Motivation on the Run

• Nine Nontechie Skills that Hiring Managers Wish You Had (and How to Get Them)
  Looking for that next promotion? Here’s some help
  (tags: leadership, motivation)
• Student spotlights: Those who make a difference in South Sound
  A profile of a 17 year-old that knows what she wants to do with her life.
  (tags: leadership, motivation)
• Too Much Information? Ignore It
  You make the decision … do you want to work, or have a life?
  (tags: motivation)

 

 Live the Dream [10:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Live the Dream is the new theme for Motivation on the Run. This begins a new era for MotR where we dig deeper and ask harder questions requiring introspection. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe I can ask a few good questions enabling you to come up with your own great answers.

Music By

John Korbel
David Henderson

Steve Farber, good friend, author and speaker extraordinaire, has a free offer that will make a real difference in your life. He is offering readers Extreme Leadership: In Pursuit of the OS!M, that normally sells for $49.95, FREE! Three hours of audio content with a total cost of a double opt-in subscription.

This is typical of Steve, giving more than you expect, then exceeding even that by a few levels. Steve is the author of two books, The Radical Leap, and The Radical Edge, which you can pick up at Amazon.

Here is a brief documentary on Steve that will show you a little about his leadership philosophy.

• Companies face looming leadership crisis: Study
  More evidence of the upcoming shortage in leadership
  (tags: leadership)
• The formula for success
  leadership you say? Even in the IT sector? gracious
  (tags: leadership)
• B-School: Finding the Perfect Fit
  Good interveiw with a B-school Director of Admissions
  (tags: leadership)

Are you the best leader you can be? Is your networking paying dividends beyond your wildest dreams? Two stories in Business Week Online yesterday take us where no leader or networker has gone before.

In the first, by Carmine Gallo, seven secrets are revealed to make you a better leader. Carmine is working on a new book titled Fire Them Up. For the book, he interviewed a lot of leaders on how they inspire and lead. Judging from the article, the book will become a must read.

The Seven Secrets of Inspiring Leaders
American business professionals are uninspired. Only 10% of employees look forward to going to work and most point to a lack of leadership as the reason why, according to a recent Maritz Research poll. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All business leaders have the power to inspire, motivate, and positively influence the people in their professional lives.

For the past year, I have been interviewing renowned leaders, entrepreneurs, and educators who have an extraordinary ability to sell their vision, values, and themselves. I was researching their communications secrets for my new book, Fire Them Up. What I found were seven techniques that you can easily adopt in your own professional communications with your employees, clients, and investors.

Liz Ryan’s article titled, 10 Tips for Networkers, is a keeper, too. She cuts to the chase without mincing words uses great analogies to illustrate her points. If you think you’re a good networker and don’t seem to have a great time at different events, don’t let Liz hurt your feelings. Listen and learn to get better.

10 Tips for Networkers
If you want to impress your friends with a fancy new word you’ve learned, here’s a good one: retronym.

Dictionary.com defines it as “a term, as acoustic guitar, coined in modification of the original referent that was used alone, as guitar, to distinguish it from a later contrastive development, as electric guitar.”

I bring this up in a workplace-advice column only because I’ve got a new retronym to add to our vocabulary, and it’s this: “non-disgusting networking.” Yes, back in the old days we could talk about plain old networking, referring to business events after hours and industry galas where businesspeople would mingle. We could use the word networking to refer to our LinkedIn activities and other kinds of outreach that happened among professional types online. Those days are pretty much gone. Now, if we don’t want to alarm people when we talk about our networking endeavors, we have to be quick to note that we’re talking about the non-disgusting kind.

[tags]Business Week Online, networking, leadership, inspire[/tags]

As most of you know, one of my year goals of 2007 is to learn about mind mapping. I am learning a lot. I use several different tools on a regular basis, and discover new ideas daily.

Yesterday, D*I*Y posted this article about making a life-map, giving details about the process. I hadn’t thought of this idea before, so I wanted to share.

Make a Life-map of Achievements | D*I*Y Planner
Looking back at my life, I sometimes get so bogged down in the day to day activities that I forget all the good and wonderful things I have done in my life. Sometimes, I need to be reminded of my accomplishments to help get me out of a funk. That’s why I sometimes keep a list of all the accomplishments laying around. However, while playing with my mind mapping software, I came up with an alternative idea for visually keeping track of my accomplishments. I call it my Life-map of Achievements.

