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Archive for the ‘Success’ Category

Although the New Year has just begun there might be some of us who have already broken some of our New Year’s resolutions. When you set about making big changes in life, it makes sense to reflect back before moving forward.

Don’t neglect to take time to review and assess your personal and professional challenges and accomplishments of 2011 as you plan for an exciting 2012 to come. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you take time to assess your personal and professional challenges and accomplishments from the past year:

1. What are your proudest successes and accomplishments from this past year?

2. What people, books, events, or activities created good memories for you in 2011?

3. Who and what supported your personal and business growth and success this year?

4. How consistent is your work with your deepest values?

5. What are you most grateful for this year?

6. What slowed you down or stood in the way of fulfilling your intentions?

7. What unexpected opportunities came up and what did you learn from them?

8. What have you been putting off that you know you need to execute on before the end of the year?

9. What goals did you fail to achieve and why?

10. What big, major goal are you working on for 2012?

Now here’s a bonus question:

How can you bring more love, enjoyment, and peace into your life in 2012?

Taking the time to think about what you’ve done, what you wanted to do but didn’t, and what you’d like to do in the year ahead is a great way to get some closure and begin the year on a positive note. Be sure to celebrate your accomplishments, but don’t punish yourself for the failures. Trying and failing is the only way to make forward progress.

Wishing you a healthy, prosperous and Happy New Year!

Marshall Brown, a certified career and executive coach, entrepreneur coach and personal brand strategist, has always had a passion for helping people find ways to live more fulfilling lives. As a coach, Marshall helps individuals to find their passions and encourages them to move ahead in reaching their goals. For more information, contact marshall@ mbrownassociates.com, 202-518-5811 or visit www.mbrownassociates.com.

Effective personal branding requires that you know yourself. Brands are based in authenticity. In this video for Personal Branding TV, William Arruda shares with you some questions you can ask yourself so you unearth your personal brand.

Whether you’re learning to swing a golf club, baseball bat or tennis racquet, coaches always emphasize the importance of follow-through. It’s not just hitting the ball that matters, it’s how you continue your swing once contact is made.

The same thing applies in job interviews, networking, sales and almost any work situation: without purposeful follow-through on your actions and interactions with others, you won’t really be able to reach your professional potential.

“Failure to meet deadlines, honor commitments, monitor staff, return calls and keep track of long-term projects is the most underrated cause of chaos and failure in business life,” writes Stephanie Winston in Organized for Success.

So often we feel we’ve completed a task because the action of it is “done,” but we underemphasize how powerful it is to continue developing, tracking and monitoring operations and relationships even after they’ve been set in place. As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan note in Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, “Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously. Following through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed timetable.”

It’s Not Just What, But How

When we think of follow-through, we tend to think of taking action. But a large part of follow-through is about first figuring out how things will be done. Once you define your goals, set aside some time to decide just how you will reach them. What steps will be needed to accomplish them? Who will do which steps and when? What is the desired timeline? If a strategy does not address the how, it is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Take meetings, for instance. A plan for follow-through should be detailed at the end of every meeting. “Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow through will be, who will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom,” Bossidy and Charan suggest.

Organizing and Delegating

A good organizational system will support follow-through more than almost anything. If you are among the organizationally challenged, do one of two things:

1. Make a vow, buy an organization book or two, reserve a weekend or a week, and just do it. Get organized once and for all. You’re not likely to follow through well, if at all, when the disorganization gremlin has hold of you. Getting organized is one of the biggest keys to success; not doing so is an extremely common and most unfortunate form of self-sabotage.

2. Hire someone to organize you and keep you that way. The investment will pay for itself when you begin following through more consistently.

Delegating should also be part of an organizational system. “Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill,” according to Bossidy and Charan. “Indeed, if you can’t do it, you’re not leading.” Delegating is an efficient way to ensure that the greatest number of tasks, including follow-up tasks, get done in the shortest amount of time. In other words, if you want to be successful, don’t be afraid to dole out the workload to others. The key is to always think in terms of the big picture instead of focusing only on whatever task is in front of your face at the moment.

