Thoughtful Kick Start Podcast

Most likely you have heard the expression, “begin with the end in mind.” Today we're going to delve deeper into that concept for the purpose of you enjoying outstanding career satisfaction and success.

That's the end and I have in mind for you.

The title of this program is “begin with your mind in the end.” I invite you to immerse yourself in a vision you have for the future. Close your eyes and visualize that possible future. You might first pick a date and time and place in the world where you’d like to be in the future. or an activity or career environment that you would most want to create around yourself. You could also consider few items and people you want at the same time for example wanting to live in a climate that suits your clothes and having a team of people working for you fully engaged on fulfilling your vision for your business.

Whatever you envision, stay with it for 5 to 10 minutes today or for 5-10 minutes longer than you usually stay in an envisioning kind of mindset. Revisit it tomorrow and everyday this week. Note some of the details. Create it to be as fulfilling as possible. Who are the people and what are the resources you need? What do you see? What you hear and smell – what’s the air like? Engage all your five senses.

If you put your mind in the end zone of your success, you are much more likely to have a vision with details that you can act on and fulfill. And send me a note. I would love to hear how we can help you make your dream come true.

So how about you? What’s something you envision for your ideal success in the future?

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

― Alan W. Watts, 1915-1973, British philosopher, writer and speaker.

Today we are going to talk about how to create a game. Make whatever you are doing exciting and fun. Perhaps you are unhappy with your work and are looking for a new job or career path. Or you are in business development looking to get more clients. Or you have a team to lead and are getting stuck or frustrated with how you are leading. There are some aspects of your work that are not fun. In fact, you could say that’s why it’s called work.

Work is not always supposed to be fun. But you can turn work into a game by using a couple of key strategies from well-conceived games. Look at any sports, or your favorite sport. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. There are rules and there’s a way of keeping score and keeping track of how you are doing along the way.

Here are some pointers borrowing from well-conceived games:

1. Frame up your goals. What would you like to achieve and by when? Set goals that are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. We don’t always apply them when we could. Look at an area where you want to achieve something and set a time frame around a specific goal you want to achieve.

2. Have a team. Even if you are doing something solitary like getting a new job. Don’t go it alone. Partner up with somebody. Let them know what is your game, what you want to achieve. Hold each other accountable.. And see if they want to create a game for themselves, too. Hold each other accountable. Tell each other how many actions you are each going to take and by when. Constructive accountability is a great part of winning a game.

3. Track your results. Keep a score card visible and handy. Anytime you have a base hit, you keep score and enjoy the little victories and progress along the way. It might also remind you that whatever you have been working on, that had not been fun before, is in fact a game you are playing to win.

4. Celebrate and review your results at the end of the game. During every game, you will be winning and learning even if you don’t always hit the results you had hoped to. Certainly, if you do hit your results, you want to celebrate your win.

So what about you? What are you pursing that you want to turn into a game?

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Confucius

Today and every day, I am committed to you enjoying outstanding career satisfaction. I want you to wake up every day excited to go to work, and to know that your work is meaningful, rewarding and lucrative. I want your soul to smile and for you to earn enough for your financial needs are met and the future of your dreams is on track.

Let’s explore the key motivators that will lead you to outstanding career satisfaction whether you are currently in a job you like a little or don’t like at all. These ideas also apply if you’re out of work looking to get back into the game, or if you are looking towards retirement.

Here are three elements to explore fully to get you great clarity:

1. Direction: Where does your passion and talent meet a market or society need? What do you love to do and are really good at? It’s important to explore this in specific terms because it will be the curtain rod that everything else in your search hangs on. For example, rather than just knowing that you like working with people, look more specifically if you prefer speaking to large groups of people or if you would rather listen listening deeply to people in one-on-one conversations toward solving problems. Get the idea? Explore what subsets of people you like speaking to and what topics deeply interest you. Maybe you are moved to alleviate the world’s hunger problems, or perhaps you prefer working with customers buying fast cars. You can do whatever you want.

Maybe you’re moved to alleviate the worlds hunger problems working with people in the third world, or maybe you want to work with investment bankers and private equity investors or companies in the Fortune 500. Maybe you want to work with companies in the middle market, or maybe you want work with patients at a hospital or maybe you want to work with administrators at a hospital. Whatever you want to do, there’s a group of people there to serve and a career path around them. You can do whatever you want you want as long as you are willing to create and sustain a commitment until you’ve succeeded. I am convinced that you will find more satisfaction if your work also makes a difference about something you care about, which leads me to the second point.