[tags]mind mapping[/tags]

Darren Rowse of Problogger is having a fantastic $54,000 give-away over the next week. Prizes of all types, are being given away in different ways each day. Some only require leaving a comment, while others require telling people about the shindig.

Problogger’s birthday bash, celebrates three years of blogging as a professional. Darren has gathered prized from all over the world and the best part of the party is the gifts are for the readers, not Darren. How cool is that?

If you enjoy fresh content daily, easy-to-win prizes, you’ll enjoy Problogger.

[tags]Problogger, birthday party, birthday gifts[/tags]

Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

I had a life changing experience seven years ago when I shaved off my thirty-year mustache. Samson had a life changing experience when Delilah cut off his hair, which gave him super strength. However, he regained his strength when his hair grew back. Ergo, I need to regrow my mustache to get my strength back.

Where did our obsession with hair come from? And is this focus on facial hair somehow unnatural, or is our constant removal of this naturally growing hair a wrong-headed notion? Why do we spend so much time thinking about the hair on our head or the lack thereof?

Last week The Redhead asked, “Have you thought about how our lives have changed since you shaved off your mustache?” I admitted I had not, but it started me thinking: What was our life like when I had my mustache, and how did it change after I shaved it off?

With Mustache

I grew a mustache naturally, meaning, as a teenager, I just never shaved my upper lip. For the first few years, no one noticed I had a mustache, but I knew it was there (It’s a man thing). Gradually it thicken and darken over the years, which pleased me to no end.

Our lives with the mustache followed a natural progression of jobs and houses. Here is the overview of thirty years with the mustache:

• 11 different company jobs
• 3 businesses started
• 8 houses lived in
• 4 of 8 houses we owned
• Income increase every year

Without Mustache

I held a sales job for a national office machine company, and after eighteen months accepted a promotion to Sales Manager in the largest sales territory in the Southwest Region. The company had a “no facial hair” policy, but my mustache and I had slipped under the radar in a remote territory without much supervision. The promotion would bring me into the spotlight, so I decided to shave the mustache before moving to Houston.

Long story short: I left that company thirteen months later in pure frustration, taking my clean shaven face with me. Here is what the seven years since then have looked like without the mustache.

• 2 different company jobs
• 1 business started
• 7 houses lived in
• 0 houses owned
• Income decreases every year

As you might conclude, The Redhead is getting a bit frosty about the housing situation. In the last seven years, we’ve lived in one less house than in the previous thirty years. That’s unacceptable and needs to change. The income is another story, but we’re working to rectify that issue.

The Mustache is Back

The mustache is back!

[tags]mustache, facial hair, Samson, Delilah[/tags]

Are you looking for more time? Do your time-management skills need some work? Today, you are the luckiest person on the planet because Kent Blumberg wrote an article listing 25 truths about time. The list is comprehensive, but probably not exhaustive. If you can add to the list, I encourage you to visit Kent’s site and add them.

Here is a brief sampling from the twenty-five.

Kent Blumberg: 25 Truths About Time

1. Time is a limited resource - you can’t make more of it. But, you have more time than you need if you use it wisely.
2. You choose how to spend your time.
3. Time is elastic - you can stretch it or compress it.
4. Do what matters to you.
5. Eliminate shoulds and coulds.

And it just gets better.

[tags]Kent Blumberg, time, time-management[/tags]

In the past, I’ve mentioned the software, TraxItAll on Motivation on the Run. It is one of those simple Palm programs that does one thing very well. Here is more information from their website.

Very simply, you can use TraxItAll to track anything that matters to you. With TraxItAll’s combination of simplicity, flexibility, and power, you can track anything that you want or need to track.

And now, using our new desktop module for Windows, users can print and even email their reports! (Emailing requires the use of 3rd party software for creating PDF documents, such as the free CutePDF program.)

I bring this up because of the 20% off sale going on this week. They also offer a free 30 trial if you’re not sure. Head over and see for yourself.

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with TraxItAll except as a happy customer.

[tags]TraxItAll, Palm[/tags]