The Career Edge™

Storytelling is a powerful tool for understanding many aspects of life, including the essential work skills that power our best performance. This week’s guest, Scott Montgomery, does just that by sharing an incredibly disappointing experience that led to future, incredible experiences. The ingredient that turned the situation around? He decided to take a positive, learning mindset versus a victim, negative one. His story is an excellent example of how we can all take control of our destiny and achieve our life goals.

While building his IT consulting firm, Worldgate, Scott discovered his passion for helping individuals foster a continuous learner mindset to find their best selves. He obtained an ICF-ACC leadership coach certification to ensure he successfully develops and mentees his employees and others. He now serves as a strategic advisor on Brize’s board and is the author of the upcoming book, How Did You Get Here? Lessons of Unconventional Success, both of which enable him to achieve his goal of helping individuals perform at their best and live their happiest lives.

In this episode, Brize's founder, Leslie Ferry, reflects on how academic success differs fairly significantly from the approach to performing well in our jobs. Her unique analysis stems from not only her career and education but from her recent years instructing a strategic marketing class in a master's program. Observing her students heightened her awareness of just how differently success is fueled between the two stages of our lives.

Leslie's perspective is helpful to individuals who entered the workforce in the last several years and those who manage individuals who entered the workforce in the last five to seven years.

Knowing our work style and that of your coworkers is a secret ingredient to working efficiently, influencing others, performing at your best, and lower work-related stress and anxiety. This super-power knowledge eliminates misunderstanding and misinterpretations of behaviors. It helps us determine how to best work with others to achieve our goals and influences progress. 

Listen to hear more about the four high-level work styles and discover your own.

In this episode, Pamela Coleman-Davis and Leslie Ferry dig deep into the actual sources of stress, which go beyond having too much to do, too few resources, and unrealistic deadlines. Although, these can all be factors of stress. Listen to identify what might be your current core source of stress.

In this final episode on stress, Pamela Coleman—Davis shares with Leslie Ferry how we can effectively manage our stress to stay at the positive, motivational level.

This episode is part 1 of 3 on the topic of stress. Pamela Coleman-Davis, a Leadership Coach, joins Leslie to explore this ever-present topic. 

We all experience stress -- there is no escaping it, but we can successfully manage it. But before Leslie and Pam jump to the punchline, they define what stress is compared to burnout in this first chat. They also explain how to recognize where we fall on the stress spectrum from positive, motivational stress to burnout and what lies in between.

#stress #stressmanagement #careersuccess #selfawareness

The stages along the path to understanding, defining, and then taking actions to accomplish our “why” vary for each individual. And this podcast has advice for everyone, whether you already know your “why” or if you are still defining it. 

Leslie is joined by Pamela (Pam) Coleman-Davis, a 25+ year corporate veteran who has successfully navigated extraordinary change throughout her career and is now sharing her experience and knowledge as a Leadership Coach. Pam and Leslie explore the power of intentionally defining our “Why” in life and at work. 

Some of what you’ll hear:

• Pam has not always known her way. But she focused on learning what she is good at and what she enjoys and doesn’t, which led to better career decisions in her pursuit to define her “why.”
• Our “why” doesn’t need to be groundbreaking; it just needs to reflect your values.
• Actions displayed by individuals who know their why can lead to unexpected opportunities.

From wanting to make more money to a desire to learn through more challenging responsibilities to balancing work and personal responsibilities, we are motivated to take actions that will get us there when we understand what we want to accomplish - purposeful actions.

You can learn more about Pam’s experience and approach to helping her clients at https://www.colemandavis.coach/.

#knowyourwhy #careergrowth #careersuccess #careercoaching

Congratulations on your new job! You are undoubtedly feeling a lot of emotions, possibly a little anxiety about the unknown. But hopefully, excitement for new possibilities and a heightened desire to have a positive impact. Kick-start your positive impact by ensuring the strength of your Active Listening, Building Relations, and Collaboration skills.

In Building Relationships, you will hear about the 4 primary work styles. To work collaboratively with all of our co-workers, we need to understand the uniqueness of each. You’ll hear how we can misunderstand the behaviors or actions of our colleagues when we are unaware of their work style, which leads to unnecessary stress and anxiety. 

Know your work style and then actively listen and observe your co-workers to identify theirs. 

• Harmonizer
• Introspective
• Energizer
• Captain

#careersuccess #activelistening #listening #workrelationships #collaboration #brize #bebrize

As we all know, humans are unique and complicated. We have individual talents, different stressors, competing personal and work responsibilities, personal traits, different approaches to work, and more. To be successful at work, we need to know how to navigate the uniqueness of our colleagues to ensure we work effectively together.

To build strong, collaborative relationships from the start, we need to understand different work styles and human traits, our organization’s functional area responsibilities, and natural cross-department tensions. We also need to be masterful at conducting relationship check-ins to ensure they stay on track. And if we disagree with a colleague, we need to take the initiative and have a conversation to get the relationship back on track quickly.

Last season on Bright & Wize, Dr. Nikki Blacksmith and Dr. Mo McCusker explained that confidence is a mindset that emerges from the highly interrelated human elements of neuroticism, self-efficacy, locus of control, and self-esteem. This episode revisits these personal elements that influence our confidence and then explores the soft skills that are foundational to building stronger self-confidence. These skills are critical thinking, problem-solving, communicating effectively, and knowing our strengths and weaknesses.

• Critical Thinking meets the esteem element of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because it powers accomplishing things or goals. Critical thinking leads to sounder decision-making and more successful outcomes. We more clearly see our value from these satisfying outcomes, increasing our self-esteem or self-worth.
• Problem-solving requires strong cause and effect analysis powered by critical thinking. A systematic, analytical approach to solving problems leads to the creation of solutions that address the core cause of the problem. With more successful results, we believe we can accomplish more ambitious goals. Which improves our self-efficacy and locus of control.
• Communicating effectively, confidently. After building stronger cause and effect and new data analysis approaches, it is time to present our opinions, ideas, or recommendations confidently. Effective communicators structure their conversations so that they are easy for their listeners to understand. With greater understanding comes higher recognition of our abilities by our co-workers, fueling greater self-worth.
• Strengths and weaknesses. Confident individuals recognize they are not experts at everything. They know what they do well and what they do not. They know asking for help is a strength in itself, and it leads to greater fulfillment and less disappointment, increasing their self-esteem or self-worth.