2. Making a difference: In my opinion and experience, people who burn out in their jobs are caught in a rut of doing the same old thing and need to create something new in their job that would make a difference to our planet. This will make them happier to be in their jobs. Obviously, some jobs lend themselves more clearly to this, for example if you raise funds for a non-profit. But whatever you do, you can make a difference. For example, if you are providing customer service to people driving fast cars, consider also putting some of your salary to a good cause like lending to women in the developing world start a business. Perhaps you could convince customers to contribute to a worthy cause while they are driving fast. When you are out making a difference, you inspire the people around you. And this will give you career satisfaction.

3. Plan your work and work your plan. The first two ideas in this blog post are meaningless unless put to work. If your career direction is unclear, contact me or your favorite career advisor to crystallize your career path. Then communicate this to the right people so that they know what you are doing with your passion and talent, especially as it makes a difference.

When you integrate those three elements into your work every single day, you will find yourself in an outstanding state of being engaged in everyday living and everyday working. And that will show up when it’s time to get promoted or to get more business from your next client.

So, what about you? What’s next for your career? Which of these elements will you strengthen first?

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.” –Japanese proverb

I am in the final days of a six-week career track boot camp to help 25 people, who have been out of work for two years or more, get into a job-fit shape. We did a lot of mental muscle building around a range of key job seeking skills ranging from maintaining the right frame of mind to taking initiative once hired in a new job.

It was a powerful collaborative effort that involved several organizations including the Westchester County Association, The WorkPlace, Career Edge, my own firm and one of my colleagues, Melissa Schnapp.

My excitement and inspiration is at a very high level from how the boot camp went and how the people participated. These 25 people won’t give up. They just keep trying. Other people who have been out of work for that length of time make poorer decisions than these students who were at least bold enough to sign up for a six-week boot camp. Their enrollment is the first inspiration.

We went through some key components, both as a group and individually, including:

1. Career Direction - clarifying an objective statement in powerful language. Some folks rebranded themselves in this exercise.

2. Marketing – we took a deep look at applying neuroscience and marketing strategy to radically change the approach to writing resumes and cover letters.

3. Interviewing – dealing with the most difficult interview questions that many people botch, including answers to challenging behavioral questions employers are now asking. For example, “Talk about a time when you had to work closely with someone whose personality was very different from yours.” The answer to a behavioral question like that must begin with “When I was (my title) at (company name),” and then must include a real specific example or paint a very specific picture. “When I was a Vice President at Google, at least 80 percent of my job was working closely with a staff of 12 that I managed and personalities were very diverse. One day …”

4. Taking initiative – when following up with a prospective employer, one must have done the homework when preparing to interview. With the information you have found in that preparation, you then follow up with relevant articles, invitations, insights and other value-added ways to be pleasantly persistent and engage your future employer to hire you. Then, when you are on the job, continue to find way to add value above and beyond your job description.

The feedback was fabulous. People were inspired. They gained a lot of practical knowledge and a strong sense of sustainable confidence. One participant wrote “Day by day I am feeling more and more empowered personally and professionally”

Another man came back to class midsession from an interview that was twice as long as any interview he had taken before. And he was, at that point so far, the only candidate to have met with the company’s C-level executives. This was an additional inspiration to everyone in the class.

Finally, I have to acknowledge the class for turning themselves into a collaborative community. People were bringing in job ads for each other, providing supportive feedback and role-playing mock interviews and even going out to a comedy club together. I’m moved by how they are being with each other and excited for their graduation.

More on this as it develops and on other career programs coming up. Watch this space or contact me if you’d like to know more.

For now, I ask, how about you? What’s next for you and your career?

My older son, Nathan, pleasantly reminded me of this inspiring thought when he quoted me on his radio program last week. He claims I told him, “If you doing good work, you are going to ask for help – if you’re doing great work, people are going to ask how they can help.”

In our day-to-day work and lives, we ordinarily have to do good things and do them as well as possible. There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary but this conversation is about being extraordinary in your career and in your leadership.

If you’re up to doing something extraordinary – something that you are willing to talk about that will make a difference for more people than you can imagine - you are likely to hear people say to you, “That’s exciting. How can I help?”

For example, in the summer of 2014, television anchor Matt Lauer and golf legend Greg Norman created the Ice Bucket Challenge as a way to raise awareness and money for the ALS Association. ALS, also known as “Lou Gherig’s Disease,” is a degenerative nervous condition that impacts mobility and breathing and is often fatal. While the Ice Bucket Challenge met with some cultural criticism, the “ALS association announced that at the end of August 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge had raised over $100 million, which is a 3,500% increase compared to the $2.8 million they had raised during the same period in 2013.” That’s 35 times more money!

