5 Tips to Keep You Mission-Ready

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Whether you’re currently employed, seeking a new opportunity, or transitioning from the military into the civilian work force, it’s important to continuously find ways to hone and refine your professional skill while on the job.

Below are five critical wing tips that will keep you flying high and mission ready in a turbulent work environment and rapidly changing economy:[wcm_restrict]

  1. Walk the flight line: Get out there and connect with different departments on the job. If you’re in sales, grab a cup of coffee with tech support or customer service. If you’re in marketing, spend an hour or two in finance or in research and development. Make your objective not only to get to know the job of your fellow wingmen at work, but to get to know them personally. When you treat you co-workers as people first and employees second, they will go the extra mile for you when you call out “mayday” and ask for help when the missiles of business are launched.
  2. Seek out an informal mentor: We always learn more when
    we get authentic (and timely) feedback on our performance. Ask your supervisor or a trusted colleague to sit in on your sales call or presentation. Politely ask for their honest feedback, but be willing to be humbled. Then, thank them and take immediate action to work on the areas that need improvement. Finally, offer to do the same for them. Wingmen naturally want to help others in their formation.
  3. Fine new wingmen, and jettison the wing nuts: The relationships you have outside of work are almost as important as the ones you have at work. Who do you hang out with after hours and on the weekends? Are they wingmen who challenge you to grow and lifting you to new heights? Or are they wing nuts – dragging you down and holding you back? If you want to grow personally and professionally, spend time with wingmen of character who will hold you accountable for meeting your commitments and won’t “yes” you to death.
  4. Be a wing-giver: Think outside your cockpit. When a volunteer opportunity at works presents itself, raise your hand and take it on. Help lead a company fundraising initiative or volunteer to serve on a committee that plans the annual holiday party. Be the type of wingman others can come to for help. These behind the scenes missions that often go unnoticed are great opportunities to showcase your leadership and planning skills. Most importantly, it will give you a chance to build relationships with other employees in your company from different divisions.
  5. Sharpen your sword: Don’t rely on your company to provide on-the-job training. Seek out opportunities to grow outside of work. In addition to finding wingmen that are committed to excellence, attend a skills seminar or personal development course that may not have anything to do with your immediate job requirements. Attend a public-speaking class, a weekend seminar on communication skills, or a local three-hour course on Microsoft Excel. These will pay off huge dividends on the job as you become more professionally balanced and flexible enough to handle additional tasks.

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About the Author

Robert “Waldo” Waldman is a decorated former fighter pilot, sales manager, and professional leadership speaker. His Fortune 500 clients include Hewlett-Packard, Aflac, Marriott, Medtronic, and Nokia. He has been featured on Fox News and BusinessWeek online and in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Selling Power. A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, Waldman lives in Atlanta where he was ranked one of the Top 40 under 40 Business Leaders in Georgia.

Delegation: The Key to Self-Management

Delegation: The Key to Self-Management

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Who manages you? You may have a boss, who manages some percentage of your tasks at work. But who manages the entirety of your life? No one, if you don’t. Are you willing to supervise yourself, to manage yourself? Are you willing to allow yourself to be so managed?

Your life can be considered one never-completed to-do list, such that tasks are added as fast as they are completed. Did you shop for groceries yesterday? Great. But you’ll need to shop for groceries again! Did you prepare dinner and/or clean up afterwards? You certainly can expect that task to come around again soon. It can be very burdensome to have a never-ending to-do list. In the face of overwhelming lists of tasks we can experience stress and even depression.

[wcm_restrict]One way to de-stress is to perceive that you, today, are the manager of a vast team of subordinates: the you of tomorrow, the you of the next day, and the yous of all the days after that. Even if you don’t have a cook, a housekeeper, or a personal secretary, you can delegate the tasks in your life to your future selves in a way that will lower the amount of uncompleted tasks you carry around, like emptying that invisible but weighty backpack you carry on your back.