Pro-activity and Integrity

Following through means taking action and keeping your word. Below are some additional considerations regarding follow-through.

•  When you say you’ll do something, be scrupulous in meeting your commitment, whether to a client, supervisor, customer or direct-report. If you can’t deliver it, don’t promise it.

•  In job interviews and networking, rapid follow-up can mean the difference between landing the job and/or client. Hiring decisions are often made very quickly after interviews. And getting in contact with people soon after meeting them means they will remember you, increasing the likelihood they will eventually buy from you.

•  Be sure to send a thank you note after you close a sale or receive any courtesy. This will make you stand out from the others, inviting an ongoing relationship to develop, or continue to develop. Also, a short thank-you note gives you a great excuse to add anything you forgot to say in a meeting or interview, or to highlight details you only glossed over.

•  All top salespeople are masters at follow-through. Lack of follow-through is the primary element missing when sales are not keeping pace with leads generated. You may have hundreds of leads with a great deal of potential. But unless you follow through and actively market/sell to these leads, they will not turn into sales.

•  Following through after sales have been made also makes good financial sense. Getting business from new customers costs significantly more than securing additional business from existing customers.

When it comes to follow-through, something is better than nothing. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing. The best is to follow-up as frequently and best as you can, a practice that can even affect productivity positively.

“On a day-to-day basis, consistent, automatic follow-through can deflect a lot of the firefighting that can push your day off course,” Winston writes.

If you’d like some support in honing your ‘follow-through’ skills, contact me today and let’s talk about how coaching can help you to achieve the life you desire.

Photo credit: Mark Eglan

Great ideas can mean the difference between mediocrity and huge success, between boredom and passion. Whether you want to streamline a process, write a best-selling headline or start a killer business, consider the following tips:

1. Pay attention. Awareness is the first step of anything. Take in all the details as they are; then you can begin to develop ideas to address the facts.

2. Stimulate creativity. What helps take your mind in different directions? A day off? Chasing your 2-year-old? Dancing? A mastermind group?

3. Examine your beliefs. What thoughts keep you stuck in the same old same-old? Which ones sabotage your efforts or keep your ideas small?

4. Play. Play with words. Play with concepts and characters. Play both inside and outside the box.

5. Identify the “juice.” What is it you LOVE to do? See if you can incorporate that—or the energy of it—into your ideas.

6. Get your pen moving. This writers’ trick works in all kinds of scenarios to generate great ideas. Just start writing.

7. Notice what’s not working. The heart of a problem is rich with possibility for creative solutions.

8. Ask. Solicit input from people in your field of interest. Or, if you’re spiritually inclined, ask for guidance from whatever you consider your “higher power.”

9. Be open. Ideas can come from anywhere. Your teenager may articulate just the thing that will work for your needs.

10. Keep track. Great ideas are often born while driving or running or sitting at the beach. Keep a tape recorder or notebook always handy to capture them.

“If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.” —Jim Kouzes, co-author of Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It

When people trust and believe in you as a leader, they’ll follow you far and without much question. But without credibility, that critical foundation of leadership, you face an uphill battle, because you’ll have the extra strain of trying to pull people along with you. And whether you’re the one pulling or the one being pulled, pretty soon you’re both weary and ready to give up.

Credibility stands on several legs: expertise, trustworthiness and integrity.

Expertise is an objective judgment, determined by such things as your credentials, your rank in the company and your prior accomplishments.

Trustworthiness is a subjective judgment, formed over time from a person’s experience interacting with you. Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Do you know what you say you know? How does it feel to work for you?

Integrity is another subjective judgment, formed over time from a person’s observations of you. Do you walk your talk, or do you say one thing and do another? Are you honest? Do you admit and take responsibility for your mistakes?

You may think you have a pretty good sense of your credibility among your team members, but what are they really thinking?

One of the best ways to truly know how people are experiencing, observing and judging you as a leader is to conduct a 360° assessment. Named for the 360 degrees of a circle, this type of assessment measures your performance from the perspective of everyone you work with, including your direct reports.

