The Career Edge™

Being an effective communicator is a given for successful Salespeople. And, another obvious skill is active listening, but the key to active listening is being masterful at the listening part versus waiting for your turn to talk. You can't hold on to what you want to say but rather need to listen to respond with relatable information. If your responses are not aligned with what a prospect is saying they need, you risk demonstrating a lack of understanding. The other skill that powers this knowledge is empathetic concern.

 Listen to this bonus episode of Bright & Wize if you are interested in understanding how Active Listening, Empathetic Concern, and Effective Communication integrate to help improve closed sales rates.

 Skills Covered:

• Active Listening
• Empathetic Concern
• Effective Communication

#listening #activelistening #empathy #empatheticconcern #communication #effectivecommunicaion #careersuccess #brize #bebrize

Strategic thinking is an involved process that leverages several soft skills. It starts by seeking understanding (Active Listening & Intellectual Humility) and focused, effortful thinking where reason dominates (Critical Thinking), which is the opposite of our typical every day, automatic thinking. And it requires foresight, which is the ability to identify reactions four, five, or six steps beyond an initial action (Problem-Solving).

Being a strategic thinker is essential at work today – it is one of the most highly sought-after skills by employers. It leads to creative, innovative, breakthrough ideas that elevate our company's customer experience, eliminate problems customers face, or introduce processes that make a company run more efficiently. 

When we demonstrate strategic thinking and sound decision-making at work, it can lead to new work opportunities. It also leads to lower stress and anxiety because it eliminates the need to re-work some project or task and speeds up completing our responsibilities.

This bonus episode explores how to achieve the career goal of communicating more effectively. The unexpected big discovery of this topic is that communicating well is a process that starts before we say anything.

The soft skills needed to communicate so others understand us are: 

• Critical thinking
• Empathy, and specifically Empathetic Concern
• Building Strong Work Relationships
• Methodical preparation – and no conversation is too small to prepare for

The final step is critical to bringing together the data and knowledge we gain through the prior three skills so that you can answer the questions "what, so what, and why" when conveying your thoughts or ideas.

 If your goal is to communicate more effectively, this podcast will help reveal the skills needed to achieve it. 

 #criticalthinking #empathy #empatheticconcern #workrelationships #careersuccess #brize #bebrize

This is the first in a series of Bonus Bright & Wize podcasts dedicated to defining and explaining the skills that lead to achieving specific career goals.

 This episode explores how to Get a Promotion or More Challenging Responsibilities.

You will hear that ambition and a desire to achieve more are essential motivations for career success. And, you'll also learn that the critical element to career growth is exceeding the expectations of our co-workers. To do this, we need to produce high-quality work, show initiative, and demonstrate strategic thinking & sound decision-making.

 The skills that fuel these attributes are:

• Active Listening
• Intellectual Humility
• Critical Thinking
• Problem-Solving
• And then Taking Initiative

If your aim is a promotion or more challenging responsibilities at work this year, this podcast will help you define a to path to achieve it.

#strategicthinking #decisionmaking #listening #humility #criticalthinking #problemsolving #softskills #initiative #careersuccess #brize #bebrize

There is a growing recognition that self-awareness is the secret to career success, happiness, and mental well-being. But the big challenge is knowing how to develop it. On this episode, Leslie shares information from the psychologists and career coaches who developed the educational content for Brize, including:

• How self-awareness powers career mental well-being
• The broader details of what it means to be self-aware
• How Brize’s approach eases the overwhelming feeling of knowing how to develop self-awareness and soft skills

 Brize users:

• Learn how to achieve their career goals
• Develop strong soft skills and deeper self-awareness through work-related exercises
• Strengthen their mental health and well-being

This week, we wrap up our conversation with Dr. Mo McCusker and Dr. Nikki Blacksmith, who share a secret to building self-awareness and succeeding at work. This episode may be short, but it is powerful.

To build self-awareness, you’ll hear that we need to seek knowledge of self, others, and us and what our emotions tell us.

 #selfawareness #curiousity #careersuccess 

This Bright & Wize episode with guests Dr. Mo McCusker and Dr. Nikki Blacksmith is jammed packed with insights and invaluable advice on how to embrace mistakes and failures versus fearing them.

As Nikki shares, a fear of failure is rooted in fear of looking foolish and how others will perceive us. She goes on to share that success is less about the mistake but rather how we handle it. When we take responsibility for our actions that might feel like a failure to us, others are more forgiving and will pitch in to help us fix it if needed. Mo shares that failure is a rite of passage in the start-up space and that teammates lift each other in work environments that accept mistakes will happen.

Listen to hear how mistakes and failures lead to success, why it is a mistake not to accept responsibility for our errors, and sage advice on steps to take to minimize the impact of our mistakes.

And you’ll want to hear the story Nikki shares about the brave professor who tweeted their CV, but it only included their failures. 

Another resource on this topic is the Brize app. It includes information on how to graciously accept responsibility for a mistake and then move on in the Intellectual Humility module. It also includes exercises to train our brains to look for the learnings in our failures.

#selfawareness #fearoffailure #softskills #humility

Over the last two weeks, Dr. Nikki Blacksmith and Dr. Mo McCusker have explained self-awareness, illustrated its value through the positive outcomes it produces, and guided us on how to develop this invaluable knowledge. This week Leslie shifts the focus of her discussion with Mo and Nikki to the barriers we can create to gaining greater self-awareness and performing at our best.

The first barrier they explore together is confidence and how low confidence can lead to self-handicapping or self-sabotaging behaviors. Subconsciously, we can create obstacles to our belief that we can succeed and achieve our goals.

#confidence #softskills #careersuccess #impostersyndrome #selfconfidence #selfesteem

This week Leslie is back with Dr. Nikki Blacksmith and Dr. Mo McCusker, continuing their discussion on the importance of self-awareness at work. In this episode, Nikki & Mo share guidance on how to tackle building greater self-awareness.  A couple of key takeaways is that self-awareness is not a one-and-done process; we are continuously evolving and truly developing self-awareness requires more than understanding ourselves and ourselves in relation to others. Listen to learn the "and then...."

The process of building greater self-awareness includes:

• Assessing our current abilities, values, and aspirations
• Reflecting on our actions, behaviors, skills, and output 
• Defining and developing any needed changes

#selfawareness #softskills #careererperformance  

 

This episode’s title is a declaration of why Leslie Ferry created the Bright & Wize podcast and the Brize app. Both aim to raise personal and other self-awareness to fuel career empowerment and success. 

Dr. Tasha Eurich coined self-awareness as the “meta-skill of the 21st century.” Dr. Nikki Blacksmith and Dr. Mo McCusker embody this belief and have dedicated their learning, research, and careers to empowering individual and team success through greater self-awareness and self-awareness in relation to others.

This is the first in several episodes where Nikki & Mo will share their expertise on the topics of: 

• Self-awareness. What it is and how it extends to learning about our colleagues at work.
• How it drives positive outcomes at work (and in life).
• How soft skills are critical to strengthening self-awareness.
• And finally, unknown barriers we all create to becoming self-aware and achieving our goals.

# careersuccess #selfawareness #softskills