Bills and Mail

Do you sometimes get overwhelmed with the amount of bills and mail that piles up? Delegate to your Thursday evening self, twice a month, to put aside time to do bills. Now you don’t have to think about it – it will be done, by your very efficient and reliable subordinate (you, every other Thursday evening). When Thursday evening comes around, ‘Do bills’ will show up in your schedule, 7-8PM. You know what you’ll be doing at 7PM, and you know that by 8PM you’ll likely be done. No worries about forgotten bills.

Infrequent Tasks

If you like to get things done early, set aside ‘February 15’ as ‘Tax Prep Day’ and assign to your ‘Feb 15th self’ the task of doing your taxes. If you need the pressure of deadlines, make ‘Tax Prep Day’ April 12th, and you’ll be fine.

‘Tomorrow’ Tasks

Don’t delegate all your to-do-list items to ‘tomorrow’- ‘tomorrow’ likely will never come and the to-do list may remain uncompleted. Rather, delegate the high priority items to the prime time in your day, today or tomorrow, and be disciplined about performing the tasks that will allow you to have confidence that, over the next few days, tasks that need to be completed will be. Space out your to-do-list, ranked by time urgency or task priority, so that you will complete tasks in advance of their drop-dead due dates.

Delegating to Others

This process works whether the work we are talking about is your work or study, family or other life tasks. At work, you may have other people to whom you also may delegate portions of your tasks or projects, for whom it would be developmental or interesting to join you in your projects. This may also be true in your family – delegate to other members of the family tasks that will help them contribute to the family’s overall functioning. But remember, whether you are delegating to yourself (in the future) or to others, delegation only works if you are willing to hold those to whom you delegate responsible for the completion of their work. Even, especially, including accountability to yourself.

Your Delegation Toolbox

Here are a few resources to help you take these ideas and turn them into habits that remain part of your daily life:

  • Getting Things Done (GTD) – self described as the art of stress free productivity, David Allen’s GTD methodology has become a hit among those seeking enhanced productivity. At the least, take a look at this summary.
  • Calendar Manager Strengths and Weaknesses – a central calendar is essential for any type of delegation. This blog post discusses your best options, paid or free. For simple self-management you may want to consider Google Calendar, but if you want to share your Calendar with others or need to manage multiple categories of calendars, check out ClearSync.
  • Task or Project Management Tools – this is a list of 50 project management power productivity tools that are both useful for self and remote delegation. After all, once you delegate, you need to be able to track progress and in the case of remote delegation, communicate effectively.

In Conclusion

The point is not to schedule out one’s entire life, but to clear the decks, so that when time comes around that is not claimed by the manager of your life (YOU!), you are free to be spontaneous, to enjoy life, to relax, to bask in the sun or to curl up with a book warmed by a fire, or to enjoy your family and friends. You can do this guilt-free, knowing that your responsibilities are being handled by your staff (YOU – past and future!), and so you (in the present) can enjoy life unencumbered by the to-do list of responsibilities you carry.

How do you handle self-delegation? Do you find that you are as hard on yourself as your boss? Do you use any tools to manage your self-delegation? We would love to hear from you. Please post your comments, questions and ideas below.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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Elmer Thomas blogs primarily at Thinking Serious which focuses on programming, design, business and productivity content for tech entrepreneurs living in a 2.0 world. That is, when he is not tickling his entrepreneur itch or consulting. To read Elmer’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 27 – An Interview with Chris Edgar, author of Inner Productivity

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 27 – An Interview with Chris Edgar, author of Inner Productivity explores how to eliminate the mind’s distractions that diminish work productivity, heighten stress, and limit personal happiness. During our discussion, Chris Edgar, author of Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • the principle of mindful efficiency
  • how mental distractions cause individuals to unknowingly multitask; reducing their work productivity
  • practical activities to eliminate one’s internal distractions thereby increasing focus on the task at hand
  • steps an individual can take to overcome a creative blankness such as writer’s block

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Chris shares in Inner Productivity and this special edition podcast are the additional resources accessible from his website at www.InnerProductivity.com. Chris’s book, Inner Productivity, can be purchased by clicking here.

