The One Thing That Makes Love Work
Feb/100
You can’t walk down the street at this time of year without seeing a schmaltzy couple draped over each other or a window full of love hearts. Whether you like it or not, the trappings of St Valentines Day can be seen everywhere.
Now, I’ll put my hands up right now and tell you that I’ve screwed up my fair share of relationships. I still get tongue-tied when I see a beautiful woman, I’ve pushed people away to protect myself and I’ve run round and round in circles wondering how things ’should’ be done.
Despite that, there’s a heap of things I do know about relationships. I know that it’s important to know what you really need from one; I know that you need to be in a place where you feel ready to be in a partnership with someone; I know you need to open up your baggage so that it doesn’t weigh you down or steer things in the wrong direction; I know that relationships aren’t about blaming someone else for what’s wrong or needing to be right and I know that the things you like and love about your partner are what matter, not what you don’t like.
But what I’ve also learned is that all of that stuff is useless without one, simple thing:
You have to be ready to let go and make it up as you go along.
I call this act of letting go “freefall”, because there’s a point where you just have to let yourself go; a point where you have to loosen your grip and let gravity take its course.
Love isn’t about game playing and it isn’t about logic, and all the relationship tips, advice, checks and balances mean nothing unless you agree to do this one thing.
Loving someone is scary, confusing and unpredictable, and the catalyst to making a choice to freefall is a big bag full of courage. You have to trust yourself to feel your way through and you have to forget about the old rules you’ve set and all the “should’s” and “ought’s” that set you spinning.
Be willing to make it up as you go along. Be willing to let your heart play a bigger role. Be willing to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing and be willing to take a chance.
As far as love goes, we’re all in the same boat. Play from the heart.
Steve Errey almost died at age 9 as he choked on a grape. Today, Steve is still feeling the effects of some extravagant spending but remains remarkably upbeat and positive. As a leading confidence coach with clients right around the world, Steve has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Read more at The Confidence Guy
Winning Sales Presentations: 5 Lessons That Add To The Sale
Jan/100
Debbie Mayo-Smith wrote about winning sales presentations and the techniques she learned from me!Thanks Debbie…
Creating a great sales presentation isn’t very different to crafting a great speech. You want to keep attention. Motivate. Convince. Move to action. Here is a formula that I follow (learnt from the Maestro Patricia Fripp) that should help you to vastly improve your success when putting together and delivering a sales presentation.
1.To whom are you speaking? Be prepared before you go in and know as much about your audience as possible. Age, attitude, industry and gender will all have a bearing on how you present your points. Men and women have different senses of humour. Younger audiences will be more impatient than older, C level executives don’t need the details. Your presentation style and content must fit their perspective.
2.You are not the hero What is the ratio of your PowerPoint slides (or written material) devoted to your company vs. the potential client? It stands to reason if you are invited to pitch, you have already passed the preliminary vetting. The convincing is done. Wow them, stand out from your competition by focusing on them – not stories of you, your company, achievements or accolades. Do you like listening to egotistical sales people? Share the glory with sales teams. Ensure you put the prospective company in the lime light.
3.I-You Ratio Likewise look through your sales presentations and count how many I’s, we’s and us’s you have. Make certain your slides and stories are about them, not you. Change the perspective at every opportunity possible. Wrong: Our company is number one in Right: You benefit from our number one standing because
4.Questions Don’t end with questions, rather take them before you review so you can close on a high note.
5.Review If possible use a story again – outlining a client that benefited in all the ways you highlight they will benefit.
Debbie Mayo-Smith (CSP; BSc Hons Econ) is an International Speaker, best selling author and expert in showing how you can free up time
Are You a Productive Person? Look at the Number of People Who Are Waiting On You to Get Back to Them
Jan/100
During the course of the average working day, we make a number of promises to get back to people. We make some of them verbally or in writing directly. At other times, we quietly make a personal promise to ourselves.