Another example is the current Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, which among other points of political merit also highlights his resistance to super-PAC contributions. It’s outstanding that Mr. Sanders is only counting on a grass-roots effort of donations from individual supporters rather than go the route of other candidates who lean on big businesses and in today’s political environment have been cause of an erosion of trust in government among millennial voters.

With regard to your leadership, can you create a bigger mission and goal that will inspire people? The more you speak about an initiative that will make a difference for a lot people, the more people will become engaged and want to participate in seeing your vision fulfilled, and thereby it will make a greater difference. Can you see how you can inspire more energy, innovation and productivity from people if you play a bigger game that has a greater impact on more people’s lives?

This is one of the hallmarks of great leadership. In invite you to stay committed to being inspiring, developing yourself and others as great leaders and being a source of outstanding, fulfilling careers – including your own!

So, how about you? What are you up to that if you expand your goal and make it bigger, bolder and more impactful for a larger number of people, you will find that the people you need are going to get inspired to offer more help.

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." Mark Twain

This weekend I am going to be rappelling down the side of a building for an organization called Shatterproof My sister, Lori, is involved in the Shatterproof’s mission of bringing attention and better treatment to a disease known as drug addiction. We are hopeful that if recognized as a disease that requires treatment, rather than a stigmatized weakness, many lives will be saved.

In 2013, Lori’s son, my nephew, Matthew, lost his girlfriend to a relapse and heroin overdose even as the two of them had built over 2 years of sobriety together. These were bright kids and they were doing well, but drug addiction is a powerful illness.

My sister’s friend Gary Mendell’s son, Brian, lost his battle with addiction in 2011, and Mendell felt that it was time that people addicted to drugs in America had the equivalent of an American Cancer Society. He founded Shatterproof in June 2012, the first national organization to protect children from addiction to alcohol or drugs, to spare others the tragedy suffered by his own family.

The name of the organization is based on the idea of not letting a shattering experience, such as the death of a loved one, shatter your commitment to a fulfilling and purposeful life. In any of your pursuits, you are likely to hit roadblocks, have breakdowns and sometimes simply lack the time, energy and resources you’d prefer to have in service to your goal.

I’m inspired to talk about being shatterproof and being unstoppable in your life. If you want to grow your business to the next level, take your career to new heights or reach high for anything you want in your life, you can get it by setting your sights to the goal and never giving up from making it happen. No matter what tries to break you, be unbreakable. Be unstoppable. Be shatterproof! Can you feel the energy that can be generated by that kind of commitment.

Our fund raising is centered around rappelling down the side of a 22-storey building in Landmark Square, Stamford, Connecticut. I will be among some one hundred people who will be raising money this way to bring attention to our cause in this all-day event on Saturday, Oct 10. While it is an exciting challenge to scale down the side of this building, the most rewarding aspect is doing this for a worthy cause. If the spirit moves you, please donate through my link. MY FUNDRAISING PAGE.

So what about you? In what way and toward what goal will you be shatterproof this week?

Empowering Women To End Poverty

“On virtually every global measure, women are more economically excluded than men.” – The World Bank 2014 Gender at Work.

I have been fascinated by micro-finance programs that lift societies out of poverty through lending to small businesses and entrepreneurs. There are several reasons they target women in particular. First, women are the most vulnerable and poorest segments of society. Second, they have proven themselves more reliable than men to repay promptly. Third, women are more likely to spend the money on their children and households while men have tended to spend it on alcohol and/or gambling.

The non-profit lendwithcare.org says, “women are the change agents of the families because women spend a greater percentage of their income on the welfare of their household than men do. As a consequence, increases in women’s income improve the health, nutritional and educational status of other member of the household, particularly children.”

The non-profit notes that as women have become better organized, microfinance has formed a basis for addressing a range of other issues such as domestic violence, male alcohol abuse and in regions where women’s mobility is limited, women have become more visible and are better able to negotiate in a public sphere.

This also increases their self-esteem, their confidence, and their status both within the household as well as in the wider community. This is good for the women and for their children who are the next generation of income producers and pulls a community out of poverty.