Chris also offers an insightful six part video series on eliminating the inner distractions that limit personal productivity. These include:

About the Author

Chris Edgar, author of Inner Productivity, is a renowned author, speaker, and personal coach who focuses on helping people follow their true career callings and find more enjoyment and efficiency in what they do. His articles have been published in Balance, Balanced Living, EdgeLife, Mystic Pop, New Age Journal, New Renaissance, Self-Improvement, WellBeing, and Wisdom. To read Chris’s full biography, click here.
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Putting “You” in the Denominator: The Renaissance of Self

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The Oracle of Delphi told Socrates that he was the wisest man in all of Athens. After many years of reflection, Socrates had the answer. He was the wisest, because he knew he wasn’t the wisest. Pretty cool, huh? Leaders know the road of self-knowledge and self-discovery are never ending. This yellow brick road leads to many rewards, but not pot of gold. The rewards found here are contained within the journey, not the destination. You see, there is no destination for leaders. Knowing yourself means separating who you are and who you want to be from what the world thinks you are and wants you to be. Most of us, including myself, lived up to other people’s expectations for years before discovering the power of the space between stimulus and response, and the freedom and responsibility of choice.

There are four lessons of personal renaissance:

[wcm_restrict]First lesson: You are your own best teacher. No one knows how best you learn than you. Even if you’re not consciously aware of your learning style, you likely gravitate to it anyway. Learning is experienced through personal transformation, a literal transformation of brain architecture. Your brain actually alters its connections when you learn something new. The new chemistry, the new expression of the learning process is what allows self-understanding, and ultimately leads to your ability to express your new self. This is how reinvention really takes place on a cellular level. Any personal renaissance for a leader is almost always motivated internally – meaning that leaders have an intrinsic motivation to teach themselves, what I call intrinsic insatiation. And that motivation is always influenced by a leader’s sense of role in any situation – because no matter the situation, as a leader, you always have some role to play in every situation (this role is usually defined as a perceived gap in where you think you should be and where you think others think you should be). That internal drive and the perception of role drive leaders to never stop learning.

Second lesson: Take ownership. A personal renaissance takes place when people assume ownership. All of the sudden the stakes are higher – the pain of failure is more palpable. And yet for an authentic leader, failure is not an option, so the responsibility then of ownership… breeds success. And for great leaders, they create their own success – they take the building blocks of life and experience education in their very own self-designed university – the school of life.

Third Lesson: Learn from everything. I learned in executive coaching school that we can learn from everything – it’s absolutely true if we allow the perspective to saturate our understanding of how the world works. If we can develop a tolerance for every conceivable experience, then we have set the appropriate table, the right platform that allows you to learn from everything and gain perspective from everyone. For leaders, learning is seeing the world simultaneously as it is and as it can be. This is where the term we use here at WealthBridge comes into play – intervision – the ability to see the future and the past at the same time. It’s not about being present (that’s one dimension). It’s about being in two places at one time. Taking an honest stock of the present situation while understanding how those implications influence our vision, and how they were impacted by our past. Leaders understand what they see, and take appropriate action on that understanding. The holy grail of learning from everything is making connections. Leaders connect disparate ideas from many different industries and make the application work in their own business. This is the synthetic mind that Howard Gardner tells us will be so vital in the next 25 years. Learn how to connect. Practice taking ideas from other disciplines and apply them in your business. Mental gymnastics are very important.

Fourth Lesson: Reflection on experience leads to understanding. Reflecting on experience is a means of having a Socratic dialogue with yourself, asking the right questions at the right time, in order to discover the truth of yourself and your life. What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to me? What did it mean to me? Reflection is asking the questions that promote self-awareness and true understanding of an experience, so that it can inform the future. So then the importance of reflecting on experience, the idea that reflecting leads to understanding is a main component of a leader’s mind. Learning and understanding unlock the ability of a leader to move forward à to be self-directed – to be proactive. To look forward with acuity means we must have reflected, or looked back, with brutal honesty. Leaders learn from others, but true Authentic leadership is not emulation. – leaders don’t simply copy another person’s creed and actions. They take the distinguishing characteristics from others that allow them to differentiate, and then synthesize the other with self, and in the process of reinvention, the leader with a distinctive voice all their own emerges from the experiment.