Many of us are resigned to what we believe is God’s cruel trick – not giving us enough hours in the day to respond to everyone. Others complain that they can never find the time.
The problem is that almost no-one tells the truth – their time management system isn’t doing the job that they need it to do.
What does time management have to do with getting back to people? Isn’t that a matter of simple courtesy?
Well, it used to be, but it no longer is.
In the good old days, we simply didn’t interact with as many people as we do now. In the past year or two, consider how quickly your Facebook network has grown. I had no idea that I knew 1,000 people, yet my list will top that number this year.
With the click of a few keys, I can send each of them a message, pulling them into my life in numbers and with a frequency that was unthinkable twenty years ago. As a result, on any given day, a bunch of them expect me to get back to them about one thing or another.
Many of us fail to respond to this increased expectation.
We are convinced that our memories are just not good enough. We believe that the older we get, the harder it is to remember, and there is a measure of truth in this assertion, according to the scientists. Above a certain age, we are losing brain cells each day, and with them goes our ability to respond.
We also live in the age of distractions – I just read an article in the New York Times that noted that the number of people who are reporting themselves as “injured while walking and texting” has risen dramatically. It’s tough to get back to people when we are pulled in other directions by 200 channels, sexy apps on our phones, IM’s, tweets and the like.
The flood of information coming our way has also been selectively blamed for blocking our attempts to get back in touch. There’s too much information coming at us to process and we can’t possibly find the time to reply to that snail-mail from Aunt Martha, who doesn’t even have a computer.
Fortunately, a real solution doesn’t have anything to do with better memory, less distractions or an escape from information. Instead, it has to do with how we manage our time.
Consider the habit that many have developed when an email arrives in their inbox.
If it requires a few minutes of either reading or thinking, most professionals will leave it for later once they have completed a quick glance. This particular habit isn’t a problem when applied to a single email. However, when it’s done a few hundred or thousand times, it creates a mountain of half-promises that we have made to ourselves, each saying “I’ll return to it when I have time.”
In other words, we are promising ourselves to get back in touch with the sender of the email when we get over our memory challenges, distraction and information overload!
It’s like smoking. Done once in a while, it’s not a problem to our health. Done to excess and it kills.
In the case of unreturned email, it kills not just our confidence in our abilities to stay on top of our game, but it seeps into our relationships, until we become one of those people who “never stays in touch.” All this because of a simple habit that almost all of us practice.
What we don’t see clearly is that we do damage to our reputations and to our time management systems when we don’t manage individual habits. A bad habit that becomes a ritual can drag down our productivity, without our knowing it.
The key is to make the connection: weak time management systems are made up by people who don’t manage their habits. For that reason, it’s a good idea to engage in what the consultants call “kaizen” – a Japanese word for continuous improvement. In other words, in order to prevent a time management system from becoming stale, it’s better to keep looking for habits to make it better.
After all, we are always upgrading our computers — why not something that’s even more critical to our effectiveness?
At the highest levels of performance, the most productive people have upgraded their time management systems to the point where getting back to people is not a problem.
In fact, if you ask them to tell you who is on their list of people to get back to, they give you a quizzical look. It’s not something they try to remember.
Instead, they rely on their time management systems to tell them when they need to get in touch with someone, and they just don’t need to remember who they are.
For them, the problem of getting back to people has disappeared.
For most of us, and especially those of us who have long lists of people who expect us to be back in touch with them, we need “kaizen” programs of our own.
I own a management consulting firm in Florida, and recently moved to live in Jamaica. Shortly after arriving, I began to study time management techniques when I found that my old system didn’t work. I eventually coined the term “Time Management 2.0″ for people who are continuously upgrading their own, custom approaches. Find out more about Time Management 2.0 and the MyTimeDesign training.