A leading player and resource in the microfinance world is Kiva, an online portal at kiva.org. Individuals and companies lend to entrepreneurs through the kiva.org web site, which I have been using to support women business owners since 2011. Kiva has field partners in such places as Mongolio, Thailand, Cambodia, Paraguay, the Philippines, Ukraine, Dominican Republic and many other countries around the world. The statistics are staggering. Over $3 million of loans just last week were sponsored from regular people like you and me, giving from $25 and up, through Kiva’s website. Borrowers have paid these loans back at a rate of 98.6% which is less than 1 ½ percent default rate.

So, what about you? Will you take a visit to KIVA.org and choose a woman business owner to help be successful. When she pays you back, you get to recycle your donation and lend it to another woman entrepreneur.

I look forward to hearing about your successes lending through Kiva.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” John F Kennedy.

In your leadership career you will find it’s easy to keep the train on the tracks in the direction it is going. Leading people to keep doing what they are already doing is more in the category of management than leadership. Great leaders shine when they are agents of change; looking for where a market might be going and leading the way to capture that market, honing in on where improvements might make a business more profitable or identifying actions that would make a difference for people and the planet. Changes like these set you apart from the competition and make your business the place to be.

However, every individual in your environment has a different stomach for change. Everyone transitions differently. For example, research shows that men need to have more of a transition period and a framework for getting something new underway while women typically multitask and make changes more frequently.

While pain occurs with the breaking of connections and even the anticipation of it, pleasure is the making of and anticipation of making connections.

This is what you can do to take change from pain to pleasure:

1. Find the people that typically are more willing and more engaged in changes that are made. Gather input also from those who will be involved in implementing the change. Get these people involved in the process of creating the new direction. People are usually more willing to buy into something they had a say in creating.

2. Clarify a step-by-step process. Any time a giant step becomes too stressful, people might revert to their comfort zone. But if you break a big project into small baby steps, people would get accustomed to one manageable stage at a time and learn from each step along the way.

3. Celebrate each change and each day along the way with gratitude and appreciation for the people who are dealing with it.

So how about you? What is a new direction that you want to lead your team or your world toward, and how will you facilitate a smooth transition?

“…yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet”.

Managing one’s career is a long-term prospect. It starts with today and goes full circle.

Imagine if you started today to schedule some dedicated time - a few hours, a day or even a weekend retreat - to ponder these questions:

Where does your passion match your talent? And where do these overlap with market need? Where do you fit in society and meet a need in the world or in a market based on your passion and talent? This requires some thinking, perhaps even doing an assessment and talking to people.

Start to imagine 10 years from now what your career would look like. What would you be doing? What kind of environment will you be in and with what kind of people? What values would they have? If you had done that 10 years ago and followed that commitment along the way, today your dreams would have come true. And that's what we want for you - that your dreams come true.

Imagine a version of that 5 years from now. What would have to happen along the way? Or two years? Or this year? What are some of more of the short term steps that you have to take?

Write some paragraphs on this. Draw pictures. Allow yourself to immerse in the envisioning of your ideal career path. Then, come back to today and start planning, taking the action and sharing this plan with people close to you who will stay in a committed conversation with you to fulfill on your career direction.

In 10 years, and starting right away, you will be on the path of your dreams coming true.

So what about you? When and with whom will you schedule this soul searching for your career direction?

The word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of that force, the expression of the word, which is your own life.” -Miguel Angel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements.

Today’s theme is going to knock your socks off. The subject is declarations.

Declarations are often a beginning. They also sustain and provide momentum for the something new and powerful happening, something that might not otherwise happen.

A dictionary definition of a declaration is that it is something that is avowed or proclaimed. It’s important to understand and be aware of the power of declarations in your communication. All of your work and life accomplishments boil down to speaking and honoring your word - the things you say, promise and put at stake.

A tremendous example is the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrated this weekend - a statement that forged the United States of America into being an independent entity separate from Britain. In the 50’s Babe Ruth declared that he was going to hit a home run for a young boy who was sick in hospital and then did so. John F Kennedy’s famous declaration inspired people to rally “to put a man on the moon and return him home safely” within a decade. Wow!

More recently, President Obama declared that we would have health care reform which has been something that this country has struggled with for years. While not perfect, there is now a new health exchange.

The neuroscience on the subject is that the brain operates based on the programming we give it, primarily verbally. The more we speak with powerful declarations, the more our brains, and the brains of those who hear and believe in us, trigger behavior and commitment to fulfill on those declarations. There is biochemistry behind the notion that if you say it will be so, so it shall be.

I declared that this message would knock your socks off and it has or it will especially if you answer the next question powerfully and follow up with commitment.

So what about you? What’s a goal you are willing to declare will happen? What new actions and approach will you take this time to make it happen?