons from Inside a Cold Pool (part 2 of 2)

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Swimming lesson #2 – Your personal best is the only thing that counts

This is not for the softies – although my questions are somewhat soft.

Is winning the only goal even if it reinforces bad or mediocre performance? I think not.

And is losing the end of the world if a person has performed at their peak?

I think not.

Step outside of the pool with me as I show you what I mean by this.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on a tennis court on a sunny Sunday morning.  There, you are likely to find the recreational tennis player who only hits lobs and make-me-cringe sliced shots.  I guarantee that by playing that way, that person is beating a lot of other players and annoying the heck out of them too. However are they playing the best tennis that they have the potential to play? Far from it. 

That person is so obsessed with winning that they are willing to do anything – even look and play funny – in order to win.  In the case of this compulsive ball lobber and slicer, winning does not make them a good player.

Back to the pool.

As a competitive person myself, and not of the healthy kind, it was while swimming on a sunny Sunday morning that I learned to focus on my personal best, on the black line under my lane.  Some would say that this means that I’ve lost my competitive edge. I say that I’ve actually discovered what real wining is about.

Is it true, that if I beat someone who performs at a lower level than mine, that I’m a good player?  No because beating bad or mediocre does not make me good.  What makes me good is being able to perform at my peak.  And winning does not necessarily mean that I’ve achieved that.  I now know that my ambition to win is a distraction because it tempts me to focus on outcomes, not on the task at hand.  It’s when I’m able to be in the moment, focusing on the here and now, that I’m more likely to perform at my peak.  At that point, it really does not matter whether I swim faster than the guy in the next lane or sell more widgets than my colleagues.

The black line under my lane has become a reminder for me, inside and out of the pool, to focus on my personal best.  That black line is there to remind me that it does not matter how fast or slow the guy on the next lane is going.  What matters is the pace of my breath, the follow-through of my strokes and the strength of my kick.  That is what will take me to the finish line, not looking side-ways to figure out what the other guy is doing.

As Po Bronson says so well, “jealousy and envy are the enemy of creativity.” 

The question for you sitting at your desk reading this, is are you so obsessed with winning, that you’re willing to stoop down to the level of the compulsive lobber/slicer, or are you determined to focus on the black line under your lane to perform at your best – at work and in life?