Propositioning the Rich Italian
Jan/100
TITLE: Propositioning the Rich Italian
AUTHOR: Stephanie Morris
AUTHOR URL: http://www.stephaniemorris.webs.com
GENRE/THEME: Contemporary Interracial Romance
URL TO THE BUYING PAGE: http://www.bookstrand.com/node/805943
SERIES: Indulgence – Book 1 of 6
Blurb:
Tierra Davis is shocked when her fiancé abandons her at the altar. She knows just how to get over it when she meets a painstakingly handsome stranger. What better way to start over than to have a two-week affair with a complete stranger?
Antonio Carabelli walks into the bar of the hotel he co-owns after the end of a hard day and is intrigued by the woman he finds sitting there. It isn’t long before Tierra tells him about her plans to have a no-strings attached affair, and he is interested. However, he is only willing to move forward if they have physical chemistry. What better way to find out, than with a simple kiss? The results are explosive, but Antonio soon realizes he has a dilemma. Two weeks isn’t enough.
Scott McKain "Seven Biggest Lies in Business" this is #3 Management
Nov/090
Biggest Lies in Business : #3
Time for the third in our series of the "Seven Biggest Lies in Business" – our ongoing series here in the UCE-zine — moving you to enhance and alter your perceptions of what is true…and what isn't…in today's dynamically changing business world.
This one applies if you are an entrepreneur, executive, HR official, or manager of any type:
Lie #3: We Cannot Keep/Get Good People
Of course you can. You just haven't been willing to engage in the kind of organizational or personal behavior that secures it.
Imagine for a moment that you are Dr. Bob Brockelman, driving a snowy road on a Midwestern winter's day to a university campus to recruit prospective employees to work with you at your $110 BILLION company.
That may sound like it is no problem if you're running a hip and progressive high-tech company, working to hire all the good people you can acquire. That is, until you realize that Dr. Brockelman's company – competing for top talent against the GE's and Microsoft's of the world – is the Farm Credit Bank of Wichita, Kansas. You are asking soon-to-be college or business school graduates to forego the offer from Proctor & Gamble and instead head to Hastings, Nebraska to begin your career.
"The silly thing," says Dr. Brockelman, "is that it's really pretty easy. The problem for most companies is that they've told each other this lie that it's impossible to get and keep great people for so long that they simply aren't doing what it takes to make it happen."
In fact, they are so good at it, Brockelman and Farm Credit Bank of Wichita have reduced turnover to a miniscule (and unheard-of) 3%. Within this lie, "We Cannot Get/Keep Good People," are three erroneous assumptions many of us make –
1) "Money is the only motivator of employees"
There's a major problem with believing this: Every major study proves it isn't the case. Employees want to be paid comparably with those in similar work situations. However, this belief is a mere cop-out by those managers unwilling to confront other motivators. It's easier for us to believe we aren't getting what we want from our employees because we aren't paying them well enough – as opposed to thinking it might be because we aren't managing them well enough.
2) "The (fill in this blank with any age group except the one to which you belong) Generation has no loyalty and a horrible work ethic."
Wrong. However, different generations have different standards of loyalty and differing responses to varied leadership styles. You just have to learn how to appeal to the loyalty of the different generations and what motivates each generational group. If you need more on this topic, check out information from my friend and colleague, Eric Chester, CSP.
3) "We just train them and then they go work for someone else."
There are two problems with this statement:
a. First, why should they stay if all your organization is providing is training — and not opportunity after the training has concluded? Education that precedes a lack of opportunity to apply what is learned breeds frustration.
b. Second, the most terrible approach isn't training them and they leave – as my good friend, Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE says, the worst thing is to NOT train them and they STAY!
"Nearly 100 percent of the top-performing key people have the souls of entrepreneurs."
Brian Whitlock, "Modern Machine Shop", January 2006
It is NOT impossible to acquire and retain good people. The fundamental problem is that managers are better trained and emotionally equipped to make investments in R&D, capital improvements and better operating procedures instead of people.
What will YOU do so that you obtain and retain your best people – so they can help you create Ultimate Customer Experiences?