We began this article with Socrates; we end with Socrates…He said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Leaders use their experiences, and the examination of those experiences, instead of being used by them. They remain in control and at choice. When you consider the prevailing equation that most people subscribe to: Family + Friends + Workplace + Society = You. But to undergo a personal renaissance of self, stick yourself in the denominator [Family + Friends + Workplace + Society / You]. The denominator is all powerful…rather than being designed by your experience, you become your own designer. You become cause and effect rather than a mere product of your environment. The process begins with Self-awareness = once you accept yourself and your uniqueness, it fosters self-knowledge = knowledge always leads to confidence and ownership = what you own, you can control = what you control, you can express à awareness that ultimately results in Self-expression. You make your own life by assuming ownership of the space between stimulus, what happens to you, and your response to it. What lies in the space is the freedom to choose your response. Choose to know yourself better than anyone, and learn to lead the most important revolution in your life – the personal renaissance of the leader in you.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Dr. Greg Gillum is the Chief Learning Officer of WealthBridge Connect (www.WealthBridgeConnect.com). As CLO, his primary role is writing leadership and management curriculum for the international faculty of WealthBridge Connect that helps members drive their business to new heights. In addition, his role at WealthBridge Connect includes lead executive coach and trainer, specializing in leadership development applications, business performance coaching, emotional intelligence, and guiding transformational change in individuals and organizations. Dr. Gillum has also served as the CEO of the humanfusion group of companies (www.humanfusion.com) since 2004. He is a frequent keynote speaker in the areas of human performance and potential. Dr. Gillum spent six years on the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia, and eight years in marketing and senior management with GlaxoSmithKline. To read Dr. Gillum’s complete biography, click here.

B-R-E-A-T-H-E™ In The Workplace Saves Dollars And Lives

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In our current economic crisis, workplace wellness programs have become essential to maintain the health of both the employer and the employee. Stress in the workplace has been shown to increase absenteeism, hostility, mistrust, and attrition rates, and decrease company morale and productivity. In addition, workplace stress increases rates of anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular mortality. Recent studies have shown how workplace wellness programs focused on diet, exercise, and stress reduction lead to decreased absenteeism, improved productivity, and substantial cost savings.

In a recent issue of BusinessWeek, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson discussed how investing in their large scale health promotion and disease prevention programs served to reduce benefit costs and improve worker productivity. Data from a study of their program also showed how improvements happened quickly and were sustained over time.

[wcm_restrict]Over the past fifteen years, I’ve personally witnessed how emotional stress directly impacts the hearts of my patients. Studies show that workplace stress creates two specific types of emotional stress that are hazardous to our hearts. The first deals with increased physical strain, or feeling like you have too much to accomplish in not enough time. The second involves a type of stress created by feelings of isolation and loneliness, which occurs when employees feel unappreciated, unacknowledged and as though they have little or no chance for career advancement. I often hear complaints of how the demanding pressures at work, coupled with the lack of time to decompress at home, are exhausting.

The reality is, we all experience rising pressures to perform under increasingly more demanding schedules. So I set out to develop a solution, and developed the BREATHE™ technique, a seven-step exercise that helps reduce stress and heal your heart. BREATHE™ combines two proven forms of relaxation – guided imagery and breath work – and puts a modern spin on ancient wisdom. Both of these techniques elicit the “relaxation response” which is opposite the “stress response”. When practiced regularly, like toning your muscles in the gym, you’ll develop a special neural network that will help you focus and find a sense of calm when faced with one of life’s unexpected stressful challenges.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

John M. Kennedy, M.D., is the medical director of preventative cardiology and wellness at Marina del Rey Hospital, and author of the new book, The 15 Minute Heart Cure: The Natural Way to Release Stress and Heal Your Heart in Just Minutes a Day. He has also incorporated the BREATHE™ technique into a company wellness program, BREATHE™ For Company Wellness, which will enable companies to provide a healthy and safe alternative for employee stress release; the program features a private social media component. Dr. Kennedy may be reached at john@johnmkennedymd.com. For more information, please visit www.johnmkennedymd.com.