It takes courage to enter into this process. You may not like everything you hear, and it may highlight some things that need changing. And that’s exactly why bringing credibility issues to the surface is such a crucial matter.

On the other hand, you may be doing most everything right, but your credibility in the eyes of your team members is still not where it needs to be. The most likely cause is that they don’t see what you’re doing.

In this case, it’s time to become more visible in the organization. Turn your office into a fishbowl and reveal what’s been going on behind closed doors. Then, get more involved and aware of what everyone else is working on. Practice “management by walking around,” the successful Hewlett-Packard strategy that Tom Peters and Bob Waterman popularized in their book, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies.

A 360° assessment will reveal how credible you are in the eyes of your team. Then you’ll have the opportunity to improve that rating. It’s not enough to have the expertise and credentials. Your team members need to observe and experience your trustworthiness and integrity for themselves. So open up the office door more often, and get out and interact with people more. Show them you’re someone they can believe in.

Author’s content used under license, © 2008 Claire Communications

By Marshall Brown

Over the last several years, I have been reading more and more about the law of attraction. I was first introduced by the concept with the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know, followed by, The Secret. I listened to speakers on the subject, read a few books and the like.

Then about 4 years ago I was introduced to vision boards by two coaching colleagues of mine.  As they will tell you, I fought the idea tooth and nail, but I finally made one, and then we all shared each other’s stories and vision boards.  I still have it in my office and since then I have made  another one.  I have also had numerous clients of mine create vision boards for themselves.  I admit I haven’t done one recently, but I will when the time is right. By the way, my boards over the years have included places that I wanted to visit (of which 3 places I actually did go), and growing my business internationally (which has happened over the last 6 months). I also have to admit, some things haven’t occurred yet. I guess I just haven’t put the right energy into it yet.

What I am doing though, is reading The Law of Attraction, by Meera Lester.  It is based on the theories of Esther and Jerry Hicks, Michael Losier and Rhonda Bryne.  It’s a powerful book and very enlightening. I am not about to admit that I know everything about the law of attraction, but I can share with you some general steps to clear away some of the blocks that you might be facing.

1. Manifest positive thoughts

Write positive thoughts down imagining what you do want. Write it as if it already has happened. No butt’s! Reprogram your thoughts and let go of the negative baggage you might be carrying.

2. Cultivate feelings of self-worth

Know what you do have to offer and deserve to have. Forget the negative thoughts.

3. Focus on what you want rather than on what you don’t want.

Make a list of all the positive reasons why you deserve it and own it! Visualize it and declare it as yours.

4. Create space in your life for what you do want.

Clear out the emotional and physical space for what you do desire. Clear away the clutter.

5. Open your mind and heart to all of the possibilities and look at it from various perspectives.

Imagine it in different ways and fantasize about all the possibilities that could occur.

6.  Be grateful for what you already have.

Acknowledge the loving relationships that you may have, the possessions and other positive feelings.

One thing I try to remember is that the most important thing is to feel good. You will begin to see that as you focus on the positive and express gratitude for what you already have the universe will send you even more to be grateful for.

I am finding, and I hope you do as well, that we can have the life we choose. It just takes positive thoughts and a little imagination.

Resources:

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne New York, Attria Books 2006

Mastery of Abundant Living “The Key to Mastering the Law of Attraction” by Bruce Goldwell and Tammy Lynch 2007

The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham by Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks 2006

Having a great time in Thailand working with USAID! Amazing adventure on the River Kwai here in Thailand. Boat cruise on a bamboo raft and elephant riding!!

June 2011

Welcome to the June issue of According to Marshall…

There is a lot of information out there and most of us have little, or no time, to read it. My goal is to provide you, my readers, with relevant, important and up to date information that will help you in your business success. It’s just a quick summary, on various topics of interest, that I am sure will be relevant to your personal and professional success.

If there are particular subjects that you would like to receive information on, let me know. And if you want to share relevant information I would be happy to include it to my readers. Please feel free to send your information to me.

10 Tips to Get People to Act on Your Emails

by Jessica Strelitz, Smart Blogs

“Want to be more innovative? Stop doing all the stuff that is wasting time and sapping energy.”

Click here to read the full story

The Most Important Question a Manager Can Ask

by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback, Harvard Business Review

“The most effective way to find out what your employees need from you — and to be a better leader — is to ask “What can I do to help you be more effective?”.”

Click here to read the full story

9 Ways to Use Summer to Your Career Advantage

by Andrew G. Rosen, USNews

“As adults, most professions require we that we show up at the office, regardless of the season. While summertime can be considered “lazy days,” it’s actually the perfect time to up your game and advance your career.”

Click here to read the full story

Why Branding Your Resume Produces a High ROI

by Jessica Holbrook, JobDig

“It has been no secret in advertising and marketing for some time now that you need to know your target audience. In a job search it really isn’t any different. You need to know who you audience is, what their needs are and how to communicate the benefits of what you offer.”

Click here to read the full story

Properly setting expectations for directors and employees/team members is a critical dimension in quality workplaces, according to a study of managers undertaken in the 1990s by the Gallup Organization. Below are some tips on setting clear expectations that will set standards for excellence and results.

1. Start with a vision of what you want the end result to look like. Not just what you want done, but the results you want to achieve when the project is completed.

2. Discuss the how you define “excellent performance.” Paint a complete picture. Refer to your performance review form. Don’t assume.

3. Focus on the desired outcome, not on describing each and every step. Your goal is to guide, not control. Letting individuals find their own route toward productive outcomes encourages them to use their strengths.

4. Tie the mission of the department to each job. People want to know that their role, whether large or small, makes a difference.

5. Put the expectations in writing.

6. Stay on the sideline. You may be tempted to step in and ‘play the game’ for a subordinate, but if you do, no one will learn.

7. Give feedback, and often! The annual performance review is too late to let staff members know how they are meeting your expectations. Schedule informal review time weekly (quarterly for larger departments). Feedback given along the way sounds more like coaching, not like punishment.

8. Ask for staff members’ feedback on how they think they are doing. Two-way communication clarifies expectations.

9. Give positive reinforcement. Don’t mix negative and positive. Mention the thing you like and you’ll get more of it. Be specific and prompt.

10. Don’t take it personally. When staff members don’t perform as you think they should have, look for solutions, not blame.

May 2011

Welcome to the May issue of According to Marshall…

There is a lot of information out there and most of us have little, or no time, to read it. My goal is to provide you, my readers, with relevant, important and up to date information that will help you in your business success. It’s just a quick summary, on various topics of interest, that I am sure will be relevant to your personal and professional success.

If there are particular subjects that you would like to receive information on, let me know. And if you want to share relevant information I would be happy to include it to my readers. Please feel free to send your information to me.

If you have trouble reading this or seeing graphics click here for the online version.

The Stop-Doing List

by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón, Bloomberg Businessweek

“Want to be more innovative? Stop doing all the stuff that is wasting time and sapping energy.”

Click
here to read the full story

Why Goal Setting Doesn’t Work

by Ray Williams, Financial Post

“Despite the popularity of goal setting, there is compelling evidence that regardless of good intentions and effort, people and organizations often fall short of achieving their goals, whether it be to lose a set amount of weight or sell X number of widgets. More often than not, the fault is attributed to the goal setter. But the problem may actually be in the efficacy of goal setting.”

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here to read the full story

How to Market Your Skills in Your Job Search

by Curt Rosengren, USNews

“If you‘ve ever looked for a job, you’ve probably seen skills checklists, ones that ask you to tick off every skill on the page that sounds like you. The trouble with that is, when it comes to telling your story to a prospective employer, it’s still pretty one-dimensional. There’s nothing to back it up.”

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here to read the full story

Finally, Some Good News for Job Seekers

by Kimberly Weisul, BNET.com

“It’s time to get your resumes updated. Not only has the unemployment rate fallen to 8.8 percent, its lowest level in two years, but a new survey from CareerBuilder and USA Today suggests that more hiring is on the way, especially among large companies and those in the Western part of the country.”

Click
here to read the full story